Page 10 of Our Last Resort
From:[email protected]
I’d like to see you. Before the shoot. I think it’d be nice to speak without cameras around.
That was hard to type:I’d like to see you.Gabriel was the one who’d moved away. He was the one who’d stopped writing. But I had to try.
It stunned me that he wanted to do the documentary. Gabriel relocated two thousand miles from home for a chance at anonymity. Even then, he could never fully evade scrutiny. And now he was ready to show himself to the world again?
Not just that—he hadthings…to say?
What things?
I needed to talk to him. In person, and freely. Not over the phone or by email. Not in any way that could be traced.
Gabriel came. He boarded the flight out of Seattle while I traveled from New York. We met at the municipal airport. He materialized almost too easily. One second, I hadn’t seen him in half a decade, and the next, there he was: tall, mismatched eyes, one brown, one blue, his hands solid around mine.
Sure, some things have changed. It’s been five years. His hair is a slightly darker shade of blond. There are new lines on his forehead. He even got a tattoo, his birth year—which is also mine—etched in small Roman numerals on the inside of his left wrist.
This is what time does. It warps people, turns them into half strangers.
The first rays of daylight frame our blackout curtains. Outside, the mountains will be turning a glowing shade of amber. Critters will skitter back to their hiding spaces. Catalina warned us on our first day: “At night, you might see a coyote.” This is the desert: one world in the dark, a different one in the daytime.
For a moment, I can bring myself to believe intoday.
Today,I will talk to Sabrina Brenner.
Today,small acts of kindness will yield impossible results.
I feel it before I hear it.
It’s all around us, a vibration in the ground. In a few seconds,it will shake birds out of tree branches, pull hotel guests from their beds, quicken their heartbeats, sharpen their senses.
Thisthing.
This sound.
This scream, fevered and high-pitched, like a hammer to the desert’s dome of sacred silence.
5Escalante, Utah
The Fifth Day
Gabriel sits up with a panicked inhale.
“What was that?” he whispers, his voice brittle with sleep.
Before I can answer, he leaps out of bed. I struggle to a standing position, my legs numb from my night on the floor.
Gabriel is holding the bedside lamp from his nightstand. He raises it, fingers clutching its iron base, ready to strike—what? Whom?
“Put that down,” I say.
Outside the suite, hurried footsteps approach, then fade away. I reach for the door handle.
“Wait!”
Gabriel holds me back with a hand on my arm.
