Chapter 17
I WAKE UP FIRST. VEER IS PRESSED INTO MY SIDE, ONE arm flung over my chest. The easy hum of cars outside like a white noise blanket.
Today, I’ll bury my worries about my mom and focus on the thing I know is real: Brian, and the menace of walking into a stranger’s house and hoping you can trust him.
Pale daylight peeks around the edges of the curtains.
It catches on the comforter wrapped around my legs, turning its cheap quilted seams into the pitted scars of a flood-carved canyon.
I scan the room, making a semiconscious inventory of our things.
My duffel bag’s zipper-toothed smirk. Veer’s tank top puddled at the foot of the bed.
The corner by the door looks funny. It’s too dark, like there’s something there the sunlight can’t penetrate. The hairs on my arms stand to attention.
A noise like a camera flash, and day-bright yellow blots my vision. A four-legged figure materializes for a moment in the glare. Worm-ridden muscle pulls taut over its bent-back bones, fleshless lips curling to reveal rows and rows of saw-edged teeth.
Then, just as fast, it’s gone.
The bed is too small. I’m trapped by the sheets, caged by the insistent contact of Veer’s body.
I need to move. I try to lift my head, but my neck screams in protest. My leg is cramping.
Her arm is an anvil pushing down on my lungs.
I can’t breathe, dread is folding me smaller and smaller and soon I won’t even exist, I’ll be dry bones ready to be snapped in half, to crumble to dust because there’s nothing left of me to destroy.
Veer stirs.
“Good morning,” she mumbles, and kisses me, and my panic ebbs and it’s all just sheets and skin again.
The motel coffee tastes like moldy cardboard. We stop at Taco Bell, and Veer gets cinnamon twists for breakfast. When she twines her fingers with mine over the top of the car console, the sugary grit rubs off on my knuckles.
We drive, Veer talks, we stop again for gas and more coffee.
This cup tastes like aspartame and fumes.
The road rumbles restless under our tires as she tells me about her brother, about their childhood scars and how night after night of hauling bodies softened her anger toward him.
She emails him every week, but this is her first visit in a while.
In too long. She’s nervous about what he might say to her, and more nervous that she won’t know what to say back.
I tell her about Uncle Bill, about his dog-shit yard and the chemical smell of his hands.
How he liked his instant coffee, how he was in a bad garage rock band when he was a teenager, how he ditched my mom and how she found him again.
How he’d stop just short of saying that he resented having us around, but how I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye sometimes, how I smelled it on sweltering, windless days, a scent halfway between brake dust and watered-down whiskey.
And I tell her about my mom. About her pink lipstick and her favorite shows, about all the things she lies about.
Finally, I tell her about the freezer door and the smashed windshield and how it felt to tell her I hated her, to know it was the truth and still wish I’d cut my own tongue out instead of saying it.
Veer listens, quiet, her hand on mine, and maybe she’s getting ready to say something, but the GPS interrupts. “Turn right on Coal Canyon Road.”
We turn, and turn again, and then we’re there.
Desert gives way to parking lot gives way to a low, brutal concrete slab with a glass entrance.
The facade is painted a deep, vibrant blue, the opposite of the desert’s brown-green haze.
Maybe that’s on purpose, the state of Nevada’s big fuck-you reminder that its desire for subjugation is stronger than the earth’s barbarity.
Still, the mountains loom yellow and silent behind it as if to say, Go ahead and try.
No walls can ever keep me out, no guard towers or barbed wire or electric doors can keep me in.
Veer squeezes my hand. I smell her deodorant and the stick of gum long chewed-out and stuck under her tongue, and underneath both, I smell her fear and uncertainty.
“Okay,” she says, like she’s nerving herself up. “I’ll be done in an hour, max. Are you cool to take the car, then pick me back up?”
“Yeah,” I say quickly. I had assumed she’d want me to wait here, and drive together to Brian’s, but this is better. Safer.
She nods, like she’s trying to convince herself too. “Call me when you’re on the way back. Actually, can you turn on location sharing?”
I toggle it on and she does too. Then she squares her shoulders and jerks the keys out of the ignition. She’s already halfway out the door as she shoves them into my hand. She freezes, suddenly, dips back, but I react too slow and her kiss presses into the side of my mouth.
I want to try again—and again, and again, and again—but the car door’s already slammed behind her. She doesn’t look back as she disappears into the glass doors’ hungry jaws.
