The base of the domes—the potential lobby where guests would check in and pick up keys—was a poured-concrete foundation with walls stunted at the height of Alice’s shoulders. Sitting within the walls during the late morning felt like playing hide-and-go-seek—waiting with excitement for her brother to come claim her. She’d always preferred hiding to seeking because it came with the thrill of being found. During one game, when she couldn’t have been more than six or seven, she was the seeker, and when she couldn’t find Gus she’d begun to panic, thinking he’d disappeared. I need you to come out now, was what she’d said, her voice quavering with tears. This was according to her brother’s story—a story told and retold. / need you to come out.
It was hot and Alice drank a can of Coke, absorbing the sug- ary jolt that steeled her against the kicked-up dust settling on her sticky skin. A sense of calm had taken over. She was remembering how—if she was honest with herself—her father never seemed to expect Gus to come home to them. He had shrugged and nodded, nodded and shrugged. She couldn’t imagine what on Earth her father had written in that letter. Don’t you care? she’d nearly cried out, when he’d turned into a sick old man without a visit from his son, but she had done everything in her power not to excite him. She had been good about it, keeping everything—all the questions and frustrations, all those lonely clocked-in hours—she’d been good at keeping things contained.
So when she heard footsteps in the gravelly dirt, not one set but two, not a quiet whistling but a male and female dialogue, Alice kept her head below the walls and listened.
“But don’t you want to contact her?” Gus asked.
Silence.
“Maybe she’ll give you some money, at the very least.”
“Yeah, and maybe she’ll tell me I’m a slut like your mother,” Erika said. “Maybe she’ll tell me I’m a stupid slut.”
Feet planted in the gravel. Cars passed by, ocean far away— all the sounds were no more than disruption. She wanted to hear every word. She wanted to hear them breathe.
“Okay” Gus said, “but if you don’t tell your mother? Prepare yourself for when she shows up in a few months and just see what she does then. You think that’ll be better? Besides, I want to talk with her again.”
“I do not care if she respects me.”
“Yes, you do. Erika,” he said, “you do.”
Alice felt her stomach lurch as she saw herself stand and make herself known repeatedly in her mind. There they stood, right on the other side of these walls, and yet a world away. The minute Alice stood and confronted him, she knew she would never go back. She would never again possess such nagging nostalgia, for truth would become too important. She needed to know why he was hiding from her and why he seemed so troubled, but more than anything she needed to know what had happened in Oaxaca and what had brought him here.
There was silence, and Alice imagined that Gus and Erika were kissing; she stared at gray cement and pictured his hand through that dark mess of hair, her fingers pulling at his T-shirt like taffy—conveying a misleading playfulness that no doubt made him feel free.
She counted to ten and still she was seated. She counted to five and she gripped the Coke can until her fingers ached. Then she stood up.
They weren’t kissing. They weren’t even looking at each other, and yet they looked oddly comfortable in their obvious standoff. “Alice,” Erika said—noticing her before Gus did— which was not, Alice couldn’t help thinking, a promising start.
“You need to talk to me,” Alice said to her brother, in a voice so understated, so serious, that Gus merely nodded. Although after he nodded, he looked up at the hot blue sky as if to say, Enough.
Erika stayed where she was, with her hand twisting a strand of hair around a bitten finger. She smiled at Alice, revealing sharp little teeth, and it made Alice terribly uneasy, like being in a dream where all the colors were off and the people she thought she knew all went by different names.
Alice looked at her brother, who said with surprising diplomacy, “Erika, please. Can we finish this later?”
“I can’t stay?” she asked Alice, audacious creature that she was.
“Well, no,” Alice said.
“I don’t see why not,” she said.
“Well, you should,” Alice said, and the words weren’t her own; they were too confident and too mean. She drew a box with her foot in the dirt and made a mark in the very center. “I’d like to talk with my brother now.”
“Don’t worry; I’ll come find you,” Gus said to Erika, who shot Alice a significant look.
“Yes?” Alice asked, looking deep into those kohl-lined eyes.
But Erika was already turning away, walking into the shade.
“Let’s walk,” Gus said, and they did. They walked through the huerta, through sprinkler-fed fields of beautifully symmetrical crops. They walked past a corral of sheep, a truck where men stood drinking beers. There was the ever-present sound of roosters—first one and then an excited call and response, like lost relatives at a disaster site—and dogs, who knew how many dogs, growing noisier before dying down. A woman on a horse came up over the dunes from the beach where she’d been riding. She was fair and middle-aged and looked like she’d learned in an English saddle somewhere on the Gold Coast. “You think she’s the black sheep of her family?” Gus asked, after she passed by with a smile. “You think she married the horse trainer on her family’s ranch and stole away to Baja?”
Alice nodded. “I think she loves it here. I think she misses them only during the holidays, when she gets unstoppable cravings for good champagne.”
“Once you’ve had the good stuff,” he said, “it’s impossible to go back.”
“We’re walking toward the ocean, I take it?”
He nodded, coughed up, and spit on the ground.
They paused in front of some abandoned construction projects. “Did you know,” Gus said, “that unless you build something here—anything—on your properly within six months of purchase, the land becomes legally unclaimed?”
