Blue. Abigail Padgett

species. Including, I told them, that species which pulls weeds for twenty years in blazing hot strawberry fields so that its young may study social psychology at San Gabriel University. And the bond of clan is each individual’s last defense against the slide back into brute muck. While it is primitive and flawed and not to be worshiped, it must at all costs be respected.

      I was still searching for a way to respect my clan bond with David, whom I loathed as much as I loved Misha. And both were, for very different reasons, totally inaccessible. There was, as The Book of Common Prayer so bluntly puts it, no health in me. Nothing but black holes, head to toe. Until a short man who looked like Yosemite Sam climbed my fence, knew a poem, and hated his sister for being a woman but showed up anyway because she was family.

      “Strip and get in the pool,” I told Dan Crandall, observing a desert etiquette which demands the sharing of water. Any water. “It’ll take me about ten minutes to make a pitcher of lemonade. Have your pants on when I get back.”

      In the kitchenette of the motel office I turned on some music to drown the air-conditioner whine, and squeezed lemons into a gallon plastic pitcher as Brontë lapped bottled water from a red ceramic mixing bowl. One of the several reasons I was able to buy an entire motel for the price of a single DKNY outfit is that the Wren’s Gulch Inn has no piped-in water. That is, the pipes are there, but they’re empty. And they’ll stay that way until the settlement of a dispute initiated by the four remaining Indians on a tiny reservation everybody had forgotten existed until the Indians opposed a plan which would have extended water utilities to Wren’s Gulch through a few feet of reservation property. The youngest of the Indians is seventy-eight, but his lawyer is only twenty-nine. In the desert, people understand the value of simply waiting.

      Meanwhile, I had the water for the pool trucked in at enormous expense, and every week another truck arrives to refill my modest water tank, also at enormous expense. The Indians could do nothing about the buried power and phone lines the owner, Cameron Wrenner, ran two miles in here from the main line on the road before abandoning the motel project to whatever fate his attorneys could arrange. It could scarcely have mattered to Wrenner, whose empire of used-car dealerships had made him one of the richest men in Southern California. It isn’t possible to live here without a car, and Wrenner’s ruddy face, topped by a white cowboy hat, smiles down from billboard ads from here to the Nevada border. Anyway, Wren’s Gulch, as the locals named this fiasco, has lights, music, wi-fi and electronic gadgets that allow me to chat with other weirdos all over the world whenever I feel like it, which isn’t often.

      “Coming out!” I yelled through the blue Mylar film I’d painstakingly glued to the office picture window after the sun ate leprous patches out of the original cheap carpet in less than three months. After that I installed a sand-colored indoor-outdoor nylon Berber in the office and the first unit, which serves as my bedroom. Then I plastered up this blue stuff which is supposed to filter ultraviolet rays and keep the sun from burning away the molecules which comprise carpets, drapes, and upholstery. The effect is like living in a furnished aquarium.

      Dan Crandall was hopping around beside the pool, trying to pull gray knit boxer shorts over a penis that looked tired in its nest of jet black pubic hair. It occurred to me that nothing growing naturally on Dan Crandall matched.

      There’s an interesting study which suggests that women who have not been sexually assaulted score higher on tests of empathy for men after seeing pictures of naked men doing ordinary things like talking on the phone or grocery shopping. In interviews the women often admit to finding flaccid penises rather cute. Sort of like demitasse spoons or those little carved wooden fork sets from import stores that everybody gets as a wedding present from an aunt who wears jangling bracelets. Nobody ever knows what to do with these forks. And I’m one of those women who find penises cute despite the fact that the great love of my life is a woman. Or was. It had been two years since I had any definitive evidence that Misha Deland was still alive.

      “I’m entirely tied up right now with a marketing research project, and I have no experience whatever in the legal-criminal field,” I lied, setting the tray on a cable spool I found at a dump and painted bright blue to match the chaise cushions. “Your trip out here has been a waste of time.”

      Crandall failed one test when he poured himself a tumbler of lemonade while leaving mine empty, but passed the next with flair.

      “The so-so lawyer I hired bills around a hundred-fifty an hour,” he said while wringing water out of his ponytail onto my foot. “I can pay you the same up to ten, maybe fifteen thousand.”

      “Expenses?”

      “Within reason. You’ll have to clear with me first.”

      “What is it you think I can do?”

      His dark blue eyes regarded me with the same interest people lavish on old movie tickets found in jacket pockets.

      “Save my damn sister’s ass,” he said.

      Miles beyond the baking sky a black-silver grid flashed for a nanosecond and then wasn’t there, had never been there. Its ten billion dillion bars and lines and filaments, each crossing each at curving right angles, was only a fairy tale. I had made it up myself.

      “Call it God, call it Harriet,” Dad told David and me in our backyard in Waterloo. “Doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s there and the only choice you have is to hang on for the ride or sit it out on the sidelines.”

      I was a kid at the time and decided to call it Snoopy. Now, at thirty-five, I just called it the grid because that’s what it felt like. And I was tired of the sidelines.

      “Deal,” I told Dan Crandall. “You can leave a thousand-dollar retainer and email me everything you’ve got tonight. I assume your sister’s being held in Las Colinas?”

      The women’s prison in a suburb of San Diego had been named either “The Hills” or “The Cabbage Seeds,” depending on translation. The notion of being confined in a cabbage seed struck me as mythical, even charming.

      “Yes,” Dan Crandall answered with distaste while pulling a slim checkbook out of the right pocket of his wool shirt.

      “How am I supposed to get in to see her?”

      “I’ll tell the lawyer to fix it. Maybe you could analyze her and give him a report. He’ll set it up.”

      “Crandall, my field is social psychology, not clinical. I don’t analyze people. Are you sure you know what you’re hiring here?”

      “Talk to her,” he insisted. “Just do that, okay?”

      The check, drawn on a bank in Anchorage, Alaska, fluttered happily beside the lemonade.

      “Okay,” I answered, but the answer was more general than the question. I meant that I’d think about it while I wondered what it was he expected me to do.

      In seconds he’d pulled on his socks and those platypus-foot boots, stuffed the rest of his clothes under an arm and walked away in the direction of the locked gate where I assumed he’d left whatever vehicle brought him out here.

      “Misha,” I whispered into yellow-gray afternoon light, “a man in his underwear is leaving, but I’m back.”

      It was the first time I’d spoken to her in two years.

      Later I went online to find out what you wear while visiting a women’s prison. A retired cop in a Quaker chat room typed, “When visiting any prison you have to wear a bra, carry nothing that could be used as a weapon, and avoid dangling earrings in pierced ears. She might grab ’em and rip your lobes in half.”

      When the moon rose like the edge of a spoon over my bowl of broken rocks, I was pawing through storage boxes behind the third of my twelve doors, looking for the tiny lapis earrings that had been my mother’s. They had gold posts. Muffin Crandall would have a hard time ripping them out of my ears.

      Chapter Two

      When the phone rang at five the next morning, Brontë snarled irritably