Prairie Ghost

Ellie stood in the bed of her grandfather’s pickup, elbows resting on the roof, binoculars pressed to her eyes, looking for something she only halfway thought was there. Grandpa was mending a fence, and she’d been so bored that at first she couldn’t tell if the moving shadow about a hundred yards away was real or a daydream. So she’d hoisted herself into the truck’s bed and started scanning the stretch of bone-white earth and gray-green scrub where she’d (maybe) seen the movement. Nothing. She turned slowly in a circle until she figured she’d turned too far—no way something could have moved from here to there so fast—and that’s when she spotted the animal. Like a deer, but with short, backward-curving antlers, its fur reddish brown except for a white belly and white stripe around its neck.

She shoveled her long brown hair from her eyes and adjusted the binoculars’ focus. Now she could see the grain of its cinnamon coat and the crease of muscle where its back legs met its rump. Its ear flickered like a leaf in a breeze. It shifted its weight on arrowhead hooves, quartering toward the truck. Its liquid-black eye ticked over the land and locked on her.

Ten years old was still young enough to imagine the animal had a reason for being there. It was trying to communicate with her, maybe, warning of a sinkhole or a child in trouble. She held her breath and thought in the animal’s direction, Here I am. Tell me what you mean.

​​The animal leaped. Ellie’s fingers danced on the binoculars’ knob. The world lurched in and out of focus, and a splinter of pain stabbed her forehead. She dropped the binoculars and rubbed her stinging eyes with her pinkies.

She could feel the part in her hair starting to burn in the sun, so she climbed down and sat in the truck’s shadow. For the first time, she noticed how alive the land was. Ivory blossoms, tall as a grown man, swirled up from green starbursts of leaves. And strange ugly-cool plants like twisted spines that sprouted thorns like claws and blood-red trumpets. Even the dirt: it was striped with rills of pebbles like the broken shells at the beach back home. It’s prettier than it was before, she thought. Too bad it doesn’t mean anything.

▴ ▴ ▴

The Trading Post Truck Stop is a floating world hovering in that parched stretch of eternity between Fort Davis and Van Horn. Trucks from everywhere else roll out of the night into the flash-bang brightness under the gas pump canopy. Some of the rigs have sheets of ice on their roofs. Others are spattered with spring mud. After they gas up, the drivers who aren’t after lot lizards or pills will head for the faux-adobe diner. Inside the cube of fluorescent light, there’s rumbly male chatter and the scrape of forks on plates. Caught between brightness and the pitch-black desert outside, the plate glass windows are night-blind. All they can show the customers is their own reflections.

Ellen is the night-shift waitress. She goes from table to table with a hitched-on smile, meeting clear eyes and bloodshot ones, irises skittering in place or hidden under drooping lids. For every shit-kicker accent, there’s the rat-a-tat delivery of a New Yorker or the mushy vowels of a Virginia gentleman. She waits on locs and mullets and bald scalps, on mesh caps browned with sweat and polo shirts exuding the powdery smell of the baby wipes that stand in for a shower. She likes the constant nowhere motion of weaving among strangers as they huddle together over coffee, pie, and bullshit stories, enacting ceremonies of brotherhood.

Because she hasn’t nailed the West Texas twang yet, a lot of her customers lead with the same question.

“All over, more or less,” she answers. “Mostly back East.”

“I’m from North Carolina/New Jersey/Arkansas,” they say. “I thought I heard a little bit of the Piedmont/the Shore/the Ozarks in your voice.”

Laying claim to her life before feels wrong, like trespassing. But everybody has to have a story, just like everybody has to have a name, even if it’s not the one intended for them at birth. She gives the customers the bare bones; they supply the flesh and blood. “When I was little,” she says, “we lived just outside Winston/Toms River/Pine Bluff.”

“Don’t that beat all? I live just about [insert mileage] from there.”

“Really? Do you remember this one restaurant…I forget the name. It had the best barbecue ever.”

“Gotta be Buster’s/The Oakton Inn/Short Sugar’s. They don’t mess around with that mustardy/tomatoey shit. They’re the real deal.”

