Lauren
At a gas station in Twentynine Palms, I bought two silk scarves.
“Tie it over your head,” I said, studying Nadine’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “We’ll put the top down.”
Watching her gather her copper hair, I thought of that night on the porch at Lambda Chi, when I’d tucked it behind her ear and kissed her on the mouth. Maybe she’d pulled away, but in my memory, she pulled me closer. We had been freshmen then. We graduated a week ago, and it still hadn’t come up—not once in four years, no matter how hard I willed her to mention it.
I started the engine and turned onto a two-lane road. It led us up into the mountains before dropping down into Palm Springs. I imagined fluttering green palm fronds framing pool party after pool party.
I asked Nadine if she remembered our junior year apartment, the one with the Christmas lights strung up on the rafters. She said of course, she did, but what I wanted to ask was if she would always remember it—if she would always remember me.
My room in that old place overlooked the street, and on Sunday mornings, I would study the sidewalk from bed and see her walking home from Seth’s or Jason’s or Mark’s house in the first light of day. She always paused at the intersection of Main Street and 6th Street, wrapped her arms around her thin frame, and squinted into the sunlight.
Every boy on campus was in love with her, and I wondered what it felt like when they laid her down on their cotton sheets and pushed themselves inside of her. I wondered what they whispered into her sharp little shoulders.
◆
Nadine
The road trip was Lauren’s idea—our post-graduation hurrah, she called it.
“Let me take your picture,” she said from across a booth at a tiki bar in Palm Springs. She had said that everywhere we went—the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Joshua Tree—always followed by, “In case we’re not as close someday.”
Glowing pufferfish lanterns hung from the ceiling. I held up my drink and smiled for her like she wanted.
“He’s staring at you.” Lauren nodded to the bartender in the Hawaiian shirt. “Guys are always staring at you.” She rolled her eyes.
I couldn’t tell if she was jealous of them or jealous of me. I plucked the pineapple out of my drink and sucked the rum out of it, shifting on the hard wooden bench. I felt restless, like I was waiting for something, but I wasn’t sure what.
When we stepped outside, the mountains were deep brown, almost purple. Maybe I would find it here. I searched the craggy cliffs with my eyes, picking out crevices in the rocks and wondering what might be inside.
◆
Lauren
At the hotel, I bought matching white bikinis from the gift shop.
“The color will look better when we’re tan,” I told Nadine.
We found two lounge chairs by the pool. Nadine caught the eyes of a waiter and put up one finger. Ambient lounge music drifted over us as girls with blonde hair languished beside boys with hairless chests. Above us, palm trees moved back and forth. The leaves looked glossy—almost wet—in the sunlight.
As the sun changed from hot white to gold, the beautiful girls and their boyfriends began to dance, their limbs loose with tequila.
Every time Nadine set down her empty drink, the waiter returned, smiling and holding a glass of something frozen and pink.
The night before we had shared a queen bed at a motel. I stayed up, touching my fingers to her silk pajamas—lightly, so she didn’t wake up—and listening to the cool whirring of the fan going shhhhhhhhh.
“Honestly, I don’t know about California guys,” I said.
And then we both saw him.
He was sitting alone across the pool wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. He was blonde and tan. The pool and palm trees reflected in his mirrored sunglasses.
I sucked the last of my drink through my straw and set it down.
The man sat up in his chair, lowered his sunglasses, and looked right at Nadine.
“Oh,” she whispered.
Jack—I guess that was his name—took us to brunch the next day at a country club.
“I thought this trip wasn’t about boys,” I said to Nadine in the bathroom.
“It’s not.” She spread coral gloss across her lips.
I squinted at my reflection in the mirror. I was getting a pimple on my nose.
She wore a long, white dress and gold sandals.
“You look so pretty,” I told her. “Promise you won’t ignore me?”
We sat at a table beneath a canopy of palms. Somewhere nearby, I could hear the bounce of a ball and the swinging of rackets on a tennis court. Jack was an artist from Los Angeles, or so he said, who was renting a trailer at a lake called the Salton Sea.
“At night, I walk down to the beach and sketch the sunset on the water. The Chocolate Mountains turn deep red.” He fixed his gaze on Nadine. “You would look beautiful there. I can picture you now, in that little white bikini, fishing from a boat.”
“I don’t fish,” Nadine said, but she was studying him, listening to him speak. She would go with him, I knew. She was always looking for the most interesting option, even if it wasn’t me.
Jack lifted the bottle of champagne from the ice bucket and poured the last of it into her glass. And then for the first time, he turned to me.
“Do you ladies want to go?”
