MESQUITE IS A PESKY PLANT, with long thorns prone to puncturing car tires and poking the soft parts of children playing on the ground. It prefers semiarid climates like the southwestern United States, where its ability to suck up water has alarmed more than one rancher trying to maintain a steady water table. Its roots grow deep; it’s nearly ineradicable, and many consider it a pest, the rabbit of the plant species. It is perhaps not a small consolation that mesquite wood burns slow, hot, and flavorful, adding a distinctive twang to barbecue grills across the region where it thrives.
Thousands of years ago, the Mesquite Sand Dunes were a muddy lakebed teeming with mesquite. When the bed dried out, conditions became less than perfect for the plant but, true to form, it refused to vacate the premises. Over time, the desiccated area acquired bits of feldspar and quartz swirling in from the surrounding mountains. The sandy debris piled up—in some places as high as 150 feet—and spread out over fourteen square miles. The sand dunes were born. And yet the mesquite hung on.
“Wow, can you believe plants actually live out here?” Richard trotted up the first sandy hill, which was about fifty feet from where they’d parked on the side of the road. He marveled at the low-lying clumps of vegetation dotting the shallower, outlying hills. Farther in, there was nothing but sand.
He already loved the dunes. They were just sitting there on top of the boring, scraggly, southwestern desert, a bit of Tunisia grafted onto California: a beach with no ocean, or a beach where the ocean was the sand, each individual dune like a giant wave frozen in place, its surface rippled by a wind that must have gone elsewhere for the day. The air was perfectly still.
They were the only ones there. This was no surprise, since it was the middle of the week and well past noon, though fortunately for them the weather was mild, the air temperature hovering somewhere in the 80s. Elizabeth joined him, carrying a backpack retrieved from the trunk of her car. He watched her walk up to a plant at the edge of the sand. There were two shriveled, yellow flowers on one side of it, but as far as he could see it wasn’t much to look at—unremarkable, other than for its existence.
“Those flowers look pretty rough,” he said. “The Beverly Chambers of flowers.” He was still annoyed they hadn’t learned anything useful at the castle, and on the ride over he’d made several other clunkers at the old woman’s expense. Elizabeth nodded mechanically. He could tell she wasn’t listening. What’s her deal? he thought, his eternal refrain. She’d been quiet on the ride over—quiet even for her. “What’s that smell?” he asked, mainly to say something, sniffing at the air like a bloodhound on the trail. “Must be coming from the plant. Smells sort of . . . smoky?” He had an inspired thought: “I guess it’s mesquite! Mesquite Dunes, right? And the smoky smell makes sense. Mesquite grill.”
Elizabeth gave an infinitesimal shrug of her shoulders. If she’d been paying attention, she could have told him he was wrong, that the plant was creosote, not mesquite, and that the odor it emitted was responsible for its name since it smelled similar to the creosote leftover from burnt coal or wood. All this information lay in her brain somewhere, buried yet accessible. But she was too lost inside her head to recall it now.
Richard gave up on her, racing up the face of a much steeper dune. When he reached the crest and got a better look at the vast expanse of sand stretching before him, he turned around, exclaiming, “It really does look like Tatooine!”
He wished Elizabeth would catch up with him so that he could tell her about the Skywalkers’ home planet, with its dual suns and endless deserts. But she was too slow, so he bounded ahead again, eyes trained on the largest hilltop in the center.
Elizabeth’s calves began to ache as she slogged her way through the dry, shifting sand. She paused, scanning the dunes for Richard. He was already far in the distance, and the perfect, pristine silence closed around her like a physical presence, a massive swaddling blanket she found either comforting or constricting, she wasn’t sure which. She watched as Richard scaled another dune without hesitating, his knees practically touching his chest with each deep stride he took, arms pumping, head thrust nearly straight up in the air. I love you, I love you, I love you, she thought, certain now that the silence was, in fact, intolerable. She wished desperately for something to break it—the distant whir of a motor, the caw of a bird overhead, the devastating crack of an earthquake. Maybe then she could have whispered the words aloud instead of just thinking them. And if she could have whispered them, she could have spoken them, and if she could have spoken them, she could have run over and shouted them directly into that stupidly perfect, pink beach shell of an ear of his. But the silence was impregnable, and the words remained stuck inside of her.
