Desert Crossing

by Elise Broach

  The line of his jaw tightened. He didn’t seem like he was joking. “Just like you were right in the car that night, when we hit something. You said we had to turn around and find out what it was. Look how well that worked out.”

  I swallowed. “What do you mean?” He loaded the last two plates into the dishwasher, his forearms wet and gleaming.

  He looked at me. “That girl had nothing to do with us. And if we’d kept driving, if we’d driven to Albuquerque, we wouldn’t have gotten in trouble with the police. We’d never have met Beth. Jamie wouldn’t have slept with her. We’d have been in Phoenix the next day and right now, instead of being stuck here, we’d be spending spring break with your dad.” He slammed the dishwasher shut and took the towel from me, roughly wiping his hands. “Which would be a hell of a lot more fun than this.”

  I stared at him. “So now you’re blaming everything on me?”

  “Well?”

  “It’s not my fault the girl was dead.”

  “No. But it’s your fault we found her.”

  I turned before he could see my face and ran back to the bedroom, kicking the door shut behind me.

  * * *

  I lay on my stomach with my face against the pillow, breathing the clean smell of the sheets, trying not to cry. I didn’t know why I was surprised. Of course that was what Kit thought. I’d ruined his spring break. I’d ruined everyone’s spring break, and more than that. Jamie was in this mess because of me.

  Kit and I had kissed and kissed—it made me tremble just to think about it—but it didn’t change who he was. He was still Kit. And I was still me.

  I wanted to talk to my mom. Not to tell her anything, I couldn’t do that. But just to hear her voice. She was working tonight, the evening shift at the clinic. I took the phone and punched her number.

  “Women’s Healthcare Associates.”

  I sighed, leaning into the calm of her voice. “Mom, it’s me.”

  “Oh! Honey, how are you? Where are you? Are you headed for your father’s?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “But why not? Aren’t things cleared up there? Your father talked to the sheriff this afternoon. He said you were free to go.”

  “Yeah, we are…” I hesitated.

  “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing, Mom. Nothing happened. It’s just—”

  The other line beeped. “Oh, hold on a second, Lucy.” I waited.

  “What were you saying, honey? Why haven’t you left for Arizona?”

  “It’s just that the police don’t know anything about the girl yet. They didn’t find an ID or anything. And it looks like she died of a heart attack.”

  “Yes, I know. Your father told me. It’s so strange. Terrible. Poor thing, and her family—they must not even know she’s dead yet. I can’t imagine it.” I could feel her shuddering. “Oh, hold for a second.”

  I waited, listening to the steady beeps.

  “Lucy?”

  “You’re busy. I can call you later.”

  “I won’t be home till midnight, honey. It’ll be too late. But I still don’t understand why you haven’t left. Is everything okay?” The phone beeped again, but this time she ignored it, waiting for me to answer.

  I hesitated. Nothing was okay. “Yeah, Mom. By the time we heard from the police, it was so late, you know?” I took a deep breath. “We didn’t want to drive at night.”

  “Oh. Well, that makes sense, especially after what happened. So you’ll leave first thing tomorrow? How’s Jamie? Does he seem better?”

  I swallowed. “I think he’s still kind of shook up.”

  “Well, put him on for a minute. And then I should go. The phones are ringing off the hook here.”

  “He—” I hesitated. “He’s outside. He went for a walk.”

  “He did?” I could hear the flicker of doubt in her voice. “Are you sure everything’s okay, Lucy?”

  “Yeah, we’re fine. I just wanted to talk to you, that’s all. I’m sorry I called you at work.”

  “No, no, I’m glad you did. Call me tomorrow, okay? Love you, honey.”

  I set the phone down and listened to the silence in the room. I wondered what my mom would say if I told her everything. What she’d do. That was the thing about telling your parents anything important. They never just listened, they always had to do something about it. Which sometimes only made things worse.