I pursed my lips and looked at Nadine. “I don’t want to.” I hoped she would take my lead and say, Then I don’t want to either.
“Sure,” she said with a careless smile. “Why not?”
◆
Nadine
I saw the dust-choked Imperial Valley for the first time from the passenger seat of Jack’s Toyota. The landscape was brown and empty, punctuated by date palm farms. They grew beside the parched highway, planted in tight rows. I imagined a black hole at the center.
“You sure your friend won’t miss you?” Jack asked.
“She will.” I twisted my hair between my fingers.
I was grateful for a break from Lauren. The way she stood behind me every time I did my makeup, her eyes watching me from the mirror.
Jack laughed, revealing Hollywood white teeth. His trailer was perched on the shoreline of a town called Bombay Beach. I kept repeating the words in my head. Bombay Beach. It sounded exotic.
Jack made a motion with his hand like he was pantomiming throwing something out the window.
“She is forgotten,” he said.
A faded billboard advertised lots for sale in Salton City for $2,700. A sign told us we were eighty-six miles from Mexico. I pictured Tahoe with its deep cerulean water and smartly dressed Californians on boats. This looked like the end of the earth. I liked it.
From far away, the Salton Sea glimmered blue, so vast I couldn’t see the other side. Jack had told me it was the biggest lake in the state, but at that moment, it looked like an endless ocean. The breeze moved across the still water, and the dust in the air shimmered golden in the light.
We parked and got out. I choked on the smell of the air. It was like the ocean itself had spoiled.
“What is that?” I asked, gagging.
“I may have left out some details,” Jack said.
As we walked to the shoreline, something crunched beneath my feet. It wasn’t seashells; it was fish bones.
“It’s a saltwater lake,” Jack said. “And it’s drying up. That makes the salt concentration even higher than the ocean. There’s less oxygen in the water, so the fish, well, they’re drowning.”
“And that’s the smell? Dead fish?”
“It’s a lot of things. It’s the dead fish. It’s chemicals from the irrigation runoff. It’s raw sewage from the New River. The smell is why all of the tourists left. Well, that and the receding shoreline.”
The water appeared blue, eternal, and pure. It was impossible to believe that it would one day vanish.
“Are you mad?” Jack asked.
The ground beneath us was turning to mud. I could feel squirming beneath my feet. When we reached the water, I saw something billowing and green beneath the surface. I looked out at the Salton Sea, where sickly birds floated on the surface, their vacant eyes scanning for dying fish below.
“No,” I said. “I like it.”
Later that night in his trailer, after he fell asleep, I slid out of the bed. I shut the door quietly behind me and made my way down to the beach. Under the silvery moonlight, the Salton Sea glowed. I walked until my feet touched the water.
It wasn’t a resort destination anymore. Now that it was decaying, no one wanted it.
I wondered what it would feel like to be ugly like that, to be free to do anything.
Lauren texted me. When are you coming back to Palm Springs?!?!
I don’t know, I responded and then turned off my phone.
◆
Lauren
I stayed in bed with the shades drawn. Laughter rose from the pool below. The TV was on mute, and the light flashed across the darkened room.
Where was she?
Nadine had always been so quick to run off to someone or something else, like I wasn’t enough. I plucked the phone from the receiver on the nightstand and held it to my ear, willing her to call. But she was somewhere on a beach, squealing with laughter as Jack untied her bikini top and lowered his mouth to her breast.
I looked at my cell phone.
No missed calls.
I dialed her number. It went straight to voicemail.
◆
Nadine
It was achingly hot.
Each evening I walked to the briny water. The smell of dead fish baking in the sun lifted from the shoreline and encircled the broken summer cottages that lined the streets of Bombay Beach. The residents had all left years ago.
Jack wasn’t captivating, but I was willing to be with him if it meant being close to that dazzling body of water. There was something about it that made sense to me, as if all my life I had been looking for this place without even knowing it. I thought back to that moment outside of the tiki bar in Palm Springs, watching the mountains glow in the fading sun, radiating heat. Was this the place I’d been dreaming of then?
Jack put makeshift curtains on the windows of the trailer to keep it cool. He had an old record player, so we laid on our backs and listened to The Rolling Stones while a ceiling fan turned the air. By the end of the first week, my hair was heavy with sweat. I cut it off with plastic scissors. I didn’t think about the men who once touched it and trembled like they were discovering gold. I just sat on the stairs and snipped it, one chunk at a time until it was as short as I could get it without using a razor. When I was done, I stood in the dirt and felt the hot Imperial Valley air on the back of my neck for the first time.