Richard reached the crest of the center dune and put his hands on his hips to catch his breath. He turned in a full circle. The valley floor stretched well beyond the dunes in every direction, ending in a continuous mountain range that encircled them like a giant, purple-and-silver-fingered hand, the dunes the golden treasure cupped in the middle of its palm.
He peered down, looking for Elizabeth, and experienced a rush of vertigo. In an effort to regain his balance, he focused on the dune directly beneath him. It had two distinct sides, he realized: a gentle one, up which the wind coaxed individual grains of sand, and a much steeper face, down which the sand tumbled. He saw now that he’d made things harder for himself by going up the steep face of the dune: against the grain . . . s, he thought, relishing even this pathetic little wordplay. The two sides met in a long, peaked ridge upon which he now stood, venturing another glance down the steeper side to check on Elizabeth’s progress, or lack thereof.
A portion of the topmost layer of sand shifted, in a cascade that began with the grains directly under his sneakers and ended about five feet down the slope. Elizabeth was another fifteen feet below this and didn’t notice a thing. Richard ran to an untouched section of the ridge, and did it again.
It was cool to see a miniature avalanche of sand, but this spectacle was not the source of his fascination. When all those grains moved together, they made a magnified version of the sound of pouring sand, and even though it was magnified, it was a sound so gentle, so delicate, that hearing it was like an affirmation of the silence that reigned before and after. It was like a negative sound, Richard decided, highlighting the otherworldly quiet upon which it intruded for a moment. Somehow it left things more peaceful than they were before—like a shushing, as if the sand were telling him to hush, to listen, to appreciate the stillness of the world in this untouched, magical place.
His leg shook as he watched Elizabeth trudge up the last few feet. When she reached the top, she put her hands on her knees, panting slightly. She was in good shape, but she never climbed hills. Venice was unvaryingly flat.
“Slowpoke,” he teased her.
Elizabeth lifted her head without moving, shooting him a glare that would have been icy if they hadn’t been enveloped by sun, sand, and heat.
“Okay, I have to show you something,” he said.
She dumped her backpack on the ground, producing two Poland Spring bottles from inside it. Richard took one without opening it, waiting impatiently as she took a long swig from the other. To his annoyance, she insisted on returning it to her bag, from which she then produced a gargantuan tube of SPF-85 sunscreen, offering it to him.
“Do you want any?”
“Nah, I’m good.”
“You should at least put some on your face.”
“I’m fine!” he exclaimed, a little shortly, because he knew she was right. He was without a doubt in the process of getting a burn. Out here in this unembellished landscape, the sun showed its true character—like a veiled woman with tempting eyes who, when she removed the shroud from the lower half of her face, revealed nostrils flared with hatred and a leering mouth full of needlelike teeth chomping hungrily: I will destroy you. But there was no room to worry about the sun.
“Okay, so you have to be really quiet for this.”
Not a problem, thought Elizabeth, rubbing the thick, pastelike cream into her arm.
“You have to look!”
She sighed, but good-naturedly, looking up. Richard was crouched over the peaked ridge, and he was almost too beautiful to behold. It would have been easier to look at the sun.
He put up a finger. “Now, listen!”
He pushed down with one foot: another plain of sand fell away, accompanied by the soft, low shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh sound he had already grown to love. He looked up at her, grinning.
“Isn’t that the coolest thing ever?!”
Elizabeth clenched her eyes shut, pressing her temples with the thumb and middle finger of her right hand. It looked as though she had a sudden and catastrophic headache. Richard stood up.
“What’s wrong?”