“It’s good to know there’s one thing hasn’t changed.”

Predictable as sunrise, they’ll work up to asking, “How’d you end up out here in the middle of nowhere?”

There is not enough distance in all the world for her to tell them. She nods toward the faded black-and-white poster of Patsy Montana, cowgirl yodeler, hanging above the jukebox. “Like Patsy said. I wanted to be a cowboy’s sweetheart.”

In the kitchen, there are no questions. The cook and dishwasher speak only Spanish. Thanks to summers volunteering in Mexico during nursing school and nine years working in a south Philadelphia ER, Ellen understands a good bit of what they’re saying. She doesn’t let on, though. That would mean more people trying to talk to her. She learns that Freddy has a weakness for tamarind candy because his grandfather used to sneak it to him behind his mother’s back, and that Pablo dreams of going to cooking school and becoming a real chef. Later, she learns that Pablo was orphaned when he was six. That Freddy has a baseball-sized benign tumor in his belly that he can’t afford to have removed. She stops listening.

Ellen’s favorite time is around three a.m., when the diner is quietest and she doesn’t have to pretend that anything around her is real. She sits at the counter and rolls silverware. Her just-washed hands smooth the white paper napkins and point one corner toward her. She folds each one to make a pocket and nestles in the utensils, one at a time. Roll, tuck, stack. Then she collects the bottles of ketchup, mustard, and hot sauce from the tables and groups them on the counter. She refills the bottles, listens to the liquids burble and glug. Next, the sugar. The shushing slide of the grains from bag to jar sounds like the passage of time. She saves the refilling of the old-fashioned salt and pepper shakers for last. She likes the feel of them, their surfaces bricked with tiny raised squares, the grip of metal tops sliding into glass grooves.

▴ ▴ ▴

Sitting with five other men at the circle booth in the corner, known as the Liars’ Table, Moose Blevins sets a challenge: “Best ‘Stupidest Thing I Ever Did’ story. Tompkins, you first.”

Freebird Tompkins strokes his black handlebar mustache. “Okay, fellas, I’mma tell you about this time I was taking a hay hauler through the mountains of West Virginia in the dead of night. I came to one of them forty-five-degree switchbacks, and the damn thing jackknifed. I got that bitch straightened out and went on my merry way, but then this glow flares up in my rearview. My load’s caught a spark. I’m seconds away from going up in flames.”

The men grunt appreciatively. Freebird continues, “I put the hammer down so’s the wind would blow out the fire, or at least keep it off the cab. By the time I pulled into the Love’s in Ripley the fire was out, but I had a whole caravan of smokies on my ass. They surrounded my rig and stood around trying to figure out what to give me a ticket for. Finally, one of ’em said, ‘Ain’t no law against a man having balls bigger than his brain.’”

“He’s been telling that story for years,” says Colleen McKenna. The Trading Post’s owner is sipping coffee and leaning on the counter where Ellen is rolling silverware. “Used to be something he seen. Now it’s something he done. That line about his balls is always the same, though. Makes me think there might be some truth in it.”

“It’s got a ring, for sure,” Ellen says. Certain sentences serve as a lifelong chorus that reminds people who they are. Hers: You loved him. He died. There's nothing to tell.

“Thing is,” Colleen says, “that ain’t the stupidest thing he ever did. When he was a rookie, he took a curve too fast in a stiff wind. His rig rolled over and fell fifty feet down a cliff. He cracked his skull, spent a week in a coma. He never tells anyone about that, though.”

“Maybe he can’t remember exactly what happened.” Some stories have to be told right, or not at all.

“It don’t make for good listening, either. ‘I drove like an asshole and got hurt.’ So what?” A bell dings in the pass-through. Colleen picks up two heaping plates—pancakes, fried apples, grits, and toast—and sets one in front of Ellen. “Eat some breakfast before you clock out.”

“Thanks,” Ellen says, “but I had a sandwich earlier.”

“I won’t dock your pay for it. Or do you have someplace else to be?”

