Chapter 1
Sunday, 11:04 p.m.
You’re picking up where you left off.
Ten years without a word, and then four, on a Sunday at 11:04 p.m.: It's my turn Saturday.
I was in room 9 at The Gardens at Spring Valley, in Las Vegas, one hand under Mr. Delgado's neck, the other turning his pillow without waking him. He was ninety-two, with skin like cigarette paper and the calm conviction that I was a nun. He called me “Sister.” I'd never set him straight. He was the only person in the world who gave me a title.
The phone buzzed against my hip, in the pocket of my scrubs. At that hour it could only be Lola, calling from the B-wing station to tell me the lady in 17 had pulled out her IV again and was holding it like a bouquet. I eased Mr. Delgado's head back down on the cool side of the pillow, took the phone out of my pocket, and it wasn't Lola.
A number I didn't know. It started with 435.
I knew what 435 meant. Southern Utah. St. George, Hurricane, Kanab, that whole strip of red desert stuck up against the Arizona line like a scab on a wound. Nobody called me from southern Utah. Nobody called me from anywhere, if I'm honest, except a robot that wanted to extend the warranty on a car that didn't deserve one.
I answered. I kept my voice down, for Mr. Delgado.
“Yes?”
Wind. A wide wind that hit the mic in gusts, with the snap of a sheet being shaken out on a line. I knew that wind. There are no trees to slow it down where it was coming from, just sagebrush and distance. And under it, very close, someone breathing through their mouth. Then a whisper, so low I heard it as much in my stomach as in my ear:
“It's my turn Saturday.”
The call ended. I thought: dropped, not hung up. There's a difference, when you grew up somewhere the signal hangs on one bar and the goodwill of God. The screen went back to the time. 11:04 p.m.
I stood there in the middle of the room with the phone against my cheek. Mr. Delgado opened one eye.
“Are you praying, Sister?”
I looked down. My hands had come together in front of my chest, fingers laced so tight the knuckles had gone white, the phone pinned between my palms. I haven't prayed in ten years. My hands never got the news.
“Yes, Mr. Delgado. Go back to sleep.”
He went back to sleep. He always did what the nuns told him.
A whisper has no age. It barely has a gender, either. That's the point: you whisper so the people asleep in the next room won't recognize you, and that way nobody can recognize you at all. I replayed those four words in my head until I'd worn them through. They gave me nothing back. Only the wind, and the way “Saturday” came out, leaning hard on the first syllable, the way we say it back home.
I thought: Selah. I went on thinking it until Wednesday night.
Where I was born, they give the girls away. The place is called Peniel. It sits at the bottom of a sagebrush valley at the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs, in northern Arizona, and it takes twenty minutes of dirt road off the highway to get there, two cattle guards, and the feeling that they saw you coming from the start. The girls are given by the Father — Father Asa, Asa Gedge, who founded the town and speaks for God — at fifteen, at sixteen, at seventeen, to the man God has named to him. You find out a few days before. The man's name, you find out the night before.
“It's my turn Saturday”: where I come from, you didn't need to say any more. Those words never meant anything else.
My little sister had turned sixteen on February 2. When I left, she was six. She slept in my bed because hers was against the north wall, and she'd press her icy feet against my calves to warm them up. I'd grumble. She'd laugh into the pillow. That was our whole language, at that hour: “Sel, your feet.” “Ket, your legs.”
Nobody in Peniel has a phone. Women aren't allowed one, girls even less, and the men who own one for their job sites keep it in the glove box of the truck, the way you'd keep a gun. Somebody had bought that number on the outside. Somebody had found the money, found a SIM card, found my number. And found the spot.
Because I knew where the wind was coming from.
There's only one public place in Peniel where a phone picks up anything: the water tank, on its knoll north of town, a big steel drum painted green, with a rusty ladder and a stock trough underneath. From up there, at night, you can see the headlights on the highway seven or eight miles off, tiny, sliding left to right and disappearing behind the shoulder of a hill. The men go up there to call their foremen. I used to go up with my sister to watch the headlights. She thought every pair of lights was a family on its way home.
Up there the wind never stops.