She shook her head, and her right hand along with it, while with her left hand she made a fist at her side. Richard regarded her uncertainly, relieved when a few seconds later she dropped both hands and opened her eyes, a more collected expression on her face than he expected.
She pointed to the ground:
“Sit.”
He obeyed her immediately.
She took the spot next to him, on the peak of the dune. This time she did look at the sun, allowing it to burn a hole in her vision. She closed her eyes. Against the black backdrop of her eyelids, the spot pulsated an electric silver-green. She opened her eyes again. The spot turned red against the boundless blue sky, and over the next few minutes it lost its radiance more quickly than she wanted it to, fading to a bruised-looking purple that marred the otherwise spotless firmament more faintly as each precious second fell away. She held on to this stain as long as she could, but at last it disappeared completely. There was nothing left.
And yet, she still delayed. Just pretend it’s Orpheus, she told herself, and the thought of him strengthened her just enough to bridge this terrible pause. She cleared her throat.
It was time.
“I was the perfect child. I know that sounds obnoxious, but it’s true. I was like a poor Chicana version of Hermione Granger. I did everything right and I always followed the rules. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was number one in my class, the editor of the school yearbook, and captain of the girls’ soccer team. I taught CCD after school at my local church. I was a National Merit Scholar. I represented my school district in the Young Republicans of California.
“I was offered full scholarships to a lot of colleges. A lot. I was leaning toward UCLA because I wanted to stay close to my neighborhood. I wanted to stick around there during college. That way I could become a congressional representative for my district as soon as possible. I had my career all mapped out. I was going to become the first Latina president of the United States.
“My brother Hugo was smart too. But he was shy. He was two years younger than me and he leaned on me a lot. My parents worked long hours, so a lot of the time it was just him and me. He looked up to me. He asked my advice on everything. I was like his second mother, and I liked it that way. I encouraged it.
“He came to me in April. I could tell something was wrong, but it took a while to get it out of him because I was the first person he told. He said he was gay. He said he’d been attracted to boys since he was twelve, and he couldn’t stop thinking about this one boy in his class, who he was pretty sure had feelings for him too. He said he didn’t know what to do.
“I told him his impulses were wrong. That the church and community he belonged to condemned them for a reason. I said he had to figure out a way to stop having these thoughts, not just for his family’s sake but for his own sake too, for the sake of his soul. I lectured him about how we couldn’t as human beings give in to our baser impulses, how showing restraint was what separated us from animals.
“He listened to every word. Like he always did. And when we were done I told him I wouldn’t tell our parents if he promised not to act on his desires. I said he had to try as hard as he could to improve himself. I said I was willing to help him, but only if he helped himself. I made an analogy to how hard it was for me to get a perfect eight hundred on my SAT math, since verbal came so much easier, but how I studied hard and made it happen. He said he would try. He promised.
“A few days later I came home early from soccer practice. My parents still weren’t home. I called out to Hugo and he yelled to me from his room. He said he was doing homework, but something was off, I could tell.
“There were no locks on our bedroom doors, but we always knocked—we were always respectful of each other’s privacy. I figured it was worth barging in just this once to make sure everything was okay. Given what he’d told me before.
“They were on the bed together. With their shirts off. I threw the other boy out without saying anything to him, not even a word. Then I marched back to Hugo’s room and told him I was going to have to tell our parents everything, because he hadn’t kept up his end of the deal. He looked at me, and he was crying and he said, ‘I can’t help it, Lola. I love him.’ And I told him, ‘You don’t even know what love is. That’s not love. It’s disgusting.’
“He started to cry even harder, so I left. An hour later I was done with my homework and I went looking for him. But he wasn’t in his bedroom. He wasn’t in the bathroom either. He wasn’t anywhere.
“He ran away. So I did end up telling my parents everything. They weren’t even angry with me, at first. They just wanted to find him. So they filed a police report, but the thing is, even though my brother and I were born here, my parents weren’t. They came here illegally, and if they were deported it would only make things worse. So there wasn’t much they could say when the LAPD told them they were ‘working on it,’ but didn’t seem to be doing much of anything.
