Martha and Susan make it as far as Tularosa before they’re forced to stop for gas.

Two stations stand on the verge of town, one on each side of the bare highway, both sunk in darkness. Martha chooses at random, the Conoco on her right, pulls into the parking lot and cuts the engine. The cold is quick to take the pickup’s interior, flooding the wind-worn window seals.

There are no lights in the parking lot. No lights inside the small building. The gas pump beside them shows no sign of life, no glowing display illuminating prices.

“I think they’re closed,” Susan says.

“They can’t be closed,” says Martha. “It’s not even eight o’clock.”

“They look closed.” Susan, doing what she always does. Needling to the point where she’ll make Martha lose her temper.

But Martha’s determined not to do it. Not this time. She’s so close to being rid of Susan. They just have this trip—this mission, really—and at the end of it, they can go their separate ways. Martha can keep her temper a little longer. She looks toward the building, the darkened glass, and sees a faint flicker. “There’s a light in there. There must be someone in there.”

“It doesn’t mean they’re open. It could be someone robbing the place.” Susan can’t stand it, the way Martha thinks she’s always right.

“Why don’t you go see?” Despite her efforts, Martha can’t keep the scorn from her voice. The meanness. Mean Martha, her brothers called her, the kindest thing they called her, back when they were young on the ranch where Martha and Susan are now headed, not far from Tularosa, in the southern fringe of the Sacramentos. 

Susan, in the passenger seat, makes no move to undo her seat belt. She, like Martha, is thinking about how close she is to the end of this. Why should she continue to give in again and again? There’s no more value in keeping the peace.

And as though Susan’s thoughts have made it happen, Martha gives in. “I’ll go.” She wants this to end more than she wants to score some point.

As if this is the cue she needs, Susan releases her seat belt too.

They make their slow way across the asphalt using Martha’s phone flashlight. The door is unlocked; it yields to Martha’s shove.

Inside, the smell of old tacos and the small glow of another phone flashlight. “We’re basically closed,” says the person in the gloom. “Power’s out.”

A girl, Susan sees, a bored high schooler. This is the kind of place Martha might have worked as a teenager, except of course Martha was miles from any gas station.

“What about next door?” Susan says, despite that place’s identical darkness. She still holds out hope. They could fill their tank and be on the road. Make it to the ranch by nine, drop the bag, drive back home, and by morning, their obligation to each other will be over.

“Their power’s down too,” says the girl. “It was a lightning strike.”

Susan and Martha had seen the storm as they drove the flat strip of Highway 380—green and blue seams slicing the black sky. Thunder shook the broken, barren road under their tires. No rain. One of those desert storms that only taunted.

“What the hell are we supposed to do?” If Martha’s mean enough, she hopes, she might force some different answer from this girl. “We don’t have enough gas to get anywhere. Are we supposed to sleep in our car?”

“There’s the Four Winds,” the girl says in a bored voice. “The motel, you know. It looks like there’s power down that way, closer to town. Or you could wait here. The power might come back on.”

—

They sit in their cold truck in the dark parking lot. If they sit long enough, they believe, the lights that overhang the gas pumps will re-illuminate themselves. They sit for twenty minutes, half an hour. Then they resign themselves. Martha drives toward the meager lights, the part of town that was spared.

—

When they were out alone, riding fence lines on the ranch, Martha’s brothers called her more than mean. A bitch, a dyke, a carpet muncher. Martha’s brothers were older, two, three years. Stronger. They could pull her from her horse. Knock her flat in the sharp sand and sagebrush.

Martha tried to find some strength in herself to match theirs. She lifted hay bale after hay bale in the dark barn after everyone was asleep. Did push-ups every morning when she tumbled out of bed. 

Still, her brothers were stronger.

Martha hated the ranch, and she hated her family. Her father toggled between absence and temper; he’d disappear to Las Cruces or El Paso for days at a time, returning in the same clothes he’d left in, hair greasy, reeking of alcohol. Her mother’s hard gaze pressed Martha down until she was like the worn, blue-black carpet.

Which is to say that Martha believes now she’s owed some ease. She suffered through the long path of her childhood, and she’s angry that she’s not allowed to do what she wants: buy gas, leave Susan.

—

Martha and Susan drive up the dark road. The Four Winds Motel and RV Park, when they come to it, has power. The marquee sign, a yellow haze behind the removable black letters. TV, F ee Wifi, No P ts.

Again, they have to decide. Who will go in. Martha is less yielding this time. “This was your idea,” she says to Susan.

Susan wants to point out that it was the girl in the gas station’s idea, but she doesn’t. She slides out of the car into the cold wind and pulls the sticky handle of the lobby door.

