When we were young, the water was clear and fresh. My brother and I would swim in the shallows, where a rainbow of polished round stones shone up at us like a thousand eyes. We’d watch the yachts bob across the sparkling water and listen to the music carrying over the waves. Alden celebrated the popularization of the bikini while I cupped my hands in the water, knowing that somewhere along the shore, the Beach Boys were swimming. While our mother cleaned resort rooms, we spent our days in an endless vacation.

We thought the sea was clear because it was young—unmarked by the wear of anxiety that had weathered our mother’s face. We thought it was beautiful. But a young sea has a childlike temper, and one night it swallowed the towns and the desert around it. It had rained for a week straight and the swollen farm canals flushed their agua negra into the Salton Sea and the sea heaved. Some tourists ran for the boats, and some ran for the surrounding hills. Alden and I perched on the roof of the resort. Mother stayed below, going from room to room—cleaning, as if in competition with the scouring wave.

When the water withdrew back into its bed—then lower and lower still, till it shrank back to a fraction of its former self—the people withdrew as well, each drifting further from the other till nothing was left but the broken bits of resort towns and those of us willing to stay, and those who had died in the water. Like mother, her apron a shroud, a duster bouquet of wet feathers in her stiff fingers. The receding water had pulled her from the hotel, as if calling her to the beach to play. Her hair had caught on the wrought iron fence and tied her there. I spent hours untying those dark, wet knots. I wouldn’t let Alden cut them.

When the tourists left, the workers followed—their white service jackets the same no matter where they went. And then the fishermen left—back to the ocean coast, to happier shores where the fish didn’t tie your gut in knots. To ancient oceans with mature tides, not the fickle temper of this inland sea.

The town was nearly deserted. The big hotels sat like empty seashells, still stinking of the life that used to be there, pieces beginning to break off around the edges. The news declared that the pleasure towns had turned to ghost towns. We supposed, then, that we were ghosts. And we haunted our old resort, stretching across luxury linens in the presidential suite. We needed that familiar shore, needed to be near the cluster of concrete crosses set back from the water in the tall, dry grass. Near where mother lay safe under the desert. I dug my roots deep into the rocks.