“Our neighbors did what they could. They helped us look, and pray, and wait. But we never found him. He just disappeared. As soon as I had some real money of my own, the first thing I did was to hire a private investigator. I’ve hired three of them, actually, the last one a year or two ago. I’m pretty sure he’s dead. I know that’s what my parents think.”
There was a pause. She knew without looking that her face had acquired the pained, squinty-eyed expression she’d seen on her mother’s face so many times before, and which usually meant there were tears on the way. But she also knew she would not cry.
She heard his lips part before he spoke. They sounded dry. She wondered dully why he wasn’t drinking any of the water she’d given him.
“Did he have a mole on his forehead?” he asked her. “Above his left eyebrow?”
“Yes,” she said, turning to him, the dread rising inside her. “How did you know that?”
Richard winced. “I think—”
He cut himself off. Elizabeth watched dumbly as he took a few sips from the neglected water bottle before speaking again.
“I think your brother was responsible for Kyle’s death,” he said finally. “My best friend from high school. Remember?”
Elizabeth stared at him: petrified, uncomprehending. Eventually Richard took the opportunity of filling the silence with a monologue of his own.
“Kyle was visiting his aunt and uncle in San Diego over spring break. It happened on the Five, and even though he was killed instantly, the driver only had minor injuries. They arrested him at the hospital. He had no license or ID, and he wouldn’t tell anyone his name. I remember they guessed he was around nineteen, so it must’ve been a few years after he ran away. The car he was driving was stolen, too. He was . . . he obviously wasn’t in a good place. I guess they never matched him with any missing person cases. The one your parents made was probably long gone by then, or maybe the police never even bothered to make one.
“I told you how I testified at the trial, right? To help put the driver away for as long as possible? He got twenty years to life. Which was a lot, considering he didn’t have a record. But I remember the judge making a lot out of the fact that he wouldn’t identify himself. She said she was going to have to assume there were prior convictions under his real name. I think it was meant to call his bluff, because that was pretty much a worst-case scenario. But he still wouldn’t say who he was. So he got sentenced like he had all these prior felonies, no chance of parole for at least nineteen years. That was thirteen years ago. I can still remember him staring at me as they read out his sentence, before they took him away. I’m pretty sure he hated me. I know I hated him.
“There was a plaque at the castle today. I think she put it out as a clue. It was for charity work at a prison, and it made me think of him because he’s the only person I know, not that I really know him, obviously, who went to jail. That’s why when you said he ran away—” Richard hesitated. “I mean, maybe it’s not him—”
“It’s him,” said Elizabeth flatly. It was all so awful, it had the unmistakable ring of truth to it. She supposed she should have been elated that her brother was still alive, but all she could think about was that she’d been responsible for another person’s death. She’d always known this, somehow. Even though her lawyer’s brain was already arguing that this accident was in no way foreseeable, that her actions were nowhere near proximate enough for legal guilt—she thought of Palsgraf v. LIRR, plunging all the way back to first-year torts—there was no question according to her personal code of ethics that she was 100 percent guilty.
“You’re probably right. That birthmark would be too much of a coincidence. The only reason I remembered it is cuz I mentioned it in the first sentence of my college essay: The man who killed my best friend had a large, round, black birthmark approximately one inch above his left eyebrow.” He paused. “He must’ve told her about us. About both of us. But I still don’t know why she’d go and do all this. There’s no way he would’ve wanted it.”
I know why, thought Elizabeth. Her parents believed their only son was dead, and all that old witch could think about was playing matchmaker. But she guessed Hugo had told Beverly Chambers not to tell his family where he was. If he’d gone this long without contacting them, he probably never wanted to see them again.
Elizabeth had an overwhelming desire to be alone, like an animal that retreats to some dark, solitary place to lick its wounds in peace. “Thank you for telling me,” she said. Her tone was formal, distant. “It’ll help my parents to know, no matter what’s happened to him since. So—thank you. For that.”