Inside, it smells like old grease and cigarette smoke. The only upside: This looks like a place that takes cash. They won’t have to leave any trace of their journey. Although why this is a concern, Susan can’t quite say. Despite all the trouble they’ve taken, Susan doesn’t believe that anyone would ever try to track them down. No matter. She’ll pay cash.

She has to ring the bell twice before someone comes out of the back room behind the counter. A woman with bleached blonde hair, ponytail so tight Susan can see the imperfections of her skull beneath the skin of her forehead.

She looks at Susan but says nothing. Despite the pulse that leaps in her throat, Susan thinks she might be a cadaver.

“We need a room,” Susan says.

“Seventy-two fifty,” says the woman. Her voice is a surprisingly robust baritone that could barrel Susan down. It frightens her. Her hands shake as she opens her wallet, fumbles the bundle of cash from it, thinks how Martha would chastise her for putting this on display. You don’t know what it’s like down there, she’d said once. You don’t know how those people are.

Susan slips the money through the slot in the plexiglass. The woman sniffs, snatches it, counts it slowly, twice, three times before she seems satisfied. She pulls a key from the rack behind her.

“Room 121,” she says.

Susan puts her wallet away. She picks up the key. There’s a stain on the metal head of it, brown and flaky. It could be blood. She tells herself not to be melodramatic. She takes it back to the car, to Martha.

—

The motel doors are numbered with thick, spray paint slashes, lit by small bulbs. Martha and Susan drive to 121 and get out. The wind tears their coats, the clothes beneath, opening space between fabric and skin. Thunder still grumbles somewhere in the distance. 

They have only themselves to take inside. They brought no clothes, no luggage. They meant this to be a day trip. Get to the ranch, dispose of the Ziploc bag, and then get away. The Ziploc bag, they leave in the glove compartment. Best not to let it in the motel room, best not to lay any more claim to it than they already have.

They don’t notice the child until the child is almost at Martha’s elbow. “Excuse me.” A reedy voice, almost inaudible beneath the wind.

Martha jumps. Her fear angers Susan. Martha’s supposed to be the hard one, after all.

“Excuse me,” the child says again. Their voice grows stronger, deeper.

Susan tries to see what kind of threat this child might be. Short, skinny. Child isn’t the right word. A teenager. Their shirt, heavy flannel, obscures their body. Hair shaved on one side, dyed a deep blood-dark color on the other. No way to tell what gender they might be. Susan is ashamed of herself, first because of her confusion, and then for believing that it matters, that it would help her to understand something. If this is boy or girl.

—

Susan knows nothing of this part of the state, knows nothing about how things might work in a place like this, knows only that it is a backwater, a place, she assumes, where gay people could be dragged behind pickups, tied to barbed wire, left to be finished off by vultures.

She knows nothing, either, about what that kind of fear might look like. Her life, the facts of it, viewed from the outside, could only be described as comfortable. Her parents, both engineers at the National Lab in Albuquerque, had shrugged, indifferent, when Susan kissed her eighth-grade classmate Sheila in front of them. A chaste peck on the lips, but enough, Susan hoped, to give them the message. She didn’t really like Sheila; she wasn’t even sure Sheila was actually gay, but she could tell Sheila was willing to let her experiment, and she wanted to expose herself, her gayness. Bring the fallout she longed for but never got.

“I guess this means we don’t need to worry about birth control, right?” her mother said, and that was all.

Unlike Martha, Susan has no dramatic origin story—no flight, no now-dead parents who’d long considered her dead. Still, there was something in her, some restless ball of hate that would never settle, fueled by the spring winds, the dust, the relentless sun that squeezed her body during the summer. She felt cheated by Albuquerque, trapped, hemmed in. She made her gayness a point of glamour. She wore it like the blonde highlights in her hair, her Esprit brand shirts. She bragged about the crushes she had on other girls. She took pride in the way her more prudish classmates made gagging faces.

Eventually, this wasn’t enough. She began to cut herself. At first to raise the same revulsion in her classmates, and then because she hoped she might find some way to exorcise the thing that roved through her veins, restless, spiteful, ready to bite. She cut herself long into her thirties, long after she met Martha, although Martha never said anything, not even when her fingers brushed Susan’s long lines of scab in bed. She stopped only after they sent Josh and Stacey away.

—

The yellow light next to the motel door flickers. Martha’s eyes go to the pale lines of scar on the kid’s exposed skin, just below their collarbone. No different than Susan, she thinks meanly. Except Susan would never have the nerve to approach strangers in a motel parking lot.

“Excuse me,” the kid says again, and now their voice has heft, force, is louder than the wind. A grit that could be masculine.

“We don’t have money for you,” Susan says. She holds her purse over her breasts like she might make a shield of it.

“I don’t want money.” 

“We don’t have any.”

“I just need a place to stay for the night.”

“We don’t have that either,” says Susan. The wind eats at her fingers, her lips, her nose.

