I opened the fridge and took out a bottle of beer.
“Lynnie,” she said.
“The thing is, Mom, if you’re so desperate to find Wylie, why don’t you look for him yourself?”
She set the bowl gently in the drainer and turned around, water from the sink stretching across her abdomen, like a smile or a scar. “Do you think I haven’t?” she said.
So in the morning I set off again in the Caprice, the radio turned up loud, and drove through the sun-addled streets. The city looked criminaclass="underline" dust blew across the windshield, men leered at me from corners and from behind the wheels of their pickups, working girls paced beneath the bleached neon signs of fleabag motels. The Sandias were brown in the distance. The houses were brown. The highways were brown. Everything was brown. The car’s wheezing air-conditioning blew a stream of tepid air over my right shoulder. I was sweating and cursing by the time I pulled up at Wylie’s place.
No one answered my knock. I sat down in a slice of shade on the landing outside his door and waited for someone to come back. A stray dog ambled down the block, head down, marking its territory here and there in the brown lawns. In this neighborhood dirt and weeds were fighting a winning battle against all grass. The dog lifted its head, sniffed the air, and looked at me.
When we were kids Wylie and I had a dog named Sycamore — Syc for short, which my parents thought was funny— that we took on hikes in the Sandias with my father. Hiking was our main activity together. During the week he got home too late for us to see him much, but on Saturdays or Sundays my mother would send the three of us packing so she could clean up or chat with her friends or talk to her mother on the phone. My father always wore the same thing, brown shorts and those too-high socks and a broad-brimmed hat, and he almost always took us on the same trail. It led to a cave, where we ate a lunch he’d carried for us in his knapsack. Sometimes he invited a friend, another scientist from work, and they’d walk too fast, talking shop and ignoring me and Wylie until we turned on each other and had to be yelled at. Other times, though, alone, he’d talk about his own childhood in Chicago, a place that sounded dramatic and foreign to me, with snowdrifts higher than I was and hot dogs as long as my arm. For years I dreamed about going there in winter to skate on the streets to my father’s school, the way he’d done when he was a kid.
On one of our hikes, Syc came bounding back onto the trail, his tail wagging like crazy, with something in his mouth. My father bent down, sweat loosening his glasses from the bridge of his nose, and said his name softly. Syc just stood there, wagging. My father gently pried his jaws apart and a pale-gray rabbit dropped onto the ground, shiny ropes of dog saliva coating his fur. Wylie and I stood there looking at it. Then my father put the rabbit behind a tree and shooed Syc away. Wylie asked to keep it, but my dad said no, so he pouted all the way home. But I’d seen what Wylie didn’t: that the rabbit just lay there, stiff, on the ground.
The shade had widened over the landing. In front of me, the stray dog snapped up a piece of garbage in somebody’s yard, seemed dubious about it, then moved on. I watched it leave, shaking my head at myself. It had been over ten years since I’d gone on a hike of any kind. But if your brother held wilderness all-important in an overly civilized world, why on earth wait for him at an apartment building? Why would you, unless you didn’t really want to find him in the first place? I decided I was an idiot and got back into the car.
I could remember only that one trail, which started in the western foothills by a water reservoir, a round white container that always looked to me like an oversized aspirin the mountain was trying, year after year, to swallow. At the trailhead, two mountain bikers in fluorescent gear were squirting energy food from tubes into their mouths. It was a weekday afternoon, and aside from a single jogger far ahead up the trail, there was no one else around: just the sky and the sun and the arid ground, with dry husks of burnt-out cactus making the skeleton shapes of bushes.
I started walking. Where the dusty foothills pulled steeply upwards into a bit more greenery, I saw the jogger disappear around a bend. Now there was really no one around. Gradually the trail took on a malevolent air. The dead cacti rustled and whispered; invisible animals scurried underneath. Fifteen minutes later I was exhausted. I could walk for hours on city blocks in high-heeled boots, but a quick stroll at Albuquerque elevation was killing me.
On a rock barely shaded by a juniper tree, I sat down and wiped my forehead with my T-shirt. “I hate being hot,” I said out loud. I hated being thirsty, too. I vaguely recalled there was some kind of stream on this trail, although maybe you weren’t supposed to drink from it because of the bacteria. Or was that somewhere else? I was ignorant; my feet hurt. I thought about Wylie spending weeks at a time in the mountains, philosophizing or thinking or whatever it was that he did out here, and felt a profound wash of affection, even gratitude, for the attributes of civilized life, for apartments and stoplights and magazines and the steam that issued from manholes on the streets of New York.
But none of that was within my reach just now, so I stood up again. Somewhere up ahead was the cave where Wylie and I used to pretend, over lunch, that we were prehistoric man, if prehistoric man had had access to peanut-butter sandwiches and Nilla wafers. My father often began those hikes with a distant, preoccupied air, speaking about current events and the weather as if we were strangers he’d just happened to fall in step with; but gradually he’d relax into his more fatherly self, telling stories and jokes, every once in a while ruffling Wylie’s hair. I always thought that it took him a while to get used to his family again, not because he didn’t like us but because during the week, when he was at work, he just didn’t think about us that much. We weren’t the central focus of his life, and he was capable of forgetting us. When he died I thought: if he’d cared a little more, he would have fought harder to stay.
Birds muttered in the low bushes by the side of the trail. The sun shone on the back of my neck, the heat a pressure as real and finite as an iron flat on your skin. My shoes were covered in brown dust. I climbed up through rocky crags, heading up switchbacks, turning back and forth like a goat. I kept thinking the cave would be around the next corner, but it never was. On another rock I rested again, this time looking back toward the city, flat and undistinguished below me: the gray acreage of parking lots, the beige hulks of new malls, the streets hectic with tiny cars. In the distance I could see the small peak of Mount Taylor, floating in the desert like an island rising from a brown sea. My throat and feet and neck were dry and sore and sunburned, respectively.
I gave myself ten more minutes and finally reached the cave, though it was less the cave of my memory than a rocky overhang with the remains of a fire below it, charred rocks, scattered trash and paper, old beer cans and condom wrappers. It was a ready-made antidote for childhood nostalgia. I sat down in the shade, leaned my head against the rocky wall, and passed out.
When I opened my eyes the jogger I’d seen earlier was standing over me holding out a bottle of water. It was Angus Beam. I was almost positive I was dreaming. His skin shone thickly with sweat. He was wearing a light-blue T-shirt that was soaked and translucent, sweatpants, combat boots, and a Panama hat. His arms and neck were the color of persimmons.
“Drink this,” he said.
I grabbed the bottle and drank almost half of it, undeterred by its weird taste, which was both chemical and citrusy. A layer of dust had somehow settled on my tongue as I slept.