1
In Arizona, on the road between nowhere and somewhere, there is a moment where sunrise and sunset look the same.
Or maybe Beck’s been driving too long. She’s got that twitch in her calves, the kind that scuttles through her legs and begs her to get moving beyond the shift of her foot from the gas pedal to the brakes. She holds a hand up to block the light from her eyes, palm facing the sun, and she feels the last heat of the day die behind the jagged horizon.
Roads in the Southwest aren’t like the roads back in Washington, all tunneled with trees so thick you can’t see the sky. There’s no deer crossing signs, no falling rock warnings—actually, Beck can’t think of the last sign she saw on this highway. Deep in the desert, the road is like a weathered conveyor belt, rolling the car through an unchanging backdrop of red dirt and sky. They crossed the California border in Yuma three hours ago, but parked on the sloped shoulder of the highway, it feels like it’s been days since she saw another car. The world is all one long horizon, unchanging even as dusk washes the sky pink.
She shouldn’t have pulled over, not when they’re almost there. The goal was to soar down the coast, tear past LA, and get to Arizona without stopping. But there’s something about the sky just now that eats at Beck. The pink’s not quite right, too light, watery as a washed wound.
Beck unearths her mother’s notes from her backpack and sighs, wipes away the sweat beaded on her nose. She leafs through the loose papers until she finds a plain piece of printer paper with a sketch of a desert sunset. She traces her finger along a shaky pencil line that points at the sharp cliffs. Next to it, her mother has written, Not here.
“What does that mean, Mom?” Beck asks under her breath.
If it was her mother here, she would probably take a thousand pictures. She’d snap this horizon from every angle and pin the photos to her office wall. She would stare at them until they untangled for her. Ellery Birsching’s greatest talent was looking at a thing until it let her understand it. The sheer force of her will was usually enough to get what she wanted. She’d done it to story subjects, to broken sinks and stuck garage doors, to morning crosswords and jigsaw puzzles littered around their little green house. To Ellery Birsching, everything had an undercurrent of real truth; the raw kind most people tried to hide. Every person had a story she could extract like honey from the comb if she just waited long enough.
If her mother was here, Beck imagines she could explain the strangeness of this sunset in minutes. After all, this desert was her favorite subject.
Ellery’s old Honda crackles, hot and exhausted, at the side of the highway. Beck pats the car once, gently, on its baking silver hood. This is the first breather she’s given the car since they left Sacramento in the morning and it’s a miracle it’s still chugging along. Beck props a foot on the hood of the car and stretches her taut hamstring. Her audiobook grumbles from the stereo and Beck realizes she hasn’t been paying any attention to any of it since they turned onto this highway. The windshield is smattered with bits of gravel and dirt, a battlefield of bug corpses splattered across the glass. Through the glass, Beck watches Riley.
Riley, Beck’s little sister, whose head is lolled back against the headrest, blond bob splayed at her shoulders. Riley, who promised she’d stay awake the whole drive because she knows Beck doesn’t like to drive in the quiet. Riley, who’s been asleep for the last five hours, who’s only fifteen and can’t drive yet, so she has the luxury of sleeping the whole way down. To Riley, this drive is as simple as closing her eyes outside of LA and waking up in Backravel, Arizona.
Nowhere, then suddenly, somewhere.
Not like Beck, seventeen and the oldest Birsching left. She gets the honor of feeling every miserable moment of this drive. Her eyes are dry from staring out the windshield, watching the horizon, begging civilization to finally appear.
But maybe that’s karma. After all, coming to Backravel was Beck’s idea. And maybe it’s only fair that the person who suggested a twenty-five-hour drive in three days, cooped up in an old Honda almost guaranteed to perish before arrival, be the one to do all the hard work. Beck props her wire-frame glasses at her hairline and presses fingertips into the swollen bulge of her eyelids. She sucks in a deep breath. It’s fifteen more miles to Backravel. Fifteen miles until the end of all this in-between. In Backravel, she might be able to turn some of her questions into answers.
She climbs back into the driver’s seat as her GPS reminds her, “Continue on AZ-85 for ten miles, then take the right exit onto Backravel Access Road.”
