The man from the next property sent the boy inside. He agreed that the boy didn’t need to go to school that day. The man got his pickup truck and tossed every last buzzard in the bed, so he could haul them out in the desert and dump them. He couldn’t believe how light they were. Each bird weighed about as much as an apple. He had a tarpaulin cover for the bed and he stretched it on, to keep the rest of the buzzards at bay. He wondered if all the live ones would follow him when he drove off, a grim cloud. He got the rabbit out of its cage and rested it on the seat of his truck, and then he grabbed a shovel. He was going to dig a grave for the rabbit, and the buzzards he was going to dump on the side of a little-used road, to show them what it felt like.
SOREN’S FATHER
He finally answered one of Gee’s calls and she told him before he could even say hello that she was only interested, at this point in her life, in getting swept up in a person, and that with Soren’s father she had been doing all the sweeping. She wasn’t looking to take care of someone. She wasn’t misery looking for company. She had given more than she’d gotten all her life, she told Soren’s father. All her life. She’d realized she’d wanted to start a restaurant mostly for him, to give him a partner and work to do and distraction and self-respect, and so she’d scrapped the plan. The restaurant was off. She was going to work on her memoir full time, something selfish, something for her.
Soren’s father had a perverse impulse to beg her not to leave him, to say he wanted to join in on the restaurant even, but he was able to swallow it. She had never been angry with him before.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be. Just be grateful. Be grateful for the time you had with me.”
“I’m that too.”
Gee exhaled into the phone. “This was the last time I was going to try calling you. I’m driving to Phoenix to see my son. Bags are packed.”
“You spoke to him?”
“Not yet.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Drive into his six-month-old neighborhood in my twenty-year-old van and knock on the front door of his mini-mansion. That’s what.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Soren’s father said. “I wish you luck.”
“I can feel that it’s time,” said Gee.
Soren’s father was grateful to know Gee, but he was also grateful to her for sharing her intentions about seeing her son. It was good news that felt like good news. Gee could’ve said her little piece about breaking up with him and then hung up the phone. Soren’s father felt a burning in his sinuses and realized it was the beginning of tears. He took a greedy breath to hold them back.
“There’s going to be a reunion,” Gee said. “And that occasion will be the final triumphant chapter of my memoir.”
“I’ll read it when it comes out.”
“And it will come out,” Gee said. “I’ve done harder things in my life than publish a damn book.”
“Yeah, you tried to be my girlfriend.”
“I was trying to help myself at first. I thought I needed to get close to Soren or close to you. I thought I needed something, but I don’t. I’ve fixed myself dozens of times.”
“I’ve never fixed myself once.”
“You don’t need a whole lot of fixing. You don’t need a complete overhaul. You’re just a little lost.”
Soren’s father looked over at his son. Whenever he was upset, it seemed to him that Soren was breathing slower, but it was only Soren’s father’s impatience.
“Let’s say I’m lost,” he said. “What am I supposed to look for?”
“You don’t find anything,” Gee told him. “You just be brave. You make that a policy.”
Soren’s father had never thought about bravery. He didn’t know what his policy was.
“We’re friends,” Gee said, “and I’m going to tell you one thing before I get off the phone.”
“Okay,” said Soren’s father.
“Don’t use your son as an excuse.”
Gee left the line quiet a few moments. Then she said she had a hell of a drive in front of her.
THE PIANO TEACHER
She had never thought of herself as possessing nerve. She’d thought of herself as a person with endurance, a person who, if she entertained fantasies, did so in the service of her everyday stamina, but here she was pulling past the clinic, past the vigil, already in progress, and hitting the gas rather than the brake. There were only two of them left now in the parking lot, two women, two vigilers. The piano teacher didn’t feel she’d made a decision. She felt as though something had been sprung on her. She hadn’t packed a stitch of clothing or even a toothbrush, but here she was cruising right past the final shadowy pair. Here she was rolling by the Mexican market with the happy vegetables painted on the walls. Here she was getting on the empty interstate and bringing her car up to a speed it hadn’t achieved in ages.
She would leave her car in the garage and her daughter would have to pick it up. The piano teacher imagined the phone call and could already savor her daughter’s outrage. She’d tell her daughter she was staying a week and wouldn’t tell her daughter where, and then after a week she’d tell her she was staying another week. She’d have to return eventually. It wasn’t a permanent escape. She would run out of money, for one thing, and that’s what her daughter would be most worried about. Maybe the piano teacher would spend every penny she had and force her daughter to pay to fly her home.
She exited the interstate. The road that led into the airport was lined with towering terra cotta pots and the pots were imprinted with symbols and drawings that could have meant anything. Wherever the piano teacher ended up, she was going to buy a crappy piano that was all hers and play it just for herself, and she was going to keep it until the day she died. Her daughter would have to ship the thing home and the shipping would cost more than the instrument. The worst piano she could find. Maybe with a family of mice in it. The piano teacher felt a physical craving for her fingers against keys, felt a need to put organized noise into a cranny of the world. The piano teacher would soon be near an ocean, in a place with vines and moss and high-hung fronds, a place that appeared on the verge of swallowing itself. The piano teacher was going to listen to the noise of honest blue waves spending themselves until she couldn’t remember the noise of this broken desert wind that, for once, seemed to be at her back.
CECELIA
During the vigils, she never heard songs. She heard only what was meant to be heard, the noise of the sand and pebbles and gravel and whatever else was slight enough to be brushed about by the wind. The gusts came from one direction and then another, as if the wind meant to sweep the world’s scattered ingredients into a pile.
Only one other still attended, the elegant woman whose boyfriend had quit. The woman was different than usual. She was focused. She was looking up at Soren’s window but Cecelia could tell she wasn’t thinking of Soren. Cecelia had stubbornness, but this woman had been surviving ordeals long before Cecelia had, and Cecelia had no idea if she could outlast her. At least Cecelia knew who her most worthy opponent was. Cecelia knew who she had to beat. She had authority over whether she won or lost. Nothing could stop her from showing up here except herself, and she wasn’t going to stop. This chick with her pricey coat and soft makeup was in for a struggle.
Cecelia hadn’t received a song for many days now, the longest she’d gone without receiving one. She wondered if she’d had control the whole time, without knowing it. She’d made a definite wish not to receive any more, and now she wasn’t. She was glad she’d received them, and glad now for a break from them. Maybe Reggie had simply run out. Maybe he was doing something else. He might be in a good place. He might have a view of a distant bay full of burnished boats, none of the boats having a thing to do with him, all owned by strangers and visitors. In this place, every person has a strong heart and a share of important work to do. In this place, the future placidly becomes the past. In this place, each person feels the dignified solitude of one engaged in a lost cause. And there were realms sweeter than this, realms that would suit Reggie precisely, that Cecelia could never envision. A million heavens waited, a million people scuffling around the desert hoping not to see their heaven too soon, failing to believe in the afterlives that awaited them and would have them in time, whether they kicked and screamed or closed their eyes and sighed, whether they tried to do good and could not or tried to do bad and succeeded.