The Unseen Shore (part 2)

III.

The breeze by the pier shook Sarah with a quick chill. Tendrils of hair stuck to her chin. She blinked black spots from her vision. The day was still shuttered up. Boats on the dark eye of the harbor cast bobbing pinpricks of light on the water. Sarah’s phone buzzed in her hand. Elle glanced at the blue glow of the screen where Clark’s name lit up as the caller. Sarah clicked ignore. The screen immediately brightened with another call. She clicked ignore again. This time the phone—everything at the pier, even the water—stilled. 

“I can’t believe he stopped,” Sarah said. Heat slowed in her body, leaving her freezing, scooped out like a grapefruit. She always hoped they would come back—Clark, Brie, her parents, the visitors at the hospital.

“You sound disappointed.” Elle’s words were short and hard. She pressed against the metal railing separating tourists from the sea splashing the shore below them. Tall, thin, light poles sent brightness over the whole surface of the pier. The ocean behind them was dark, and the buildings looming in the shadows ahead of them were dark too. If Clark had followed them there, he wasn’t moving from the shadows between the buildings. He would like that, the drama of it—watching them wonder if he was there. 

“You pulled me away from him,” Sarah said. Elle lifted one shoulder.

“You’re welcome.” 

 “I should have told you about the harp,” Sarah said. “You’re angry.” 

“I would leave,” Elle said, “But I’m not sure some maniac isn’t waiting for us in the shadows.” She gestured ahead at the buildings. Through their dark bulk was the only route off the pier, back to the city. Sarah’s breathing slowed at Elle’s slight admission of need. Below the pier, stacked almost to the top of the railing, were dark mounds of sea kayaks. 

“You been in the water this late before?” she said. Silence stretched and hardened between them. “We can’t stand here all night.”

“I told you,” Elle said. “I don’t like the water.” 

“I was in a boating accident when I was a teenager,” Sarah said. They kept their backs to the bay, their eyes trained forward, at the buildings. “Ripped my leg up, and after I healed, everyone assumed I was done with water.” Elle wrapped her arms around her stomach. “They were wrong. I joined the swim team. I learned to sail. I tried windsurfing. My hair was wet all the time.”

 “This is so weird,” Elle said. A wave misted their shoulder blades with water so cold it stung.

“I spent almost a month in the hospital after the accident,” Sarah said. “Everyone visited me. Even Brie, every day.” 

“Getting your leg chewed up is not a personal vacation.” Elle shivered. 

“He won’t follow us onto the water,” she said. 

“No thanks,” Elle said. “Not for me.” She twitched at each creak of the pier.

“I worked the kayak rental here. It’s that building ahead of us.” Sarah tugged the chain holding the stack of kayaks together. It slid through her hand. “I led the full moon tours in the evenings. We didn’t usually lock the kayaks after we came back, just looped the chains around them.” 

“We’re not going out there,” Elle said. 

“It’s not so bad.” Each moment that slipped by and Clark did not make himself known, Sarah found it easier to convince herself he hadn’t followed them. Her heartbeat began to calm.

“You sound like you’ve done this before,” Elle said. 

“I’ve been swimming at night,” Sarah said. “I go out and kick as hard as I can. I bought a wetsuit. It’s so cold you can’t think. It wipes you blank.”

“A boat would never see you,” Elle said. 

“The first night I went was the night Clark left. I drove back and saw what he did to my apartment. I don’t know how far out I was in the harbor. That was my first night living alone. There was a baseball game at the park. The floodlights were the way I swam back.” Sarah didn’t mention how long she floated in the dark water, listening for her name, for him to come looking for her. Even when she returned to land, she checked her phone, but there was nothing from him, from anyone. Water rustled at the edge of the shore.  

“I won’t,” Elle said. 

“We’ll go in a double. I’ll steer.” Elle shook her head.

  

They might have been able to do it together, walk forward, leave the dock and sea and kayaks behind them, weave through and past the dark buildings, but a man emerged from the shadows ahead of them. Something about the shoulders seemed too sloped, too uncertain for Clark. Perhaps it was just someone on a run, but the sound of feet pounding towards them, the rough outline of a man, rid them of their hesitation. Sarah’s heart pounded quickly again. Elle yanked the kayak chain. Sarah jumped the gate and climbed the ladder down to the bobbing platform below the pier. She was right. The bottom three kayaks in the stack weren’t locked. She slid a dark red double in the water and motioned for Elle to sit in the front. Push off and launch came from a forgotten habit. “We’ll just paddle out a little,” Sarah said. “Enough to reach a different dock.” 

Water slapped the sides of the kayak, and soon they were soaked through and shaking. When she turned back, someone leaned against the railing, but she couldn’t tell anything from the silhouette. Half a cup full of moon hung in the sky; a patchwork glimpse of it flashed from behind the fog rolling around above. Elle stopped paddling once they were far enough out that the shoreline flattened into a line of light. Sarah set her oar across her lap. Her body tingled. She wrapped her hands around the paddle to steady them. Elle inhaled long and slow and then emptied her lungs of air. The Bay Bridge arced in gold above them—the faintest hint of its reflected light playing over Sarah and Elle’s skin and clothes.  

Sarah told Elle how she returned from swimming after Clark left her and balled up in bed watching the red numbers on the clock roll towards early morning. Light streaked the base of the sky when she dressed and sank in the elevator to the storage locker. Elle didn’t turn, but Sarah kept talking. She dragged the harp—heavier than she thought—into the trunk of her vehicle. Wherever Clark’s anger had taken him, there had clearly been no room for the instrument. The dirty green and brown of the San Ramon Valley spilled past her car windows, but she focused on the highway. A few cars were in the upper parking lot of Mount Diablo but no people that Sarah could see. She tugged the instrument to the lookout, a castle-like turret, and sat inside, the harp beside her like some kind of bird. An unusually clear day brightened before her. Rough puffs of green trees and stretches of pale earth spilled west, right out towards the glitter of downtown San Francisco and the faint smudge of the Golden Gate. The blue vein of the San Joaquin Delta ran uninterrupted, and she traced its path with her finger until she pointed at the bright snow-capped Sierra crest in the beyond. Looking at the ridgeline, the blunt contrast between the snow and the mountain, Sarah wondered what it was like to be so definite—one thing or the other. On the balcony of the lookout, she leaned over the railing and called out. She shouldn’t have worried. There wasn’t anyone, not even another car on the roadway, until she was in the city. The harp tipped over the ledge. It cracked hitting the stones below. Strings separated like frayed threads from the wooden frame. It bounced down the cliff and out of sight. 

“If I’d taken it to the police,” she said. “He’d never have come back.” Elle’s shoulders stiffened, and Sarah didn’t know if the tension in Elle’s body was from anger or the sight of a late-night cruise ship slipping out of a band of fog. It loomed, the harbor’s water started to roll.  

“We’re too close.” Elle said it like a question—as if the answer could be that they were safe. Sarah’s fingers were numb, but she jolted with pain and emptiness. The ship would strike them, she thought. Waves spilled into the kayak. She told Elle to paddle hard. Water flashed on their arms.  

“We won’t make it.” Elle’s breath was short and fast. Her head kept turning to look at the ship. Sarah’s arms burned. She could stop, lay the oar down, fix on the clouds, and let the ship come. She might have done it, feeling like she did, but Elle’s breathing was frantic, and Sarah remembered her own breath before Elle took her by the arm in the office—how quick, how panicked. 

“Keep going,” Sarah said. “Pull towards the bridge.” She counted a rhythm out loud. Elle’s breathing deepened into pants of exertion. The kayak plunged forward into the golden glow, but the cruise liner was so close Sarah could hear the water breaking. They tilted from side to side, almost tipping. She tried to focus on the lights, but all she could think about was Brie, taking her boxes away one by one. Sadness rolled out in her brain and pulled her past the water and the bridge and the smear of city light, unraveled her into whatever was in the ragged darkness, and what if she kept going right into it, right over the edge? Music blared from the speakers of the ship. Pain lit through her shoulders, and when the oar slipped from her hand, or did she let go, and the liner was upon them, Elle yelled something about being clear.  

The ship powered by them, close enough that the wake rocked the kayak sideways, pouring them into the water. Cold closed over Sarah’s head. She surfaced coughing, water burning her nose. The ship was already passing beneath the bridge. When her shoulder was grabbed, she wasn’t surprised. Whatever little dark she’d been waiting for had come. Elle’s arms squeezed. Elle tightened her grip until sparks popped in Sarah’s eyes, and she knew Elle was drowning and she was too.  

“Let go,” she tried to say, but she choked on the water filling her mouth, and her kicking feet slowed. She sank below the waterline. Elle’s grip slackened as she pushed against Sarah, sending Elle upward and Sarah downward. Her clothes were weights. Elle’s feet thudded Sarah’s shoulders and stung the top of her head. She was still trying to move as quickly as possible past her fear and doubt, yet everything slowed. The wake from the ship flattened. Bubbles from Elle’s struggling burst and quieted. Sarah hung in the deep. Though she hadn’t been sure she would, she had made it past the cruise liner, and that had her out of her body, looking down from a great height, a height from which she could see surviving was a matter of reaching into the black and pulling upward. Her chest flexed in and out, but she squeezed her lips shut. In the drawn out dark, she lost any difference between herself and the cold and the water, and for a moment, the rush of need and adrenaline was so strong she couldn’t recall anything about herself. She kicked the shadows. She punched above her head. The glass broke. She coughed.  