Her only other place is her car. It’s parked at the farthest corner of the back lot. There, she will eat an expired protein bar before curling up under a picnic blanket in the back seat and sleeping the day away. “I guess not.”

“Then tuck in.” Colleen douses her own pancakes with maple syrup, sloshing some on the apples and grits too. She’s a stout woman, often red-faced and winded. Ellen wonders what her blood pressure is.

“How long have you been here?” Colleen asks. “Three, four weeks?”

Ellen would’ve guessed a couple of months. “Sounds about right.”

“You’ve done good,” Colleen says. “Not a single wrong order since your first night.”

Clonazepam or lorazepam. Sulfasalazine and sulfadiazine. Cyclosperine and cyclosporine. An invented language of bifurcated syllables. Misplacing one meant death. Here, the litany is white or wheat, black or blond, over easy or sunny side up. As harmless as the Lord’s Prayer. “I’ve got a good memory, I guess.”

“You’re too smart for this job, I seen that right away,” says Colleen. “How long you think you’ll stay?”

“I’m not thinking about leaving, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Good,” Colleen says. “The drivers like to see a familiar face. The CB and cell phones are fine, but nothing beats face-to-face conversation.” She hands Ellen some jelly packets. “For your toast. My daughter used to say mixing strawberry and grape was the best.”

Colleen always refers to her daughter in the past tense. Ellen slowly peels the silver tops from the packets, trying to decide if this will be the night she asks why. But asking would mean listening, and listening warms you, softens you, makes it easy for words to start seeping out.

“Ninety percent of the truckers’ stories are bullshit,” Colleen is saying. “But every now and then, out of the blue, they’ll tell me things they wouldn’t tell another soul. I expect it’s safer for them to talk to someone when they’re far from home.”

Ellen spreads blobs of jelly on her toast, careful not to scrape off the crisp, golden surface. She takes a bite. “You’re right,” she says. “The strawberry and grape are good together.”

▴ ▴ ▴

Ellen sleeps in her car, a few ragged hours of unconsciousness wrestled from the early spring sunlight. Reciting nursery rhymes helps. The rhythm settles her mind into a trough between sleep and waking. There, she can feel a child’s weight in her lap and the curve of his skull tucked against her neck, amplifying her own steady pulse.

At first, she resisted the comfort of the skin memory. But she’s discovered that it always comes with a price. Fall asleep to it, and she’ll wake into it as well. A few seconds of peace, and then the gospel truth—her son is dead because of her—will gash her open again. It seems a fair bargain to strike with the void that was God: to accept only the comfort that she can trade for pain.

▴ ▴ ▴

A man and a boy are sitting at the two-top in the corner. Dusty jeans, faded T-shirts, skin sunburnt to almost the same color as their work boots. The boy sits like the man she guesses is his father, arms flung wide across the back of the booth, but his boots tiptoe on the floor. A wing of black bangs falls over his eyes as he struggles to pronounce the English words when he orders. His voice breaks, his father laughs. “Puta madre,” the boy mutters. He holds up the menu to Ellen and points at pictures.

His eyes shine like black ice. They’re too big for his face, so she guesses he’s about twelve or thirteen. Nose like a chickpea, doughy padding in his cheeks. A brownish spot under his right eye. It could be a birthmark. Could be a bruise.

He orders chocolate chip pancakes, sausage patties, and a fresh fruit cup. Ellen is repeating his order in Spanish when the father interrupts him. “That’s too much food for him.”

“But I’m hungry,” the boy says.

“Nobody is that hungry.” The man tells her to bring him grits. For himself, he orders the Sunrise Special with steak and double French toast.

Later, she notices the boy running his finger around the inside of the bowl to collect the last specks of grits and lick them off. She goes into the kitchen, takes an unopened can of pineapple rings from the reach-in, and fills a bowl with a week’s worth of vitamin C.

When she sets the bowl down in front of the boy, the man scowls. “I didn’t order this.”

“No charge,” she says. “It’s the last of the can. The kitchen was going to throw it out.”

