THERE WAS ONLY one hole in the bedroom ceiling, which made it the only room in the house that wasn’t sheeted with a thick layer of sand. While Ayala wouldn’t come out of the room at all, I sometimes snuck into the living room for a change of scenery. I’d shift the buckets around, grab a bite to eat, but that’s pretty much it. We spent most of our time in bed, side by side. The air got thicker, the room darker, leaving me and Ayala no choice but to get closer to each other. To burrow into one another until our sweat mingled. I told her I sometimes imagined our bodies as blocks of ice cooling each other off.

“That’s a lovely way of thinking about it, but the reality of it is still super gross,” she said and laughed. And she was right.

The crampedness edged out the romance, and neither of us was able to hide the particularities of the body. Wrinkles on her chin and hairs on my cheeks, calluses on the bottoms of her feet, a swollen scar on my back.

“Well, are you hopping on the next bus?” she’d ask every now and then, and I’d tell her I didn’t know and hugged her tightly, hoping she wouldn’t notice how tired I was getting of living in such a confined space. Of the heat and the sand. But she did.

One night, waking up drenched in sweat, I saw her reading The Catcher in the Rye. I told her I had read it in high school and kind of liked it. She stopped reading and looked at me suspiciously.

“Then what’s the name of the girl who kept all her kings in the back row?” she asked. I had no idea what she was talking about. I told her I couldn’t remember, that I had read it a long time ago. She sighed irritably and said I was just trying to sound smart.

I told her everything I remembered about Holden, about his journey through New York. She wasn’t the least bit impressed. She snorted, said I probably hadn’t even given any thought to what happened to Holden after the story ended.

“How am I supposed to know what happened to him?” I mumbled, and before I could say anything else, she cut me off. “He commits suicide,” she said decisively.

“I don’t think that was in the book,” I replied hesitantly.

“Of course it wasn’t.” She said that because the author didn’t have the heart to kill him off or admit him to some loony bin for the rest of his life, she was pretty sure that’s what happened. “Someone like Holden doesn’t grow up to be a psychological engineer or something like that,” she teased.