When she was new to the neighborhood Audrey used to plod past Carol’s house in the heat of afternoon and think, ew. Carol’s split-level ranch was one in a long line of split-level ranches. Audrey didn’t turn her head to look at it as she passed. She didn’t have to. The peripheral world appeared in the bright gap between the white slope of her own cheek and the edge of her sunglasses. Through it, she could see everything she needed to; low-pitched eaves festooned with flags that said things in a language that looked like worms; windowsills lousy with candles sunk in bubbly pools of their own wax; Carol, puttering in the yard.
Audrey just happened to be walking by like that one day when Carol extended a delicate hand from the shade of her porch.
Their feathers look just like fingers, Carol said, pointing up at the wide, black birds circling above them. And they wobble—hawks and eagles glide, but turkey vultures wobble. Carol loved turkey vultures because they live without killing; not even plants or bugs. Isn’t that neat?
Sure, said Audrey, feeling anything but.
Here’s what lived on Carol’s bookcase: a lot of talismanic carvings. Thin, colorful paperbacks about mindfulness and dream interpretation and monks. Monks who used chopsticks to arrange grains of sand into intricate patterns they destroyed at the end of each day, Carol said. Dusty white sage and bone fragments and turkey vulture feathers. Back issues of National Geographic. A framed photograph of Steve from an early anniversary, a backpacking backpack on his back and a red-faced baby in a baby carrier on his front. “Anniversary.” Carol wiggled two fingers on either end of the word when she said it like, We Don’t Need No Piece of Paper from the City Hall. A lot of good that did, said Carol. A gray clay pinch pot, a pair of red dice. A small canister of some hand-made herbal salve long since dried shut. A geometric knot of lavender crystals the size of a ham.
That might have done some damage, Audrey thought later.
When Carol was found crushed beneath her bookcase; oh, that had been awful. No one in the little red-and-blue-lit throng had known what to say to her teenage daughter, the same one from the baby carrier. No one except Derick, who put a big hand on the daughter’s camisoled shoulder and offered to drive her up to Steve’s.
That’s one of the things Audrey has always liked about Derick: he’s calm in crisis. Thoughtful, considerate. Audrey had been so occupied by the thought of Carol’s daughter discovering the body that it hadn’t even occurred to her to confirm the details. Really, the sheriff found it. Found her. Carol’s sister had been calling every day for a week to tell him she was having a Bad Feeling. Carol’s sister lived in Illinois and claimed to be clairvoyant. Bullshit, Carol always said. Audrey watched Carol’s daughter stiffen beneath Derick’s hand, watched him withdraw it and bend to listen.
Here is how Audrey knows Derick loves her:
Oh my God, Audrey will say, hoisting her ass onto the kitchen island and Derick, turning to slip between the tips of her pointed toes and the Spanish tiled counter just beyond them, will tickle the bottoms of her feet before asking about her day. That’s the evidence. Or maybe, that’s the expression. Audrey loves Derick and it’s totally mutual. They are married; they own their own home.
To this day, the Realtor’s corrugated plastic sign still lives happily stabbed into their cobbled front yard. Everyone in the neighborhood leaves the Realtor’s sign up, even years after they’ve moved in and settled down, installed yard art and a novelty mailbox. Peering out the heat-tinted passenger window of Derick’s truck as he drives Audrey down their block is like watching a flipbook. The motionless Realtor grinning while the split-level ranches behind her change color; pink to green to goldenrod and back. Audrey and Derick’s house is beige.
Taupe, the Realtor said.
Flesh color, said Carol, although her own flesh color was closer to bone than beige.
Steve’s house is champagne yellow. Audrey searched for it out the back passenger window and asked the daughter questions about her summer plans.
Okay, an internship. Now, what is that exactly?
Good to keep the kid engaged, good to sit beside her. They’d met before, once on Carol’s porch and another time in the swamp cooled living room. It had seemed to Audrey that the girl was in perpetual transit between her parents’ houses, duffle bag strap stamping a red stripe across her collarbone like a seatbelt burn after a bad crash.
