The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  “You just laugh in that case,” Tania said.

  “That’s right, that’s right,” Britney said. “I guess I didn’t realize it then, because I was like nine. But I understand now, because what can you do? You can’t unbreak the leg. I mean, that’s what parenting is, isn’t it?”

  “Most of the time,” Tania said. “What I recall, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry,” Britney said, “I didn’t mean to bring that up.”

  “It’s okay,” Tania said. “I had a daughter and now I don’t. I can’t unbreak that leg, either.”

  Britney nodded once and then looked over her shoulder, back at the tables filled with gamblers waiting for their drinks. “I should drop these off,” she said.

  “What did he do, Britney?”

  “Killed someone in his car,” she said.

  “Was he drunk?”

  “No,” she said, “just doing someone else’s bidding. He’s pretty much been a fuck-up his entire life.”

  “You don’t go from being a fuck-up to killing a person,” Tania said.

  “Maybe not most people,” Britney said. “He’s my brother and I love him, but he wasn’t ever a good person until he confessed. That’s something, right? Does that seem stupid to you?”

  “He killed someone,” Tania said.

  “What kind of lesson is that?”

  “None at all.”

  Britney nodded again, liked she’d reached a conclusion she hadn’t expected. “I don’t know. Your adopted daughter, she ran away?”

  “Yes,” Tania said.

  “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing,” Tania said, though that wasn’t true. She’d brought her from Russia to Las Vegas. She’d changed her entire life without ever asking her consent. “She didn’t want to be here. I tried and failed to keep her. If she has a better life now, that makes me happy.”

  “Does it really?”

  “It has to,” Tania said.

  “What I don’t understand,” Britney said, “is how my brother and me, we grow up in the same house, same values, and he’s this one kind of person, the kind who hurts people. And I’m this entire other kind of person. Maybe you don’t know it, because we aren’t friends or anything, but I’m a very caring person.”

  It was Tania’s experience that if you had to convince someone of a certain fact, the opposite of that fact was probably true, but she didn’t feel that way about Britney and it surprised her. “I’m sure you are,” Tania said.

  “You know I got a kid?”

  “A boy, right?”

  “His name is Trevor. But here’s the thing. Trevor loves his uncle like crazy. They used to roll around like puppies together, just real playful with each other, and now my brother is in prison and I will not take Trevor to see him. I told him Don got a job in China. I feel a lot of shame for that.”

  Britney’s eyes welled up and Tania knew that the right thing to do was to set her tray down and hug the woman, take her in her arms and tell her that everything would be okay, that her life didn’t need to be paralyzed by the choices she’d made, that her brother had made his own choices and they were the worst possible ones, and that if Britney were smart she’d just excise him from her life and move on, stop looking for other ways her life could be fucked up by other people.

  Instead, Tania stood there and watched Britney collect herself. “I’m sorry,” Britney said eventually. “You’re just real easy to talk to.”

  “You don’t need to share this stuff with me,” Tania said.

  “I know that,” she said. “I’m a grown woman, Tania.”

  They were both silent for a moment and Tania reached over and took the photo of Don out of Britney’s order book. “You have the same chin as your brother,” Tania said.

  “Would you like to write him a letter?” Britney asked.

  THE WAITING AREA inside Woods isn’t the best place to read. The fluorescent lights flicker intermittently. There’s always someone crying. It smells like a mixture of body wash, sweat, and coffee with a dash of whatever the blue fluid is that the janitors (who are actually trustees) use to periodically spray down the seats and mop up the floors. But Tania knows that if she just sits watching Fox News on the lone television suspended from the ceiling that she’ll be in no mood to chat with Don. It’s not the news itself, but rather the realization that dawns on Tania whenever she watches that the world is moving way too fast now, that there are so many things happening at once it’s impossible to keep up anymore. What aren’t they reporting? Who is being left behind? Do I need to worry about these sick people in China? How is she to know what is important and what can be ignored when everything is told in that same voice that says: The end is coming, there is no chance for anyone, run for the hills, unless they are on fire, in which case stay in your house, unless the floodwaters have reached your door. They should say, Stay in bed and keep the covers over your head, and just be done with it.

  So instead Tania reads her book about the Pilgrims. The experience is entirely different than hearing it over her car speakers. There are copies of letters and diary entries the Pilgrims wrote reproduced in the book, and Tania finds herself fascinated by their handwriting. It’s nearly impossible to read—their cursive is a thing of art, really, all flowing lines and sharp points, and the few words she can decipher are spelled oddly—but what interests Tania is that she can see certain points of pressure in the handwriting, places where the writer pressed harder than usual with their pen and ink pooled, or places where they seemed to pause and the ink dotted out incrementally between words.

  But it’s the white space that captivates her, the spaces in between paragraphs, specifically. Nearly four hundred years later, Tania can see where these people stopped to think. What happened in that white space? How much time elapsed between paragraphs? Was it the next moment or the next morning?

