She was crying now, her hands shaky on the wheel. He had orchestrated this. He had set it up. All those years—all those times she had wished she could go back, undo the damage she had caused. He had done this.
Somehow she managed to switch lanes, get off the freeway. She pulled onto the shoulder, glanced at her gas gauge: nearly empty. She was going to stall out here in this no-man’s-land of Walmarts and In-N-Outs and Wendy’s.
Lizzie twisted around, looking for a station, and it was then that she saw the dinosaurs: two gigantic prehistoric sculptures that commanded the desert, shadowing a low-roofed diner and a gas station too.
Lizzie had forgotten all about the dinosaurs. How could she? She circled the service road that followed the curve of the larger dinosaur’s slender neck and took her into the gas station. She got out of the car, her legs unsteady. The warm air was fragrant, a heady scent of flowers and gas and oil-soaked fry. She paid for a tank, downed a bag of oatmeal raisin cookies and a bottle of seltzer. A sign read world’s biggest gift shop inside a dinosaur! She made her way over to the door cut into one of the dinosaurs’ tails.
She’d been inside this gift shop before. It was before her mother had died, when her father was working so hard to impress—an antic tap dance of plans and sights and attractions—bumper cars and corn dogs at the Santa Monica Pier! Lunch at a movie studio! Guess jeans and Kork-Ease and satin jackets and anything she and Sarah wanted! Sunbathing in the desert in January—can you do that in New York? Can you?
But this particular outing had not gone well. Neither she nor Sarah would try a date shake at Hadley’s Farm (but they’re sweeter than sweet! Joseph had said) and then there was Sarah’s meltdown about the lack of a miniature personalized license plate; they didn’t have her name (inexplicably they had Sara, but no Sarah. “Who cares?” Lizzie could remember saying. There was no Lizzie or Liz either. “It’s not like it goes on a real car”). Their father had tried to tell them about the man who had built the dinosaurs. He had spent years working on them, using concrete and steel left over from the construction of the freeway she had just gotten off. Everyone thought he was nuts, she remembered Joseph saying. But he didn’t care.
She walked in. The gift shop occupied a small dark space, filled with rickety displays of dinosaur kitsch. But the back wall held a different type of attraction: institute of creation science, a sign read. Primordial soup to the zoo to you; is evolution true?
Apparently not, according to the display, which talked about how early humans coexisted with dinosaurs (“just like the one you’re standing in!”) and how the earth (“in all its splendor and diversity”) was created in six days. A painted bust of a Cro-Magnon man, looking like a hirsute Jon Voight, sat next to a sign arguing against Darwin’s theories; a clay diorama of Noah’s Ark showed two dinosaurs next to a duo of giraffes.
“I don’t understand,” Lizzie said to the young girl behind the register. “Since when is the gift shop a creationist museum?”
“We’re just offering information,” the girl said coolly, and returned to her book.
“Well, it’s insulting to both scientists and dinosaurs,” Lizzie said, but she said it as she was nearly out the door, a coward’s retort. Outside, she leaned against the dinosaur’s tail, pulled out her cell phone. What was she doing? She felt a heaviness slowing her breath. Still she dialed. “Do you know there’s a creationist museum in the dinosaur gift shop?” she said. “A fucking creationist museum—how crazy is that?”
“Lizzie? What are you talking about?” Sarah said. “Where are you?”
Lizzie looked around. In the pale crepuscular light, everything winked and glowed—the nearby Burger King, the dinosaur belly, the cluster of desert city lights in the distance. “I’m in Palm Springs—well, almost in Palm Springs. Remember the giant dinosaur sculptures? I’m there. I’m here; I’m getting gas.”
“What are you doing there? Are you with Max?”
Lizzie shook her head. Max, she thought. “No,” she said.
“What are you doing there?” Sarah repeated, more forcefully this time.
Lizzie shook her head again. “I don’t know,” she whispered. And then, “I saw the detective. It’s a mess.” She was crying now. “I’m a mess.”
“What detective? What are you talking about?”
Lizzie didn’t answer; how could she answer? She gripped her phone close to her ear, suddenly precious, the only thing securing her to this world.
Sarah’s voice sounded tinny and far away. But she did not hesitate. “Just stay where you are. I’m coming.”
Was it misfortune or good luck that one of the few rooms available was a luxe villa at the Grove on Palm Canyon Drive—a midweek special, theirs for the night for a mere $600. By the time Sarah arrived, Lizzie was already checked in, ensconced on the big private patio, listening to the hum of the few golf carts still traversing the green, the light clicking of the sprinklers, when her phone rang. Max, she saw. She let it go to voice mail, looking past the sand traps and the fourth hole at the marbleized surface of the craggy mountains in the distance, inured to the bite in the air. She had taken only a cursory glance at the sumptuous king-sized bed, the deep soaking bathtub that could hold a party. I earned this luxury, she thought, pulling a bottle of C?tes du Rh?ne from the minibar, feeling as tender as a bruise. Every moment of this, I deserve.
When Sarah rushed out onto the patio, they hugged and hugged, and for once, Lizzie wasn’t the first to let go. “Dad did it,” she kept saying.
Sarah shook her head. She poured herself a glass of wine and motioned Lizzie to sit beside her. “Tell me.”
Lizzie recounted what the detective told her, the free fall in the art market, the fact that the artwork was insured for far more than the current value. She told Sarah about the PI Joseph had supposedly hired and how that wasn’t true. She reminded Sarah about the business manager who ripped Joseph off, and the real estate deal that had soured. “It all fits,” she said to her sister.
“It doesn’t,” Sarah said firmly. “I don’t believe it.”
“I do,” Lizzie said. She was worn out, exhausted and depleted, and yet she felt a smooth glide of a sensation that she recognized as truth. “It makes sense. No one broke in, they took the most expensive art and didn’t touch anything else. He was stressed about money and then he wasn’t. It all makes sense.”
“But none of that means he did it. Where is the evidence? Where is the proof? The fact that I can’t prove to you that he didn’t doesn’t mean that he did.”
“If you had talked to Detective Tandy—”
“I don’t want to talk to him.”
“I know,” Lizzie said softly, miserably. “I know, I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not,” Sarah said, looking out at the lights spotlighting the fourth hole of the golf course, the ground’s bright, unearthly green. “You think the worst of him; you always have.”
Lizzie shook her head. “That’s not true,” she managed.