That night, Jack said he would soon be going to Santa Fe for an artist residence. Good, I thought, and when I asked him if I could stay in the trailer after he left, he laughed like I was joking. Around midnight, I crawled out of bed, tiptoed across the linoleum floor, and pulled back the curtains to look at the lake. Beyond the crumbled foundation of an unfinished hotel, I could make out a lone armchair rotting on the beach. I went down to it, settled in, and watched the birds land on the water in the moonlight. I closed my eyes and inhaled the smell.
Further down the beach, the dark carcass of a long-forgotten boat was sinking into the earth. Rusty trailers and boarded up beach houses descended into the muddy shore. As the Salton Sea shrank, it was reclaiming its property.
I leaned back in the armchair. It was wool and covered in sand, like a piece of furniture inside a beach house. The sand stung my skin.
◆
Lauren
Nadine’s parents were looking for her at the Salton Sea, so I drove to smoggy Los Angeles, in search of her, or perhaps in search of Jack.
“That’s where he said he was from,” I told them.
My nerves burned beneath my skin. I felt like I had swallowed a stone. At night, I laid down in the backseat of the rental car and saw her face in the dark above me. I went to galleries, museums, asking everyone I saw if they knew an artist named Jack.
“Blonde hair,” I’d say, “Almost white. Maybe he was with this girl?” And then I’d take out her picture.
“Wow,” one gallery owner said, “She’s radiant.”
“What a pretty girl,” another said.
“Yes,” I agreed, “She’s so beautiful.”
◆
Nadine
I sat on the steps of Jack’s trailer drinking a warm beer. The fridge was broken, and it was hot as hell inside. Feral cats stood in the road, yowling and hissing, their eyes yellow. A scrawny black one lunged at a fat seagull. The bird let out a squawk and flew away. The cat paced the ground, hungry and hunting.
They were everywhere in Bombay Beach. They peeked out from beneath rusted cars, skulked in the shadows of abandoned concession stands, skittered across the floorboards of gutted hotels.
Jack emerged from the trailer, holding a sketch he’d drawn of me. It wasn’t good.
The cats scuttled away like crabs. Jack sat and kissed my cheek.
He had seemed so inviting in Palm Springs, his brown eyes amber in the California sunshine, but I was tired of him touching me. I breathed in, and the scent of the Salton Sea filled my nostrils. I wanted to be alone with it. I imagined it filling up my lungs and turning the blood in my veins to salt water.
Jack traced his fingers over my shoulder blades and traveled up my neck to the back of my head.
“I wish you hadn’t cut off your hair,” he said. “It was so pretty.”
Pretty. It was a word I’d heard my whole life. My parents would pat me on the head when the neighbors said it about me. My boyfriends would drape their arms around me when their friends pointed it out.
Now my scalp was blistered from the sun. My skin was scaly. My fingernails were ragged. My lips were peeling.
“Where do you go at night?” Jack asked.
“Down to the sea.”
Somewhere far away I could hear the birds screeching, the cats hissing. He was talking, but I couldn’t hear him. That night, I cupped my hands, brought the water to my lips, and drank deeply.
◆
Lauren
I checked into the Sea and Sun Motel on the western shore of the Salton Sea and told myself I wasn’t checking out until I found Nadine.
“We think she might be in San Diego,” her mother said on the phone. “We’re looking for her here.”
The room smelled like a wet bikini in a hot car. There was a broken mini-fridge in the corner. The television didn’t receive any channels. When I saw the dead cockroach on the pillow, I wasn’t surprised.
I sat on the bed and ate pretzels, wondering what Nadine would be doing if she were with me.
Every day I drove to another abandoned town on the shore of the Salton Sea and walked through crumbling buildings in search of her. When it got dark, I drove back to the hotel and ate cereal from the box. I made notes in the small leather journal Nadine had given me for my birthday and then turned off the lights. I rarely slept.
I searched for her at a ghost town called Desert Shores. The beach was littered with dead birds, their bodies mangled as if they’d been wrenched from the sky. I doubled over and vomited.
I hopped the fence of a rotting beach house with bashed-in windows at Salton City and peered inside. I thought I might see her standing in the entryway in a gold dress, laughing like it had all been some grand adventure, but she wasn’t there.
I got on Highway 86 and drove south to sunbaked towns in the deepest south of southern California. I searched for her in Westmorland, a town filled with empty houses and hand-painted signs. I searched for her in a nothing town with a name that sounded like a fistfight. I searched for her amongst the faded brick buildings of El Centro. And then I drove south and stood on the border of Mexico in a town called Calexico. I promised myself that one day I would get my passport and see if she had left the country for Mexicali.
