SUMMER 1977
The hospital was noisy and bright, smelled of metal and bleach. They pumped Izzy full of fluids and calories and antibiotics; a doctor conducted a physical. Izzy stood naked in front of the man but really she was back in the room, that glorious moment, leaving her body, moving toward the new sun.
When the doctor left, the police came in, a sheriff’s deputy in uniform and a detective in a brown suit, a self-assured man with a neatly trimmed mustache. Izzy sat on the edge of the bed. She didn’t want to get under the covers like a patient. She wouldn’t allow them to make her feel there was something wrong with her.
She refused to talk to the police. This didn’t seem to bother them. The detective said that Tanner had already told the whole story—how Danny convinced them all to stay in the room with the promise of everlasting life. Tanner said he had gone along with it for a while but changed his mind after Danny attacked the college boys. Then Danny refused to let any of them leave.
She didn’t have to be afraid of Tanner anymore, the detective said. Even though he regretted his part in all of this, he’d still spend a couple of years in prison.
The desert room was some kind of art installation. The artist, a woman named Jess Shepard, was the one who called the sheriff in the first place. If it wasn’t for her, the deputy said, who knows what would have happened to you.
Both cops called her Miss Serrano. Martha had given them Izzy’s name. Breaking her silence, Izzy asked if she could see Martha. The detective told her that wasn’t possible. Martha had been taken to a different hospital. They were overwhelmed with the press attention. You’re like movie stars, he said.
Finally the police left, joining the noise outside her room, doctors and nurses walking up and down the hallway, their footfalls heavy and urgent. With each thump Izzy saw Danny collapse in the room. She saw Tanner fall to his knees, welcoming the police. His lies filled Izzy with guilt and gratitude. He and Danny had sacrificed themselves to protect her.
Izzy’s nurse was young and slight, with soft eyes and long hair twisted into a bun. She seemed uncomfortable, moving constantly, checking the IV bag, adjusting the bed, talking nonstop, as if worried to leave any opening for Izzy to speak.
They were in Dalhart, Texas, the nurse said, less than an hour from where Izzy was rescued. That was the word she used, rescued. There were reporters all over town, but Izzy shouldn’t worry. She was a minor, so the police hadn’t released her identity. Nobody knew who she was.
“But your parents are on their way,” the nurse said. “When they get here, I’ll send them right in.”
The nurse heard her name summoned by the PA in the hall and let herself out with obvious relief.
A neatly folded pile of clothes sat on the chair in the corner. Hand-me-downs from the hospital thrift shop, the nurse had said, but clean and probably close in size. Izzy pulled the IV from her arm, took off her paper gown, and got dressed. A pair of Lee jeans soft at the knees, a baggy yellow blouse with a beaded spiral on the front. Her wallet was there, too, with what was left of Martha’s cash. Back in Vegas Martha had asked Izzy to carry the money, joking that even on an empty desert trail she’d find a way to spend it.
Izzy opened the door and slipped out into the hall. From a speaker in the ceiling, the PA voice called for a Dr. Michaels to report to Radiology. Another nurse came out of a room a few doors down and approached, walking briskly. Izzy remembered that smile she had perfected years ago, shopping with her mother. She stretched her face into that smile, feeling herself disappear as the nurse’s eyes ran over her quickly, sliding past. The nurse continued on down the hall.
Izzy walked toward the elevators. She pressed the button, pressed it again, impatient, sure that at any moment someone would shout her name. Two women huddled together by the window at the other end of the hall. One was making loud, quick wheezing noises, her body jerking with the wild reflex. Izzy couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying. The elevator dinged and the doors opened. Two men were already inside. They looked like businessmen. One man’s suit was light, the other charcoal gray. The man in the light suit held a cowboy hat down by his belt buckle; his wide forehead was marked with a red band where the hat had pressed into his skin. Izzy thought of Vince for a moment, a million miles away. The thought felt out of place in her head, like it belonged to someone else. She walked into the elevator and stood between the two men, turning to face the closing doors. The man on her right cleared his throat, as if he needed to make some kind of noise to break or claim the silence. Izzy looked at their reflections in the metal doors, wavy abstractions, a tall tan blob and a tall gray blob and a small yellow blob between them. The seam where the doors met split her right down the middle.