“You have a motel room.”

“No,” says Susan. She clutches her purse more tightly.

“We’ll see,” Martha says. She only wants to contradict, to push Susan a little. She doesn’t intend, not really, to let the kid inside their room. She puts her palm to the outside of her front pocket, feels the hard lump of pocketknife she carries. A tiny movement, automatic. The knife is feeble; the blade would snap against any real point of resistance: bone, skin. She carries it mostly as a reminder of the long hours she spent in her childhood bedroom using its dull point to chip laminate from the coffee table she used as a desk, a reminder of the way she chipped her freedom, or what passes for it, out of determination alone, the way it might be quickly taken away again.

“No way,” Susan says, and the kid, seeing a gap between Martha and Susan, is quick to wedge themself into it.

“Just one night,” they say. “I thought people like you . . .”

Martha tastes metal rising in the back of her throat. When she worms her fingertips inside the tight pocket where her pocketknife lies, the cold plastic handle feels unfamiliar, like a strange tongue in her mouth. People like you.

“Well, you thought wrong,” says Martha.

Susan tries to figure out, mind slowed by cold and, yes, terror, what the right course of action might be. Get back in the truck and flee on gas fumes? Expose their cash and offer this kid some? Push past this kid and try to make it inside the room, turn the deadbolt against the sound of the kid’s voice?

She knows for sure that the right course of action is not to listen to this kid’s pleas. She’s seen the news. Kids these days are violent. They all have guns. Shooting at the slightest provocation. Hopped up on drugs, all of them.

“Why would you even want to stay with us?” she says. “We could be anyone. We could be murderers.”

“Are you?” says the kid.

“Are we?” says Martha.

In the faint light, Susan sees the small flashes of scar on the kid’s shoulder. She feels her own lines of scar pulse with some kind of recognition, biceps and belly and thighs all lighting up.

“I just need a place,” the kid says. “I can’t go back with my mom.”

It makes Martha sick, the way this kid begs and grovels. Don’t you know, Martha wants to say to them, what happens to people who look weak and needy?

But of course, this kid’s pleas might only be a trick. The kid might think Martha and Susan are the ones who look weak.

“Weren’t your parents shit too?” says the kid.

What Martha and Susan both hear, words morphed by guilt and wind and exhaustion: Weren’t you shit parents too?

—

Susan and Martha never wanted to be parents, but somehow, some twenty-odd years ago, not long after they first moved in together, they let themselves be lulled by the idea. Their friends Robert and Gabe, who worked at the National Lab with Susan, had been foster parents. They’d adopted a three-year-old. That was what people like them did, after all. Queer, hopeful people.

“It’s not like some states,” Robert said every time he brought the subject up. “New Mexico doesn’t care. They just want these kids to have loving homes.”

A loving home. It wasn’t how Susan and Martha would have described their modest ranch in a northeast Albuquerque neighborhood. But they filled out the application anyway.

Despite Robert’s assurance, Susan and Martha knew there was risk. But the social worker who came to do their home study only pinched her mouth in a mean way when she asked about their relationship, and she scribbled “domestic partner” without comment.

They spent four Saturdays at a training class led by a foster parent, a stocky butch woman with white hair and Birkenstocks. Caricature of a lesbian. As if CYFD wanted to say, look, see how open we are. Or else, they wanted to mock people like Susan and Martha.

The instructor and her partner had adopted seven children. “The thing to remember is never take anything they say at face value, these kids,” she said. “You can’t trust any of them. They’re all liars. My sixteen-year-old once called 911 on us and said that we were keeping her chained in the closet. I had to show the police all the reports about her diagnosis. She’s got all of them. Schizophrenia. Reactive Attachment Disorder. These kids can be a pain in the ass. But you have all the cards. One call and they’re out.”

Martha and Susan felt that they’d sullied themselves somehow by participating in this class, the whole process. But they’d started down this path, and they felt it would show weakness to turn back. 

The one point of agreement left between Susan and Martha: They were bad parents. They didn’t like children. They had little patience. On weekends, they liked to go out in the Sandias, east of town, with their backpacks, only water and trail mix for survival. They hiked until they couldn’t hike anymore and then they pitched a tent, slept in whatever rubbly spot they could find, no matter if it was a designated campsite or not. No one ever bothered them.

They didn’t want to be beholden to someone. They had no desire to clean shit from someone’s diaper, dress them, shovel food into drooling mouths.

But they persisted. They got their license, printed on watermarked cardstock, stamped, embossed. They had a social worker assigned to them, a young woman named Caitlyn Flores, with high, hair-sprayed bangs.

First, Caitlyn sent them a six-month-old who arrived at two-thirty in the morning and never stopped screaming during the eight days she was with them. Martha and Susan couldn’t mix formula fast enough to satisfy her.