I walked through the trash-strewn dirt roads of Slab City, a squatters’ camp situated on the dusty cement remains of an abandoned artillery training range, shouting her name.
I crossed the cracked parking lots of rest stops and showed her picture to gas station attendants. I knocked on trailer doors, but no one ever answered.
◆
Nadine
In the blue light of dawn, I left him.
I made my way through the skeletons of beach houses, past the cars sinking into the mud, and down to the shore.
At last, I was alone on the beach, looking down at dead fish blanketing the shore, their mouths agape.
I took off my shoes and felt the bones beneath my feet.
Soon, the sun would rise, and the Salton Sea would turn pink and gold, but for now, it was dark. I closed my eyes and stepped into the water.
◆
Lauren
Sometimes, on sleepless nights, I pictured Nadine sitting on the side of a dirt road in Mexico, weaving palm tree branches into baskets. I imagined that she wore a white cotton dress and a wide-brimmed hat. She was tan and happy. Sometimes, I imagined her on the side of Highway 86, with coral lipstick and her thumb in the air, ready to disappear into the Imperial Valley. Other times, I dreamed that she was holding a fishing pole on the deck of a boat in the middle of the Salton Sea, blissfully unaware that the fish were dead.
Nadine
I awoke on the shore in the shadow of birds flying over me, their wings beating the air. To my right, the water of the Salton Sea lapped against the beach, washing over the remains of the fish and stripping the flesh off their bones. The sun was warm on my face.
A scrape on my abdomen wept blood, but I knew the Salton Sea had healing powers.
The birds circled over me, crying out. From the darkness beneath an overturned boat, a feral cat hissed.
◆
Lauren
Nadine’s parents decided to wait for her at their house in Arizona. They made one last trip to Palm Springs and then flew home for good.
It hurt, but I gave up too. I checked out of the Sea and Sun Motel and headed north, out of the Imperial Valley. Somewhere near the town of Thermal I changed my mind and turned around. Even though I hated it, I wanted to see the Salton Sea one last time.
I parked the car and walked down to the shoreline. Starving cats with knotty tails skittered out of the way, and birds with nicotine-colored wings rose to the sky.
I would never find Nadine.
Now that I was leaving, I could see the place Jack had described at the restaurant in Palm Springs. If you held your breath, the Salton Sea was beautiful in a way. The sun sank behind the mountains and the colors of the Imperial Valley glowed yellow. From somewhere far away, I could hear palm trees shifting in the breeze.
And down on the shoreline, from behind a decaying rowboat, a shadowed animal emerged on all fours, crawling to the edge of the water in search of something. A slender heron startled and flew away.
The sunlight fell onto the creature, and I saw that it wasn’t an animal. It was a human girl, naked and covered with mud. I stood and began to walk toward her. Her scalp was covered in scabs and, in some places, was bleeding, but there was still one spot near the nape of her neck where a single lock of bright copper hair grew. She pawed at the dirt.
I was standing right beside her, but she still didn’t see me. Her eyes were wild and focused. She dug furiously in the mud. Her legs were long and bony, and her stomach was distended. She was hunched over in a way that wasn’t human, her back curved like a primate. I watched as she pulled something from beneath the carpet of decay. She held the rotten fish to her face and brought it to her mouth.
I wanted to say her name, but it caught in my throat.
I thought of that night on the porch freshman year of college. Her warm, sweet breath. I thought of the drive into sun-dappled Palm Springs, her fiery hair catching the light.
She made a sucking sound as she ripped the spoiled flesh from the fish. Her mouth was ringed with gray filth and the skin on her face had been burned red and rough from the sun.
“It’s me,” I whispered.
She froze, finally noticing me.
She dropped the fish on the ground and looked up, but her eyes were those of an animal. She bared her teeth at me and hissed, one long, feral sound. She turned, still on all fours, and charged toward the water. She paused at the edge. I could see every knob in her spine. Her shoulders heaved with heavy breath. She grunted and looked back at me, and then we both looked out to the Salton Sea.
I had stood on the shore countless times since she disappeared, angry and asking for answers, but the water was always a blank face.
Without another glance back, Nadine crawled into the Salton Sea, moving swiftly on her hands and knees away from the shallow shoreline. When the water was at her chin, she slipped beneath the surface. She paddled her arms and propelled herself away from the beach, toward the dark center of the sea, to a place she couldn’t return from.
The sea curled around a waterlogged armchair. Broken champagne flutes and party favors of long-gone revelers disappeared into the mud. Behind me, beach houses buckled and sank into oblivion as if finally accepting their demise.
The Salton Sea was drying up and disappearing. But somewhere out on the water, Nadine was already gone.