While the boy forks up the pineapple rings and eats his way around them, she circles a washrag around the same spot on the counter and watches him. He tips the bowl up and slurps down the juice. His chin must be sticky. He needs napkins. She bends to reach for them under the counter, and a weight seems to settle on her back. The boy needs a lot of things. She can’t provide any of them. She has nothing to give anyone, except plates of food.

She stands up and shoulders through the swinging door into the kitchen. Through the pass-through, she watches Colleen ring up the father and son. The boy spots her. He smiles, a big grin showing gappy teeth. She ducks out of sight.

▴ ▴ ▴

“Did I ever tell any of you assholes how I got my nickname?” Moose Blevins sweeps his walleyed gaze over the men sitting with him at the Liars’ Table.

“This ought to be good,” mutters Freebird Tompkins.

“There used to be this lizard named Candy working the Petro-Pass in Ontario. She was a forty-dollar hooker, but she said it’d cost me a hundred.”

Ellen is unloading a tray the size of a wagon wheel onto their table: omelets, chicken sandwiches, chili Colorado. “See, this so-called Candy charged according to length.”

Six men laugh and look at Ellen. The words bubble up, tickling her. “Canada uses the metric system, right? You sure she wasn’t measuring in centimeters?”

They laugh again, even Moose. Even Ellen.

The faces of comatose patients sometimes do their own thing. Their zygomaticus muscles, for instance: sometimes they contract spontaneously, and the patient’s mouth opens and widens. An interaction of muscle and nerve and skin. Doesn’t mean that they’re happy, not even for a moment.

▴ ▴ ▴

The kitchen is all noise and wet heat. The dishwasher whirs, meat sizzles, and a beat-up radio on top of the reach-in blares hip-hop in Spanish. Grease from the flattop bonds with steam from the sinks and condenses on Ellen’s arms as she scoops potato salad from a two-gallon vat into white plastic bowls.

Freddy slouches over his sinks as he scours dirty pots. The skin under his eyes pools in gray pouches. His face is always damp, so he looks like he’s permanently melting. Pablo is the cook. His face is an arrangement of sharp-edged planes, his hair shaved down to stubble. On his left forearm there’s a tattoo of a grinning skeleton holding a pair of scales.

“The business, it’s going well?” Freddy asks Pablo in Spanish.

“No questions, man. Not now.”

Pablo glances over his shoulder at Ellen. She smiles emptily and wipes potato salad from the rim of a bowl with a dish towel. Despite her best efforts not to pay attention to the men, she’s heard that Pablo is selling drugs to the truckers.

The song on the radio is a narcocorrido about a firefight in Ciudad Obregón. Federal police versus a gang led by somebody named Félix. The police set an ambush for him, but he and his men shot up the federales and barreled down the Sonoran highway in a haze of glory.

“I was there,” Pablo says in Spanish. “Those federales barely knew what hit them.”

Freddy snorts. “That happened, what? Fifteen years ago? You would have been just a kid.”

“So? Because I was a kid, I didn’t have eyes? It was the baddest shit you ever saw. Those heads exploded like las sandías.”

Sandías isn’t a word that came up when she was treating Spanish-speaking patients in the ER. If the cliché is the same as in English, sandías are probably some kind of melon.

Anyway, his story has to be bullshit.

But Pablo has gone silent. Even his spatula is quieter as he smears cracked eggs into a sizzling yellow pool. The spatula circles faster and faster, thinning the eggs into wisps that blacken and vanish.

She’s close enough to grip Pablo’s arm and break the fierce whirling rhythm, make him stop. She whacks the spoon on the edge of the potato salad bucket until all the bits have fallen off. When she drops it in Freddy’s sink, the spoon looks like it’s never been used.

▴ ▴ ▴

In her car, midmorning, Ellen drifts in and out of sleep, shadowed by an image of a boy standing on the side of a road, watching men’s heads blow up. She knows with dream-certainty that he’s five years old, although he’s only the size of a toddler. His hair is shaved down to the scalp, and he has a bruise under his right eye. He has wet himself. His little nostrils shiver and burn as clouds of gun smoke engulf him.