Then brothers, seven and eight years old, who spent their five days with Martha and Susan scraping paint from the walls of the hallway in some unexplained frenzy. One of them put a foot through the drywall.

All of these children had been, in Caitlyn-speak, reunified. Meaning, they went home to a parent. Martha and Susan weren’t sad to see them go. Let their parents deal with them, they thought. Why should they have to clean up someone else’s mess?

So when Martha got the call about Josh and Stacey, midday on a Tuesday, what she meant to say was no.

“They’re eight and eleven,” Caitlyn said, popping her gum as she spoke. “We’d like to keep them together, if we can. But Stacey’s very parentified. She thinks she has to control everything Josh does.”

These children, Caitlyn told Martha, would not be reunified. Their parents’ rights had been terminated. There had been sexual abuse and a lot of meth use. They had been with a foster father in the East Mountains for two years. “One of our really good parents,” Caitlyn said, “and then he had a heart attack. Stacey was the one who found him, dead on the kitchen floor one morning. So terrible, after everything else she’s been through.” Her voice had the relish of a tabloid headline.

It would have been so easy for Martha to say no.

“I wouldn’t usually put them with new foster parents like you,” Caitlyn went on, “but you did so well with the Gonzales brothers.”

Maybe this appealed to Martha’s vanity. Whatever it was, she didn’t say no. “I’ll have to ask Susan.”

She was sure Susan would say no. But Susan only said, “What do you think?”

Caitlyn dropped Josh and Stacey off at four that afternoon. They stood in the kitchen, side by side. Susan watched their eyes trace the space. All the things she’d been proud of—the pale eggshell colored paint on the walls, the blond-wood cabinet fronts, the stainless refrigerator doors—revealed their flaws. Scuffs and spiderwebs.

“Can I look in your cupboards?” Josh said at last.

“Sure,” Susan said, knowing it was the wrong answer, hoping they’d left nothing untoward where he might see. She only said it because she could tell that Martha had been on the brink of saying no.

Josh took a chair from the table and shoved it to the counter’s edge. He mounted the countertop and opened the cabinet where Martha and Susan kept their plates and glasses. He gave a sniff of disappointment. He started to say something, but Stacey gave a small whisper, and he fell silent. He moved on to the next cabinet. He took each box of cereal and shook it.

When Martha said, “I think you should stop now,” Josh didn’t argue. He put the cereal box away. He got down from the chair and scraped it across the linoleum until it had retaken its place neatly at the table.

Stacey kept her head bowed so that her hair fell over the sides of her face. She whispered when Martha and Susan asked her questions, one-word answers they struggled to decipher. They resented her for it, the way she gave them nothing.

They saw nothing in Stacey to make them think Caitlyn had been right when she said that word, parentified. She seemed largely oblivious to what Josh did. Only sometimes, she would make a strange jerky motion with her head, and Josh would fall silent for a few seconds. But then he would start up again. He talked and talked. Endless fantasy stories about a man he called Two Moons Martin and his pet snails.

—

Martha and Susan had met after Susan had a hiking accident, out in the Sandias, alone, doing the thing a person was never supposed to do. A slip on a rock. A stupid error of step that left a neat line of break in her ankle. Martha had been her physical therapist.

Susan tamped down the squishy feeling that rose from her cunt to her chest while Martha watched her rotate her ankles, stretch her calves against the wall. She went home and masturbated furiously and told herself not to do something embarrassing. She told herself she was imagining the thing she saw in Martha’s gaze, a drilling down, a lingering.

Until it came time for their last session. “What you need,” Martha said, “is a hiking partner.”

To Susan, Martha felt grown-up, solid. She had a job that she’d been granted due to her own grit. She had a house that she owned. Susan had a job only because her father had called his boss at the National Lab and asked for a favor. Her degree in American Studies qualified her for nothing. Susan had an apartment in a shitty complex where the water dripped incessantly from the showerhead and the oven gave off a smell of blackened plastic every time she set the cook temperature above 300 degrees.

Martha had struggled and prevailed, and Susan felt that she would elevate herself somehow to be a part of this. She could put her restlessness to bed. She might be able to stop her embarrassing habit of reaching for an X-Acto blade.

Martha, for her part, was flattered that someone like Susan wanted her. It made her feel that she had some bona fides. As a grown-up. As a lesbian.

They didn’t always hate each other. This should go without saying, but sometimes they found it hard to believe themselves. Hard to remember how they felt when they first met, the way they fit each other, like worn clothes. The way they didn’t have to talk, the understanding that settled in the air between them.

—

There were incidents at school. Josh punched a boy in the mouth. Then he punched a different boy in the shoulder. Next, a third boy, in the balls. A girl in Stacey’s class came to a teacher with a note. Square blocky handwriting: You will die soon. She said Stacey had given it to her.