  I reached down and tugged my backpack across the floor to the bed, unzipping the inside pocket. Carefully, I drew out the bracelet. The silver gleamed. The little charms danced and clinked against each other. With one finger, I tapped the horseshoe, watching it turn. I dropped the bracelet on the blanket beside me. I thought of the girl’s slim wrist, and how easy it had been to unfasten the bracelet and slide it into my pocket.

  Maybe everything was my fault. But how could you ever know the right thing to do? If you could somehow see what was going to happen, it would be different. Then you wouldn’t make these mistakes. I’d never have told Beth that Jamie was gay, because I’d have known exactly where it might lead. But at the time, it had seemed such a small thing, so unconnected to anything else. Like taking the bracelet. Like looking through the rain-splashed window of the car that night and saying, “We have to go back.”

  I touched the delicate surface of each charm. There weren’t so many choices, were there? Once we found her, we had to do something. We couldn’t leave her there, alone like that, on a highway in the rain. She was somebody’s daughter. Maybe somebody’s sister. Just because she was dead didn’t mean she didn’t matter.

  I heard Kit’s footsteps in the hallway and closed my fist over the bracelet, shoving it under my stomach on the bed.

  “Luce?” He sounded impatient, not sorry.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What are you doing in there?”

  I burrowed my face into the pillow and mumbled, “Nothing. Go away.”

  The door swung open. “I can’t hear you,” he said, walking over to the bed. When I opened one eye and squinted up at him, I thought he did look a little sorry. But I turned my face away, clutching the bracelet tight beneath me. He sat down on the bed, the springs creaking, and my heart began to beat a little faster.

  “What are you mad about?” He put his hand on my back, fanning it over my ribs. I could feel my skin leaping up to meet his fingers, tingling under their warmth. I shivered.

  “You’re jumpy.” It was the voice he used with the waitress. “What, am I making you nervous?”

  “No,” I said, still not looking at him. “You don’t make me nervous.”

  “You sure?” He swept my hair away from my face and leaned close to me, his breath on my cheek. His hand moved in slow circles over my back. I stiffened.

  “I thought we weren’t going to do this,” I said.

  “Do what?” His voice was soft. He started kissing me, rolling me toward him, his mouth on my face and my lips, and suddenly I was pressed against him and reaching up with both hands to hold him, to hold myself and keep the room from spinning.

  I remembered too late about the bracelet. It dropped from my hand and clattered on the floor.

  I pulled back, catching my breath.

  And that was my mistake. If I’d kept kissing him, Kit would never have noticed. But now he lifted his head and glanced over the edge of the bed. “What was that?” he said.

  I bit my lip. He wouldn’t recognize it.

  He picked it up and brought it onto the bed, laying it between us on the cover. His brows came together. “Is it yours?” he asked uncertainly.

  I could have lied, gathering the words to make him believe me. He would never have known.

  But I wanted him to know. That was the thing about lying. In the end, it was so lonely.

  I shook my head slowly.

  He kept looking at the bracelet. With his index finger he shaped it into a circle. “Beth’s?” he asked. Then, frowning, “No. Wait.” He raised his eyes, and they were
full of wonder. “It’s hers.”

  I nodded.

  “You took her bracelet?”

  I nodded again.

  “That’s messed up.”

  I pressed my face against his shoulder. “I know,” I said into his shirt.

  22

  The urge to stay like that, with my cheek against his shirt, was so powerful that I couldn’t bring myself to move. But I didn’t have a choice. Kit pushed me back, tilting my face up so he could look at me.

  “You stole her bracelet? Off her body?”

  It sounded so much worse when he said it that way. I couldn’t answer him.

  “But why? Why’d you do that?”

  I rolled backward on the bed and covered my face with my hands. “I don’t know! I don’t know.”

  He didn’t say anything. When I spread my fingers to see what he was doing, he was staring at the bracelet, lifting each charm and turning it in his hand.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I said hopelessly.