Alice barely shook her head.
“And when a house is completed, taxes have to be paid. People scramble to build something just to claim their land, and then they tend to leave their houses technically unfinished to avoid paying taxes.”
These houses would never be completed. They might never be claimed again. “Dad would really have loved this,” Alice said, looking around at the fine mess.
Gus pointed to a few sheep meandering in and out of a freestanding brick doorway without a door. They were livid and sickly and it was anybody’s guess where they belonged. When he’d stopped looking at the skeletal houses and the sheep, his eyes rested quizzically on her. When she didn’t respond, he seemed vaguely relieved. “When we first got down here, Cady and I went to this resort on the East Cape, where the water’s calm. I bet she didn’t tell you about that, huh?”
Alice shook her head.
“Every room had a terrace and a perfect view of the sea. We’d lie in bed and pretend we were shipwrecked. The management rang a bell three times a day for meals, and we were, for some reason, the only people there. She loved the bland food and the little hot rolls and, of course, the drinks before dinner. There was an old bartender named Juan who played a mean game of darts, and he could pour an exact ounce of anything—anything—without measuring.”
“It sounds like a great time.”
“It was.”
They stepped through muddy tire tracks and onto an un-fenced lot, which was littered with cement blocks and empty bottles. Gus said, “But on the way back, after we’d had this really great couple of days, we saw a sign for a town called Santiago featuring a zoo. Both Cady and I were horrified by the idea of a zoo in the desert, but we were also really curious and we made the turnoff. There was no town at all, only two government employees manning cages and listening to Creedence Clearwater on a boom box. There was a tiger, a bear, an otter, a lion, and dozens of tropical birds. They were in boxy small cages; it was seriously hot. It was sad. I mean, I felt unreasonably sad.”
As they were about to walk toward the base of the dunes, Alice’s calm aspect fell away. Her teeth were nearly grinding. “You know,” she said, stopping dead still at the foot of steps leading to no more than a poured-concrete foundation, “you’re telling me about poor animals in the desert, and I know my job is to feel like you’re this really sensitive person. But I have to tell you: I’m not buying it. I can’t. You have been,” she said, “outrageous. You didn’t come see him—you didn’t come see us. You wouldn’t help me. And now … what happened to Cady?”
“What do you mean, ‘what happened to Cady’? She left me, Alice.”
“Well, I think it’s more than a little strange. She called me and told me where the two of you were, and then just like that, she’s gone?”
He said nothing, only kicked at some dirt, which settled in dust over Alice’s ankles.
“Ever think about what I was doing while you were off at a resort? While you were feeling so blue over the poor imprisoned animals?” She found she was holding back from kicking dirt in his direction. “You thought you could marry Cady De-Forrest and then take up with the first vaguely attractive woman you met? My God, she’s pregnant.” The wind had picked up and they stood on a stranger’s unattended land, both of them squinting at the light and the wind. “It’s yours, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?”
“Stop yelling,” he said.
“I’ll stop yelling when I feel like stopping. You don’t hear
me” she said, “ever.” She shook her head, and deep in her gut a current emerged and drew away her restraint. “You never listen. You never ask any substantial questions and you never really have. You kept our mother all to yourself by never coming home. You played up your devastation so completely that you got away with doing nothing for Dad. When I asked you for help you ignored me. Over and over again I asked and I asked. And then, when you did come, when you finally showed up, you hold my hand at the funeral, you tell me not to cry, that you’re there, and then you go and disappear again. You left without saying good-bye, Gus. You left and that was it. What are you trying to do to me? It’s humiliating.” She was breathless but far from finished. “So it’s hard, it is very hard not to yell.”
Sitting on the cement steps, Gus gathered himself inward like a kid hiding in a closet. He looked up at his sister who loomed above him, parchment and crimson and copper against an invisible house. He looked up in that exaggerated manner, his chest heaving up and down, and he reached into the pocket of his drawstring pants. Alice thought he was reaching for a wadded-up tissue, but he withdrew a few folded pieces of paper and thrust them at her. The thin pages flapped in the wind. She knew it would be a mistake to get greedy and grab for them and so she kept her hands at her sides; the effort in doing so caused her whole body to go slack.
He was crying. At first Alice thought it was only the wind— it had really picked up. “Take this,” he said, he kind of yelled. “Hold on to it carefully. This is what he left me. This is why I left so quickly. Read it.”
“Is this a joke?”
“No,” he said wearily, “no, it’s not.” And he rose to his feet and started walking. But Alice didn’t even notice, for her eyes were on her mother’s violet-black ink, the spare and slanting uppercase letters that had always looked so unlike Charlotte. Her handwriting was cramped and economical—as if the letters themselves bore the full weight of the content they created.
The pages were oily from frequent handling. Unidentifiable colors—maybe wine, maybe blood (a paper cut?)—had left their mark, as well as ubiquitous water stains. Two rips on the first page on the sides, where his fingers must have worn away the eggshell-colored paper. When? Maybe on the sixth read, maybe on the fifty-first, but it was most likely, Alice thought, as her eyes began allowing those letters to become words and letting those words possess their meaning, that those rips were made by Gus during reading number one.
In the upper right corner there was a date.
November, it said, 1985.