Elle struggled at the edge of the kayak. Her breathing was staccato. Snot traced down to her lips. “It’s okay,” Sarah said. “Inhale to five. Exhale to eight.” She repeated the numbers until Elle’s breathing slowed. Sarah’s teeth clicked together. Cold made her lips feel immovable. An oar bobbed a few feet away. 

“I have to get the oar,” Sarah said. Elle’s head moved back and forth. “I’m coming back. We have to flip the kayak.” Elle shook. Sarah stroked over to the oar, cradled its firm weight beneath her arm. 

“Let go for a second,” she said when she returned. Elle’s arms remained clammed to the plastic shape. “Slide then.” Sarah showed Elle how to slip her hands along the kayak until her fingers curled at the edge. “We have to go under and push it over.”  

“No,” Elle said, but she adjusted her hold on the rim. Sarah counted down from three and when she ducked beneath the surface, she heard the splash of water as Elle dunked down too. Kicking up, back towards the bright, they surged one behind the other, righting the kayak. They dragged themselves above the water, their feet pressed against the solid bottom. Air constricted against Sarah’s skin. “Keep moving your arms and legs,” she told Elle. “I’ll take us back to shore.” 

 

The sweaty summer after senior year when Sarah and Brie were seventeen years old, they visited their mother’s brother Graeme and his husband Tom in Santa Barbara. G and T—they insisted Sarah and Brie call them that—were happy hosts. They left fat bowls of fruit on the kitchen table for them each morning and whenever G saw them he would say, “Our beloved guests, what can I do for you today?” Brie was especially happy, often saying with the flair for infinity that marks most seventeen-year-old girls, though rarely Brie, even then, that if she could she would remain a beloved guest forever. She grew softer in their care. This contentment grew between Sarah and her sister, a lovely but divisive weed. Sarah, who thought her parents would summer with them by the water, saw only the blankness of the faces of people in the town. She knew no one and most of the people she did meet were several decades older than her. G and T tried, she knew that, but she couldn’t see them as anything but not her parents. She couldn’t understand Brie’s ready acceptance, joy even, in staying with G and T whose house was so close to the beach that when tides were high, sand and foam washed into the front room. When the sea rushed out, it left white rinds of salt on the furniture, a whimsy that delighted Brie and irritated Sarah.

One morning, near the close of the season, they pushed the paddleboat into the water. Wild swished over their feet and their knees melted into liquid mirrors. They moved quickly, each in their own thoughts, until their breathing chopped up into rags. When they finally paused and looked around, blue stretched without end. Sarah found herself wanting to dissolve Brie’s calm expression. The way she scanned the blank water, the blunt sky, Sarah’s frowning face, if only Sarah had known enough to see what Brie’s serenity said about her, about what she had decided she could and could not live without, but Sarah didn’t. She was angry instead of reflective and when a rocket of black and white Dall’s porpoises shot past them near the fuzzy horizon, she refused Brie’s exuberance. 

“They move so quickly,” Brie said. “Like they don’t have to think at all.” She turned to Sarah, her grin an invitation to share her excitement. Sarah called the creatures stupid. She said she didn’t even see them. That she had seen the porpoises, that they were rarely sighted, that they were clearly something in which Brie invested a significance and certainly a delight, Sarah ignored in order to watch Brie’s hurt spread across her face, rippling it in a way that reminded Sarah suddenly, and painfully, of her mother’s face. They stared at each other, and Sarah, regretting what she had done but unable to say it, chose instead to start pushing her feet at the paddles. When they reached the beach, Brie said in a soft voice that they would return to the city the next day—a week sooner than planned. Sarah knew, even then, that Brie did the right thing—the kind thing. She knew she should have told Brie they could stay the rest of the week. She had been in the wrong but she couldn’t do it. Instead, Sarah clapped her sister gently on the shoulder and said, “We made it.” 

“We did,” Brie said. “We will.” She slung an arm around Sarah’s shoulders. The squish of seawater and sad squeaking of sand on their skin was such a happy sound in Sarah’s waterlogged ears. 

 

  Sarah and Elle abandoned the kayak on a different pier, one further along the shoreline. Morning light was a hopeful thought beyond the dark jacket of the sky. She looked for him, but if Clark was there, she couldn’t see him. The edge of her fear remained, but it felt used up for the moment, like an orange rind. They walked towards the city center, water dripping from them. On a street where people sipped beers and laughed in the warm glow of pub lights, Sarah and Elle sat on a bus bench. The pain creeping through Sarah’s body since the hospital edged its way slowly back into her awareness. Her fingernails rimmed with heat. The city was restless. Plants and people and garbage drifted around them.  

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “For everything.” Words were useless to show Elle what she meant. Pain flared on the side of her head. She pushed her palms along her hairline. Flesh swelled where Elle kicked Sarah in the water. Elle shifted. She pulled Sarah’s hand from her temple. Her breathing puffed heat along Sarah’s cheek. 

“Did I do that?” 

“It’s okay,” Sarah said. 

“I didn’t apologize,” Elle said. “It’s starting to bruise.” Part of Elle’s hair had dried. It wisped around her face.

“Most people would have gone into shock,” Sarah said. “Most wouldn’t have gone back under the water.” Elle sighed. 

“I was hugging that kayak wondering why I didn’t let myself go be with my boyfriend,” Elle said. “If there is anything—after.” She skimmed her fingers over Sarah’s head. A butterfly of fire brushed through Sarah. Elle’s throat pulsed as she swallowed. “I didn’t think I would fight so hard.”

“You were brave,” Sarah said. Elle collapsed against the bench.

“I’m going to get onto the next bus that comes.” 

“I have to tell you something,” Sarah said. “I don’t know how to say it.” Elle pointed down the street where the bus lurched, a dimly lit box.

“Stop saying you can’t,” Elle said. Sarah could see the blue plastic seats in the bus. Water pooled at Elle’s feet. Sarah looked at the scratches on her arms, the way Elle had struggled not to drown, even amid all her grief. 

Before guiding the full-moon kayak tours, Sarah needed to take a water safety course. The instructor explained repeatedly, so that it might well be the only thing Sarah remembered from her time in the stuffy, brown instructional room, that when people were drowning, they were dangerous. “Do not swim right up to the victim,” the instructor underlined this advice six times on the whiteboard. “Toss a flotation aid to them instead. Drowning people will use anything, including you, to get above water. You must always maintain a safe distance from the victim.” At the time, this made perfect sense to Sarah. She was well-versed in the sensation of some large and lifeless, overwhelming thing closing off the expanse of the chest, the spread of the lungs. Oftentimes she could chart, as if following an invisible map, what it might take to draw others across the safe distance—towards herself, her pain. Elle could not have known, Sarah had not known, that she would fall still in service to saving a woman she met only hours before. It had been, Sarah admitted to herself, a blind, instinctual reaction but it had still been hers. 

“I think I’m sick,” Sarah said. Elle’s tapping foot stilled. Sarah squeezed a rivulet of the sea from her sweatshirt. “I’m afraid.”

“Who isn’t?” Elle said. 

 

A few feet away, a thin girl in a ruffled dress opened her instrument case. Taxis honked. People booed. She shouted she was just playing the violin. Sarah still needed to find her sister, she knew that, but right now, everything felt slightly drained. “We should listen to the music,” Sarah said as she stood. A subtle firmness formed beneath her skin. It was delicate, water chilling her—in the way of thin, quick oil settling into a white bone of grease. The approaching bus didn’t slow. It rushed by in a gust of air. Elle watched the bus disappear around the curve of the street. “I’ll stay until the next one.” She stretched out on the bench. “You really smashed it on the Diablo?” 

“I did,” Sarah said.

“Okay.” Elle shut her eyes. Her face relaxed. “I think that’s okay.”

 

Sarah walked towards the musician. When she looked back, Elle was still laying down. Her breathing slowed. One hand waved at Sarah and then folded into rest. The girl leaned against a light pole, the instrument case open on the ground, and propped the violin beneath her chin. Sarah recognized the melody, but she couldn’t find words that matched the music. Each sway of the bow on the strings bloomed differently within her. Clark’s honeyed voice, the pink of his tongue, the white cuticle Brie chewed on her finger when she was thinking, the dark mole beside the nurse’s mouth, the pale glitter of the ridgeway. She still had the scattered light of these strange treasures, even amid the wreckage. Sarah stood in front of the girl. She looked her in the eye. She raised her arms above her head. The violinist kept playing, and although it felt strange to move like she was and it stung, like prayer, it seemed right, acting out loud. Another chord and a white paper boat folded itself in her mind. Chord after chord washed over her and each built, rung after rung. Although she didn’t know where the notes were taking her, she spun anyway. She shuffled from side to side. She waved her arms like seaweed. She opened as much as possible. She widened her eyes. She hopped along the curb edge and placed one foot in front of the other, balancing as she danced. Each pace felt more definitive, like if she did walk off the edge, whether it be close or far, whether alone or not, she might keep walking towards whatever was out there for her.

 

IV.