  Kit just looked at me.

  “Okay, I meant to, but not to steal it. I—” I stopped. He wouldn’t understand. No one would understand. “I wanted to keep it safe. You know? The police were coming and I knew they would take her away and I just wanted to—” How could I explain it? I didn’t even understand it myself.

  “When did you take it? I didn’t see you.”

  “No. You and Jamie were talking to Beth. It was right before the ambulance came.”

  “This is so messed up,” he said again. “The police said she didn’t have any ID on her. Something like this could be important.”

  “I know. I know.” I touched his hand, and his fingers immediately curved over mine, so the bracelet was pressed between our palms. The warmth of his skin sent little prickles through me. “But if I tell them now, if I try to give it back … isn’t it stealing? Won’t I get in trouble?”

  He turned my hand over and uncurled my fingers, lifting the bracelet. It swung in the air between us, inches from my face. The room was almost dark now. I could barely see it, or Kit’s expression. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  I swallowed. “Should I tell them?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  I lay back on the bed again, turning away from him. “What if it’s some kind of clue? Would it help the police figure out who she was?”

  The mattress shifted and I felt him sink down beside me, his shoulder almost touching mine, but not quite, so there was a charged silhouette of space all around me, thin and electric. After a while, his voice came out of the darkness. “Is there anything on it? I mean, besides the charms?”

  “No. No name, nothing like that. I checked. Just charms. The kind you get at jewelry stores. At the mall.” I pointed to the silver heart. “I have one just like that on my charm bracelet at home.”

  “Then maybe it wouldn’t matter anyway.” I knew he was trying to make me feel better.

  I looked out the window at the blue-black night. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done,” I said hollowly.

  Kit snorted, sounding like himself again. “No way.”

  “It is. I stole something from a dead person.”

  “Oh, come on. You must have done worse things than that.”

  “No. Really.” I turned slightly, watching his fuzzy profile in the dark, feeling the warmth of his body close to mine. “What’s the worst thing you ever did?”

  He started to laugh, but suddenly I wanted to know. It seemed important. “Tell me,” I said.

  “Are you serious? That would take all night.”

  “Not everything,” I said, frustrated. “Just the worst thing. Please.” I was almost whispering. “I told you mine.”

  Kit turned toward me and his face was inches away on the pillow. I watched his lips move in the dark, softly changing shape. “The worst thing? Jeez.”

  “And not one of those stunts you and Jamie pulled at school, either.”

  He was quiet for a minute. Then he clasped his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. “Okay. The worst thing…” In the last bit of light coming through the window, I could see him chewing on his lower lip. “Last year, Jamie and I were out at a bar, late—”

  Immediately, I wished I hadn’t asked him. Of course it would involve Jamie, and it wouldn’t be something I wanted to hear. “You mean drinking?”

  “Uh, yeah, that’s generally what you do at a bar. But not around home, you know? Not where someone would recognize us. We were over in Winston.” Winston was almost an hour away, a small town with a community college, mostly farm kids, and a tiny, run-down main street. “And we’d been there awhile—two, three hours—when this guy comes in with a really pretty woman, a redhead. They’re a little drunk, kissing, and everybody’s looking at them, and…” He stopped.

  “What?”

  “And it was my dad.”

  I stared at him. Kit’s parents were both good-looking in a glossy, sophisticated way, like an ad for a country club.

  “But…”

  “Yeah. My dad. With this woman. He didn’t see us, you know, so we snuck out. Right away. I mean, Jamie and I didn’t want to get caught.”

  “Oh,” I said. “No.”

  “But then, afterwards, I knew this thing about my dad. And I was mad, right? I mean, it wasn’t like a huge shock. I kind of figured he was sleeping around. But what was he thinking, going to Winston, which is only an hour away, with some other woman? Anybody could have seen him. What’s up with that?” He straightened one arm over his head and tapped his knuckles against the wall.