  The woman sitting beside her in the waiting area was maybe nineteen. She had a tattoo of a cat’s claw on her neck, and she wore a plain white top with no bra and kept asking other women to borrow things—a pen, a piece of paper, lipstick—that she had no real use for, but the asking would get her involved in a conversation for a few minutes, to the point that Tania now knew pretty much all she needed to know about the woman: she was there to visit her boyfriend Andre, who was doing five for burglary, but she was pretty sure he’d get out early on account of his good behavior, because he was pretty much innocent and thus was trying to keep it real clean in lockup. She’d asked Tania thirty minutes ago what she was reading about and Tania said, “The Pilgrims.”

  And the woman said, “That come with Columbus?”

  And Tania said, “Yes,” because she didn’t want to have to tell her she was wrong. It just wasn’t worth it.

  “I learned about that in fourth grade,” the woman said. “What I never understood? Why anyone would want to come to this busted-up place back then.”

  “They wanted freedom,” Tania said.

  “Yeah, that’s what they said in fourth grade, but I’ll tell you one thing, nothing free about freezing to death. Them and the Donner Party. That’s crazy, you ask me. I’d stay home by the fire and be happy. You got a Kleenex I could borrow?”

  The woman had been quiet for the last several minutes, but her words still reverberated. When was the last time Tania had been happy? Her wedding day was happy, but it ended so quickly, and then she was back on the freeway headed for the desert and each mile she drove turned the ceremony into a memory that became more diffuse with each passing city. Had she just married prisoner number 1892K075, a man who couldn’t possibly love her, a man she couldn’t possibly love? There was a bouquet of roses on the passenger seat and a simple silver band on her finger, a stack of paperwork in a manila folder in the backseat that included a receipt for the deposit she’d made into Don’s commissary account at the prison—$300—so he could treat himself and his boys to some snacks for the next month.

  She’d paid nearly $50,000 to adopt Natalya from Russia
all those years ago, Tania recalls. The deflated price of love. Everything is in recession. It took Tania several months to become happy about life with Natalya, to learn to love her child, and by then she didn’t even realize she was happy, she just knew that she’d survived the unknowable process of motherhood and come out the other side feeling . . . right. That was all. She felt right. When Natalya left, that feeling went with her. Don had filled up some of that space, if only because she knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

  “You’re Tania Hobbes, right?” the woman beside her says suddenly.

  “Yes,” she says, though she’d never legally changed her name, though she told him she had. “How’d you know that?”

  “I remember you from a few weeks back,” she says. “You were reading a book about spies, so I bought it at Target.”

  “Did we talk?”

  “No,” the woman says, “I just was looking at you and thought you looked pretty put together, so I made a point to remember your name when they called it.”

  “Did you read the book?”

  “Tried to,” she says, “but it didn’t make any sense. Bunch of people running around talking about conspiracies and shit. And I was like, you kill someone, you don’t need to have the president behind it to make it dramatic, you know? People getting killed is people getting killed no matter who calls the shot.”

  “I believe that, too,” Tania says, and then she tells the woman something she’s never told anyone, not her coworkers, but of course they know because of Britney, not even her sister, though her sister could find out easily enough. “My husband killed someone.”

  “Yeah? How come?”

  “I don’t really know,” Tania says.

  “You didn’t ask him?”

  “No,” Tania says. “It happened before I knew him.”

  “You seem like a nice lady,” the woman says, “but you need to dump that man of yours. He makes you guilty by association.”

  “What about you? Are you guilty of whatever your boyfriend did?”

  “I am,” she says. “And so here I am, just like you, every weekend, doing my time.”

  IT’S FOUR IN the afternoon when Tania finally gets called in to see Don, which means she only has thirty minutes to spend with him today instead of the normal hour. She’s led into the visiting area by a female guard named Sherry that she’s met a few times, and who she once saw eating at the Chipotle down the road in Valencia. It was a little bit like being a kid and seeing your kindergarten teacher at Safeway buying groceries. They both nodded at each other but didn’t speak, not that they would have had anything to talk about, really. But since then, Tania always got a nice smile out of Sherry when she saw her and even a few more minutes than was allotted, but it was closing time today, so when Sherry drops her off at cubicle #19, she tells Tania she can only let her stay until the half hour and Tania thanks her.

  “Hey, darling,” Don says when Tania picks up the phone on her side of the cubicle. It’s what he says every time she visits, and at first Tania thought it was cute, but now she wonders if that’s just what he says to women, if he’s said that to every woman who’s ever been on the other end of a phone line. It’s the sort of thinking that can make you crazy, Tania realizes, the sort of thinking that disappears when you love a person, because you can’t imagine them ever speaking intimately to anyone other than you. “How you been?”

  “I’ve missed you,” Tania says.

  “Me, too,” he says. “How was your week?”

  “I’m reading this book,” she says, “about the Pilgrims.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You wouldn’t believe,” she says, and then she stops herself and for a long moment she stares at her husband and tries to imagine what he looked like when he was killing that guy in his car. What was that guy’s name? She didn’t know. She’d never asked. Never once had she even bothered to look at his court records. What was the use? He was guilty. He’d done it. And yet here she was, a few feet away from him, separated by bulletproof glass and guards with guns and the excuses they’d both told themselves over the years. So much weight. So much distance. So much time. Don looked interested in whatever she was going to say next, as if what she might tell him could matter compared to whatever it was he fought with inside his head. Fifty-seven years had come and gone in Tania’s life and to what end? This day? This life? All this time looking for a bit of clarity and it was here, in a prison, all the time. “You wouldn’t believe,” Tania says again, “what they went through to survive.”