The city burned with the first weekend of September when Agage’s press assistant announced the mayor’s immediate resignation. Agage was not resigning out of guilt or a sense of fault but rather because he no longer aligned with the position of local government. Her finger tracing condensation on a tea mug, Sarah watched the news flash across a television that was almost eight hours away from San Francisco. The television was behind a poolside bar featuring wicker stools and a tiki hut awning. The screen was small and crackled and a dead bee carcass poked out of the edge of the frame. It was just the broken down thing on which she should learn that, with the resignation of Agage, city officials at last confirmed the superbug. The media called it the Heartbreaker. 

Agage spoke. He insisted San Francisco was bug-free. 

The mayor’s resignation was only two days after a group of investigative journalists in partnership with ONE and the San Francisco Department of Health released an exhaustive report on the superbug. The report splashed conclusive evidence of the reality and deadly threat of the Heartbreaker across every media source in the state. ONE provided funding, as well as private clinics and resources that allowed medical teams of scientists, doctors, and researchers to work on proving the bug’s existence. Officials high up in the Health Commission were kept informed, by ONE, of the medical team’s findings. Brie, Sarah realized as the news unfolded, was the contact between the journalists, the research teams, and the Department of Health. 

Her sister’s face filled the television screen. Something sharp and shaking ran through Sarah. Brie stood beside the Health Commissioner in front of UCSF. She looked calm. Brie was explaining, to a blonde woman who shook her microphone in the air, that proving the Heartbreaker, despite the mayor’s resistance and denial, was an impressively coordinated effort. She emphasized that while ONE provided financial and physical resources, the support of the Department of Health, and the tireless work of the journalists in collating information, tracking down possible victims, and eventually connecting the report’s findings with as many news sources as possible, was essential. Brie said that ONE, the Department of Health, and the journalists all shared a deep commitment to preserving and protecting the lives and health of San Francisco’s residents. Sarah thought about Brie’s late nights, her work on the report she told Sarah she was preparing to convince the Health Department to investigate the bug; Sarah understood now that all of Brie’s preparations months earlier had been in service to this outcome. Sarah couldn’t decide what was more unsettling: Brie’s expression, so assured above reporters shouting questions, or the fact that without Sarah, look how good Brie could be, look how good she was, look how she turned the city towards the right thing. 

The camera cut to a newscaster standing beside a map. He waved his hand over the red lines boxing in the Moraga area. “Quarantined,” the man said. The exposé identified an experimental medical lab called HealthEd on the outskirts of Moraga as the initial source of the bug leak. People were advised not to travel to or out of San Francisco. Sarah bit down on her lip, catching a strip of skin between her teeth. An aerial shot of the crowd surrounding the medical lab filled the frame. One woman held a sign written in bright red paint that said WE WANT ANSWERS. The camera zoomed in on a man waving a piece of cardboard on which he had written SAN FRANCISCO IS OVER. Someone else taped a life size picture of Agage’s head with a bullseye on it to the top of a wooden stake. The newscaster interviewed a woman in a white lab coat with a UCSF Medical Center logo. Sarah lost track of how long she had been sitting on the stool, the news rolling—clips, scenes, and scrolling headlines—across her. Her chest fizzed with the familiar burning. The woman, a doctor, Sarah realized, was explaining the superbug testing procedures. Sarah’s finger hovered above the increase volume button on the remote. The interviewer asked the doctor about screening people in the city for the bug—preventative measures, possible treatment. The woman hesitated before she answered, and Sarah changed her mind. She hit Mute. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath and forced herself to exhale. On the slightly out of focus, now muzzled television, the doctor spoke, her hands gestured through the air like animations in a foreign language.

 

Five days before the mayor resigned, Sarah said goodbye to Elle at the bus stop and cabbed to her apartment. In the gloom of early morning on the last day of August, Sarah packed a green army duffle that used to be Clark’s and called her boss and told him she was taking her vacation. With the duffle, a sleeping bag, and a pillow piled in the backseat of her vehicle, she settled behind the wheel and drove. When she hallucinated Clark’s face in the blur outside her windshield, she pulled over on the shoulder, struggled into the sleeping bag, and reclined the driver’s seat. She woke to day glowing with light and the stretched out, grinning face of a guy knocking the butt of a glass bottle against her window. 

“We’re cold,” the man said. “Warm us up, why don’t you? C’mon honey.” On the passenger side of her vehicle, another man tugged the locked handle of the door. The car rocked. With her feet still cushioned in the sleeping bag, she dropped the car into drive and pressed the gas pedal. The car jerked forward. She didn’t look in her rear view mirror for seventy miles. A few sun-baked hours later, she crossed into Palm Springs.

She checked into the first motel she saw, tucked away in a residential area. The Sun Inn was a brown, multilevel box with scraggly palm trees scattered around the edge. The sign had loopy, white letters on a green background. A giant, yellow sun smiled down on the word Sun. Across the street was a flat, white and brown building. Half of it belonged to Lyon’s Prime Rib & STEAKS. Lyon’s sign was written in Germanic font with spikes and flairs that didn’t suit the peeling, brown shingles and cracked, whitewashed bricks of the exterior. The other half of the building was for Palm Springs Best and Psychic Love and Tarot Card Reader. The printer ran out of room for the word Reader so it dipped downward like a drooping leaf. A neon sign in the psychic’s window blinked Open.  

A shell-shaped garbage can bloomed in the entryway of the Inn. Sarah paused in front of it and pulled her phone from her pocket. Cupped in her palm, her phone was still and dark and warm. Her hand hovered above the shell. Without her phone, if anyone wondered where she went, wanted to know where she was—noticed she was gone—Sarah may not know. The slight tension of holding her arm out tugged tenderness in her shoulder, and Sarah thought about how strong she felt last night, the soreness a reminder of what she had done, however inadvertently, for Elle. A little of that feeling of capability remained. Flipping her palm quickly, she let her phone fall into the moon-shaped mouth of the receptacle. Her fingertips tingled. She was alone. 

The woman at the front desk raised an eyebrow when Sarah asked for a room for a week, but the woman didn’t ask anything except if Sarah wanted a mountain or pool view. Behind the desk, a young girl, about ten years old, read a thin tablet. She didn’t look up, used to the conversations of people above her. Sarah said the pool was fine and a moment later, she sat, the duffle at her feet, in a motel room distinguished from others of its kind by the color. The bedspread, carpet, and walls were all different shades of green. She sank into the mattress, but her legs were restless and she popped back on her feet. 

The balcony glass door slid stiffly aside, and she stepped into the heat. On the little patio was a plastic chair and table. A single panel railing separated her from the pool that waved, blue and light, a few steps away. Rows of white pool chairs on a wide strip of Astroturf faced the sun on the other side of the pool. Behind the chairs, to her right, was the bar. Dense, green bushes cut into bowls scrunched around the perimeter, and the brown, bristly back of what looked like a mountain rose into the sky. All of it, the sparseness of the desert, the quiet that multiplied, opened emptiness in Sarah that she immediately went to fill. She hadn’t packed a swimsuit, but in the solitude, she stripped off her t-shirt, hopped over the railing, and padded, quickly because the pavement was sharp with sun, to the tiled edge of the pool. Dead and dying insects dotted the surface. She jumped into her reflection, sent it shattering and shaking into the sunlight. Her tightened muscles locked air inside her body. The grainy bottom of the pool scratched her skin. Bubbles streamed out her nose in a blur. Her eyes stung with chlorine. Even if she wasn’t drowning, it didn’t mean she wasn’t still underwater. When she crashed upward, she pulled a stream of air into her lungs. The emptiness eased, and the feeling from the Bay, the feeling she drove all this way to protect, stirred and flared. She floated, let the sun and water and air fan the feeling until she was alight. A longing for a manual, some kind of twelve steps to climb, emerged with the heat from the sun on her skin. It tasted like the chemical cleaning agents in the pool. She held one arm up. Wiggled her fingers. Water streamed bright from her skin.  

 

The pamphlet of Local Attractions left on the bedside table in her room informed her in glossy print that there were plenty of must-see attractions near the Sun Inn. Everything required driving except two activities: the botanical garden (two-minute walk) and the psychic (less than a minute walk). The pool helped, but Sarah was still jumpy from being on the road for so long. She toweled off her wet hair and chose the psychic. 

Inside, Palm Springs Best was clean and spare. White walls and beige furniture spread around a small room. Behind the desk, a woman with fake boobs and professionally bleached blonde hair tapped a pink, acrylic nail on the surface and looked at Sarah. “How can I help you?” she said. Sarah hesitated, and the woman waved at her. “This way,” she said. “You came here for me, right?” Sarah nodded, wondering why she’d assumed a psychic’s office would be dark. In a tidy office in the back were a glass coffee table and two brightly patterned chairs. A money tree trembled slim and leafy in a corner. The ceiling fan whirred through the quiet. “Sit,” the woman said. “I’m Candy.”

Candy was a self-professed Catholic in recovery who lived in an all glass bungalow in Old Las Palmas. She told Sarah how she made hula hoops with silk ribbons she imported from Italy and hand dyed different shades herself. Although her career as general counsel and executive vice president for a massive developer and operator of high-end hotels and casinos in Las Vegas made working optional, she wouldn’t quit. “I hate the job,” she said, “but retiring falls in with the other things I deny myself—like bread.” Candy took her company-allotted three weeks each year, during which she opened Palm Springs Best for business. “I get bored,” she explained. “I need the stories from people to chew on. I can’t be alone.”