  “So I thought I should tell my mom.” His mouth curved down sharply. “He was making a fool of her, you know? I mean, why should she sit around ironing his shirts and fixing his dinners when all the time he’s just…”

  I leaned toward him, watching his face. I wanted to fix the angry twist of his mouth, to smooth it away. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said.

  “No, listen. So I’m nervous about it, right? Like, who wants to tell their mom that? But one day I just say it. I tell her the whole thing, how we were in the bar, what we saw.”

  He hesitated.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  “She slapped me. Right across the face. She said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are, telling me something like that?’”

  I stared at him.

  “And that was it. We never talked about it again.”

  Suddenly it seemed like nothing to reach across the charged gap between us and slip my hand into his, holding it tight. I’d known him for years, but maybe I hadn’t known him at all. You could spend months and months with a person and not learn anything about them, compared with what you found out in a few minutes, with one story. Maybe everyone had one story that explained who they really were.

  “Kit,” I said, curling close to him, leaning my forehead against his shoulder. “That’s not the worst thing you ever did. That’s the worst thing they ever did.”

  “No,” he said, his voice hard. “I shouldn’t have told her. It wasn’t any of my business. And it could have wrecked things between them. Maybe it did.”

  “Why was she so mad at you? Did she think it wasn’t true?”

  He shook his head. “That’s what I thought at first, that she didn’t believe me. But then I thought, no, she believes me. She already knows. And I wasn’t supposed to let on that I knew, because then it was just too hard … to keep the whole thing going. She thought it was, I don’t know, disrespectful, or something. For me to tell her about my dad.”

  I squeezed his hand in the dark. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well, shit happens.”

  In the yard we heard the loud burst of the dogs barking, and then voices coming closer. “They’re back,” I whispered, sitting up. “You’d better get out of here.”

  He looked at me silently for a minute, then got to his feet in one motion and left the room.

  23

  I slipped out of my clothes in the
dark and dropped the bracelet into my backpack. I could hear Jamie and Beth in the hallway. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, just the low, flowing river of their words, blending and separating, punctuated by her soft laughter, the rush of his response.

  He’s falling in love with her, I thought.

  How could that be? It was too soon. But I could feel it.

  I crawled under the cool sheets, straining to follow their voices in the stillness. After a while, I heard them open the door to Beth’s room and go inside. When the door closed, the sound was firm and final, like a lid snapping shut. It sealed Jamie in, separating him from Kit and me.

  * * *

  I had another dream about the girl. I saw the road and heard the heavy rain, just as I had the past two nights. I was starting to think I’d never really sleep again. Sometimes I couldn’t even tell if I’d slept until the dream came, so real that I woke up shaking.

  This time the girl rose, glowing in the headlights, with her arms outstretched and her lips moving. I tried so hard to hear what she was saying, but her voice was muffled. I knew she was asking for some kind of help. But before I could figure out what she wanted, the car slammed into her.

  I bolted upright, breathing hard. My watch said 2:00 a.m.

  I lay back down, holding the sheets close to my chin, listening to the quiet house. I could hear faint rustlings in the kitchen. Maybe it’s Jamie, I thought. Maybe I could try to talk to him again.

  But when I got to the kitchen doorway, the person I saw was Beth.

  She looked otherworldly in the dark, her nightgown sliding over a bare brown shoulder. It didn’t seem like the kind of nightgown she’d wear. It was so delicate, and there was nothing delicate about Beth, with her paint-splotched hands and quick competence. She was standing at the sink, staring out the window.

  I held the doorjamb to steady myself and said, “You have to stop.”

  “Oh!” She turned, hugging her arms against her stomach. “Lucy, I didn’t hear you. What are you doing up?”

  “I had a bad dream.”

  “What about?”

  I shrugged. “Please,” I said. “You have to stop. Jamie’s too young.”

  She looked at me, a long guarded look. “I know that.”