Martha and Susan got calls from the school office. They would need to come and pick up Josh, pick up Stacey. They fought about which of them should leave work and go. Susan was always the loser. “They’re foster kids, you know,” she would say apologetically to the woman in the front office, although they had been told in their training they were never, ever supposed to say this.

At home, in the evenings, Martha and Susan saw none of this. No fighting. No notes. Josh acted out Two Moons Martin scenes in a corner of the living room with scraps of cardboard he’d torn from a Lucky Charms box. Stacey went to her bedroom and closed the door. When Martha knocked, she never answered. It seemed worrisome, but even worse to force the door.

Martha remembered her own bedroom door, the flimsy, battered wood that kept no one out, the way she wished more than anything that it would.

—

Josh and Stacey had been with Martha and Susan nearly a month when Stacey came to them in the living room one night after eleven, creeping quietly through the doorway, her approach disguised by the sound of the TV, the Married . . . with Children rerun Martha and Susan had let play after the news. They didn’t notice her until she was at Susan’s elbow in her oversized T-shirt and her green flannel pajama pants. Her head was up. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a neat ponytail.

Susan jumped and hit the power button on the remote like a guilty child.

“What are you doing?” Martha’s words like pin jabs, sharp with embarrassment.

“I couldn’t sleep.” Stacey’s voice was the loudest they’d ever heard. It was low, grounded; it was obscene in her skinny frame. “There’s something I can’t stop thinking about.”

Martha and Susan didn’t look at each other, but they could feel it, the way the other was shrinking inside. They didn’t want to hear whatever it was that Stacey was about to share with them. They remembered what Caitlyn said when she called the first time about Stacey—sexual abuse. They remembered the woman at the foster parent training, the way she screwed up her face with relish when she said “sexual acting out.” They didn’t want to be in the middle of this. They just wanted to watch the heterosexist stew of Married . . . with Children in peace.

But Stacey wouldn’t let them do this. “I killed Mr. Dean,” she said.

Martha rose to the bait. She knew she shouldn’t, but there were the words, out of her mouth. “Who the hell is Mr. Dean?”

“Our last foster parent. Mr. Dean. I killed him.”

They remembered. The heart attack, the way Stacey found him on the kitchen floor.

Susan saw a flicker at the corner of Stacey’s mouth, annoyance that her announcement didn’t bring the earthquake she hoped it would. It was an annoyance Susan recognized. “I’m sure you didn’t kill him,” she said. How could Stacey kill anyone? She was a skinny eleven-year-old.

“He was no different than our dad. I had to. I got ant poison from his shed and I put it in his coffee and he died.”

Her voice had a hot core that made something deep in Martha’s own throat begin to burn. She didn’t want to believe that Stacey, in her oversized T-shirt, might have had the nerve to do what Martha herself never could all those years ago.

“Why are you telling us this?” Martha said in a voice that was nowhere near as steely as she wanted it to be.

“Because I have evidence,” Stacey said. “And I need to get rid of it. I’m giving it to you.” She dug in the pocket of her green pajama pants and extracted a Ziploc bag, sandwich size, filled with what looked like a wadded paper towel. She held it out to Susan and Martha.

After some minutes, Susan rose from the couch and took it from Stacey.

“Why would you give us this?”

“I decided to trust you,” Stacey said. “I don’t have anyone else.”

Stacey went back to bed. Martha and Susan stayed on the couch. They passed the Ziploc bag between them. Whatever was in the mess of paper towels was soft, pliable. They couldn’t be sure there was anything but paper towels in it at all. At one point, while Susan was holding it, she moved her hands to the purple line of seal, ready to pull it open, but Martha snatched it away.

“Don’t do that. You’ll get your fingerprints all over whatever’s inside it.” She regretted it as soon as the words were out.

“It can’t really be evidence,” Susan said. But she wasn’t sure what to believe.

The truth was they were flattered. By the bag, by the way Stacey said, I decided to trust you.

And Martha was frightened.

—

Martha’s mother directed her ire at Martha’s father toward Martha. By the time Martha was a freshman in high school, Martha’s father had mostly stopped coming home, and the ranch house had settled under a film of her mother’s neglect. The orange couch in the living room vanished under heaps of laundry. Dishes piled in the sink.

Despite the way she’d told Martha early on to help her brothers with the fence lines, Martha could see that she thought there was something untoward about Martha doing it now that she was older.

“You need to pull your weight around the house,” she said. “This place is filthy.”

“Then clean it,” Martha said.

“You live here, don’t you? You eat food, don’t you?” Martha knew her mother thought Martha should hold back. Let the men make the first move. Have their fill.

Martha’s mother’s view of the world was narrow, but she was no weakling. She wasn’t ground down; she made no secret about her own power.