 

 After two hours sweating in Candy’s office, Sarah realized that although Candy seemed, from the outside, like a walking stereotype of California, she was the sort of person Sarah wanted to meet but never did. Candy took too many liberties. She leaned in, like they were old friends, and told Sarah all about her life. She was lonely, that much was evident, but so was Sarah. When the room grew too full of heat, she linked an arm through Sarah’s and walked them to the pool bar at the Sun Inn. She shook up margaritas. While she mixed and blended, she told Sarah about stealing a dog for company and pawning her ex-boyfriend’s Cartier watch to pay for her first year in law school. 

“He used to snap the watch against my skin,” she said. “The metal bruised streaks up and down my arm. He called me peach. He found it funny.” Candy served margarita slush in flower shaped plastic cups. Swimming in Sarah’s mind was that Clark never actually hurt her, just bruises anyway. She pinched the thought into little pieces. She focused on what he did break. Her microwave, for one, was still cracked on her counter. Candy raised her cup, and Sarah clinked it with her own drink, and then Candy drew deep on her straw, red tinted lips pinched together. Ice and sugar glided down Sarah’s throat and traced a chilled path inside her chest and stomach. 

She could change her mind. She could fall into Candy and this bristly desert and fuzzy, sunset peach sky and stay, let the dust and bright golf courses swallow her. It would be easier than what she came here to do. Cold bloomed behind her eyeballs, and Sarah pressed her fingers into her forehead. Candy wrapped her arm around her and said, “I’m a part-time psychic so that kind of gives me a license to offer unasked-for advice.” There was a pause and Sarah said, “Say it.” The arm tightened and Candy said, “I know what a woman looks like when she’s trying to get strong. Let me help you.”

“You don’t know me,” Sarah said. “Why would you help me?” Candy chewed the end of her straw. 

“Someone helped me a long time ago,” she said. “When I showed up looking like I’d come to die.” 

“When was that?” The brain freeze eased, and the pain running through her limbs emerged again.  

“Another life,” Candy said. “I’ve had a few of them.”

“I didn’t come here to die,” Sarah said. Candy shook her head. 

“Figure of speech.” 

“I might have,” Sarah said. “Before. But now—you’re right. I had this idea that I could be strong, but I’m not sure what to do.” 

“Been there,” Candy said. “I’d just left my first and last husband.”

“What did you do?” Tequila made Sarah feel slippery. 

“I made all the same mistakes I swore I wouldn’t again.” Candy folded a sheet of hotel pad paper into a lotus flower. “After that, I got new habits. Chose somewhere to eat.” Sarah thought about leaving San Francisco. The way she always left when she was afraid. “Don’t feel bad about it.” Candy looked at Sarah. “You’re down here.” She waved to the base of the hill curving over them. “Start small. Pick a restaurant.” Sarah scrolled through her memories of dinner dates and take-away orders. She might not have chosen a restaurant in years. At the top of the maybe-mountain, light from an electrical pole poked through the sky. “See,” Candy said. “The same for me too.” It sounded like a gimmick, and yet she drove here without a plan. She didn’t know what was too easy, or right to do. Sarah bent her straw into a knot. The plastic creased and splintered but didn’t break. She felt like she was teetering, wavering like the tiki lights glowing on the surface of the pool. 

“Tomorrow,” she decided. “Lyon’s Prime Rib & STEAKS.” Together, they sipped the flowers hollow.

 

The next night and the night after that, in the light of Lyon’s table candles, Sarah told Candy about Clark and Brie and Elle and the way Sarah’s chest still burned, and Candy made Sarah write lists of decisions she could make. “You’re a muscle,” Candy said. “The more you decide, the stronger you hold. Practice not being afraid.”

“Where do you get this stuff?” Sarah said. “What New Age, self-help section of the library did you clean out?” Candy clicked her nails at Sarah. 

“Don’t.” She smiled. “It sounds funny, but you don’t get many chances to really change before you harden in place.” Sarah told Candy how she thought it would end—either dropping dead in line for a triple scoop at Bi-Rite, or getting dropped by Clark, the way she thought both of those things would happen without Brie’s knowledge. 

“Is that why you’re here?” Candy said. “Hiding out?” Sarah shook her head. She didn’t know how to explain the small hope she held dancing near the bus stop. There was so much fear when she woke the next morning and everything was still unresolved. She understood then she needed to get away, protect the flame until she knew what to do with it. She stopped packing only once, when she realized what it meant to leave. When Brie left, Sarah stayed put. Ready to be found. Still, perhaps Brie’s boxes moved across the country or were sent to float like junk in space. Maybe her sister was never coming back. 

“I used to let my ex-boyfriend dress me,” Candy said. “He’d place my outfits on the bed. Now, I show up for first dates in leggings because I like the stretch waistband.”

 

Four days into Palm Springs, Sarah finally returned to the pool. She flopped on a float shaped like a slice of pizza. All her knots drifted in the tangle of her hair. Slipping in and out of sleep, she muddled in her mind. Whatever rift gaped between her and her sister could be allowed to continue. It could pull open further and leave Sarah and Brie on opposite sides of a great expanse. Perhaps, with time, its sheer breadth would be remarkable, like the Grand Canyon. She imagined little tour buses driving tourists, binoculars and visors shading their faces, through the vast, torn up landscape of their estrangement. Sarah caught there, because she knew she should let Brie go. Brie needed to be good. She didn’t need Sarah, who always pulled Brie out of shape. The knot became too painful for Sarah to tug all the way through it. Her fists tightened, and she started composing an apology to draw her sister across the divide. She let herself be swept up by the initial velocity of her internal speech, but another knot stopped her. She couldn’t form an apology to Brie that didn’t involve regret, regretting what she had done to the harp, what she had done for Clark. Sarah could feel what would certainly be her sister’s disappointment in her choice to destroy the instrument. Still, in the harp’s pieces strewn along the mountainside, all she could see was longing. Even now, given what she knew, if she felt the way she did about Clark again, if someone ever felt that way about her, she would tilt harp after harp over the edge to hold that close. The ghost of Brie, to whom Sarah had been drafting an apology moments ago, was shaking her head. Sarah rolled off the pizza slice and dropped into the pool. She hoped the clap of water over her head, the moment when breathing stopped could halt the feeling of weakness spreading through her body. When she opened her eyes underwater, her hair twisted around her head. Bubbles caught in the gnarled strands.

Sarah stayed in that evening. Sun drained her. She and Candy sat at the bar, the television flickering with a show called “What Does Your Cat Do At Night?” Candy’s nails played across the bar surface. Her feet jiggled. “I need to hike Palm Canyon.” Candy looked at Sarah. “Have you been?”

“Never,” Sarah said. “I’m not much of a hiker.”

“Tomorrow?” Candy said. “It’s beautiful out there.” Sarah wrinkled her nose. An advertisement for yogurt played on the screen. A woman, beams of light surrounding her, climbed a mountain. She ate yogurt in the clouds at the summit.

“It’s a sign,” Candy said. The yogurt made the woman jump into the air with joy. Sunlight poured over her. “That could be us.” Sarah could see Candy would accept only one answer.

“Fine, but if it’s too hot, I’m turning back.”

“Deal.” Candy calmed. “I knew you’d say yes.”

“Because you’re psychic?” Sarah said. Candy shrugged.

“You can learn too,” she said.

Sarah’s chest cramped beneath the heat of her sunburned skin. Candy pulled two wide and deep tea mugs with saucers out from behind the bar. For reading the leaves, she explained, the mug needed to be the right shape. Tea brewing was standard. Boiling water poured over the tea. Sarah swallowed the hot liquid. When she gestured that she couldn’t drink anymore, Candy shook her head. Sweat pilled on Sarah’s upper lip, at her temples. 

“You need to drink more to read,” Candy said. When there was a small amount of liquid at the bottom of the mug, Candy showed her how to take the cup by the handle in her left hand and move it in a circle three times from left to right. Then, Candy tipped the cup over the saucer and left it there until all the liquid drained away. “The whole time,” she told Sarah, “concentrate on what you want. If you don’t know that yet, pray the leaves show certainties.” 

Sarah felt ridiculous, staring at the cup, making wishes, keeping a straight face, but the longer she looked, in what Candy called the ritual, the more comfortable it became, the less unlikely. 

“You can look for what’s out there,” Candy said. “You can want certain things.” She showed Sarah the architecture of interpretation. The rim of the cup showed the present, the sloped side: events not far distant, the bottom: the far away future. Lines of leaves meant a journey, and lines reaching towards the handle meant Sarah should return home. She looked at what she knew were just leaves and wished for truth. 

“What do you see?” Candy said. Sarah saw a line towards the handle, unbroken, and an axe on the side. The axe, Candy told her, meant difficulties in the near future. There was an acorn at the bottom of the cup—improved health. When Candy read her own mug, she made a sound at the back of her throat and washed out her cup. She wouldn’t tell Sarah what she saw. 

 

The next night, walking through the lobby towards her room, Sarah noticed the girl that was behind the desk when she checked in to the motel. The girl sat in a chair in front of the public computer in the entryway. Her arms hung at her sides, her forehead planted on the keyboard. The computer screen was dark. Sarah crouched beside her. “Are you alright?”

“Do you need the computer?” The girl didn’t lift her head. 

“No,” Sarah said. “But what are you doing?”

“Lamenting,” the girl shifted, and her cheeks mashed further into the keys.

“That’s a big word,” Sarah said.