“Hey.” Beck shoves Riley’s shoulder. “Did you hear that?”
Riley groans and turns over in her seat. Her eyes open a sliver, irises too glassy to be fully awake. “We’re there?”
“Fifteen more minutes.”
Riley blinks once, twice, and then she’s asleep again. She looks like a fawn when she sleeps like this, too-long limbs all folded into each other, chin tucked against her chest. The thrill of arrival doesn’t electrify Riley like it does Beck. But whatever fears Beck might have about this trip into the unknown—about what they’ll find in Backravel—it’s too late to turn back now. She grips the Honda’s steering wheel, swallows the last of her lukewarm energy drink, and she drives.
She doesn’t think about the letter in the glove box, hidden tenderly under the car’s registration and an expired can of pepper spray. She doesn’t think about the loopy, disjointed handwriting on the envelope, unmistakably written by Ellery Birsching’s shaking hand. She doesn’t think about how her mother wrote a letter from beyond the grave.
Beck Birsching doesn’t think, she just drives.
* * *
The place they pull up to is a squat little house in a cluttered row of squat little houses. SYCAMORE LANE, the sign at the start of the street reads despite the lack of sycamores—or trees in general—in sight. The house is all faded white siding, capped with a slate gray roof missing a handful of tiles. A paint-chipped trellis stands woven with white flowers and scraggly green leaves that seem out of place among the red rock. A bike is tilted against the front porch, red dust caked into the underbelly of its tires. The sky behind the house is like pool water at dusk, cool and fluid and shimmering in the near-dark.
The whole neighborhood looks like any other neighborhood back in Everett. Beck’s not sure what she expected. Something more sinister, maybe. Something clearly diabolical enough to explain her mother’s fascination with this town. But this—an entirely ordinary street in a maze of other perfectly ordinary streets—makes too much sense. Ellery Birsching was never interested in the obvious thing.
There’s virtually no information on Backravel online. A quick search will tell you that it’s an unincorporated community in southwest Arizona, but there isn’t a picture in sight. In Ellery Birsching’s notes, though, Backravel is documented in aching detail. Essays, sketches, anecdotes describing rusting military infrastructures and great desert mountains, a lonely mansion on a deep red plateau. Maybe Beck expected to see the whole of it the moment she crossed into Backravel, but there’s none of that on Sycamore Lane. It’s just a handful of houses and the quiet.
Wind tunnels down the black road, gently rocking the Honda. The car hums and hums and then, with an unceremonious yank on the keys, it falls silent. The engine gurgles softly in the quiet, finally allowed to rest, and Beck closes her eyes. She shakes Riley’s knee until her sister stirs, pale face washed in tangerine light.
“Okay,” Beck says. “We have to call Dad.”
Riley presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. Through a yawn, she asks, “Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
“Now?”
Beck eyes the front door of the house. “Before we go in, probably. Just in case we’re too busy later.”
“Ugh.” Riley pops her neck. “You want me to do it?”
This isn’t just a phone call; it’s a diversion. In two weeks, they’re supposed to be arriving in Texas for their permanent stay. They’re supposed to dive headfirst into their father’s world of suburban barbecues and family movie nights and total, complete normalcy. It’ll be an entirely new world, and the idea of it leaves a bitter taste in Beck’s mouth. This was why he left them, after all. Just like everyone else that fluttered in and out of their world, their father got tired of Ellery Birsching’s Backravel obsession. He wanted things to be normal. And while, as their new sole guardian, he might be okay with a two-week, supervised trip to Palm Springs before the permanent move, he certainly wouldn’t be okay with a two-week trip to the town that caused all their troubles. If he knew where they were parked right now, he would be on the next flight to Arizona.
They have to get this call just right, have to place this first lie delicately, or this trip will be over before it’s even started.
Beck chews the inside of her cheek. Riley’s offer is kind, but they both know it’ll be Beck making the call. As long as they’ve been alive, it’s been Beck doing the dirty work while Riley provides the emotional support. Riley is straightforward, logical, direct and cool and bright as a Washington morning in the fall. And Beck is the slippery one who knows the right words to say and when to stay quiet. She’s the one who smooths things out like a palm over wet clay. She can explain away parking tickets and detention notes and calls from school about cigarettes in her locker.