When she wakes up, her arms are tucked aching against her chest, as though she’s been clutching something, or warding something off.

▴ ▴ ▴

The eastern sky is turning the colors of an overripe peach, the desert taking on an eerie, bone-white gleam under the rising sun. Ellen’s shift has been over for a few minutes, but she’s wiping off clean tables as she waits for her last customer to finish up. Danny Garza, a sheriff’s deputy, hunkers at the counter, shoulders humped like a bison’s, nursing a fruit cup with cottage cheese. He’s one of the regulars. He calls Ellen “Miss” and follows Colleen with sad brown eyes.

“Your breakfast is ready,” Colleen says to Ellen. “Don’t worry about Danny, I’ll ring him up.” She sets a plate on the counter beside Garza. Ellen wonders why Colleen wants them sitting together. She tries to not to bump his elbow as she climbs onto the stool.

Colleen lays a photo on the counter and pats it a couple of times. “Look what I come across in my spring cleaning.”

“Good Lord,” says Garza, “that must’ve been ten years ago.”

Glancing sideways, Ellen sees the photo was taken in grassland with a crumbling ridge of mountain in the background. A man, a woman, and a kid kneel behind a dead deer. The adults’ arms reach around the kid’s shoulders, holding up the deer’s head by the antlers.

Colleen slides the photo closer to Ellen. “That’s Wayne.” A moonfaced man, beaming under a thick brown mustache. Ellen remembers he was Colleen’s husband, two or three years dead now. “He and Danny here was thick as thieves from the time they could walk. And that’s my daughter, Laranda. It was her tenth birthday.”

“She looks like you,” Ellen says, although she can’t tell from this angle. Better to say that than, I thought she was dead. Colleen’s smile turns her cheeks round and hard as apples. Your face doesn’t work that way when you look at photos of a dead child. After a child dies, your face never works that way again. “Do you and Laranda still go hunting together?”

Colleen’s jaw locks. Garza nods toward the far corner of the room. “Coll, that feller by the jukebox is waving his mug in the air.”

“Thanks.” Colleen grabs the coffee pot and hurries off.

Garza says quietly, “Just so you know, Laranda’s living in Phoenix now. She hasn’t spoken to Colleen for almost a year.”

The wash of sadness Ellen feels surprises her. “What happened?”

“Colleen won’t exactly say. All I know is, they had a spat, and Laranda moved out. I don’t know who was at fault. Maybe nobody.”

Ellen picks up her knife and fork and starts slicing her pancakes into a grid. “It’s always somebody’s fault.”

She gets down about three bites before Colleen returns, smiling again. She holds the photo up to Ellen and points at the dead animal. “Know what that is?”

Ellen takes a good look at it. “A pronghorn antelope.”

“How about that?” Garza says. “Maybe our girl isn’t the city slicker we thought she was.”

“She’s full of surprises.” Colleen winks at Ellen. “Prairie ghosts, they’re called, because they’re so fast. In your sights one second, and the next, they’ve vanished off the face of the earth. You ever seen one in real life?”

“I have.” Immediately she wishes she’d lied.

“Where, in a zoo?”

Just say yes. “Brundage County.”

“Is that a fact?” Garza asks. “Recently?”

“I was a kid. My grandfather had a goat ranch. I spent some summers there.” If they ask about the ranch, she can tell them about bottle-feeding baby goats. That wouldn’t hurt.

“Brundage is on their migration route,” Garza says. “Did you see a whole herd?”

“Just one. Or two.” Hours after the first pronghorn disappeared, she and Grandpa came across another one. At least she chose to believe it was a different one.

“Strange,” Colleen says. “The herd usually sticks together.”

The urge to talk about that day unbalances her, like sand shifting underfoot as water seeps up from below. “We found one tangled up in a barbed wire fence with a broken leg.”

They had to be two different animals. The first pronghorn she saw was like a god. It couldn’t also be this sufferer, thrashing up a cloud of dust when she and Grandpa got out of the truck, its trapped leg twisted at a sickening angle.

