The salt flats took our breath away, weather-bleached and lunar along their crusted shores. They looked like they shouldn’t actually exist but then they did, for miles and miles. It was like the world had been dipped in a vat of bleach. Tilly had seen them before, hitchhiking in a truck full of feed-lot chickens with a guy named Pat. He had an Adam’s apple that stuck out like a doorknob, and he liked cracking dirty jokes to see if she’d flinch. She’d hated the sound of his voice everywhere, and the gusts of chicken-shit stink. Now she pounded the dashboard with her fist: “I knew they could be this good!”

I imagined how those years must have felt to Lucy—knowing Tilly was out there, not knowing where she’d gone. She’d made her daughter’s hurt young body, the one so prone to these abandonments. She’d seen that body ache. She’d known it well.

*   *   *

At a rest stop, we saw a trucker rattling vending machines with his fists, scratching his own arms in fits of panicked flurry. Tilly recognized what he’d done to his teeth and skin. “He’s probably tweaking,” she said. We watched him suck his open sores. She whispered in my ear, “He wants to get the last meth from his blood.”

We stopped at a motel that took the desert wind like a beating. The air moaned past our windows and rattled their glass. The lobby walls were hung with oil paintings of sailboats, windmills, puppies in cowboy hats. I skipped dinner and slipped into bed with an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes. I still enjoyed this sometimes—going to sleep hungry so I’d wake up feeling light, falling asleep in the foul smoke.

The phone rang once, twice. I picked it up. The line was dead.

A few moments later, it rang again. I picked it up: no one. It was either a wrong number, or else it was Tilly. She was sleeping in a room downstairs.

Her door was unlocked. I pushed it open. “Hey,” I said. “Did you call?”

There wasn’t any answer. The room was perfectly untouched except for a paper bag crumpled at the foot of the bed.

“You don’t have to stay,” Tilly called from the bathroom. “I’m feeling better.”

“Better?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

I heard the toilet flush. The long mirror behind the television showed a sliver of the bathroom. Tilly was kneeling in front of the toilet. I walked to the bathroom threshold but couldn’t force myself farther. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean for you to see this.”

It smelled like vomit and corporate jasmine. She’d sprayed an air freshener. The odor reminded me of Lucy—not how she usually smelled but how she’d smelled one time when my mother took us out to dinner. “I know Dora’s used to fancy restaurants,” she’d said. I guessed it had been a while since she’d seen one. Her eye shadow had been absurd that night, too dark, her floral dress bright and starched around her shoulders.