It looked like his hitchhiking days were over.

Kristen was the real loss, though. Not having The Power was a mere inconvenience. Kristen’s death was a tragedy.

They drove toward Phoenix, a series of dying desert towns bleeding into each other, empty cinder-block buildings in the open spaces between them making it difficult to determine where one town ended and the next began.

Through the side window, Mark saw a rock shop. Faded pink paint on a dirty window read: SALE!! AGATES! JASPER! GEODES! Tireless cars sat on blocks next to the store, their exposed axles rusted and sagging, wrecked corners of their bodies twisted into unrecognizability.

A white cross near a burned section of desert memorialized some driver’s death, and Mark wondered who was taking care of Kristen’s burial arrangements. Would Billings still be there? he wondered. Would the assistant have remained even after their parents’ deaths? Would Kristen have kept him on or would she have let him go? Did Kristen have any friends? Maybe they were seeing to the arrangements.

He just hoped he didn’t arrive too late. He wanted to be there for the funeral. And if there was no funeral, if the county or some social services agency simply provided her with a generic burial, he wanted to make sure that that was rectified, that she was put to rest with dignity.

Kristen deserved at least that much.

Mark closed his eyes, lulled by the heat and silence and the motion of the Land Rover. In his mind, he saw Kristen as she’d looked the last time he’d seen her: shorts and a tank top, hair long and straight and blond, sunlight glinting off her braces, tears in her eyes, the house behind her.

The house.

He did not think of the house too often, tried not to think of it at all. He remembered as a child watching Giant on television and being freaked out by how eerily similar the gothic ranch house was to that of his own family. Like the structure in the movie, their home sat alone on a flat desert plain, an island of darkness in an endless sea of tan. Two and a half stories with a wraparound porch, the house, with its deep gray-black wood and permanently shuttered windows, its gables and wrought-iron weathervanes, gave the impression of age, permanence, and old-fashioned authoritarian power. It was an intimidating building, and it had always frightened his friends from school, had always been the recipient of wide-eyed stares and hesitant approaches, treated with trepidation and barely concealed fear—unlike the house in the movie, which, despite its appearance, had been treated as though it was not unusual, not out of the ordinary, yet another average ranch building.