With some effort, Zadie turned the spigot and walked face-first into the hot water. Rust-colored dirt trickled down her ankles, forming a gruesome sanguine puddle at her feet.Between that and the spider, I could be in an Alfred Hitchcock movie,she thought, then yawned. The gentle patter of the hot water on her skull was making her tired. It had been almost thirty-six hours since she’d last slept. Her body swayed with exhaustion, and she leaned on the wall to steady herself. All she wanted to do was collapse onto a warm bed with a down comforter. The thought of sleeping on the hard ground that night made her wince.
Once again, Zadie was nearly winded by the reality of what she had agreed to.Two weeks—maybe more—of sleeping on the ground.Her body ached in anticipation. She wondered briefly if the Ladybug would be okay with the sleeping arrangement, then reminded herself that the Ladybug had a comfy uterus to sleep in. It didn’t need a down comforter.
After she’d wrung her hair out and toweled off, Zadie pulled on a fresh pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt for the walk back. The sun had set by the time she left the locker room, and the red rocks were nothing but imposing shadows against a navy sky. As she was about to turn right onto the path that led back to the campsite, she stopped. Music fluttered into her left ear and she turned toward the sound. The notes were delicate and bright like filaments in a lightbulb, but they were not particularly melodic. The song—if you could even call it that—had a stream-of-consciousness quality to it. It would stop and start. There was no obvious meter, no refrain, just arbitrary notes bunched together like wildflowers a child had picked.
The sound seemed to be coming from what looked like an old maintenance road that disappeared into a stand of Arizona white oaks. The corral-style gate was open, but the sign hanging from it readAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.Zadie knew she probably wasn’t allowed back there, but the music was so strange and entrancing that her curiosity got the better of her. She followed the road into the trees and down a short hill. What she found at the bottom was not a maintenance building. It was an RV park. Two dozen RVs were parked in a horseshoe formation around the perimeter of a large desert lot, but in the center was a shantytown of sorts; saltbox- style shelters with steep asymmetrical roofs that appeared to have been constructed from whatever the residents had lying around, from salvaged wood to corrugated sheet metal, old tires to cinder blocks. No one seemed to live in these structures. It was a gathering place filled with mismatched patio furniture, a fire ring, and long banquet-style tables. String lights swooped from roof to roof, butnot the white globes Zadie was used to seeing over restaurant patios. These were black lights, and they cast an eerie purple glow over the camp. It took a minute or so for Zadie’s eyes to adjust, but once they did, she saw a dozen or so people milling around, not at all bothered, it seemed, by the darkness.
The music was still playing. Zadie squinted, trying to find the source, then spotted a woman sitting on a lawn chair using a red headlamp to illuminate the keyboard in her lap. Her fingers glided slowly across the keys, stretching out the notes as if tapping them for sap. Every sixty seconds or so, she’d stop, look up at the sky, then continue playing, occasionally taking breaks to write something down in a notepad sitting on the arm of her chair.
Zadie took a few steps forward to get a closer look at this strange person in this strange place. The woman looked up, this time not at the stars, but directly at her.How can she see me?she wondered before looking down at her own glow-in-the-dark shirt. Above her, hanging from an old signpost, was a black light.
Zadie backed up out of range of the ultraviolet light, but it was futile. The woman had already seen her. She watched Zadie curiously for a few moments as if she were a wild animal, then raised her hand and gestured her over. Something curdled in Zadie’s stomach that at first felt like shame, but as the feeling intensified, she realized it was the beginning of a premonition. She scrambled into the shadows, clamped her eyes shut, and tried to think of a song, any song that would keep her mind in the present and not allow it to be sucked out with the tide that was lapping at her feet.
The sky is full of birds.
She looked up, but all she saw were stars.
The sky is full of birds.
Then the keyboard music began again. While the woman’s eyes were on her fingers, Zadie slipped back into the night.
When Zadie returned to camp, she saw a tent, but no Finn. “Dude, this place just keeps getting weirder—” she started, then parted the tent flap and found her sister passed out on top of her sleeping bag,The Fisherman’s Desirefanned open on her chest. Zadie gingerly lifted the book, set it on the tent floor, then grabbed the wool blanket that was bunched up at Finn’s feet and pulled it over her. Her sister grunted softly and nuzzled into the blanket.
Exhaustion tugged at Zadie’s eyelids. Ignoring the hollowness in her belly, she crawled into her own bag and sank into a cavernous sleep.