“It’s a big world.” The girl’s shoulders twitched. “My teacher said I used the word despairing too much last year.”

“You seem a little young for those words,” Sarah said.

“It’s worse when you’re a kid,” the girl’s head lifted from the keyboard. Small, square imprints creased her skin. She was very tanned, and her pupils were dark insects suspended in amber.  

“You’re lucky you think that.” 

“Terrible things happen to kids.” The girl hit the power button on the computer. In the glowing screen, Sarah saw the pages of breaking news on the superbug. An ache rushed through her whole body, even to the points where her hair attached to her head. She clicked from link to link. One page summarized the investigative journalists’ findings in a list. The article confirmed what Sarah overheard the doctors saying when she was hospitalized at UCSF. Before the block party, before the harp, there were other stopped hearts in Moraga—kids. They were the first Heartbreaker victims, likely infected by the bug hidden in the creases and pockets of scrubs worn by their parents; all their mothers and fathers nursed at HealthEd. In interviews, the nurses admitted, when they were just talking to patients and not touching them, they sometimes skipped completing the extensive protocols involved in reducing pathogen transmissions. This, the journalists posited, was a possible factor in the spread of the bug. Other websites theorized that the potency of the bug at the block party had to do with the fact that many of the nurses in attendance came post-shift, still in scrubs. Still others noted that Alfred regularly played musical sets at HeathEd—performing for bored patients who had agreed to various medical trials—and it was possible the boy somehow escaped sanitization and so came to the block party already carrying a live, contagious form of the bug. What was clear, among the postulations, was that though the harp had been exposed to the Heartbreaker at the block party, it was not the transmitter of the bug. Sarah’s hands shook, scrolling through the media. Other articles called for the mayor to step down from his position. The Internet seemed largely critical of the mayor’s denial of the bug, believing it stemmed mainly from fiscal anxieties. One writer wrote with obvious disgust that it appeared clear that the mayor, allied with powerful city business interests, believed that confirming a superbug was rampant in the city would halt business in San Francisco—especially if a quarantine was established—and so do irreparable damage to the city’s economy. The last digital news hub Sarah saw that evening played a video of Brie reading the ONE press release in conjunction with the Department of Health. She was tall and grave in a blue pantsuit. What Brie said at the kitchen table to Clark six months ago, she also said in the release: money and commerce were not to be prized at the expense of the people’s health.

“The kids died first.” The girl’s face was serious. “That’s worse.” Sarah curled her fingers against her mouth. 

 

In the morning, Sarah crumpled in bed, staring at the ceiling. There was the weightlessness of her sister’s absence, and now there really was a superbug. It had a name, its bodies were falling still—Sarah felt the last shred of hope that she was not ill, that her pain was her mind telling her body that she had done wrong by Brie, dissolve. She ran her palms along her chest, over the curve of her ribs, the valley of her belly and wondered the track of the bug, whether it traced through all her organs, whether it already pooled in her heart—a steadily rising level. She collapsed further into the softness of the mattress, walled pillows around her body. The weight of certainty that had been growing in Sarah vanished with the news of the bug. Now, she felt too light, too insubstantial, too untethered to pick up a glass of water, certainly too untied to keep doing the work of standing upright, of, as Candy said, being her own strength. This was why Sarah stayed silent when Candy knocked on the door. She waited for Candy to go away. Candy knocked and knocked. She knocked for so long, Sarah finally dropped her legs out of the bed and opened the door. Candy was dressed in leopard print leggings, an oversized T-shirt that said “Old Guys Rule” and a tan, large-brimmed hat that looked like it was meant for a safari. “You see the news?” Candy said. “Crazy stuff.” Sarah half-turned back to bed, but Candy snagged the edge of Sarah’s shirt.

“I’m not feeling well,” Sarah said. 

“You said you would come,” Candy’s voice lost its polished edges. “You told me you would hike Palm Canyon with me today.” Anger swirled inside Sarah. She didn’t need to think she had let Candy down. She wanted Candy to sit at the edge of the bed, to ask Sarah why her face was pale, to ask Sarah if there was anything she could do for her. Candy tossed socks at Sarah’s face. There was something solid about Candy, immoveable. Sarah changed her clothes instead of saying anything else. She laced her sneakers tightly around her feet.

“Good.” Candy pushed a bottle of water at Sarah. “You’ll need this.”

The speakers in Candy’s white Range Rover were so powerful even if Sarah wanted to talk she couldn’t have shouted loud enough over the bass rattling the dashboard. The drive was short, less than ten minutes long. At the tollgate, Candy held a flat palm out and didn’t close it until Sarah handed her a ten-dollar bill. Candy’s hands shook, but she seemed determined in a way that Sarah couldn’t figure out. Her body hurt. She pictured her unease winding through her muscles, bunching them into red-hot points of pain.

A brown, wooden sign with white lettering welcomed visitors to The Trading Post. Candy parked at an angle across two stalls and hopped out of her vehicle. She was a few strides ahead of Sarah until the trailhead, where Candy paused. A faded map, the squiggly lines of the many trails almost entirely bleached into similarity, was enclosed in a glass case. Hummingbirds, so small Sarah imagined them made of glass, darted near a yellow feeder by the sign. They fed in quick jabs, far enough from the trailhead map that human activity didn’t disturb them. One bird’s back lit in the light, and its feathers gleamed a bright, iridescent green. 

“This way.” Candy went right of the sign. More sun spilled over the pale, dirt path. The first hint of the Springs’ intense heat tinged the air. At the edge of the canyon, another brown sign warned EXTREME CAUTION RATTLESNAKE HABITAT. 

“I hate snakes,” Sarah called to Candy. If she heard her, she gave no indication. Candy walked along the lowering path ahead of Sarah. Dust streaked her leopard printed calves. A much smaller sign, around the curve of the trail, informed hikers to leave the parking lot by five pm, to stay on the trail, to not ride bicycles, to be aware of wildlife. Sarah read all of this to Candy who listened without expression. 

Gradually, pale slabs of rock rose from the dirt beneath their feet. The path cut through the rock haphazardly. Strands of dead palm trees like brittle hair spilled over the bleached land. California palms loomed, increasing in size and density, as they walked further into the canyon. Sarah began to forget things. Her body relaxed. The palms’ scarred trunks, the manes of orangey-yellow threads beneath the crowns of green palm fronds, blocked out not only the sun but Sarah’s anxieties too. She began to forget the quiet treachery of her organs, that her microwave would never work again, that Brie’s hair grew full and wild on its own. She began to forget that Candy’s hands were unsteady, and that Sarah was alone, and that hours away, panic carved up a city. Soon, the palms formed a formidable wall of shade and oblivion. When the shade broke, it was because a still lake, perhaps too small even, Sarah thought, to be considered a lake, spread apart the trees. Everything mirrored in the water: the bushy leaves, the sharp rocks, the blue flecks of sky, Candy’s safari hat, Sarah’s sweat-soaked hair. “Palm Canyon is an oasis,” Sarah said, realizing it only now.

“I would prefer,” Candy said, “if we didn’t talk.” She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and the skin on her face fell into faint lines. She glanced up, at what, Sarah couldn’t tell. Palms sprayed far above their heads. Even the sky was only patchwork. 

“I still don’t feel great,” Sarah said. “If you’d rather be alone, I’ll stay here.”

“No,” Candy said. “I don’t want to be alone.” There was a pause, where Sarah was relieved Candy said no and also hoped Candy would sit on one of the flat stones beside the water and let them rest, but she set her shoulders back. “Let’s go.” 

Sarah stayed quiet, and soon Candy was ahead again. Although Sarah wasn’t sure what shut Candy down, whatever it was, she definitely didn’t want to hike by herself. Every so often, Sarah caught Candy checking over her shoulder for her. They followed the slight track winding alongside what Sarah knew now was a small river. At the edge of the canyon, Candy and Sarah stopped at a sign posted by the stream. It indicated that to continue, hikers must wade through the current to the other side where the path moved up and out of the clutch of palms. The burble of water, and the image of their heads reflected in ruffled pieces on the surface, softened Candy. 

“I didn’t want to put it off,” she said. “You seem okay now.”

“The hike?” Sarah said. “You’re acting weird.”

“Thanks for coming.” Candy plunged into the water before Sarah could ask what Candy meant by put it off. 

The thunk of Candy’s booted feet kept Sarah from staying by the edge of the water. Candy’s footfalls were distinct, and sharp, a clarity that Sarah was still, even now, deeply compelled by. She looked behind her. The trees were terrible old men. She couldn’t shake the idea that the palms rooted in some ancient and unlikely source. What else could promote such extravagance in the middle of a desert? Stream water slapped cold on her legs, but the pathway on the other side was bathed in sun and her leggings quickly dried. The route moved towards the crags of the mountains above the oasis. Sarah found a large stick by the side of the trail. She leaned on it as they climbed. Her breath dragged into her lungs. Skin crisped on her shoulders.

“Why do you need to do this?” Sarah said. 

“Keep walking.” Candy didn’t turn. Her voice sounded small.

“It must be a hundred degrees out here.” Behind her sunglasses, Sarah’s eyes watered from brightness reflected off every surface. 

“One hundred and one,” Candy said. “Drink your water.” 