She wielded it over Martha with pinched cruelty. At Christmas, she gave Martha gifts that she called “fit for girls,” which Martha had to open in front of her brothers. Dresses pulled from some charity swap at the Church of Christ. Cherry-red lipstick. Enormous bras that would hold both of Martha’s breasts in one cup.

Martha knew her mother meant for these gifts to sting. She made her own efforts to sting back. She cut holes in the dresses, wore them with crooked hems, thighs and knees poking through. She crushed the lipstick on the counter in the bathroom she shared with her mother, the girls’ bathroom, marking the water-stained surfaces with hard red chunks.

Her mother said nothing. She only gave Martha the same gifts, year after year. Lipstick. Dresses. Bras.

Martha hated her presents, but it wasn’t only rage that the gifts stirred in her. Bubbling up through the black scrim of hate came something else: longing, curiosity. She began to use the gifts before she discarded them.

She lay back on her worn red quilt and held the padding and underwire to her chest. She closed her eyes. She imagined the bra swelled with breasts, imagined her hands working them, pulling the snagged nylon straps from some shoulder, her own mouth sucking and licking, the faceless person attached to them moaning softly. Her thighs were limp, her cunt wet.

She put the lipstick to her own lips, closed her eyes again, and held in her mind, not the greasy pigment, but the lips that might have once been smeared with it. Imagined that her own lips had been brightened by someone else’s.

And then she destroyed it.

It backfired, the way she destroyed these gifts. Martha knew it would someday.

When she was a senior in high school, she came home with a UNM application, which required a parent’s signature, and presented it to her mother.

“What’re you going to do in Albuquerque?” her mother said. Voice full of suspicion.

Martha realized too late what a fool she’d been. She had no reason to think her mother would go meekly along with her.

But she’d thought it because it was her only out. That someday, she would leave.

It was the thing that had stopped her from turning the rifle she used to kill coyotes on herself.

She took the application to her room and locked herself in. She sat on the floor with the application pages spread on the knife-scarred coffee table. She forged her mother’s signature. But she knew that even this might not save her.

What if, when it came time for her to truly leave, she found the door barred? Her brothers hadn’t left, after all. What if it hadn’t been indifference that kept them? They got practical Christmas gifts—leather-cutting knives, boots that would withstand rattlesnake bite and cholla needle. But maybe they hated these things as much as Martha hated her presents. Maybe they were like Martha, careful to give nothing away.

She took her pocketknife from the pocket of her jeans and opened the blade. She dug into one of the pale gouges in the tabletop. The blade was soft; the tip crumpled.

She began to plan ways she might kill her mother. Her father. Even her brothers would have to go. The rifles in the hall closet. The rat poison under the sink. The scissors in the knife block in the kitchen.

Was she the kind of person who could do this?

She couldn’t say.

Martha held the weight of it in her mind, day after day. The thought that she might kill someone.

It felt like any other thought. It had no special heft or contour. 

The thought didn’t bring her the fear she thought it should.

The most frightening thing about it, she believed, was how easy it might be.

But she didn’t do it. She wasn’t the kind of person who could go through with something like that, after all.

She pretended instead. She kissed Ben Crawley, the only boy her age at the school in Sunspot. She washed dishes. She scrubbed the horse shit that her brothers tracked into the living room carpet.

The day after she graduated, she paid Ben Crawley forty dollars she stole from the emergency envelope in the back of the silverware drawer to drive her to Albuquerque. She had sex with him in a seedy motel room that she paid for with more stolen money. And then she left him.

—

Martha and Susan kept the Ziploc bag on their dresser for two days. And then, they became frightened. Of the way they were so flattered. Of what this might mean, what kind of people it might make them.

Only then did they wonder if they should be frightened of Stacey. Would they be next on her list, the coffee that chugged out of the old pot on the kitchen counter each morning filled with poison?

But she was a child, they told themselves. She’d only filled a Ziploc bag, probably one that she took from their own kitchen drawer, with a paper towel, likely pulled from the roll beside the bathroom sink. She’d conjured up this story as a way to . . . what?

Stacey said nothing more to them about Mr. Dean. But there was something about the way she looked at them now, the cocky way she went to the cabinet and took down the Lucky Charms box.

They began to think of all the poisonous things they owned, housed here and there in cabinets, on garage shelves: the Cascade dishwasher powder, their own bottle of ant poison, old liquid fruit tree fertilizer from a long-ago attempt to revive the now-dead peach in the backyard. Ibuprofen. Cough syrup. Toilet bowl cleaner.

They remembered their training. You have all the cards.

They were no different than that instructor after all. They called Caitlyn.

—

Stacey didn’t object. Didn’t rage, didn’t lunge at Martha or Susan, murderous. She just took her trash bag of clothes that she’d never bothered to unpack and followed Josh to the back seat of Caitlyn’s car.