Riley offers to help because she’s a good sister who doesn’t want to seem useless, but there’s no question about who will cast the first lie in their big charade.
“I got it,” Beck says. She pulls her phone from the cupholder by the charging cable, catching a bit of sunlight in the cracks of her screen. She taps out her father’s phone number from memory. She should have it saved by now. She turns to Riley. “Just talk when I tell you.”
The phone rings for only a second, then static crackles on the other end of the line.
“Touchdown?”
Their father’s voice is too light, like he’s on the brink of laughter. This is how he’s always been, like everything amuses him. Their mother’s funeral was the most somber Beck ever saw him, and even then, he was the most content person in the room. Beck swallows and tries her best not to resent him for it.
“Just landed a few minutes ago,” Beck says. “LAX is crazy. We can’t talk much. Gabby’s grandma will be here to pick us up in a second.”
“Nice, nice, nice…” Their father clears his throat. “Well, I won’t keep you. Put your sister on the phone.”
Riley looks at Beck with the kind of eyes a deer makes seconds before it’s roadkill. Beck slides the phone onto Riley’s palm and mouths, Just be cool.
“Hey, Dad,” Riley says, and Beck thanks whatever higher power exists that they aren’t on a video call. Riley’s put-on smile is skewed so happy she looks manic. Lying to their father might be part of the assignment, but it’s clear how deeply Riley hates it. “How’s Julie?”
A pause.
“She’s just watching the new Bachelor episode. She uh … okay, yeah. She wants to know if you already saw it.”
“Not yet,” Beck cuts in before Riley can fumble her way through another answer. Riley sinks back in her seat, relieved. “We’ll catch up when we get to the house. Tell Julie no spoilers.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Oh, Dad, that’s Gabby’s grandma pulling up,” Beck says. She waits a moment, then says, “We gotta go, but we’ll call you later.”
“Alright. Love you girls.”
“Love you, too,” Beck says while Riley gives a half-hearted, “Bye.”
When the call ends, they’re left in the quiet. Beck stares at Riley and Riley stares back. They’re in it, now. They’ve committed to this trip and this lie and there’s no worming their way out of it. It’s just Beck and Riley alone in the middle of the desert. After all their years of treading water to stay afloat, this is what they’ve got left.
Beck reaches into her back pocket and slides her thumbnail over the rubber-banded bills there. Seven hundred dollars, minus the cost of gas in Southern California. Even less once they pay for their room. She tries to swallow the lump of panic in her throat because it’s not just about the money. Now they need pictures of their trip, phone calls to their father, stories from a trip to Palm Springs they never took. Now, Beck has to untangle the massive knot that was Ellery Birsching before this fever dream ends.
Someone knocks on the driver’s side window.
Beck scrambles back in her seat, nearly crushing Riley in the process. A man stands outside the window, stooped low with his hand cupped at his brow so he can see inside. His blue-checkered shirt is tucked into the waist of khaki slacks, fastened in place by a thick brown belt. He looks like he’s stepped directly out of a cubicle, not the middle of an empty highway in an even emptier desert. Beck isn’t sure if she’s more shocked by what he looks like or the fact that he’s the first non-Riley face she’s seen in hours. She adjusts her glasses, forcing her tired eyes to focus.
The man motions for Beck to roll down her window. She does, just a crack, and a stream of dry wind slips through. The man straightens. He pulls his phone from his pocket, checks the screen, and smiles.
“Rebecca Birsching?” he asks.
Beck stares a moment too long. Her full name sounds crooked coming from anyone but family, like the vaguely familiar name of a stranger. The last time she heard it was at the funeral, echoing off white walls punctuated with golden flower-shaped sconces, rickety folding chairs in neat rows, the urn at the end of a too-long aisle. Rebecca Birsching, the pastor said tenderly, would like to speak.
She bites the inside of her cheek, dragging herself back to the present. She can’t think about the funeral, can’t go back there yet. Not right now.
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