Monday, 9:05 a.m.

At 9:05 Monday morning I hadn't slept, I was still in my scrubs from the Gardens, and a woman in Phoenix was asking me for the address of a place that doesn't have one.

I was sitting on my bed in my studio on the third floor of an open-walkway complex south of the Strip, with a view of a parking lot and the back of a tire shop. The air conditioner dripped into a bucket I emptied every night. The bucket went tock, tock, at uneven intervals, and every time my heart answered a beat late. My shoes were at the foot of the bed, toes toward the door.

I'd found the number for the DCS hotline on the State of Arizona website. I'd waited nineteen minutes on hold, a pan flute going around and around. Then a woman's voice, crisp, tired, a voice that must have heard everything there is to hear and had decided to stay polite anyway.

“Child's name?”

“Selah Hallam. S, E, L, A, H.”

“Date of birth?”

“February 2, 2010.”

She was typing. I could hear the keys, fast, and behind her other voices saying other names.

“Address?”

“There are no addresses in Peniel.”

A pause.

“I'm sorry?”

“It's a town. Well, a settlement. North of 89A, between the Kaibab and Marble Canyon. There's a dirt road. The house is the big one with three stories, one of them unfinished. The Hallam mill is out back. Everybody knows where it is. There are no house numbers, no street names. There's no mailman.”

“How do people get their mail?”

“They don't.”

She typed something. I wondered what. “No mailman,” maybe.

“School?”

“The Assembly school. Up to fourteen. After that, the dairy.”

“Primary care doctor?”

“No.”

“And you are?”

“Her sister. Keturah Hallam. I left ten years ago.”

“And what is the danger to the child, ma'am?”

I'd rehearsed the sentence all night. It came out on its own, flat.

“She's going to be given on Saturday.”

“Given?”

So I explained. The Father, the revelation, the man you only meet the night before, the new dress. My voice was calm. I could hear it being calm, and it scared me, that nursing-aide voice that breaks bad news to a family in a hallway. The woman didn't interrupt. At some point she stopped typing.

“Ma'am, has the child been abused at any point so far?”

“She will be on Saturday.”

“I understand. But an announced marriage, even a religious one, isn't abuse that's already happened. I'm taking your report. It'll be assessed and forwarded to the appropriate office. Someone will contact you if we need more information.”

“When?”

“I can't give you a time frame.”

She typed some more, slower. I heard her hesitate, a real hesitation, like someone double-checking before saying something unpleasant.

“Miss Hallam, the State of Arizona has no record of any child by that name.”

I looked at the bucket. Tock.

“I know,” I said. “That's why I'm calling.”

---

At 10:30 the phone rang. An Arizona number, a landline. I hadn't moved off the bed. I picked up thinking the woman in Phoenix had found something.

“Ket.”

Nobody calls me that anymore. Nobody has the right. A little girl made it up when she was two because she couldn't say Keturah, and a man heard it one night and kept it.

It was the second time in my life Gideon Corlett had called me.

He had the same voice. Even, low, a voice that had never needed to rise for anyone to listen. A Sunday voice. I heard it and I was seventeen again, barefoot on a cold plank floor, a hand tapping softly at my window.

“They called me,” he said. “Your report. The hotline couldn't find an address, so they phoned the substation to ask where the child was. They wanted to know where you grew up, Ket. I told them it was a long way out.”

I gripped the phone. Of course. Of course they'd called him. For sixty miles around there was exactly one man in uniform who knew where Peniel was.

“She's going to be given on Saturday.”

“I know.”

Again. I know. He'd written it at four in the morning and now he was saying it, the same way, no pride, no apology.

“Can you stop it?”

“I can watch over her. I already do. I have people out there, I have eyes. Listen to me.”

I listened. I'd always listened to him.

“If you come, you're condemning her. They'll know it was you, they'll know she's the one who called you. They'll give her that same night, somewhere else, on a ranch, in Nevada or God knows where, and you'll never see her again. Nobody will. You understand? Let me handle it.”

A pause. I could hear a radio behind him, crackling voices calling out highway numbers.

“Like last time,” he said.

I closed my eyes.