Brown and pale shrubs, the bristling, round shapes of cacti studded the upward line of the slight mountain. The sky was so smooth a blue that it looked like fabric stretched over a frame. Sarah drew a long drink from her water bottle. The liquid was warm, indistinguishable from the spit in her mouth. Dark patches of sweat bloomed on Candy’s leggings. Sarah slowed, heat heavy in her feet. Candy diminished in the distance. Sarah’s pulse throbbed at the base of her skull. As Candy moved further from her, leaving Sarah an ever-growing distance behind, the pinch and sting of sadness closed her throat. She paused, sipped from her water bottle again and found it empty. 

From above, the palms were still visible but the trees’ bushy heads were difficult to make out, their insane color and life leached by miles of drab desert surrounding the canyon. The oasis thread a dull vein of green through the brownish red of the valley. She longed for the relative cool of the palms, the wild abundance of the trees. Candy was still a faint speck rising. She looked crouched, cut in half, from where Sarah stood. Too far up the slope, Sarah thought, for her to catch up. 

When Sarah turned to look down again, a mountain lion blocked the view. The cat was about the size of a Rottweiler, a pale tan color, as if formed from the banks of rock along the mountainside. Sarah thought mountain lions would be bigger. The animal’s ears were high, sharp points on its head. Its gaze didn’t move. A skin of sweat broke below the sweat already clinging to Sarah’s body. Her heart sounded loud. The cat eased backwards, and Sarah held still. Maybe the lion would just slip away. Heat was a forceful presence on the path. The cat lowered its belly into the dirt. It looked like a dog waiting for its owner to throw a ball. She thought about what she could do. She could try to leave, step backwards up the trail. Retreat was so familiar, like the orientation of the world, her heartbeat in her ears, the pain in her body. She might escape, she thought, go on to live in this burning place. Maybe she’d find an address in Palm Springs with windows swollen with sunlight, ride the tramway through the air, let it draw her up to the San Jacinto Peak. The desert might be dry and infinite enough to teach her its sorrow. Or she could raise a home in her own pain and loneliness, that familiar place, bend her legs, settle. She could let the cat or Candy, wherever she was, or fate show her how her life would go. One of the cat’s ears twitched. With the cat still, almost docile, in front of her, Sarah’s heartbeat slowed. She dropped her right foot behind her, moved her body slightly. The lion remained still. Sarah paused, but eventually she put another small step between her and the lion. The cat’s paws ground up little heaps of dirt. A sharp hissing came from the creature’s throat. Sarah froze. Droplets fell from her neck, sliding along her spine, a cool and then hot lick. 

The quiet of the mountainside and the mass of hot air surrounding everything like a blanket formed slowness around Sarah. Disturbing the silence and the heat seemed sudden. Sarah wasn’t sure she could do it. It was like the old dream where she tried to run but her legs wouldn’t move fast enough, trapped as if in a bog. Sarah felt that way now, stifled by the mute tension of the moment. If she moved again, if she made a sound, everything hanging in tenuous balance would rupture. She thought about what Elle said, in the bar, about being large and loud. She told herself she could. If she didn’t, the cat might break the quiet in its own, probably lethal, way. Still, this tableau appeared an unchanging state that Sarah imagined a staring contest. One of them would blink, and it would be over. Bloodless, nothing really lost in the losing. 

She and the lion fell through a long, dark space. Her hands tightened against the bark of the stick. It was rough and sliced splinters into her palm. The wooden bough made Sarah feel more definite. Still, she wasn’t sure without the cat’s desperate pressure, its blazing, unblinking gaze, that she had enough certainty. How much of it was required to stay upright: to be sure of herself, her tongue in her mouth, to be sure of what was around her, what to lean into, what to lean away from. What infinite well was she supposed to plumb? What soil did such assurance grow in? The body of the cat tensed. Pinched between the mountain and the cat, it was easier for Sarah to see where she was— alone, uncertain, the kind of person for whom no one would stay, and none of her pain or sadness showed anything different in the end, and so that was it—her fear. All this was between her and this cat and the way the creature scored the dirt reminded Sarah of the scratches on her arms, the night Elle almost drowned. 

“Sinking people are dangerous,” the water safety woman had said. “Not because their lives are at risk but because they want to live.”

Sarah would have taken anything, any kind of sign but there was nothing. Nothing shifted. She liked to think, later, whatever desperate thing clung to Clark even as the truck shot down the side of the mountain, also clung to living. Maybe it was the adrenaline. Maybe it was just knowing what she wanted, clear for a second, lighting in that moment each thing she needed to do, each decision to be made stretching before her, a series of lamps lighting, one after the other. Maybe it was all Candy’s talk about capability. Whatever it was, it was Sarah who swung the stick for no one but herself, Sarah who decided the slow momentum, though overwhelming, was in service to something—someone—worthwhile. She bit down and pushed at the heat and the quiet. With each swipe, the stick seemed to grow in weight. Teeth emerged like exclamation points from behind the cat’s black lips. The lion rose into a crouch. The oasis with all its spiky greenery came back into view. The desert reasserted itself, firmed beneath her feet. She swung the stick so hard it tore skin from her palms. She raised the stick above her head; she stretched onto her tiptoes; she drew herself taller than she had ever been. She inhaled so hard, the air hit the soles of her feet. She yelled. She rattled the stick. She jabbed towards the lion with sharp shouts and incredibly, the lion backed up, hopping away from the path. Though the cat was still visible, it was far enough away that Sarah couldn’t distinguish its features. Still waving the stick, she ran towards the river where a group of tourists panted in a rush across the water. 

“Are you alright?” a woman in a white visor asked Sarah. “We heard someone yelling.” 

“Don’t go up there,” Sarah said. “Mountain lion.” Someone called Fish and Wildlife. Someone else put an arm around Sarah. They walked back to the parking lot together. By the time they were at the lot, the crowd surrounding Sarah was almost twenty strong.

 

Fish and Wildlife evacuated hikers from the Palm Canyon area within an hour. Candy found Sarah sitting on the bumper of the Rover.  

“Heard you from the cactus to the clouds,” she said. “Good for you.”

“Why did we come here?” Sarah’s throat felt raspy. 

“I can’t look down when I’m hiking,” Candy said. “I thought you’d turned back.”

“That’s not what I asked.” 

“I always hike the Canyon this time of year.” 

“That’s it?” Sarah said. 

“It’s like eating out,” Candy said. “It’s a decision.”

“I don’t see how it is.” 

“You don’t have to,” Candy said, and Sarah saw whatever was behind Candy’s need to hike the Canyon, whatever raw and livid longing dragged Sarah along, was caged up and shut away.  

On the drive back to the Inn, a local radio announcer reported that a Department of Fish and Wildlife game warden found an aggressive mountain lion—about a year old—crouched in a grove of bushes a few feet from the trail. The animal was shot and killed because it showed no fear of the officers, said the radio announcer. A state wildlife official was called into the studio to provide insight. 

“It’s very rare the department shoots an animal because it’s a threat to public safety,” said the official. He emphasized the unlikeliness of such a sighting, saying that mountain lions were secretive animals reluctant to approach people. “If you see a mountain lion,” he said. “Consider yourself lucky.” A Fish and Wildlife lab would examine the lion’s body for diseases that may have caused the lion to be more aggressive. 

“You are lucky,” Candy said. 

“I didn’t know sickness could make lions bolder,” Sarah said.

“It’s be bold,” Candy said. “Or be dead.”

 

Sarah packed her duffle the following morning. The encounter with the lion left not only pinpricks reddening in her skin where the splinters were, but an insulation against the uncertainty that crept, with the pain, back into her body. Candy met Sarah at the bar. Steam drifted from mugs sitting on the wooden surface. Sarah wrapped her hands around the belly of the cup. The tea was already low. On the screen, a helicopter camera panned the abandoned roads into San Francisco, and the gleaming, vehicle-choked pathways out of the city. Health officials cautioned people to cancel or change their travel plans to San Francisco. Crowds of people, camped outside the hospital, swelled in the camera lens—a glimpse of Brie behind the hospital doors, beside the Health commissioner. Police stood, feet apart, in front of the Emergency intake entrance. The scene cut to news of Agage’s resignation. A doctor speaking about proposed symptoms filled the screen. Sarah hit Mute, silencing the reel of superbug media. She pushed her mug towards Candy who shook her head. “You need to see it,” she said.

Sarah drained the cup on the saucer. There was the line, tracing its dark finger towards the handle. There was an owl too, a warning, Candy had told Sarah, against starting a new path. There was also a crescent, cloudy moon—difficulties would be solved. 

  “It’s your sign.” Candy saluted Sarah with her cup of tea. “Go stand in the dark and learn. That’s what the owl means.” 

“You told me the owl was a warning,” Sarah said. 

“I don’t know everything,” Candy said. “The leaves contain multitudes.” Sarah leaned her head back and let it hang loose against her shoulder blades. She rubbed her sore palms; the faintest line of blood streaked her skin. 

“I need help,” Sarah said. She thought about the way her chest still seized like it was folding in on itself. “I have to stand in that hospital line.” It was different, saying she needed help healing, far different than admitting she was sick. Even if change was really eleven, seventy seven, two hundred thousand miles from her, it felt as if she closed some of the distance. Even if she hadn’t yet, for Sarah, it felt that way. Silence relaxed between them.  

“I hate heights,” Candy finally said. “I was sliding on my butt down the path towards the oasis when the park officials found me.”

“You were?” Sarah saw differently Candy’s shaking hands, her clipped quietness during the hike.