I drive eighty all the way to Brian’s.
The beauty of the desert is in how it eats.
It gnaws at house paint and car doors, whips sharp fingernails over shins, it licks and chews and takes its due.
The desert has carved crimson gouges into Brian’s chain-link fence, eroded the once-red flag of his mailbox, suffocated a front yard full of junked auto parts and a half-demolished pickup that might have started out blue, a long time ago.
The house is the same brown as the dead grass and the desert beyond, and the only thing between me and it that isn’t coated in dust is a big black-and-white laminate sign.
This house is guarded by God and a gun, it reads. If you trespass, you’ll meet them both.
I squint at the pulled-shut curtains. Baby blue with little eyelets at the bottom, faded white in the middle where the sun’s strongest. I figure the God part is bullshit. The gun part, I’m not so sure.
“You here?” Brian demands when I call him on the Nokia, still standing halfway between the street and his door.
“Yeah.” Be polite, Ellis. “Yes.”
“Did your uncle not teach you to knock, or what?”
I try to remember how I used to talk to Uncle Bill, but my brain’s a sieve and my body’s something worse and I can’t playact the way I used to.
At least my feet pick up and walk me toward the door.
I apologize into the phone and stuff it back into my pocket and knock.
The door was painted green, once. Now it’s just as brown as everything else.
On the other side, one, two, three dead bolts slam, and the door squeals open with the smell of old paper and overcooked sausage.
“Shit,” Brian wheezes through three inches of opening, like he’s afraid that if he swings the door wide, the desert will get its claws over the threshold. “Anyone ever tell you that you look a lot like him?”
“No.” People only ever cooed over the similarities between me and my mom. You could be sisters, they’d say. My mom loved that one. “But thanks.”
Brian pulls the door open just enough for me to slip through.
He’s a big guy, thick neck and red forearms striped with dark hair.
Tan T-shirt with an American-flag-like pattern on the front, ball cap pulled low even inside.
Two broken-backed couches crowd his living room, one dark leather with cracks in the cushions, the other draped in gold tassels and spinsterly floral with a skirt hanging to the floor.
Gas station figurines of dragons and fairies watch in neat rows from the mantel.
One at the end wears a long, black plastic cloak with a sword held to its forehead, part grim reaper, part evil wizard.
The coffee table sags under the weight of stacked paperbacks: Scats and Tracks of the Rocky Mountains, God Emperor of Dune, The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive.
“Water?” Brian calls over his shoulder as we move from the living room into the kitchen. “Might have a beer in the fridge too, if you’re a beer gal.”
There’s a fan plugged in on the counter. I don’t think he has air-conditioning.
“Water would be nice.” My folding cooler flails like a limp rag under my arm. “If you don’t mind. Do you have ice?”
He turns around as I struggle to snap the cooler into something vaguely rectangular. His eyes are a very pale blue.
“Have a drink first,” he says.
His fridge hums with the same muted menace as the pitchfork-wielding crowd in a monster movie. He brandishes a glass, and in response, the fridge door spits a stream of faintly orange water.
“Got my own well out back,” Brian explains as he sets the glass on the table in front of where he wants me to sit, then pulls a can of 7UP out from under the sink for himself.
“Neat.” The table is plastic and sunwarped. The water smells like minerals and horse shit. Tastes like it too.
“I’ve got three acres. All the neighbors moved to Reno or Salt Lake. Couldn’t handle the isolation. Me, I like it.” His grin reveals very straight teeth. A twist, a crack, and the 7UP can hisses weakly. “Your uncle ever teach you to handle a gun?”
“Um.” Would it be worse to say yes, or no? “No?”
Brian shakes his head and takes a long drag at the can. “He should have. Vegas is fucked up these days. Junkies everywhere, homeless begging on every corner, real fucked-up sex trafficking shit.”
Now I remember what it was like talking to Uncle Bill.
Biting my tongue to keep him comfortable.
Or at least trying to. I think of the desperation of the meth-jittered couples who come through the ED, arms scratched up and voices hoarse, and of the patients who come in an ambulance because they’re too poor to get to the doctor before their bodies give out on them.
I think of my mom’s failing mind and our dusty apartment building, and I wonder when the last time was that Brian even left his property, much less drove all the way to Vegas.
“Everywhere’s fucked up.”