Out on the first floor, she walked past the thrift store, the gift shop, toward the front doors, where two cops stood outside, smoking. She didn’t hesitate, only turned her head away when she pushed through, back into the welcoming noontime heat after the hours in this air-conditioned icebox. One of the cops said, “Hey,” and Izzy picked up her pace, ready to run, but then the other cop whistled, a catcall directed at her backside, so she continued through the parking lot, across the road into town.
The canister was a strange machine, strange thought, strange hope. Izzy saw it through a pawnshop window, half hidden behind the guns and guitars—a metal canister like the ones in the hospital alongside the old people in wheelchairs, a big smooth silver bullet. The strange hope was that she could bring the canister back to the room and open its top and let the machine breathe in the air of that place. Then maybe that air could be moved somewhere else, the way blouses and skirts could be moved in and out of the stores back home.
The man working in the shop showed her how it worked. There was a wand with a trigger that sprayed whatever was inside. “They’re used for pest control,” he said, “though I know some folks use them to kill weeds in their lawn.”
A row of old mirrored beer signs hung on the wall behind the counter. Izzy watched a news van’s reflection roll by from one to the next, through Stroh’s Spoken Here to Old Style to Miller Genuine Draft. She felt the van moving on the street behind her, searching. Eyewitness 5, and then another right behind the first: Newswatch 13. She reminded herself that they didn’t know her name or what she looked like. Not yet. But as soon as the police found her empty hospital room they would be after her again, and her parents were coming soon, if they weren’t here already.
“So what do you have?” the man asked, tapping the canister with a fingernail. “Pests or weeds?”
Outside, a pickup truck with mismatched green-and-blue doors was turning around in the pawnshop’s parking lot. Crossing the lot with the canister, Izzy stuck out her thumb and the truck pulled over. The driver was an old man with a white beard and curlicued eyebrows and for a second Izzy worried it was the rancher who had said he owned the room. But this man’s voice was different, whispery, as if it had been damaged or worn down. The man asked where she was headed. Izzy said that her father had been in the army and she was looking for the base where he had been stationed. The man said there had just been a shitload of trouble out there. Izzy said she didn’t know about any trouble. She wasn’t from around here.
They drove through the late afternoon, the sky rusting atop the mountains. As they approached the base, Izzy worried they would encounter the rancher, the police, reporters snapping pictures. But the base was empty, just some husks of old buildings kneeling on dusty streets. It looked like a movie set, more the idea of a place than a place itself. She got out of the pickup, lugging the canister. With every step she expected to see the room appear on the horizon, but there was nothing, only flat ground stretching to the mountain line. Panicked, she stopped and turned, looking out everywhere. Then she saw the trail, its long dark line cutting the monotony of the landscape.
Izzy ran along the trail, the dirt rutted with tire- and bootprints. She could still taste the acidic breath of tear gas in the air. She heard the police shooting, saw Danny falling, the new sun folding back in on itself. They had been so close. Another few seconds and, she was sure, they would have passed through.
The fence was at least fifteen feet high. Large plastic signs hung on the chain-link: No Trespassing and Violators Will Be Shot. Izzy looked to the room beyond, surrounded by the fence, a prisoner in a cage. She tried to climb but couldn’t while carrying the canister. She scraped her fingers into the dirt, digging like a dog, but the ground wouldn’t give. She wanted to cry. She wanted to bash her head in with the canister. She could lie down and die here, fading, dust to dust.
Then, quickly, a flash in the air. That familiar glint. Could have been a trick, or her imagination. But no—it was there, she’d seen it. She stood and unscrewed the top of the canister, holding it over her head, willing that light back into her arms.
