There are more grasshoppers than I remember. They’re resting on the edges of sidewalk pavement when things seem still. They’re feasting full on all this summer and drought, serrating anything still growing green in the heat. I do know this—the authority of an insect on the west desert. I know the west desert.
I’m waiting for her to call back in response to my message: that I am in town, where I am staying, how to reach me, but it is already six o’clock. In the hotel room, I am restless. All I can do is curse myself for the takeout fried burrito, to stare at it, throwing away crumpled napkins and half-bites, one at a time until I’ve made my way through the white paper bag. The smell sticks by my seat at the square table because the trashcan is so out in the open. I think there is no way I can sleep in this narrow room, and that I never wanted to in the first place, but it’s been so many years and some conversations need to be had in person. The trash, too uncovered and shallow—I empty the can and return to the table. Take my socks off and sit.
At seven-ten, the front desk calls to relay a message. Turns out she is just home from the ceramics studio, and it’s been a long day. She can meet me in the morning. Because things seem hopeful, I open the drawer of the desk to find the hotel notepad and pen. I write down my talking points in preparation. Keep them quick. Then, I reach into my purse and place the note, folded, beside an envelope of cash. Think: she will either accept my assistance or she will not. If this is not enough for her, I anticipate we will both end up angry and that will be telling of the mistake that is this whole trip. On the flip side, it’s almost harder to imagine her accepting me and what happens next. The anger perhaps easiest to deal with, as it has been in the past. A refusal, understandable, based on unmendable fractures and all this a last attempt for good effort. When it fails, we’ll walk away, maybe finally, maybe at last.
Soon, I am writing on a new note a story about a woman from a nightmare. Having recently come into some wealth, she’s purchased a whole house with good acreage and a tile pool. Then, weeks pass, and she hasn’t once stepped down for a swim. The pool shed did not come equipped with a skimmer net and, without one, she can’t imagine a decent way to fish out the dead toad floating belly up in the deep end. The toad, white puss around its lips, sinks lower into the basin with each day passing, and she does nothing about it.
When I finally start to feel the fatigue of my travels, I have not finished the story or even begun to really start getting it down.
—
Outside the hotel room window, a balcony wraps around the building in a half-square shape. The firm geometric angle makes sense here, in the desert, where things are just as they seem and nearly inescapable. Because my socks are too worn from the drive and from being turned inside out after arriving, I put my shoes on without them, and I get in my car to drive the fifteen minutes to her house. Better to get it over with as soon as possible. Better to sleep tonight, knowing.
On the drive, I pass long pathways of decomposed granite, rock yards covering plastic tarps flaking over the impossible dirt, the porches, the brown glazed tiles, green spurts from windowsills, the same still and more of it. Maybe all this remained quaint to her and that’s why she’s stayed. But neighbors share driveways; there are horrible plastic chairs set out in the yards, and it’s all as if no one desires privacy; the room to breathe; the clarity that brings out the deep night sky—that brings people here in the first place.
—
I am worried for a moment, just a few minutes away, that her boyfriend’s car will be parked in the driveway, that the immediacy I feel to speak with her now instead of waiting for the morning will not be productive or affirmative but betraying. This is when I think of my own house up north, and my own husband, whom I hate, and the dog that keeps me up at night, who never learned how to pace himself, or how life is long and there are people you are indebted to whom you should not cross. When I arrive, I see her boyfriend’s car is in the driveway. I park at the farthest bit of sidewalk still available on the narrow street. I think that it isn’t a mistake, that I have a right to be here. Now, the neighborhood has never changed, and I am walking to the front of her house.
—
There’s faint light through a curtained kitchen window. She and her boyfriend must be in there, seated just by the door, which doesn’t give me much time to think. With such an upbringing as ours there is an inherited sense that a woman is only as strong as her convictions. I decide I will circle around the house first, and I creep, straining to hear any sound. There is none, but the backyard is just as I imagined it to be. She has beds of wilted vegetables, none have fruited, and it is already August. I think she would keep a garden for the sense of herself. I imagine remarking to her that she needs to water.
As I am approaching the door, from the back, I hear it open. She is on the step, looking around for me. I am not sure if she had heard a sound; I am not sure if she had seen me. When she sees me now, she smiles, which I think is only to acknowledge that it’s all to be expected.
We’re close. She puts her arms out and takes me to her and then we both sit down on the steps. She asks if I would like a drink and I hesitate to look back through the storm door into the house, thinking of the man in there who is likely waiting for her and making judgments of me.
I’m sure that when she told him I was in town she probably twisted up her mouth and whispered that she would take care of it, that it will blow over, and life will resume. Selling ceramics at the farmers market, writing her blog about the desert as if she knows it from her heart.
When she sees my eyes wandering back, she tries to reassure me that it’s fine. He won’t come out. Then I think I might as well have that drink, so I say yes, and she leaves me once again to get two glasses and an opened bottle of wine. It is quiet when she’s back and pouring. I hear crickets and notice the dark, begin to feel self-conscious in this twilight, an in-between time.
In the dark, her looking at me, waiting, I begin to lose sight of what it is I really want to ask of her. To accept my money? I begin slowly, recapping what she already knows, but my voice changes, though I do not mean it to. Soon I am accusing her of the past and things she said to me about being just like our mother, controlling and unconcerned of the emotional needs of others, but that the truth is I felt pushed out. I love the desert, too. I set my glass down. It must have all just sounded accusatory, not confessional, and because she is sitting so straight up, I am almost talking from below to her. There’s the heat, and I only wish the man was not inside. I am sure she would have invited me in if he was not. She says he is a good man, only helping her temporarily until she finds something more permanent. It is not my intention, but I almost wince in annoyance, thinking of her pottery and her blog. Think: it is just this. We are never without some looming idea of the other that neither can let go of. Maybe the past does matter, but I want to know how. Whether she will ever forgive me, and if so, what difference it will make.
Whether she has replaced me entirely, and if so, whether there might be room for me still at all. How, if an end appears in front of me, I might be capable of recognizing it as an end, and, if so, what comes next.
Emily Spacek grew up in the Bay Area. These days, she studies prose fiction at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her writing is published in Red Ogre Review and Sugar House Review.