Audrey flopped a hand palm-up on the middle console between them, but the daughter did not take it. Her hands kneaded one another busily, smoothing the denim triangle her short-shorts cut across her lap. All of a sudden, she pointed out her father’s house and Derick swerved into the driveway, narrowly avoiding the Realtor’s smiling face and causing the daughter to slide across the slick leather backseat into the soft side of Audrey’s body.
Derick said they should stay in the car, give the man some privacy. The man or the men, Audrey couldn’t quite hear which before Derick shut the driver’s side door, AC on although the night had cooled off quickly. Audrey watched Derick standing in the pearl of light cast by Steve’s single, automatic porchlight. He knocked on the door and she willed it to open. She wanted to see him say exactly the right thing to this man who must by now have guessed that something was wrong.
Except no one answered so they went to town for ice cream. They sat on the tall granite curb of Comanche street, licking quietly and staring across the wide asphalt at the Old-West themed bar. The one with real bullet holes in the pressed tin ceiling and a stern bouncer wearing buckskins and a walkie-talkie. A man in basketball shorts stumbled through the swinging saloon doors and pissed across the low windows of a basement antique store. The one that sells Navajo blankets and fat silver rings and miner’s carbide helmets that fizz when shaken. That night, Steve and Carol’s daughter slept in Audrey and Derick’s unfinished basement and the next morning, Carol’s mom drove down from Reno to take her away.
The neighborhood is perfect for kids; dry creeks and culverts and half-built houses to play in and very few scorpions, all things considered. The real desert is less than a skip, hop, and a jump from Audrey and Derick’s doorstep, which isn’t right, of course. That’s just how the wilderness is out here, close. And that’s good for kids, too, in a way. Every nine months or so, the neighborhood grows a new, concentric layer. This kicks up a lot of dust.
Way back before Audrey and Derick even made an offer on the taupe house, the Realtor had warned them about this. It’s up to me, she said, to make these disclosures and then it’s up to you, the buyers, to decide if they are appropriate for your family. Her white fingers spread like cracks across Audrey and Derick’s kitchen island, almost entirely obscured by paperwork. Then, the Realtor told them what they already knew about the desert; that it was radioactive and probably harmless. Something about radon, granite, erosion. Then, she said two more things.
Can I just say two things? The Realtor said, okay, the richest, most famous people on this planet expose themselves to higher levels of radiation every day by flying in their private jets! And second, said the Realtor, raising her voice, this kind of thing is only serious if you’re out there, oh I don’t know, breaking rocks or something.
The desert around the development was pockmarked with amateurish mines dug by gold-hungry pioneers; wide, historical pits that had spent the last hundred odd years refilling themselves with litter and sediment. Back when Audrey was so new to the neighborhood she didn’t know where it ended, Carol had shown her, leading her by the hand through the wrinkling heat to the melted edge of the cul-de-sac. Suburban wilderness interface, said Carol.
Sure, said Audrey. Her flip flops lapped silent indents in the sand that accumulates drifts along the curbside. The paved road extends well past the point where houses give way to construction sites give way to land, cleared and leveled and measured out in squares. Carol toed off her sandals and abandoned them beneath the Realtor’s sun-bleached face in the last buildable lot. Gas and electric hookups waited for action in one weedy corner. Everything alive was visible from far away; spiky and saw-toothed.
Carol liked to slide on her ass down the sandy sides of the old mines and preen through the grit for collectables. She found pop-top beer cans and pioneer junk and paper-thin shards of mica that she tucked into her bra for safekeeping. Audrey would wait on the eroding brink until Carol’s arm appeared like a freckled wing over the side. Then, Audrey would plant her heels, seize Carol by the wrist, and haul her back to the surface. By the time they were safely back on Carol’s porch, the mica would have crumbled into sweaty tit glitter against Carol’s bony sternum. Audrey thought this was gross; Carol laid out like some sanctified party girl, sparkly and elderly-looking beneath her prayer flags and bamboo wind chimes.