Back outside the base Izzy hitched again, this time with a lady trucker who chain-smoked Winston Longs and talked nonstop about Jesus. Speeding west along the interstate, she asked if Izzy had found her own personal savior. Izzy said yes.
At a motel near the Arizona border she paid for a room with a little of Martha’s cash and locked herself inside. The TV showed spotlit film of the siege, police storming the room in the tear-gas haze, then a mug shot of Tanner, old pictures of Martha and Danny. A black silhouette of a girl’s head appeared next, a flat, featureless shadow. The third hostage, the newscaster said, a minor from the Los Angeles area. Then a picture of Jess Shepard working in her studio in L.A., standing over a large table covered with papers and what looked like plaster models of rooms. The newscaster said the artist wasn’t speaking to the press.
Izzy unplugged the TV and turned its face to the wall. She sprayed a puff of air from the canister and knelt on the floor, eyes open, waiting.
Nothing came.
She slept and woke, drifting in and out, unsure from one moment to the next which side of the phase she was on. She dreamed of the desert and the hot red room, of Tanner’s voice and Danny falling, of Jess Shepard in her studio. She tried other motel rooms, hitchhiking to other towns, asking only women for rides; she didn’t trust the men. Using the rest of Martha’s money, six dollars a night, eight dollars a night, she sprayed, she knelt, she waited, but the air was dead. She was stuck here, in this body. The realization wrapped around her, hands smothering.
In a motel in Needles she rose from her knees and turned the TV back to face the room. The date the newscaster gave didn’t make any sense. A month since the attack: Looking back at the events that shaped the summer. Time was meaningless now, like everything else. They showed the police firing into the doorway, Tanner’s mug shot, Danny’s body covered by a sheet. Then the picture of Jess Shepard standing over her plaster models, so smug and confident, looking down on her creation.
A warm, muggy night in Santa Monica. Izzy could feel the ocean a few blocks away, out there in the darkness. A heavy presence, like a hand on the small of her back, pushing her forward.
She crossed the street toward the glow of the gallery windows. She forced herself through the crowd, past the photographers and young leather-jacketed leeches and rich old ghouls with their death smiles and mine-shaft eyes. Moving toward the two figures standing together, their backs against the wall.
Jess Shepard looked like her photo, confident and proud, a big smile in the bright lights. Izzy stared at that smile and felt nothing but rage. She stepped forward, meeting the artist’s eyes. Jess Shepard looked at Izzy like Izzy didn’t make any sense, like she didn’t belong in that place, and then her smile dropped away. A flicker of understanding. Izzy pointed the wand.
She told the artist why she was here. She intended her voice to be a shout heard by everyone in the gallery but instead the sound only wheezed out, an airless rasp.
You took this from us. I’m giving it back.
She pulled the trigger. A woman in the crowd screamed. Jess Shepard stumbled from the force of the dead desert air. All of Izzy’s rage pushed down to the sharp tip of the wand. She swung it at the face holding that big false smile. The artist fell to the ground. Izzy lifted the canister over her head. She wanted to bash Jess Shepard like poor Danny bashed that college boy, like she should have bashed her own head outside the fenced room.
Jess Shepard looked up, a terrible slash marking her cheek, blood and torn skin. Izzy hesitated; she couldn’t believe what she’d done. This woman’s face. Her anger faltered, falling from her hands. She dropped the canister.
More shouts and screams from the other side of the gallery. Someone knocked her to the ground, a security guard, his body falling onto hers as she hit the floor. Izzy’s face was just a foot from Jess Shepard’s face. Jess’s confidence was gone. It was a mask; Izzy saw this now. Underneath, Jess Shepard was cracking, coming apart. Izzy knew that look. She understood where it came from. A secret shame revealed.
The security guard pulled her hands behind her back, then twisted Izzy’s head the other way to face the blank white wall.