Part 41 (1/2)

When she did slow down, she found herself nearly letting out a little cry, thinking, looking out at him, Richie, her brother, he was- No, G.o.d.

Of course not. What was wrong with her?

Of course not.

It was that boy who reminded her of her brother, the roommate.

The buzz cut. The nicely pressed white s.h.i.+rt. What was his name?

Sh.e.l.ly braked. She pulled over as far as she could near the bank of snow that was now the shoulder of the road. Like the first time, the last time, like the accident, she unrolled her window, called out, knowing he would never be able to hear her in the great white s.p.a.ce between them-the snow and the white annihilating everything, especially the sound of her voice.

Still, he must have heard her pull over, because he turned around. He looked at her. She opened her mouth as he began to shake his head-a slow back-and-forth no, no that made Sh.e.l.ly close her mouth, and put her hand to it. She didn't need for him to say a word to know what he was telling her: No.

There was nothing she could do for him.

He was telling her to go.

Sh.e.l.ly lifted a hand before she rolled her window up again, and watched him walk away until she could no longer see him at all in his white s.h.i.+rt in the snow.

107.

Ellen had aged. There was no denying it.

But, of course, so had she. How old must Sh.e.l.ly have looked to Ellen? It had been fourteen years since theyd last seen each other. Still, they managed to recognize one another instantly and simultaneously, and rushed toward one another there in the Las Vegas airport between the escalators and the baggage carousel, with no hesitation.

Ellen tossed down the black leather bag that was slung over her shoulder and threw her arms around Sh.e.l.ly, and said, ”I told you so,” into Sh.e.l.ly's gray hair. They both began to weep-no sobbing, just quiet tears dampening their cheeks.

Sh.e.l.ly nodded at Ellen. It was true. Ellen had always promised she'd come to visit Sh.e.l.ly in Vegas before either of them managed to die. She'd say it at the end of every phone conversation, jot it at the bottom of every email-and there'd been a million of those phone calls, emails, postcards, notes over the years. Time had seemed to create itself out of those exchanges across s.p.a.ce.

It was a short drive from the airport to Sh.e.l.ly's apartment. They were only awkward in the moments of silence, so they kept talking. They talked about Ellen's flight-four hours beside a woman who stopped blabbing only when she was chewing the cuticles of her fingernails. (”I got up to go to the bathroom three or four times, hoping she'd bother the guy on the other side of her, but she was just waiting for me when I got back.”) They talked about Las Vegas. Ellen had never been, and Sh.e.l.ly had lived there so long by then that she didn't even notice how strange it might seem to someone who'd never been out of the Midwest except to go to Manhattan, or France.

It was like moving to Mars, Sh.e.l.ly had told Rosemary on the phone when she first moved. When the plane had landed on the tarmac in Vegas, Sh.e.l.ly had looked through the little plastic window at the desert, and said to herself, I have moved to Mars.

”Good,” Rosemary had said. ”In Las Vegas, everyone's in hiding. And you have to consider yourself in hiding, Sh.e.l.ly. Don't do anything stupid, like start a Facebook page, okay?”

After that first phone call from her new life, Sh.e.l.ly had hung up, crossed the floor of her fourth-floor apartment, and looked out: Forever, she'd thought. As in the song, she could see it from the window of her apartment. Forever reached as far as the red-dirt mound of Sunrise Mountain before it abruptly disappeared from view.

And, in all the years, Sh.e.l.ly had never considered moving. Not from Las Vegas (which had become the home she'd never known she hadn't had-sometimes shabby, consistently inconsistent, but full of a beauty that was that much more lovely because you had to go looking for it) and not from the apartment.

She loved the view from her apartment. At night, the moon hovered over Sunrise Mountain as if it were completely empty up there in the sky, s.h.i.+ning light down on light, not seeming to be reflecting anything, but holding its own spot tenaciously up there-a gleaming checkpoint, long ago abandoned.

Directly below Sh.e.l.ly's balcony, a p.r.i.c.kly pear cactus spread its flowering menace between her view and the parking lot.

Once, years before, some member of the maintenance crew had tried to chop it down, swearing as the cactus ripped its barbs through his flimsy windbreaker. Sh.e.l.ly had hurried and called the landlord, who'd agreed to stop the worker, and no one had touched that cactus since.

Now every spring it bloomed as if it were some sort of simple-minded florist's offering to G.o.d. The rest of the year it didn't try to fool anyone. You knew, if you got close, it was going to rip you to pieces.