“Such a pity,” Colleen says. “They jump like they have springs for legs. But they come up to a fence, and they try to crawl under, often as not.”

“Like they forget what they’re made for,” Ellen replies. Grandpa’s answer to her “Why?”

“I hope your granddaddy did the right thing by the poor animal,” says Colleen.

There was a gunshot loud as heaven cracking open, and life became meat. “He did.”

“How old were you?” Garza asks.

“Nine or ten, maybe.” The pronghorn’s fur was still oven-warm as her hand skimmed over it.

“That must’ve been tough,” he says.

Ellen rubs her palm on the leg of her jeans. “At least a kid that age is old enough to understand.”

“She could understand and still be hurt about it,” he says.

She. Me. Something in Ellen’s chest starts to thin, like a wall of ice under rain. Colleen’s eyes blaze with hungry kindness. Garza is close enough for her to smell his mossy aftershave. She needs to tell them about the pronghorn’s velvet ears, curled and trembling like parted lips, the whoosh and snort of its breath, its musky, ancient smell. If she tells them, she might understand why she has forgotten this memory for twenty years, and what it means that she remembers it now.

She muscles her face into her usual fishhook smile and wipes her eyes. “Would you look at me,” she says. “Guess I’m a city girl after all.”

▴ ▴ ▴

In the ER, Ellen once treated a patient who wore a purple sweatshirt with cigarette holes in the sleeves. Braless, slouching, with gray hairs frizzing out of her ponytail. Her cheekbone was smashed, her lower lip split. When Ellen looks back on the woman, a great weight of time is attached to her, as though they spent hours together. Or maybe the woman was many women—plain and beautiful, young and old, poor and rich, citizen and undocumented, white and brown and Black. In Spanish and English, she asked the same question over and over: “¿Quién lo hizo?” Who did it?

At last, the woman spoke, her bleeding mouth not moving, the two words worse than silence, for silence holds the potential for truth: “Sencillamente pasó.” It just happened.

▴ ▴ ▴

The men at the Liars’ Table keep asking Ellen the same questions.

“Are you secretly a doctor?”

“Could you tell she wasn’t dead?”

“Have you ever saved somebody’s life before?”

And:

“Shouldn’t you be in a hospital somewhere, saving lives?”

“No,” she answers. No, no, no.

They’ve bundled her into the circle booth, red-bearded born-again Al Wade on her right and Moose Blevins on her left. Flanking them, more men Ellen knows by sight. Meaty arms and legs, coffee breath and underarm funk. One wrinkled face reminds Ellen of a glass cracked by a baseball bat. The man says, “Soon as I laid eyes on Colleen, I knew she wasn’t right.”

“She looked fine to me,” says Al. “Trotting back and forth, making conversation, just like usual.”

When Ellen came on shift, Colleen told her, “I’ve got heartburn in the worst way.” She’d been listing to her left, like that side of her body was heavier. That was—what, four or five hours ago? Ellen looks at the clock on the wall. Just past midnight. Less than two.

Cracked Face adds, “Then she just went down like a sack of potatoes.”

Moose flicks a balled-up napkin at him. “That’s a clichéd way of thinking. It’ll make folks’ eyes glaze over if you tell it like that. It was more like flipping a switch.”

“Talk about clichés.” Al Wade rolls his eyes.

Ellen grabs the napkin and squeezes it in her fist. Her arms are trembling. The knees of her jeans feel wet. If she’s bled through the denim, she’ll never get the stain out. These are her only pair of pants.

“That deputy, I thought he was going to have a heart attack too,” says Cracked Face. “But he jumped in and started CPR on her pronto. Those first responders, their reflexes kick in just like that.”

“Nah, man,” says Martín Espinoza, a rookie with a molasses accent. “At first he just stood there with his dick in his hand like everybody else.”

“Let’s be honest, though. What he was doing didn’t look like any CPR they do on those hospital shows.”

“Right, because TV shows are always exactly like real life.”