  MAZEL

  Tuesday nights, Kristy Levine liked to drink at a cop bar on Sahara called Pour Decisions. Even when she was working undercover, she could pop in there for a sip and no one looked at her twice. She’d been with the FBI for a decade, first working domestic terrorism and now organized crime, the last five years in Las Vegas, which turned out to be a pretty active place to be these days, the beginning of 2001. She’d been in seven gunfights, maybe a dozen physical altercations, and had come away with nothing worse than a broken toe. Which was ironic, because Kristy Levine had just found out she was about to die.

  It was a rare small-cell cancer in her lungs. She’d already had a tumor the size of her thumbnail removed over the holidays, telling exactly nobody at her office, had flown to Cedars in LA to get it done, but now was staring down three months of chemo and a prognosis that said she had anywhere between six months and fifteen years to live, depending on whether she chose to listen to her oncologist or the message boards online. Her oncologist, who looked barely old enough to park her car, suggested she should get her affairs in order. The message board on AOL said she should apply for that master’s she’d always wanted, because real life was just starting!

  So she called her twin brother, Len. Cried with him for ten minutes before they tried to figure out a way to end the call. He was a Marine. Their whole family was either military or law enforcement. Weird for a Jewish family, but her dad had said from day one that they weren’t “hide in the attic” Jews, they were “fight in the streets” Jews. Dad and Mom were both gone already, so it was left to Kristy and Len to fight the invaders, wherever, whenever. And she’d planned to go into HR, then tell the senior special agent what was what, get herself onto medical leave . . . which she knew she’d never come back from, because once the bureau knew you were ill, you may as well be dead, working on a desk until you wanted to die.

  So she decided to wait.

  “Hey, Secret Agent,” the bartender said. Her name was Sarah. “Haven’t seen you in forever.”

  “I went home for Christmas,” Kristy said. Not that she celebrated Christmas. She celebrated Hanukkah, but it was easier to just say what everyone else said. It was part of her training. Leave no impression.

  “Where’s home?”

  “Oh,” Kristy said, “up north.” Kristy had run into Sarah a few times in the real world, Las Vegas not that big of a town if you lived there. The last time was at Gold’s Gym, Sarah working the elliptical machine for an hour. They’d had a conversation in the parking lot afterward, Sarah asking her if she was Metro or what, and Kristy told her she worked for the government, that was it. Ever since, she was “Secret Agent.”

  “Like Minnesota?”

  “Washington State.”

  “I’d love to go to Seattle,” Sarah said. “Have you ever been?”

  “A thousand times.” She’d actually worked in the field office up there for six months.

  “I have this dumb idea,” Sarah said, “that I’d go there and become an EMT.”

  “Have you taken the classes?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “See? It’s a dumb idea. I just feel like if I lived there, I’d get off my ass and do it. Here? It’s too easy to make bank just doing this kind of thing.” She leaned her elbows on the bar, motioned Kristy to come closer. “I’m not trying to be in your business, but you’re like, legit, right? Like, a legit badass? I see you at the gym. You’re like a super-fit Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs?”
>
  “Yes,” Kristy said. She wasn’t really like Clarice Starling. Kristy had done deep-cover shit before getting on the organized-crime task force. But whatever. It was close enough.

  “Could I do what you do?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-eight,” Sarah said.

  “No,” Kristy said. “You’re too late.” Kristy had done eight years of Naval Intelligence before she ended up in the FBI. “But you could be a cop.”

  Sarah laughed. “I’d still have to move,” she said. She pointed vaguely around the room. There were maybe two dozen cops in various stages of inebriation and bad judgment already in the place. “I know too many secrets.” She popped up from her elbows. “Anyway. Sorry. I just see you in here sometimes and think, now that’s a person who knows who she is. I’d like to be like that.”

  “I don’t, really,” Kristy said. Fact was, last several weeks, she felt like a person wearing a Kristy Levine Halloween costume, everything hot and sticky around her eyes, her face a thick plastic mask, her breathing for shit, her vision clouded. Not sleeping wasn’t helping. Because the thing was, she knew the truth: she was dying. Six months, five years, fifteen, twenty, all that mattered now was there was something inside of her trying to take her out, and it didn’t matter what medical miracles were out there, you didn’t survive cancer, you persevered through it, until such time as you did not. It was the wreck of the Levine family. Her mother died of uterine cancer. Her father spinal cancer. Both had grown up in Pasco, downwind from the Hanford nuclear plant in Eastern Washington. Neither died with a speck of self-respect left.

  Kristy Levine was not going out like that. She’d even started going to Temple Beth Israel, up the street from her condo in Summerlin. Tomorrow, she had an appointment to walk the cemetery with the rabbi, find her happily-ever-after home, while she waited for the resurrection. Or whatever Jews believed in. She hadn’t gotten that far in the Torah.