He sweated salt. His short hair quilled like a crown.
Enough with the pissing and moaning. She waggled aboard. Shadows flowed from the walls. She worked out how to arch her brittle-star spine and bloom algae between her thighs. Her ribcage a lyre. Strum-strum, strum-strum. What she’d confess to, and what she wouldn’t, was no matter. No matter at all.
4
For the first time in over a week she poked her car through the cemetery’s entrance. Pardes Shalom, peaceful garden. Up the rise the granite rows winked against the sun. She cut the engine and got out. She’d run late all morning—sex, meetings, traffic by the crap-ton—but here everything seemed suspended in the freak heat haze. She tucked her damp dress between her thighs and knelt at the Y-joint of the paved path—a left into a hedge-rimmed distance, a right along the scalloped edges of sprinklered turf—and when she clawed inside the steel bucket, quartz dust rose like steam. She stood and sneezed. Dizzy, panting. The stones glittered in her palm and her fingers itched. Days ago there’d been sleet and hail. Though admittedly she’d hardly noticed much of anything aside from her sudden preoccupation, with its nearly assassinating private pleasures. But now, here, the white sky boiled. The Scotch pines were like green flames.
She rubbed her eyes. They felt like grit in her face.
She spiked her heels up the incline then stopped part way and scuffled off her tight shoes. Underfoot, a spongy hint of cool. If only she weren’t stuck topside, AC-less and bereft and scorched at the clavicle, nipples seared. Ridiculous at noon. Mom? Dad? Her throat smoked and hoarsened. She imagined swallowing swords. Hunched like a shrinking sideshow attraction—de-salinizing, feeling every inch of her twenty-nine years going on ninety-nine—she resumed huffing the hill, one of a series of concentric waves stretching to the east and ending in a diminutive red-pine forest. Beyond the cemetery’s carefully cultivated repose—pricey, for certain, though her parents had thoughtfully shelled a bundle twenty years previous, and then worried loudly ever since about their rapidly diminishing investments—lay hundreds if not thousands of developments serpentining in linked byways and then chopped into inscrutably isolated parcels. Townhouse and compound and browning golf course. Strip mall and mall brightened by glorious, invasive ground cover. She pictured never finding her way back home. Better off tramping here forever, forever shielding her eyes with a hand and searching for her parents’ marker but never making it out. Never arriving, as if she were hauling rope and more rope, nothing but ever-growing rope.
She tramped on. How could she have forgotten? If she let go, she’d have nothing but nothing.
She tottered atop the ridge and located the headstone. Soon she was scrabbling room for her latest offerings on its broad shelf. Rock and more rock. A dry trail resembling the desiccated tear-pellets a heartless giant might once have shed. The sun blazed higher. But a transmission of warm wind lifted her dank hair, and a good cry brought proof—despite her missed visits, she was here. Still here. Her parents too. It was as if they’d fallen down a long well and hadn’t managed to clamber free. She stopped crying and ran her hands over her bare arms to feel her follicles, alert as antennae.