“Okay.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“Good, Ket. Get some rest. You worked last night.”

He hung up first. I stayed sitting there. The bucket went tock.

I'd said yes. I'd said it the way you say it in Peniel, before thinking, with just my mouth. Yes, Father. Yes, Gideon. Ten years on the outside, a diploma, a birth certificate, a lease in my own name, and that word still came out by itself whenever a man's voice asked for it nicely.

He knew I'd worked last night.

I got up. I put on my shoes.

---

At the Gardens, Lola was finishing her night and starting someone else's day, as she often did. She saw me come in wearing jeans with a gym bag on my shoulder, and she set her cup down.

“How many days?”

“I don't know.”

“I'm giving you three. I told the supervisor your aunt was sick in St. George. You've got an aunt in St. George now. She's diabetic.”

“Thank you.”

She dug in her pocket and handed me a whole bag of cinnamon candies, unopened. With Lola, that's a declaration.

“You're going back.”

It wasn't a question. I didn't pretend.

“I'm just going to look.”

Lola looked at me, over her glasses, long enough for me to understand she didn't believe me and was letting me go anyway.

“Then look hard,” she said. “And come back and tell me.”

Walking past room 9, I heard Mr. Delgado ask the day aide where Sister had gone. I didn't hear the answer.

---

By 2:00 p.m. I was on I-15 heading northeast in my gray 2009 Corolla with Nevada plates, a pine-tree air freshener hanging from the mirror that hadn't smelled like anything in years and that I'd never had the heart to throw away. The AC worked every other time. That day was the other time.

Las Vegas came apart behind me, the casinos, the warehouses, the beige subdivisions, and the desert moved in, gray and flat, with bald mountains at the far end. Then the highway went into the Virgin River Gorge. It was a corridor of gray and purple rock closing in on both sides, sheer walls, the river way down at the bottom, thin and green.

Coming out of the gorge, the sign: Welcome to Utah. On the dash, the Corolla's little clock said 3:41. My phone, lying on the passenger seat, hesitated, searched, and showed 4:41. Utah does daylight saving time. Arizona doesn't. Las Vegas, as luck would have it, sides with Arizona. My whole childhood I'd lived out of step with the rest of the world without knowing it.

I let the two clocks argue. I knew which one was mine.

St. George showed up, its red cliffs, its white temples, its absurdly green golf courses. I took the exit without meaning to. I parked across from the bus station, engine running. The bench was still there. A perforated metal bench, painted green, under an awning. I'd slept on it two nights in April 2016, my hair hacked off crooked, with what was left of four hundred dollars in my sock and a phone that had only one number in it. A woman in a yellow vest woke me up the third morning and asked if I was hungry. She was with a nonprofit. She didn't ask where I came from. She could tell from the way I held my knees.

I drove on.

Hurricane. The road climbing, the dry grass, and Arizona again, with barely a welcome sign. A town along the highway. I didn't look at it. I looked at the white line, the whole way, carefully, the way you teach kids not to look at a mean dog. Fredonia, its silos, its gas station, its little sheriff's substation that I didn't look for and found anyway, a low sand-colored building with two 4×4s parked out front. Utah again, at the edge of town. I'd stopped looking at the phone.

And Kanab.

Kanab is the closest the outside gets to Peniel. When I was little it was the end of the world, where the men went to sell lumber and buy diesel, and where they sometimes brought back cactus-shaped lollipops for the children. One main street, motels with Old West signs, cliffs closing off the town to the north.

I pulled in at the first motel with a vacancy: a sign with a neon cowboy tipping his hat, and the hat didn't light up anymore.

The Corolla said 6:32. The phone said 7:32.

The office smelled of instant coffee and vanilla air freshener. Behind the counter sat a woman of about fifty, platinum-blond hair, long pink nails clicking on the keyboard. I'd spotted the exits on my way in: the glass door, the door behind the counter, a window onto the parking lot. I handed her my driver's license.

She looked at it. She looked at me. Her nails stopped.

“You're Mrs. Hallam?”

“Yes.”

She gave me a shopkeeper's smile, kind, a little curious.

“The deputy called to see if you'd gotten in yet.”

I hadn't told anyone where I was going.