There. Done. Over. Mystery solved, duty discharged. She’d said what she needed to say.
But this wasn’t true. There was a great deal she’d left unsaid. And it was more than the three words that had been repeating themselves in her head over and over again like some ancient, muttered curse ever since they’d left Stan’s Castle.
She wanted to tell him she knew what he was thinking: that her teenage views were archaic—backward even—but that there was nothing backward about treating homosexuality as a mortal sin in the L.A. she knew growing up. All their neighbors were Catholic (at least the ones they talked to), and everybody took their faith seriously; her parents proudly gave ten percent of their paltry income to the church, and believed whatever the pope told them to believe. Elizabeth read constantly as a child, but avoided any books the church told her not to read, anything that would have opened her up to a different perspective. The biggest scandal to have touched her till Hugo’s disappearance was her parents having only two children. As an addendum to the “birds and bees” talk, her mother explained that after Hugo was born, she’d had a hysterectomy for medical reasons. But people still whispered about them going to hell for interfering with God’s plan, and sometimes her schoolmates made her cry about it. She did not know a single self-identifying gay person growing up.
And yet blaming her environment only went so far. Why didn’t her sisterly love overpower everything she was taught? Why didn’t she embrace Hugo and tell him they’d figure it out together? Why weren’t her prejudices and misconceptions washed away, as they were for the heroes and heroines of the stories she loved?
She wanted to explain to Richard that she gave up asking why—that she went to Yale instead of UCLA to get as far away as she could, and that she stopped going to church. That she let her membership in the Young Republicans lapse. That like so many people, she grew up during college. That she read every book the church told her not to read, and that she evolved, her worldview expanded. That she did all she could to separate herself from the girl who bought into the groupthink of religion and politics, which included separating herself from her parents, who were far from bad people—who had in many ways been wonderful parents, but who were so broken from losing one child they actually, in their grief and weakness, allowed their second child to drift away. That when she emerged from this dark period of her life, her “rough patch,” with the help of antidepressants and twice-a-week therapy—both of which she eliminated from her life as soon as she could do so responsibly—she forced herself to move on, because wallowing in the past helped no one. That it took Orpheus entering her life to realize she’d been conflating thinking solely for herself with thinking solely about herself, and that she was working on this, too. That she would never be done improving herself.
But most of all she wished she had the courage to tell Richard that it wasn’t until she got to know him—really know him—that she knew what it was to truly desire another person. That even before the incident with Hugo, she worried secretly she was asexual. That she told all her school friends who teased her for being such a good girl that she was too focused on her studies to entertain the notion of a silly teenage “romance,” and that every time her mother thought she was comforting her by saying that crushes were “normal,” and “nothing to be ashamed about” as long as she didn’t do anything about them, Elizabeth felt both abnormal and ashamed because she never had an adolescent crush, not even one. That she realized only after it was too late there was an element of jealousy, of covetousness in her condemnation of Hugo, in her disgust at seeing him with another boy. She wanted to tell Richard that this failure, this lack only deepened in all her years at Yale and NYU—that it took hold of her and became a part of who she was. That it was the same at the firm. That the few men she dated she never saw more than two or three times, and only ever kissed, nothing more. That when she turned thirty she panicked about still being a virgin and picked up—in some sleazy bar—a guy whose name she purposely didn’t learn, and used him to deflower herself, except that the process was so mechanical that afterward she felt, outrageously, as if she were still a virgin, that she had concluded she would always feel like a virgin, and that she had tried to make her peace with this condition by committing to the role of La Máquina, sturdy and implacable. . . . Until him.
She wanted to tell Richard that in the beginning she used to think she’d have her fill of him eventually, that there would come a time when his presence failed to thrill her. And it did; the thrill did fade. But it was only because she’d grown used to having him around—not just each week for dinner and conversation, but each second in her thoughts—and if it wasn’t a thrill to picture him every time, it was because she could no longer imagine her life without him.