“That’s why I don’t like going alone,” Candy said. 

“You go every year,” Sarah said. “You should have told me you were afraid.” Candy shrugged. 

“I destroyed a spider this morning,” she said. “Its legs broke into pieces, that’s how hard I hit it.”

“I always worry I’ll swallow them in my sleep,” Sarah said. 

“I kept saying, sorry, why did you come so close?” Candy’s face crunched together. “It was on my mattress.”

“I get it,” Sarah said. She squeezed Candy’s arm. 

“I don’t,” Candy said. “I don’t want to be someone who kills something just because she’s afraid.”

“Is it weird,” Sarah said, “to say I want to be you when I grow up?” Candy’s smile creased the corners of her eyes. 

“As your psychic,” Candy said. “I can see the lines have fallen for you in pleasant places.”

“You don’t know that,” Sarah said. “You’re barely part-time.” Still, those were the words that she repeated, mile after mile of dark, empty road filling her windshield, her car pointed towards San Francisco.

 

She arrived in the city by late afternoon. A light in her apartment glowed in the space between the door and floor. Sarah put her hand on the knob. If it was Clark, she thought, it would be dark. He would like the performance of it, sitting there, waiting for her to come home. Or, he wouldn’t. He’d set up, as if the apartment was still his to claim. Nerves sparked slightly in her gut. She lifted her chin, opened the door, and immediately her body filled with the sharp scent of ginger molasses cookies. Her favourite. Sarah walked down the small hallway and there her sister was, sitting at the kitchen table wearing the apron Sarah never used. The kitchen table was hidden beneath Tupperware containers. 

“You’re here,” Sarah said. “You’re back.” Brie rose, turning towards Sarah. Surprise washed through Sarah at the sight of her sister, a flood so immediate she peeled a few lids off the plastic tubs in an attempt to steady herself. In the containers were neat stacks of dark, sugared cookies. Each treat was sized like the other, evidence of Brie’s exacting precision. Flour dusted the kitchen. Cracked eggshells littered the sink. A brick wall of butter was stacked where the microwave used to sit. 

“How many cookies did you bake?” Sarah looked at her sister and saw something she didn’t expect. Her sister’s face paled. Her chest expanded and contracted. The magnetic needle of Brie went spinny and loose. Brie, who never admitted breakdown, who never seemed like she couldn’t—not even the first time they were mugged, a night drawn late because Sarah wouldn’t leave the ball of sweaty, dancing, liquored people at the bar, when Brie held Sarah’s swaying self steady as the man’s knife shone like some strange, urban star, not even then did Brie hesitate and if she, after folding Sarah into the recovery position in bed, went to the bathroom and huddled in the tub and shook there until light crept through the shower curtain then that would still be only her business—crumpled where she stood in the middle of the kitchen floor. Watching her sister, Sarah recalled the turned over picture frames, the Alcatraz swim. Brie had been trying to prove something to Sarah as well as herself, about her assurance, her certainty in her own abilities—but how easy it is to know how far apart you stand when you know exactly where the other is—how much more difficult to stand apart with no real knowledge of the distance between you and what you have left.  

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “I thought you would be angry.” She sat beside her sister, wrapped an arm around her shoulder. Brie was bonier than Sarah expected, new streaks of silver in her hair. Piled beneath the table were more containers. Gladness swirled slightly through her surprise, a weird, heavy happiness that her sister returned; the world shifted after all. Sarah traced the jutting planes of her sister’s shoulder blades as Brie spoke, in a soft voice, about returning to the empty apartment after the Heartbreaker was confirmed. 

“Everyone left work early after we released the report. Some things just drive you home to family,” Brie rocked back and forth slightly. “I made the first batch, and the second, and the third, and still you didn’t come home,” Brie said. “I kept baking.” She paused. Her jaw tightened. Sarah saw Brie was angry. “I called you a million times.” Her eyes watered as the effort of anger erased itself, bared the terror beneath. 

“I threw my phone away.” Sarah pulled one of the containers from beneath the table. Cookies of all shapes and sizes filled the tub. They were still warm. The sides of the Tupperware clouded with condensation. 

“I was crying on that tray,” Brie said. “It was hard to see the dough clearly.” Sarah handed her sister a cookie. Brie cupped it in her palm. Sarah felt lightheaded. 

“I’m here now,” she said. 

“I can’t believe you left,” Brie said.

“I can’t believe you left,” Sarah said. The oak kitchen table, the stainless steel fridge, the bananas in the basket, Brie with her set jaw, they were all things she knew and yet she kept looking at them, as if they’d changed in a slight but fundamental way. The floor gleamed with the sheen of butter. Sarah had never seen so chaotic a display of her sister’s emotions. It was so unlike Brie Sarah wasn’t sure what to do or say. She glanced at where the broken microwave had been. Brie followed Sarah’s line of sight. “I got rid of that for you,” she said. “I don’t want to know what happened to it.”

“I should have done that,” Sarah said. 

“Yes,” Brie said. In her sister’s face, Sarah saw her anger, but also an openness that she didn’t think she’d ever seen. Sarah imagined Brie cracking eggs, spilling sugar, rolling beads of dough between her fingertips. She thought about Brie’s panic, transformed in the oven’s heat, piled on trays, all her Tupperware fright. With the missteps and misshapen things between them, Sarah saw it was complicated, but now, watching the bare sky of her sister’s face, she saw it was simple too. There was no way through that didn’t involve pain, what they’d lost they were still losing, but if they were going to, now was a moment to lean in, hold fast, let go. She held up her pinkie and crooked it at Brie. It was an old ritual, pulled from their early teens. Brie swiped at her face and sniffed. They linked pinkies, a tight knot that set Sarah loose in her own body like a million balloons cut from their tethers. 

 

Sarah suggested fresh air. It felt odd, leading Brie anywhere, but Brie agreed and followed Sarah as they biked in the late-day light. Sirens echoed. The Moraga quarantine was less than three miles from the apartment, but as they pedaled towards the bridge, sound faded. Fog robed the Golden Gate, and mist dripped from their helmets. The orange-rust metal of the bridge flashed by, but white clouds obscured the city skyline, the Marin Headlands, even the Pacific Ocean. Cold reached through their puffy jackets and calmed them. Brie’s hands steadied on the bike handles, Sarah’s chest eased. They slowed before they were halfway across the bridge and stopped, one foot down on the pavement, and gazed at what could not be seen. Even Brie’s body, folded forward over the railing, seemed slightly uncomfortable, cottoned with hidden things, a lost but still familiar outline. A bird dipped above the clouds, another chasing it. The fog could still clear, Sarah thought, reveal new things, new contours that followed old pathways, new ways of seeing. 

“I saw you on television,” Sarah said. “What you did will help a lot of people.”

“It might,” Brie said. “There’s so much bureaucratic shit. Agage convinced more people than we thought about the financial losses involved in admitting the bug.” 

“The harp is gone.” It occurred to Sarah that something had emerged in her that was honest. The strangeness she sensed earlier may have come from inside. “I let it go.” That she couldn’t yet fully feel she wouldn’t let the harp go again, that Sarah let stretch between them wordlessly. Still, Sarah had never been this direct with her sister. 

“I know,” Brie said. “I looked for it when I came back.” Sarah wiped her palms against her crinkled biking pants. She felt sticky. 

“I didn’t let him have it,” Sarah said because she wanted her sister to know she had managed that at least. Brie shrugged. “If we had the harp, it would have moved the report into the public sooner, but we found other ways to test the bug. ” It stung, hearing Brie’s matter-of-fact voice, but it was good too. 

“You found other ways,” Sarah said. Brie nodded, told her about a tech at the Moraga lab that informed them of a girl in his apartment building. The research team and Brie found the girl in time to speak with her, but she died on the way to the hospital. Brie didn’t look away from the fog. “She was essential,” she said. Tiredness crept between Sarah’s shoulder blades. Brie wrapped her hands around the bike’s handlebars. “The lab is working with the major medical centers in the city. They’ve set up a screening process for those potentially affected.”

“There are symptoms.” Sarah didn’t say it as a question, but Brie assumed it was one.

“We think so,” she said. “We’ll have a better idea once we see people that aren’t—”

“Already dead,” Sarah said. Brie nodded, her face grave. Droplets of water reflected light on Brie’s rain jacket. Road noise from cars motoring across the bridge rumbled around them. 

“Is there a treatment?” Sarah said. Brie pushed off with her foot, and they biked further over the bridge. She said a cure remained theoretical because there was such division between businesses that sided with Agage and who still refused to acknowledge the bug, and those that wanted to actively work on healing the city. It would take time to unravel the mayor’s influence. People needed to collaborate, a slow process. Sarah’s spine curled. Brie pinged her bell, and they swerved around two surprised joggers. 

“He came to the apartment,” Brie said. Sarah’s bike tilted. “Asked about you. So polite, so ingratiating. Said he was looking to return your stuff.” The idea of Clark at her door, smiling at her sister, acting as if the last time he’d been there he hadn’t broken through drywall, turned Sarah into a gluey paste.

“What did you say?” 

Brie pedaled faster. “I told him you’d moved.” She panted. “I told him you’d taken a job out of state.”

“He won’t believe you.” Sarah’s calves stung. “He’ll wait you out. I bet he knows I’m back already.”

“He should believe me,” Brie said. Her voice was steady. Sarah blinked grittiness from her eyes. The squish of their tires on the road slowed.

