Tonight, though, she couldn’t contain herself. “Please, baby,” she whispered, feeling, again, the pull of her womb.

His eyes swam away from her like two dark fish. “We got to get out of here before we even consider it, Iz,” he said with finality. They’d been saving to move to Los Angeles and were getting close. It would be a new start, a real escape from their parents and the sea shored with bones. A better place to raise a child, too, though he hadn’t made any promises about this. Maybe she could apply to UCLA again, he’d suggested. It wasn’t too late. She’d gotten a full-ride scholarship but hadn’t taken it, hadn’t wanted to leave Cyrus.

One night, just before the caul of sleep enveloped him, he’d said, “You’ll do massage and I’ll work construction while we go to school, and we’ll save up and eventually get a little house. Hike and read on our days off. Go to libraries and estate sales and see bands. Learn to surf.”

“To swim.” She’d laughed. Desert child to the bone, she’d never learned. The few pools in town were empty like the one in Seth and Nephy’s backyard.

◆◆◆

Izzy and Cyrus were sixteen and seventeen when they took his adoptive-brother Joe’s motorcycle to Los Angeles for the first time. Joe had pieced it together from boneyard bits, but the bike was ride-able, at least.

“‘To live and die in LA,’” Cyrus had said, quoting the song.

She thought he was teasing her when he first told her they were going: “We need a yellow convertible.” Like the singer in the video who’d taken a total of nine bullets over the course of his short life. “But you’ll have to settle for the Rat Bike. With no tunes, except yours truly.”

“Cyrus in the house,” she said.

He had surprised her at her job at the sandwich shop, come up behind her so that she jumped, pressed his fingers into her rib cage, grazing the underside of her breasts. “We’re going. I’m taking you. Tonight.”

“What?” she threw her arms around him, pressed her damp cheek to his—they stuck and separated with a light suction. His laugh bestowed her with the gift of white teeth, gold crowns.

She didn’t plan on telling her parents, Larry and Leanne, she was leaving. Just grabbed a backpack, threw in some extra underwear, a bar of soap, and sunscreen.

“Where are you going?” Leanne shouted, coming up the path with the laundry as Izzy jumped out of the Airstream trailer that smelled even more than usual of the resinous, varnish-like creosote.

“Camping,” she said. “With friends.” Her boots scuffed up clouds of dirt as she ran. The sky looked different, just as big but much less empty somehow, clouds silvering with a rain that would not fall.

Strands of Izzy’s hair, emerging from under the helmet Cyrus had carefully strapped beneath her chin, tangled in the gusts as they rode north and west.

He’d told her about the carob pods that smelled sweet as chocolate when they cracked under your feet, the acacia and jacaranda trees with pink, purple, or yellow flowers. How petals covered the sidewalks so they looked painted. He hadn’t been wrong.