Finn could have slept in. She hadn’t set an alarm, trusting her body to wake when it felt ready. As it turned out,readymeant sixA.M.
Finn crawled out of the tent carefully so as not to wake her sister, then stretched her limbs like a cat, digging her toes into the sand. It was a gorgeous day. The burnished cliffs glowed in the early morning sun, and the air was cool and smelled like smoke from neighboring campsites. It was a contradictory landscape. On the one hand, it was arid and severe, the color of heat. On the other, it was veined with verdant gullies that sang with insects and bloomed like moss at the feet of the hills. Finn let the vastness of it all sink in. Having lived her entire life in the largely flat state of Texas, she felt overwhelmed that there were things in the world that existed at such heights. She trembled with excitement at the prospect that she could seemore: more mountains, more world. It made her feel like her vision was widening, becoming a panorama. Eventually she just stopped turning her head. She could see everything.
This is the place,Finn thought, surer than ever that her mom had passed through here five years earlier. If she had to, she would overturn every rock, climb every butte until she found where her memories were hiding.
Finn walked to the outskirts of their campsite and climbed onto a boulder that had been sheared flat on top. It was warm and gritty against her thighs. She pressed her palms into the warm stone and felt a scar. Someone named Alison had carved her name into the rock. A few other names were etched into the surface, too—Michelle, Tim, Alberto—but no Nora. When Finn was young, her mom had carved their initials, NZF, into everything: rocks, trees, restaurant booths, bathroom stalls. “How else will people know we exist?” she’d said. Finn didn’t care how many people knew she existed. The only people that mattered already knew.
Finn closed her eyes and another world opened. The memories here were older than any she’d felt before. They yielded like clay between her fingers; drummed like hoofbeats and smelled like smoke. They belonged to people who lived before she was born, before anyone she’d ever known was born. It seemed that the desert had preserved them somehow, kiln-fired them and put them behind glass just for her.
As fascinating as these memories were, none of them belonged to her mother. She drew a deep breath and tried again. Snakebites and sunburns. Hunger. Thirst. The desert had been unforgiving to many. Before this was a place for tourists, it was merely another stop on a long journey west. An old mutt slept in the shade of a wagon. Somewhere a gun fired.
Then a chime. Not a memory, but her phone. She fished it out of her pajama shorts pocket and found a text from Steve:
HOPE YOU’RE HAVING FUN!
Finn was instantly awash with guilt. She hated lying to Steve even more than she did Kathy. He was the more trusting of the two, the one more likely to hand over his car keys and believe Finn when she said she would be “home by ten.” His trust was precious to her, something she wore like a locket around her neck. The thought of hisrealizing that she had broken that trust—well, she tried not to think about it.
She swallowed her reservations, snapped a picture of her bare feet against the sand below—being careful to frame out the prickly pear to her right—and texted it to her foster dad with the caption:MY FEET ARE!
He texted back:PUT SOME SHOES ON,followed by a winking face emoji.
Finn smiled and replied,WHAT ARE SHOES?She realized then that she was actually a little homesick. She missed Kathy and Steve and Milly, even if the dog did steal her socks out of the laundry hamper and bury them in the yard. She missed them the way anyone would miss their family on a long trip.
She thought back to the month before when the three of them had sat in a TGI Fridays, sharing a basket of buffalo wings. “You’re already part of our family,” Kathy said, her eyes darting nervously to her husband. “But we want to make it official.” With bright orange sauce smeared all over her mouth and fingers, Finn stared back at her foster parents, speechless. She could see them squirm as they waited for her to respond.This must be what it feels like to be publicly proposed to,she thought. Eventually she stammered something like “Wow, you guys. That… that’s awesome.”
Kathy and Steve smiled at each other. “You don’t have to give us an answer now,” Steve continued, shifting restlessly in his seat. “Just… something to think about.”
And Finn was still thinking about it, even as she followed in her mother’s footsteps. She knew she couldn’t make a decision one way or another until she looked her mom in the eye. It was the only way she would know for sure where she truly belonged.
And then there was Zadie.She would be hurt the most by all of this,Finn thought. She looked over her shoulder at the tent where her sister was sleeping. There was no reason her sister needed to know. Not yet.
Finn switched her phone to silent and slid it back into her pocket.She didn’t need any more distractions. Instead, she decided to explore the rest of the campground. After all, her mom could have stayed at any one of these campsites. If she was lucky, she’d get back before Zadie even woke up.