Ellen had aged. There was no denying it.
But, of course, so had she. How old must Shelly have looked to Ellen? It had been fourteen years since they���d last seen each other. Still, they managed to recognize one another instantly and simultaneously, and rushed toward one another there in the Las Vegas airport between the escalators and the baggage carousel, with no hesitation.
Ellen tossed down the black leather bag that was slung over her shoulder and threw her arms around Shelly, and said, “I told you so,” into Shelly’s gray hair. They both began to weep—no sobbing, just quiet tears dampening their cheeks.
Shelly nodded at Ellen. It was true. Ellen had always promised she’d come to visit Shelly in Vegas before either of them managed to die. She’d say it at the end of every phone conversation, jot it at the bottom of every email—and there’d been a million of those phone calls, emails, postcards, notes over the years. Time had seemed to create itself out of those exchanges across space.
It was a short drive from the airport to Shelly’s apartment. They were only awkward in the moments of silence, so they kept talking. They talked about Ellen’s flight—four hours beside a woman who stopped blabbing only when she was chewing the cuticles of her fingernails. (“I got up to go to the bathroom three or four times, hoping she’d bother the guy on the other side of her, but she was just waiting for me when I got back.”)
They talked about Las Vegas. Ellen had never been, and Shelly had lived there so long by then that she didn’t even notice how strange it might seem to someone who’d never been out of the Midwest except to go to Manhattan, or France.
It was like moving to Mars, Shelly had told Rosemary on the phone when she first moved. When the plane had landed on the tarmac in Vegas, Shelly had looked through the little plastic window at the desert, and said to herself, I have moved to Mars.
“Good,” Rosemary had said. “In Las Vegas, everyone’s in hiding. And you have to consider yourself in hiding, Shelly. Don’t do anything stupid, like start a Facebook page, okay?”
After that first phone call from her new life, Shelly had hung up, crossed the floor of her fourth-floor apartment, and looked out:
Forever, she’d thought. As in the song, she could see it from the window of her apartment. Forever reached as far as the red-dirt mound of Sunrise Mountain before it abruptly disappeared from view.
And, in all the years, Shelly had never considered moving. Not from Las Vegas (which had become the home she’d never known she hadn’t had—sometimes shabby, consistently inconsistent, but full of a beauty that was that much more lovely because you had to go looking for it) and not from the apartment.
She loved the view from her apartment. At night, the moon hovered over Sunrise Mountain as if it were completely empty up there in the sky, shining light down on light, not seeming to be reflecting anything, but holding its own spot tenaciously up there—a gleaming checkpoint, long ago abandoned.
Directly below Shelly’s balcony, a prickly pear cactus spread its flowering menace between her view and the parking lot.
Once, years before, some member of the maintenance crew had tried to chop it down, swearing as the cactus ripped its barbs through his flimsy windbreaker. Shelly had hurried and called the landlord, who’d agreed to stop the worker, and no one had touched that cactus since.
Now every spring it bloomed as if it were some sort of simple-minded florist’s offering to God. The rest of the year it didn’t try to fool anyone. You knew, if you got close, it was going to rip you to pieces.
In Las Vegas, they said, you never saw the same person twice. And it was true, in its way. Not at the library, not at the gym, not the shopping mall. Even the people Shelly worked with at the hospital kept moving and rotating, coming and going, always keeping their distances so well that it felt, even if it wasn’t strictly true, that she was surrounded by strangers, new strangers every day. And the people in the apartments around hers never lasted more than a few seasons, were easily replaced by brand-new people completely foreign to her, who also left. Every summer, the heat scoured the streets clean of the past.
Only once in all those years did Shelly gasp and turn around, feeling she’d recognized someone. She’d been walking a sand trail through Death Valley in the shadow of the Funeral Mountains, and five girls were walking toward her, coming from the opposite direction. They were swinging their empty water bottles, and stupidly wearing flip-flops through the tough desert terrain, and little spaghetti strap tops under the blasting sun, Greek letters stenciled against the pastel cloth, bare shoulders turning red. It was ninety-five degrees out. (“But it’s a dry heat,” everyone in Las Vegas always joked, “like an oven”).
They will die out here, Shelly thought. Just by being silly, they will die.
She considered saying something, but as those girls passed, they didn’t even acknowledge her—except for one with shining black hair who flipped it over her shoulder and looked at Shelly without smiling.
That girl, in truth, looked nothing like Josie Reilly, except that she was a type. Still, it took all the restraint Shelly had to keep walking, not to stop and say something to this girl, to the whole group of them:
Something about the stupidity of thinking you were bigger than death. That you could walk in the valley of it without even bothering to bring enough water or wear hiking shoes.
But these girls would just turn around and walk right out, Shelly knew. They would survive it. They could, and they knew it, and, after all, that girl was not Josie. Like so many others who had passed through her life over the many years (she was, after all, sixty-three years old), Shelly would be haunted by Josie Reilly forever, and would never see her again.
Shelly had made up the couch in her apartment living room for herself so Ellen could have the bed, but of course Ellen would have none of the bed. “You slept on my couch,” she said. “And you put the fight back in me, Shelly.”
“I gave you a dead end to follow for the rest of your life,” Shelly said. It was something they’d talked about hundreds of times over the years—how much and how little difference Shelly’s bits of information had given Ellen. Had they been worth the trouble in the end, since they’d never brought her daughter back?
“No,” Ellen said. “It was the only thing anyone gave me. The only thing better would have been if you’d given me Denise.”
They talked about Denise, of course, as they so often did. Marveling that she’d have been thirty-five years old now, if she were alive.
“I don’t see her anymore,” Ellen said. “I still look for her, but I can’t imagine her now. She can’t be twenty years old to me anymore, but I don’t know who she would be if she were thirty-five.”
“She’d be like you,” Shelly said. “She’d be a mother by now. And a friend. A good one. The best.”