Now, when Audrey goes into the desert, she goes alone. She doesn’t know any of the plant’s names but sometimes she feels like they might know hers, you know? When she finds one she really likes, she will call Derick. If the call drops, she will scramble up the nearest crumbling outcrop and try again. From up there, Audrey can see the suburbs and town and the hard, folded mountains beyond and eventually: Derick trudging toward her with a shovel and a paper shopping bag. He will dig up the plant and carry it home, holding the bag away from his body to avoid the green and purple spines protruding through.
Audrey likes to replant the desert plants in weird, fucked-up crop circles and spirals in the backyard. From her perch on the kitchen island, she can see through the window above the sink to her thorn forest beyond it, her swirling spiky garden. Derick rubs her feet while she looks and thinks.
That’s the kind of thing Derick will do for Audrey when she asks; rub her feet, carry a cactus through hot radioactive sand, buy her a house. Derick will make a great dad, seriously. When Audrey and Derick have one, a kid, he won’t be allowed to sleep in the basement. Not even when he turns into a teenager with a desire to slam a door and storm down his own set of stairs. He’ll sleep in the home office Audrey and Derick never use. Sometimes, he will hear Audrey and Derick having sex through the wall. Nothing crazy; it’s good for kids, Audrey thinks, to know their parents love each other.
Two years before Audrey and Derick moved to the neighborhood, the Realtor’s son nodded off behind the wheel and killed a young mother driving up the mountain while he was on his way back down it. The summer previous, he’d slipped in a motel shower on a trip back East with his club soccer team and broken his wrist and the ER had prescribed painkillers.
One thing led to another, said Carol, meaningfully.
People in this neck of the woods love to talk, that’s why Audrey plants her garden in the back. Actually, there are no woods, just stucco and vinyl siding and shingle and sheetrock. From the front, the taupe house is indistinguishable from the twin model units squatted like gargoyles at the mouth of the development.
The Realtor’s son is in prison in Mesa.
The Realtor’s daughter lives somewhere in Colorado.
Carol and Steve’s daughter never came back from Reno.
It was so obvious: the Realtor couldn’t wait to put Carol’s house back on the market. But since Steve was still listed as the beneficiary, and since Steve was still missing, she had to wait. It was all a little vague, a little folkloric. Steve gone. Holes in Carol’s head that weren’t sufficiently bookcase shaped. Shoe prints in the sand that shifted across Carol’s unswept yard. A ten iron missing from Steve’s caddy.
Nine iron, said Derick, a ten iron is called something different.
Rumor had it, the Sheriff drove to Phoenix with Carol’s little body curled in the open truck bed, no tarp even. What was in Phoenix, anyway?
The coroner, said Derick.
Sometime after Carol died but before the Fourth of July, a lady cop showed up at Audrey and Derick’s front door in the middle of the day. She asked Audrey a tangle of questions, capitalizing on her confusion the way Derick used to do years ago when they first started dating and would stay up so late that by the time they finally got around to talking, Audrey would be sleepy and vulnerable and tell him absolutely anything he wanted to know.
Here is everything Audrey knew: the divorce had been messy but the daughter seemed fine; she had an internship. Steve had been dead set on making things work with Carol before she got so tragically squished. No, Audrey didn’t know him terribly well. Yes, she supposed he was a golfer; most guys were, Derick was.
The Sheriff waited for the drought to drain the reservoir to its murky floor before he dredged it. He found pop top beer cans, bicycles, animal bones, and a handful of corn cob pipes that the little museum in town displayed in an exhibit called Domestic Life on the Frontier. He didn’t find a golf club or a baseball bat or even a crowbar. Steve got pulled over in Needles for expired tags; there was a tire iron in his trunk. But isn’t there always?
Derick and Audrey watched footage from the trial on the computer that lived like a relic in their home office until May, when they moved it into a hutch in the living room. Soon, there might be a baby; computers are bad for babies.
And bad for mothers! Carol would have said, probably. Sure, Carol. Carol had a long list of things that were totally healthy; long walks, the desert, being barefoot, Sanskrit. Audrey wasn’t pregnant by the time of the verdict, but Derick bet her she would be by the sentencing.
Such a levelheaded guy. Especially if you love someone, you want to believe them.