“Right,” said Grandma Billy, as they reached her house. “I’ll come ’round tomorrow and we’ll see about getting your garden put in.” She bent down and petted Copper. “It won’t take hardly any time at all, you’ll see.”
Selena put away the stacks of tamales. The sight of the refrigerator actually half full made something in her relax. She might still starve, but not today.
She checked the clock on her aunt’s bookcase and saw that it was only nine thirty. She sat down and perused the rows of books. There were a few nonfiction volumes, mostly guides to plants and animals of the Southwest. The bottom shelf held dozens of slim books with unlabeled spines. She pulled one out, opened it up, and saw a postcard of the Eiffel Tower pasted to the page, along with a doodle of a baguette wearing a beret. “Got into Paris last night,” read the handwritten text. “The traffic at Charles de Gaulle is the worst. Sally’s so jet-lagged that she nearly cried when the hotel said our rooms weren’t ready. Pretty knackered myself. Went and ate at a little café. That feels like a cliché.”
“These must be Aunt Amelia’s travel journals,” Selena told Copper, who wagged politely. She turned the pages, seeing more doodles, ticket stubs, and occasional photos pasted in. Her aunt’s handwriting was neat and surprisingly readable. She put the journal down and picked up another one, which showed something she recognized as the Seattle Space Needle. A third yielded photos of a temple festooned with prayer flags and a drawing of an unimpressed-looking yak.
An enormous yawn caught Selena by surprise before she could start reading more closely. “Tomorrow, maybe,” she said, and got to her feet to let Copper out back.
She leaned against the doorframe, watching the stars visible beyond the overhanging porch. They really were breathtaking.You could get used to a view like that.
Copper had just returned, tail held high, when a scream ripped through the darkness.
Copper let out a yelp. So did Selena. She clutched the doorframe, dog jammed against her legs in clear alarm. It was a high, inhuman scream, throbbing with anguish and loss, the sound of something dying in pain.
Was that a person? Is someone hurt? Oh god, is it Grandma Billy? Should I go check on her?
Another scream followed the first, and Selena noted that it was coming from the deep desert, not from the direction of the town. And it didn’t sound like it was coming from a human throat at all.
“Oh Jesus,” Selena said, releasing her death grip on the doorframe. “I think it’s an animal.” God only knew what kind of animal made such a horrible sound, but she’d heard peacocks at the zoo before, and they had sounded like someone being murdered, so it was hardly a surprise that there was something with an equally awful voice out here in the desert.
Hell, maybe itwasMerv the peacock. Maybe he wandered around and screamed at night. What did Selena know about peacock behavior?
She maneuvered Copper back inside, which was a trifle difficult as the Lab wanted to stay attached to her shins, and shut the door against the night.
Lying in bed a few minutes later, Selena found herself listening, tensed for another scream. It didn’t come. Instead, she became aware of the strange silence that underlay everything. There were no passing cars, no distant voices. The sounds of insects and night creatures seemedlike a thin skin over a much deeper quiet. For someone who had lived in the city for her entire life, it was unsettling.
She got up and went to the living room. She thought she’d seen a radio on the bookcase, and sure enough, there it was, a small black AM/FM number that probably dated to the Obama administration.
Selena took it to the bedroom and plugged it in. The familiar strains of “Good Day Sunshine,” filled the room, which wasn’t what she would have chosen, but was better than silence. She looked for another station, but it was mostly static up and down the dial. On one channel, they seemed to be having an intense political discussion, but since they were speaking in Spanish, Selena couldn’t understand more than one word in twenty. The only other channel that came in clearly was in a language that she thought might be Navajo. Embarrassed by her monolingualism, she went back to the Beatles.
“And that,” said the DJ, in a smooth, androgynous voice, “is the culmination of my ninety-seven-song thesis that songs about being happy are inherently worse than songs about being horny or miserable.”
Ninety-seven-song thesis?Selena thought.Did they nail them to the station door or what?
“You’re listening to KQDZ, the Voice of the Desert, serving Quartz Creek, Salt Lick, and Masonville. I am, as always, your host, DJ Raven. Now, let’s listen to something wildly different, shall we?”
Theremin music rose from the speakers. Copper lifted her head, clearly puzzled. “‘How the Camel Got His Hump,’” a man read, “by Rudyard Kipling. ‘In the beginning of years ...’”
It was a weirdly delightful reading, even with the theremins, and it drowned out the alien quiet outside her window. Selena lay back down. Kipling was followed by Led Zeppelin, Taylor Swift, and a mariachi cover of “Bye Bye Bye.” She fell asleep to the strains of Vivaldi’sFour Seasonsand slept without dreams.
Chapter 6
“Why am I planting a garden, if I’m just staying for a few days?”
Grandma Billy straightened up from where she’d been bent over the garden beds. “Insurance,” she said, after a moment.
“Insurance?” Selena gazed over the neat rows of Aunt Amelia’s garden. Everything was laid out in narrow rectangles, easy to lean in and harvest. The dirt was rich brown, overlaid with white dust. It was good dirt. Amelia had put a lot of love and a lot of chicken manure into it over the years.
“Probably you’ll be gone in a few weeks,” said Grandma. “Maybe get a couple of lettuce leaves out of it, not much else. Maybe beet greens. So it’s a couple seeds now and a salad later, right?”
“Right.”
“But say you decide to stay—and I’m not saying you will, mind—you get beans and squash and corn out of it. And if you don’t stay, maybe I’ll nip over and harvest a few things myself when you’re gone.”
“Well, as long as you’ll get some use out of it.”
Truth was, Selena didn’t mind working in the garden. She had spent a few seasons with a community garden plot in the city, though she hadn’t been much good at it. Walter had refused to eat the gnarled carrots she brought home, saying they looked like weird orange dog turds.
