Years would pass before she found her true escape: in the home of Cyrus’s arms.

◆◆◆

Only a few trick-or-treaters came by that night. Izzy and Cyrus answered the door in elaborate ghost costumes she’d sewn from panels of tulle, and they handed out Izzy’s homemade chocolates.

One little girl, dressed as the front end of a cow, pointed to Izzy and Cyrus and said, “You aren’t dead!” and they both laughed; kids always made them laugh, although the child’s words chilled Izzy, too. Maybe she was morbid, but ever since childhood the mention of death sent her down a path of dark ruminations. Only Cyrus’s touch could snap her out of it.

Perhaps he really could read her thoughts now because he pointed to the cow’s swaying rump, operated by a second child, to make Izzy laugh. She wondered how the back of the cow could see? Clutching blindly to the little girl’s waist, trusting her to lead him.

◆◆◆

After the trick-or-treaters were gone, the candles and smudge stick burned out. Izzy and Cyrus lay on the futon, her head on the hill of his chest, his hands in her river of hair—the rush in a storm drain after a drought. Yard, Izzy’s three-legged rescue tortoise, kept watch with somnolent eyes. She had read that you couldn’t pick up a tortoise in the wild—it would void its bladder in fear and might die of dehydration—so when she’d found Yard, she’d contacted Animal Rescue and they’d come to get him. Once he’d been treated, she officially adopted him and called him Yard because of his three feet. It still made Cyrus laugh whenever she said the name.

The waning gibbous moon lay vanquished by clouds, and the shack hunkered far enough from the highway that no lights shone in through the repurposed windows. Only cold burned the glass. In the morning there would be jackrabbits and roadrunners and maybe a coyote or a deer, Izzy thought. Maybe, if their love-magic was strong enough, and the clouds gave way in the night, there’d be rain. Maybe a rainbow.

But now there was only silence and the creature comforts of each other’s bodies.

He kissed her deep—a lotus opened within. Nelumbo nucifera. Water lily. Its seeds lived for years, she’d read. Up to one thousand three hundred years. She found herself thinking of Nephy’s belly in the white tank top the other day, her fuller breasts. It was possible that Cyrus had noticed, but it was hard to tell behind his sunglasses. No, Izzy told herself. Cyrus never really looked at other women that way; he only looked that way at Izzy, and usually when they were alone.

“Let’s have a baby,” Izzy blurted. Most of the time she repressed the thought, but it was as if the beating of her heart had forced the words out of her.

“No, baby,” he said, voice firm, and reached for a condom.

Ever since the miscarriage years ago, he avoided the subject when she brought it up. There was a list of reasons why he didn’t want a child: the early loss, their finances, the Salton Sea, the state of the world. Sometimes she wondered if it had mostly to do with their own broken pasts, some perception of her as unstable, unfit to be a mother, but he never admitted to this.