“He was at your office,” Sarah said. “Like he’d been there before.” Brie coasted. She explained how Clark met with her at work during her investigation into the Heartbreaker. He told her he had the harp, though he would not admit where. He told her he had found it, dumped in an abandoned building he was scouting for one of his projects. He wanted ONE to pay him for it, part of a lucrative plan he projected where ONE could acquire the harp and study it in private. He showed Brie how ONE could roll out treatment options before other health tech companies. The numbers, he said, were good. Brie’s mouth pinched with dislike. Sarah wasn’t surprised. She remembered Clark’s face when he imagined telling his father he’d earned enough to be an Abraham. He never looked angry or even defiant. Instead, he longed for the moment when he and his father shared in their names. Exhaustion sandbagged her arms. So that was why he stopped calling her after the news broke. The harp was no longer useful to him. She was too tired to fully feel the tendril of fear that smoked inside. By destroying the harp she had taken from Clark a chance for his father’s approval. She remembered the owl then in the leaves: was it warning or wisdom? Sarah told Brie she needed to turn back, that she didn’t feel well.

“From driving all night?” Brie’s voice sharpened. “What do you mean not well?” Sarah put up a flat palm. Tiredness pressed her.

“I’m sick,” she said. “I should sleep. I’ll know more tomorrow.” Brie opened and shut her mouth. Her teeth clicked together. Fog shifted, and a patch of sun pierced through the white. 

 

Sarah was at the edge of sleep when Brie crept into the room and settled on the other side of Sarah’s bed. Laying there, the weight of her body pressing into the mattress, the sound of Brie’s erratic breathing amplified by the quiet, Sarah found new certainty. She had spent a lot of nights as a child, even as an adult, eased into slumber by Brie’s steady, reassuring touch on her arm. This time, Sarah reached out, rested her palm on Brie’s shoulder. The muscles locked beneath Sarah’s hand loosened and lowered. 

“I’m here now,” Sarah said, again. Brie nodded, her eyes already closed. She sighed, a long, even exhalation. Sarah watched her sister. Sarah was going somewhere Brie could not follow, but Brie, Sarah was sure, would go as far as she could with her, and although Sarah wanted to stay awake, to stay with her sister, to linger a little longer in this new equilibrium between them, she found couldn’t lift herself above the dark cloud of sleep.

Batter scenting the air woke her. She looked at the clock beside the bed and understood she had slept through to the next morning. Crepes sizzled on the hot plate in the kitchen. Silverware gleamed on the table. “I need to go to UCSF,” Sarah said. “Join the line.” Brie’s shoulders tightened but she nodded, wiping her hands on the front of her t-shirt.

“I’m coming with you,” she said. Sarah pulled on her shoes.

“I need to go by myself.” 

“You can’t—” Brie started to say, but Sarah shook her head.

“I can,” she said. “I’ll call you if anything happens.” 

“With what?” Brie said. “Your magical banana phone? You said you dumped yours.”

“Oh,” Sarah said, remembering. “Well I’ll borrow someone’s. Tons of phones at hospitals. All that news to share.” She hugged Brie who held herself tight until right before Sarah stepped away and then she relaxed, her arms slipping around Sarah’s waist. 

 

Police officers organized people between bands of caution tape. Mothers and fathers rocked babies that didn’t cry, floppy and restless in their parent’s arms. Business people in natty suits, construction workers in hard hats, youths in designer sweatshirts, music blasting from their headphones, all faced the blue awning, rippled with light, of the UCSF main entrance. Sarah was three or four turns of the winding, makeshift group of people away from the hospital. Street vendors parked along points of the line. Sarah bought an umbrella from one man who told her she was too young to be worrying herself away in this mess. After an hour, the sun warmed everything, and Sarah shared half her umbrella shade with the mother in front of her who brought her seven-year-old son for testing. They took turns resting in the mother’s striped, plastic, lawn chair. News crews moved around the police patrolling the line. For the most part, Sarah sat in quiet. She scanned the faces of the men, looking, as she always did, for him. It was a habit she would break, she told herself, but not today. Somehow, sitting here amid the anxiety of death, her fear of Clark—what he might do if he found her, what she might do again for him—shifted, became the tense expression replicated over and over on the faces surrounding her. It was an odd thing, although the sheer number of bodies between Sarah and the hospital protected her from it still, she was here—facing it in each and every one of the people in line—no one certain what lay ahead.

Morning aged into afternoon. Shadows shrank. 

“We’re not far,” Sarah told the mother even though the line was not moving quickly. The boy fell asleep in the chair, shaded by the umbrella. Neither Sarah nor his mother woke him when it was their turn to sit. Sweat darkened the front of his baseball jersey. Sarah was about to ask the mother if the boy lived with fire in his chest too when she heard someone shout. She turned and saw Brie walking, dark sunglasses shading half her face, towards Sarah. People yelled, asking if she could see the line. She slid in beside Sarah, who ducked a little at the glares and mutters directed at them. “I told you I needed to do this alone,” Sarah said.  

“You have been,” Brie said. “You’ve been gone for hours.”

“You don’t have to stay with me or check I’ll really do it.” 

“It’s not about that.” From her short’s pocket, Brie pulled a travel umbrella and unfurled it. She unscrewed the cap on a bottle of water. Sarah swallowed a few gulps before passing it to the mother and her now-awake son.  

“Thanks,” Sarah said. Drops of water landed on her arm. There was a moment of coolness before the water evaporated. Shuffling feet disturbed the murmur of voices, and the line inched forward. One bend curved between Sarah and the entryway. 

“Are you scared the words you know are too small for the fears you have piled up inside?” Sarah kicked a pebble and waited for Brie to answer. 

“No,” Brie said. “I can’t say I’ve ever thought that.”

“I don’t mean thinking,” Sarah said. “I mean doing. Have you ever done something because you can’t think how to say it so that it aches like you need it to?”

“You’re loopy,” Brie said. “You’re not yourself. You’re unwell.”

“I hired a professional friend to help me find you,” Sarah said. “She thinks you can help her bury her boyfriend’s body.”

“I spoke to her,” Brie said. “She came to ONE looking for you a few days after we confirmed the bug.”

“You should help her find him,” Sarah said. “She was good to me.” 

“I did help her,” Brie said. “I liked her. She called you crazy.” 

“Do you think the doctor will tell me I have the Heartbreaker?” 

“Don’t talk like that,” Brie said. Sarah didn’t know what else to do but talk. If she didn’t, she was going to do what she always did: abandon the line, walk to Candlestick Park, pretend the wind could blow all this away. An officer at the door started counting heads. Someone said the doctor was coming. Sarah saw her through the glass doors. The boy stood, his hair slicked to his neck by sweat. The mother thanked them for the shade. The doctor was the one Sarah saw on the television in Palm Springs.  

“What’s her name?” she said. She wished she’d saved more water for this moment. Air dried her mouth.

“Kisi,” Brie said. “She knows what she’s doing.” It helped to hold something, anything, about this woman striding towards her, possibly the only one who could read Sarah’s body like tea leaves. The doctor’s hair was clipped back with purple butterflies.  

 

Heat rushed her body. Sarah thought for another second about turning around. She thought about the things she would have done: flown to Vegas to find Candy, quit her job and trashed her electronics and moved to that Canadian city with the bridge Clark built, called Elle and visited the morgue. The list came easily, this list of things she could do because she couldn’t find her words for the feeling tightening her chest. 

She chose to stop. She looked at her feet, planted on the pavement, her torn and dirty Converse sneakers, the frayed laces. She looked at the rubber soles with large chunks ripped out of them that still sealed her feet off from the dirt and rocks cluttering the sidewalk. She pictured a wave, and she turned the hot, sick, feeling running through her into a surfboard, and on the board she put that part of herself that never really thought she’d be here, a statistic of a woman, perhaps even a statistic of a disease, alone, and sick, and young; beside that part of herself, she placed all the people she knew and didn’t know, had seen and not seen, who moved away, or stayed in a terrible job, or stole a boat at midnight, or grabbed a scared, young girl by the throat because of the fears batting about inside and who had so few—maybe even no—words for them at all.  

The doctor greeted each person walking into the hospital, directing them towards the vinyl of the waiting room seats. Brie paused in front of her, and the doctor smiled. She pulled her hands out of her lab coat. Sarah introduced herself. She let the wave carry the board and all its dread—all its feints against what might happen next—towards the unseen shore. She hoped she could find her way there too, hoped all those people she knew and didn’t know could understand what she did now: that there were too many contradictions in the design, that there was so much more fear than could be named, that sometimes it was too hard not to act in some wordless, cracked up way, and if all you had was the crack-up, if you couldn’t shake the terror, if you had to break something or someone, then that was okay, she had sent you ahead, sent you to whatever unknown land you reached when you finally learned to live at peace with how terrifying it is to exist at all. 

Brie’s foot tapped the tile. Sarah placed a hand on her sister’s elbow. “Stand still,” she said, but softly, so Brie would know the words were more for Sarah than they were for Brie. Sarah couldn’t see the surfboard in her mind’s eye anymore. When she shook the doctor’s hand, the woman’s palm was warm, and all Sarah could remember was her plants—not that they ended in fire—but that the petals and leaves used to wake without hesitation at the heat from the sun, straightening, the light teaching them to rise in some wordless, enduring way every morning.