In the ER, you learn how to use adrenaline to sharpen your senses. Ellen replays it in her mind: Danny Garza lays his right hand on Colleen’s chest, places his left on top of his right, interlocks the fingers, switches hands. At last, he starts compressions. At twenty-five, he breathes into her mouth, doesn’t tip her chin back to open her airway, resumes compressions. Something crunches inside Colleen’s body. He jerks his hands away, pants, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

“Let’s ask our hero.” Al turns to her. “Did you jump in because he was doing it wrong?”

“No.” She scoots up against the back of the booth, the only way she can open up a little distance between her and the men. “I’m not a hero.”

“Modest, ain’t she?”

“True heroes always are.”

“Don’t you ever…” She feels a shriek rising in her throat, says softly, “Don’t call me that.”

“Aw, honey. Look how shook up she is, y’all.”

Moose offers her a flask. She shakes her head. “Okay, no more h-word,” he says. “What made you take over from Garza?”

Colleen was blue and gone. But Garza couldn’t know that. You can’t know something you refuse to believe. And because he couldn’t know, he’d blame himself for her death. He’d live the rest of his life with that head-to-toe numbness that somehow contains an endless ache. When Ellen shrugs, fire flashes through her shoulders. “He looked like he needed a break, I guess.”

“But he’d only been at it for two or three minutes. You kept it up for almost an hour.”

“No way,” she says. “It couldn't have been more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

“I can prove it.” Moose holds up his phone. “10:32: that’s the time I called 911. Right when you started your CPR. And Al timed how long it took the paramedics to get here.”

“Fifty-four minutes.”

The men tell her how the dispatcher first sent the paramedics to the Trading Post Steakhouse in Van Horn, nearly thirty miles away. Then they got stuck behind a pileup on the interstate. “The EMTs about passed out themselves when they realized she was still alive.”

She’s not. She can’t be, not in any meaningful way. Ellen remembers the statistic: only 8 percent of people who receive CPR outside a hospital survive. But the paramedics would have made a show; they wouldn’t have declared Colleen dead in front of a roomful of her friends. She needs to tell the men, to prepare them. “That long on CPR, you’ve got to wonder about brain damage,” she says.

“They said her pulse was faint but steady,” says Martín.

“And her pupils was equal and reactive,” adds Cracked Face.

“Whatever that means, jackass.” Moose turns to Ellen. “Tell us, darlin’. How’d you do it?”

She can see cold food on the tables, spilled soda on the floor. A tub of clean silverware on the counter beside a stack of napkins. She aches for them. “There’s nothing to tell.”

The men fall silent, disappointed. Al rests his hands on the table, fingers laced together. “Y’all might not agree,” he says, “but there’s a reason it went down this way. Why the paramedics took so long, why Ellen here suddenly had the strength of ten men.”

“Let me guess,” says Moose. “For the greater glory of God.”

“Mock all you want, but have a look at this.” Al holds up his phone.

Cracked Face leans in. “Whoa.”

“Whoa what?” Moose grabs the phone.

Al taps the screen. “Look right there.”

Moose snorts and passes the phone to Martín. “That’s the problem with you believers. You see what you want to see. It’s just a shadow.”

“It’s the wrong angle for a shadow,” ventures Martín.

Cracked Face: “And too…I don’t know. Solid.”

Al takes back his phone and hands it to Ellen. “What do you make of that?”

The photo, taken between the onlookers’ shoulders, shows Colleen on the floor. Ellen sees herself kneeling over her with a group of men standing behind her. Between her and the group is a shape like something made from smoked glass, dark but translucent. “What is that?”

“There was somebody watching over you, hon.” Al’s face smooths out like a child’s when he smiles. “You didn’t do it by yourself.”

▴ ▴ ▴

The witnesses are all gone by morning. But as Ellen sweeps, wipes tables, rolls silverware, she’s not alone. The hungry boy with the mark on his cheek, the woman with the split lip, Colleen and her daughter, Laranda: their living weight bows her, warms her. Is Colleen conscious yet? Has anyone told her daughter that she’s in the hospital? If they did, would she come? Can she forgive Colleen? Or herself?