I called back from the hallway, under the green glow of the emergency exit sign. Switched off. I called back from the linen closet, between two stacks of sheets that smelled of industrial detergent. Switched off. I called back outside, in the parking lot, next to my Corolla, in the heat still rising off the asphalt after midnight. A synthetic voice told me the person I was calling was unavailable. I knew that. I just wanted to hear somebody say it.
When I came back in, Lola was waiting for me in the break room with her feet up on a chair and her reading glasses pushed up into her dyed hair. Dolores Ibarra, sixty-one, twenty-two years of nights, a bag of cinnamon candies in every pocket and an opinion on everything. She was the only one on the outside who knew where I came from. I'd told her one December night, because of a resident who died holding my hand. She'd never asked a single question since. Lola knew how to wait.
She watched me come in. She looked at my hands.
“Sit down.”
“I haven't finished my rounds.”
“Sit down, Kat.”
I sat down. She tore a wrapper open with her teeth and put a candy in my palm, the way you'd hand someone a pill. The cinnamon burned my tongue. It was exactly what I needed.
“Who died?”
“Nobody.”
“Then who's going to?”
I didn't answer. She didn't push. She picked her magazine back up and turned the pages too fast to read them.
I finished my shift. I changed bed pads, emptied urine bags, sorted pills into little plastic cups, held the hand of a woman who kept calling for her husband, dead since 1987. I did everything I do every night, and I did it well. Peniel taught me that much, at least: to work with my hands busy and my mind somewhere else, and never drop a thing.
In every room, as I walked in, I checked where the exits were. The door. The window that only opens four inches, so nobody can jump. The red call button. I've done it for ten years, everywhere, at the grocery store, at the dentist, in gas station bathrooms. I sleep with my shoes at the foot of the bed, laces loose, toes pointed at the door. My hair has been short since a night bus between Flagstaff and Kingman, and there's a white scar across my left palm that pulls when rain is coming. It almost never rains in Las Vegas. That's one reason to stay.
I'd never changed my number. I told myself it was for the day Sel had a phone.
That's what I told myself, anyway.
At 3:40 a.m. I was in the staff kitchen, rinsing out the coffeepot, when the phone buzzed twice in a row.
Same number. 435.
A message with a picture. The time stamp said 11:06 p.m. It had taken more than four hours to cross the desert and finally land in my pocket, between a coffeepot and a dish towel.
The photo was badly framed, shot with the flash, crooked. A plank wall. A nail. On the nail, a wooden hanger, and on the hanger, a dress. Ankle-length, you could tell from the fold at the hem. Long sleeves, buttoned at the wrists. A high collar. Plain, of course. Flowers are for God. A sage green so soft it went gray under the flash, the green of sagebrush leaves once the dust has settled on them.
Nobody sews a new dress in Peniel for no reason. Dresses go down from sister to sister until the weave shows through. A new dress, plain, sage green, pressed and hanging all by itself on a nail, is a giving dress.
Mine had been faded blue. I never wore it.
The second message came right after. Three words, this time.
“Don't call back.”
I stood at the sink with the coffeepot in my hand. The water was still running. It overflowed the pot, ran over my wrist and into my sleeve, and I didn't feel it until it reached my elbow.
Don't call back. That meant: they'd catch me. That meant: the phone is hidden somewhere, and if it rings, someone other than me will hear it. It also meant, though I only understood this later, that whoever wrote it had thought about me, about what I'd do, and knew me well enough to know I was going to call back.
I turned off the faucet.
At 4:00 a.m. I opened the one thread on my phone I'd never deleted.
It was saved as “G.” I'd never saved it as anything else. Even one letter was a lot.
There was almost nothing in it. One message a year, always the same, always on April 22, always late in the evening: “Still free?” And under each one, my answer, always the same too: “Still.” Nine times his question, nine times my word, one under the other, a neat straight column on the screen like the lines in a ledger.
I've never told anyone about that thread. Not even Lola.
I stayed there a while with my thumb over the keyboard. Through the kitchen window the Las Vegas sky was starting to pale behind the neon, that dirty gray that isn't morning yet. In room 9, Mr. Delgado was coughing in his sleep.
I typed three words of my own.
“She called me.”
I didn't even have time to set the phone down on the counter.
4:01: “I know.”