She said nothing about the Ziploc bag, but then, Susan and Martha thought, what would she say?

—

They didn’t take another placement. They told Caitlyn they didn’t think it was for them. And it was true. It had been an experiment. The conclusion: They were bad parents. They were like the mesa spread behind their house, all scrub and sand and desert thorn. They could leave Stacey and her Ziploc bag out of it entirely.

But what to do with the bag? They didn’t want it in their house, but they couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. They put it in the trash can by the curb, then panicked.

They told themselves they were being ridiculous. Stacey was an eleven-year-old kid. She hadn’t really murdered anyone. This wasn’t evidence, whatever she’d wrapped in the paper towels.

But Martha remembered her own thoughts. The way she’d come close to doing the thing that Stacey said she had done.

And maybe they were still flattered. Maybe they didn’t entirely want to dispose of it.

They took it out of the trash can.

Susan buried it in the flower bed where the Legacy irises sprouted every spring. Martha dug it up. What if a neighborhood dog happened by and uncovered it?

They settled on the garage. The cabinet where they stored tools and bottles of engine oil. Top shelf, pushed to the back, so far they needed a stepstool to see it.

Eventually, they forgot. Josh and Stacey took on a sepia haze.

Until Martha and Susan admitted at last that they would be happier if they didn’t have to see each other’s stony faces every morning and they decided to separate. Split their belongings, sell the house.

And Susan remembered the Ziploc bag. She felt a strange hiccup of heartbeat. “What are we going to do with that thing?”

Martha knew what they should do. Throw it away. It had been so long ago that even if it were evidence—which, of course, it wasn’t—no one would come looking for it, no one would connect them to Josh and Stacey and Mr. Dean. But they’d made the decision not to throw it away, and they couldn’t see how to change their minds.

And Martha felt that it was an indictment. Of herself. Her past. To dispose of it would be both an admission and a weakness. And then she had it—a way to make her life turn full circle or something similar. Some sad ploy at revenge.

If it really was evidence, she could plant it out at the ranch. As far as she knew, her brothers had inherited it. They likely still worked it, the way they had since they were children.

“Why don’t we just take it to the ranch?” she said. “Throw it out in the middle of nowhere. No one would connect it to us.”

She was surprised that Susan didn’t argue.

—

In the cold motel parking lot, Susan makes up her mind. She has the door key. She’ll open the door, she’ll grab Martha by the arm, she’ll sequester them both safely inside. The kid is small and flimsy. Susan can blow them aside like a hard gust of wind.

She’ll rise to this occasion. She’ll show Martha.

But it takes Susan several tries to get it all lined up: her hand, the motel key, the wobbly doorknob. She’s shaking. Is it the cold? The kid hovering at her elbow, the way the air is filled up with their stench—marijuana and armpit sweat? She can’t quite say.

She is not stealthy in her door-opening.

And once she has the door open, a scrim of elbows and stucco and stale breath and shin-kicks. Susan can’t say who forced who. The dark doorhole, a vacuum that sucks them in. They’re all inside the room somehow. Her, Martha, the kid.

Martha fumbles along the wall, finds the light switch just inside the door and flicks it to life. Two double beds with pink-flowered comforters. A small table just inside the door. Blue carpet covered with stains. It has the sad feel of a hospital room recently vacated by death. It smells like rancid disinfectant.

The kid moves toward the center of the room, toward the far bed, away from Susan and Martha. Their face mirrors the unease Susan feels, and so do their hands, held in small fists at their sides, like a puppet waiting for someone to pull their strings, jerk them to life.

Martha closes the door. She sees Susan shudder when she does. She can see that the kid too is frightened now. But their fear doesn’t make Martha feel better.

“You need to get out,” says Susan, wielding her purse. “You’re going to have to find somewhere else to go.”

“There’s nowhere,” the kid says. “I’m not going back to my mom this time.” Martha can tell by the way they say it that they’re trying to convince themself.

“She’s right,” Martha says. “You need to get out.”

United at last in this thing. Just as they’d been united against Josh and Stacey in the end.

The kid shakes their head. “She’s not even my real mom. I’m a legal orphan. Or I was until Anoushka adopted me. I didn’t need to be adopted. I was fine on my own.”

“Except when you need a place to sleep.”

The kid falls silent. They blink quickly and go into the bathroom. Susan hears the toilet flush.

Martha raises her eyebrows. Susan thinks she means it to be a provocation, and she leans into it. They fight while the kid is locked in the bathroom, trying to keep their voices low without really understanding why. Susan doesn’t care if the kid hears them. Maybe if they do hear, it will push them to leave. But nevertheless, she whispers. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you let them in?”

“You let them in, not me.”