Even after the day-shift waitress arrives, Ellen keeps working. Sweeping, mopping, tasks that let her keep her head down. When a dropped mug makes her look up, the sun is splitting the seam of the horizon, changing the cirrus clouds from gray to butternut to the delicate pink of blood in water. The day washes over her without warning. She has to fight the urge to duck.

When she finally walks out to the parking lot, she sees Pablo leaning against the driver’s side of a rust-gashed pickup, head tilted back, smoking a cigarette. She thumbs the edges of the hateful stack of cash she’s holding. Nearly two hundred dollars in tips from customers grateful that they didn’t have to watch someone die.

She walks toward him. “Hey, Pablo.”

He exaggerates her pronunciation. ‘Hay-ay, mesera.”

“I want to buy something,” she says. “Pills. Downers. Do you have any?”

“No comprendo.”

“Quiero,” She squeezes her eyes shut, marshaling the words. “Quiero comprar ansioliticos.” The overdosers used to call them something else. Something colorful. “Gorras amarillas.”

When she asks him for yellow jackets, he flicks away his cigarette. “¿Por qué?”

“¿Cuanto?” she asks. How much?

He walks to the passenger side of the truck and jerks his head for her to follow.

There’s a woman sitting inside, holding a sleeping child. A girl, maybe six years old. Ellen knew Pablo had a girlfriend. She didn’t know about the kid. The woman is beautiful, cheekbones and chin as strong and round as river stones. Pablo nods to the woman. She smooths the girl’s hair away from her face, so gently that she doesn’t wake her. Ellen recognizes that deep sleep. She didn’t realize it could last so long beyond babyhood.

It takes her a moment to notice that the left side of the girl’s face is pink and puckered. Scars slash across her forehead and cheeks. The eyebrow and eyelashes are gone. The little hand resting on the woman’s shoulder has a thumb and one finger with small, neatly trimmed nails. The rest of the fingers are inch-long nubs.

“Fix her,” he says, “and you can have the pills for free.”

“What makes you think I can do that?”

“You did it for the boss lady.” He spits out the word like it’s a bad taste: “Un milagro.”

A miracle. She wants to tell him, hurl the words at him, that there are no miracles because she sat in a cool, quiet room, taking a test on the etiology of endocrine disorders, while her son died in an overheated car. How her memory that he was there simply vanished, how he suffered, even though she would have died for him. But words are never pure truth. They always have an agenda. She can’t use her son’s death to make a point, so she can’t speak of it at all. And if she did find a way to start telling, would she ever be able to stop?

“Just sell me the pills.”

Pablo’s body folds in on itself. Head-to-toe disappointment, like a child feels. His face, for once not angry, looks so young. He can’t be much older than twenty.

“Bitch,” he mutters. “One hundred.” He opens the driver’s side door and takes a plastic bag of black and yellow capsules from under the seat. She hands him the whole wad of cash.

▴ ▴ ▴

In her car, she considers taking enough pills to sleep forever, but that would be disloyal to her son. She has to remember him. So she takes only two. As the pills start working, the others drift away from her: Colleen, Laranda, the bruised boy, Pablo and his daughter. She becomes aware of someone else in the shadows, faint as erased words on thin paper. A girl of about ten, long ponytail, thin arms and legs that embarrass her. As Ellen drifts into unconsciousness, the girl vanishes, but Ellen feels her, as though she has slipped inside her cells. She brings with her the meaning Ellen doesn’t want to know.

As Grandpa loaded his shotgun, the pronghorn’s hide twitched at a buzzing fly. Such a homely reflex moments before its death—it seemed wrong. When she latched gazes with the pronghorn, she sensed the earthy taste of sagebrush lingering in its mouth, felt her ribs hammered by the pounding of an oversized heart. She was a child, lacking words for what she was on the verge of knowing. Without words, forgetting was inevitable. But it takes shape now, the understanding that dying is less tragic than living. That existence can encompass so much suffering without ending, and the fact that God lets it. That even at the point of death, there is all this life left over.