It was fear of losing him that held her back from saying all this, though she knew instinctively this was the time to let it all out, to not lose courage and stop halfway, to tell him everything or risk losing him anyway at the end of their year together. The seven months they still had might as well have been seven seconds compared to the eternity she craved. She would gladly have paid back the half a million dollars to ensure their weekly sessions continued for as long as they both were breathing. She would have read any book, watched any movie.
But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t say any of it. Maybe she would find the courage tomorrow, or the next day, though her instincts were telling her it was now or never. . . . No. She was done. She looked out at the purple-gray mountains and waited to see what he had to say, if anything. Who knew? It was entirely possible he wanted nothing to do with her now.
RICHARD DIDN’T KNOW what to say. He knew she’d been keeping something from him about her family, but never would he have guessed it was linked to the one event in his life he could reasonably term a tragedy. He had a million questions for her, but held off. Now was not the time.
He turned, regarding her silently. She was staring at the mountains, and the sunlight was pouring down her back, unlocking the rich, chestnut hue that remained hidden inside her dark brown hair in every other type of light. Sitting there on top of this lonely dune, she looked like the last woman on Earth—or maybe the first. Either way, she was the only woman in the world who undoubtedly belonged here with him, in this unreal landscape, on this unreal day. It seemed impossible to him now that he had ever wanted or looked forward to being free of her, and this made him think of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, of all things. During his two sleepless hours in bed that morning, he had actually finished the damn thing, in the hope it would have its usual soporific effect. But Tess had moved along in the last hundred pages, and he’d stopped reading only once, to look up a phrase Hardy had quoted from Shakespeare: “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” It was meant to be a description of the inferior love of Tess’s fickle, unworthy husband, who rejects her when she confesses she isn’t a virgin, but at the time Richard hadn’t understood it. If someone changed, why wouldn’t your feelings about that person change too? Because it was the perception, not the thing that mattered, he answered himself now, and the phrase came back to him with unexpected clarity all the way from their first date at In-N-Out: you have beautiful eyes.
Richard turned away from her, flashing back to a series of moments radiating outward from that first date: Elizabeth slurping on her milk shake, Elizabeth spilling soy sauce in the excitement of explaining Ivanhoe to him, Elizabeth spinning on the dance floor in his arms, Elizabeth asking him to sleep over, Elizabeth in that slightly ridiculous yet undeniably sexy purple dress, Elizabeth checking him out in the rearview mirror while he pretended not to notice, at the tail end of his nap. It was like piecing together clues at the end of a movie with a big twist—The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense—in support of a seemingly impossible conclusion, except that he was cherry-picking because there were other memories too: Elizabeth checking her watch a million times at In-N-Out when she thought he wasn’t looking, Elizabeth berating his myopic worldview at Factor’s, Elizabeth wanting desperately to go home after being pelted with his vomit (this still humiliated him, this would always humiliate him), Elizabeth hating his gift of the size-12 skirt, Elizabeth leaving the premiere immediately after Fight on a Flight ended exactly as she said she would, despite his desperate pleas (masked in cowardly irony) for her to reconsider.
Richard tried to picture what she had looked like the first time they met—less than five months ago, and yet a different era—in the lawyer’s office in June. The image he managed to conjure actually confused him, because she looked nothing like that to him anymore. Perception, he thought. All perception.
And then—and this was strange, but it was Mike’s face, not Elizabeth’s, that came to him. Beautiful, brilliant, brave Mike, who shone in his mind’s eye like a lightbulb over his head. What was it she had said? I thought it was important to tell you how I was feeling, no matter what you might be feeling. Mike had known before he did. Of course she had; this really shouldn’t have surprised him. He still couldn’t quite see how the hell he’d gotten here, but somehow he had.
Richard paused. Deep underground, the roots of a mesquite bush at the edge of the dunes sucked up a bit of subterranean moisture. He turned to her. He opened his mouth. Was he actually going to say it? He was.
“Elizabeth, I love you.”