In Las Vegas, they said, you never saw the same person twice. And it was true, in its way. Not at the library, not at the gym, not the shopping mall. Even the people Sh.e.l.ly worked with at the hospital kept moving and rotating, coming and going, always keeping their distances so well that it felt, even if it wasn't strictly true, that she was surrounded by strangers, new strangers every day. And the people in the apartments around hers never lasted more than a few seasons, were easily replaced by brand-new people completely foreign to her, who also left. Every summer, the heat scoured the streets clean of the past.

Only once in all those years did Sh.e.l.ly gasp and turn around, feeling she'd recognized someone. She'd been walking a sand trail through Death Valley in the shadow of the Funeral Mountains, and five girls were walking toward her, coming from the opposite direction. They were swinging their empty water bottles, and stupidly wearing flip-flops through the tough desert terrain, and little spaghetti strap tops under the blasting sun, Greek letters stenciled against the pastel cloth, bare shoulders turning red. It was ninety-five degrees out. (”But it's a dry heat,” everyone in Las Vegas always joked, ”like an oven”).

They will die out here, Sh.e.l.ly thought. Just by being silly, they will die.

She considered saying something, but as those girls pa.s.sed, they didn't even acknowledge her-except for one with s.h.i.+ning black hair who flipped it over her shoulder and looked at Sh.e.l.ly without smiling.

That girl, in truth, looked nothing like Josie Reilly, except that she was a type. Still, it took all the restraint Sh.e.l.ly had to keep walking, not to stop and say something to this girl, to the whole group of them: Something about the stupidity of thinking you were bigger than death. That you could walk in the valley of it without even bothering to bring enough water or wear hiking shoes.

But these girls would just turn around and walk right out, Sh.e.l.ly knew. They would survive it. They could, and they knew it, and, after all, that girl was not Josie. Like so many others who had pa.s.sed through her life over the many years (she was, after all, sixty-three years old), Sh.e.l.ly would be haunted by Josie Reilly forever, and would never see her again.

Sh.e.l.ly had made up the couch in her apartment living room for herself so Ellen could have the bed, but of course Ellen would have none of the bed. ”You slept on my couch,” she said. ”And you put the fight back in me, Sh.e.l.ly.”

”I gave you a dead end to follow for the rest of your life,” Sh.e.l.ly said. It was something they'd talked about hundreds of times over the years-how much and how little difference Sh.e.l.ly's bits of information had given Ellen. Had they been worth the trouble in the end, since they'd never brought her daughter back?

”No,” Ellen said. ”It was the only thing anyone gave me. The only thing better would have been if you'd given me Denise.”

They talked about Denise, of course, as they so often did. Marveling that she'd have been thirty-five years old now, if she were alive.

”I don't see her anymore,” Ellen said. ”I still look for her, but I can't imagine her now. She can't be twenty years old to me anymore, but I don't know who she would be if she were thirty-five.”

”She'd be like you,” Sh.e.l.ly said. ”She'd be a mother by now. And a friend. A good one. The best.”

108.

It didn't matter how many times she wrote it on the board (lie, lay, laid), they always got it wrong.

The students at South Plains College thought Mira was a crazy lady anyway, or just plain misinformed, herself, on the basics of good grammar. She sometimes considered going all the way-writing letters to newspapers and politicians insisting that it was simply time to change the verb tenses. (I laid down last night. Tomorrow, since it's Sat.u.r.day, I plan to just be laying around all day. I lied on the couch until noon drinking Budweiser.) It would be so much easier to change the grammar than to continue trying to teach these kids to get it right.

She erased the board, and closed the cla.s.sroom door behind her, headed for the parking lot, got in her car, and drove back to her trailer.

It was September, and the sky was blue and uncluttered by clouds, or anything else. In West Texas you really could see forever. You could have rolled a coin on the ground, and there would be nothing to stop the rolling for a thousand miles.

Mira tossed her bag on the couch, grabbed a Diet c.o.ke from the refrigerator, sat down, and booted up the computer. As she'd hoped, there was an email message from Matty, and one just under it from Andy.

The usual sweet things: Cla.s.ses were great. They needed money. Matty was in love with a girl, and Andy was just breaking up with one, and that night they were having pizza in the cafeteria, not to worry. They'd be home in a couple of weekends.

She smiled as she opened the photo that Matty had emailed of himself with his arm around the new love object. He was wearing sungla.s.ses and a UT-AUSTIN T-s.h.i.+rt. He was taller, thinner, but there was no way to overlook his resemblance to his father. Somewhere, Mira suspected, she still had a picture like this one of her ex-husband in a T-s.h.i.+rt and sungla.s.ses: Clark with s.h.a.ggy dark hair, needing a shave, smiling crookedly, an arm tossed over Mira's shoulder the way Matty had his arm tossed over the shoulder of this girl.

The girl was blond. A little chubby. Familiar-looking in the way of so many girls that age.