“That’s not true.”

The wall heater beneath the window makes a strange groan as it stirs to life.

The kid emerges from the bathroom, dripping water from their chin and earlobes. They suck at the inside of their cheek and pace from table to sink, back again. They push at the ring in their lower lip with their tongue.

“Go to bed,” Martha says. If she stays harsh, she’ll stay in control and nothing bad will happen. The past will stay where it is. The past.

“I don’t think I’m that tired,” says the kid.

“Do you think we care?” Martha says. “Do you want to stay or not? We’re going to bed. All of us are going to bed.”

But going to bed poses a complication. There are two beds, and this means that Martha and Susan will be forced to crowd together in one of them and give the kid the other. The beds are only full-sized. At home, Martha and Susan have a king so neither of them has to be too near the other. In this motel bed, they will have to touch, and the thought is enough to send bile into both their throats.

They get into bed despite their revulsion. Now that Martha has made the pronouncement—We’re going to bed—they can see no way forward except to follow through on it. To show the kid that they are not empty talk, to show the kid, in case the kid should get any ideas, that they mean business.

—

Deep in the night, the kid snores. Martha and Susan lie awake. The heater makes a strange shrieking sound every time it lumbers to life, but it doesn’t seem to produce any heat. The comforter is thin and leaves Martha and Susan shivering, side by side in the cold bed. They don’t need to speak to know they’re thinking the same thing. It sits in the air between them, foul, filthy, filling up the thin space they’ve managed to put between their bodies.

They tell themselves that this kid can’t be Stacey. This kid is too young, for one thing—Stacey must be well into her thirties by now—and for another thing, this kid talks too much. People might change, but they don’t change that much.

And how would Stacey have ended up out here in this decaying town?

But they know the answer: the same way they did. Blown here by chance and institutional incompetence.

—

They try to reassure themselves. Soon, it will be morning. The gas stations will have power again. They’ll fill their tank and leave this kid behind; they’ll drive into the desert and then up the barren mountainside. They’ll leave the Ziploc bag, they’ll be finished, they’ll have done all they can for each other.

They tell themselves that they don’t believe in fate, in signs, in a universe that has a retributive, superstitious streak.

But they know too that the universe cares nothing about their beliefs, their hopes, the small fights they’ve made of their lives.

—

The kid wakes before Martha and Susan and watches the small slats of light batter the window blinds.

The kid has a name. Briony. They hate it, this name forced on them, but they can’t find another name that feels right. They look at the women in the other bed. Pressed together, huddled under the thin comforter. They think there is something they are supposed to do to these women, commit some violence against them, maybe. A fist in the open mouth of the one who sleeps closest to them or a pillow over the face of the other. But this would require a physical force they aren’t sure they have in them. They’re tired, and they don’t actually want, when they think hard about it, to hurt these women. They don’t want to get close enough to the women for that. 

What they told those women wasn’t a lie. They hate their adoptive mother. They were adopted when they were five. They don’t remember this, they were only told this by Anoushka, and they don’t know if it’s true or not. It’s hard to believe anything

Anoushka says. All they want is to get out of this shitty town.

They hate the desperate way they begged. They hate the way these women can drive away.

They slip out from under the cold comforter and leave the motel room, closing the door behind them as silently as they can. The sun is a red seam beyond the mountains.

They feel a thin wedge of doubt. About what they are doing, in this desolate parking lot, about where they might go. About whether they were a fool to try and escape at all.

They stand in the morning chill and shiver. The wind beats at the loose fabric of their shirt. They can’t stand here forever.

They could go back to Anoushka’s double-wide. She won’t have noticed their absence, if the past is any indication.

Or they could let this be the time they take some bold step.

They could steal a car and drive away.

They have no idea how they might do such a thing.

They try the passenger door of the women’s truck. To their surprise, it’s unlocked. Not that it does them any good. They don’t know how to start it without the key, and they know they can’t return to the motel room to try and pilfer it. They don’t really even know how to drive. Anoushka isn’t up to teaching them or paying for driver’s ed.

They open the glove compartment. Nothing but junk. Years of insurance cards. Old ketchup packets. A battered Ziploc bag filled with yellowing paper towels.

They take this last thing. The purple seal at the top of the bag is so old, it doesn’t really close. They pull the contents from it. Just a paper towel. So old, it cracks and tears at their touch. It might be stained with something, a mustard yellow tinge on a corner. But it might also just be a mark of its age.

These women must have put it in their glove compartment for some reason. They decide they’ll keep it, and stuff the paper towel back inside the bag.

But walking along Highway 54, later, once the cold sun has fully risen, they change their mind. It’s trash, nothing but trash, and they don’t need more trash attached to them. They toss it out into the gray sagebrush and tumbleweed. It’s light enough for the wind to carry away.