Death Valley

A 41-year-old novelist with an addiction drives from Los Angeles to a small California desert town, hoping the trip will relieve the persistent emptiness she has carried for months. Five months earlier, her father was critically injured in a car accident and has been in the ICU ever since, cycling through unconsciousness, surgeries, resuscitations, and setbacks. She chose this town because it is the fictional home of a cartoon bighorn sheep she and her father both loved during her childhood. She checks into a Best Western under the pretext of researching her third novel's desert section but is really fleeing the weight of her father's crisis.

At the motel, she is charmed by Jethra, the warm front desk clerk with a Bulgarian accent. Alone in her room, the narrator reflects on visiting her father during his first stretch of unconsciousness, when she and her younger sister read him children's books and sang while the ventilator kept rhythm. She built a fantasy of the warm, sarcastic father from before his depression, but when he regained consciousness, he refused to make eye contact, and before she could bridge the distance, he fell unconscious again.

That evening, her mother texts that her father is awake. The narrator video-calls the ICU and sees his skeletal, mustache-less face; he mouths "Hi," moving her deeply, but the noisy restaurant prevents conversation. Later, she FaceTimes her husband, who has lived with a debilitating, undiagnosed illness for nine years, leaving him largely housebound with persistent fever, fatigue, and gastrointestinal symptoms. A new breathing pattern enrages her, though the rage brings guilt. She does not desire him but wants to want him, and silently prays a phrase from a Reddit forum, asking god to help her see her husband as god does.

Her novel-in-progress mirrors her marriage: A wife coping with her husband's mystery illness runs away with a surfer to a California desert music festival, where something triggers the realization that love is sometimes a verb rather than a feeling. The narrator does not yet know what will cause this transformation.

She drives to a trail Jethra recommended, listening to an audiobook by a psychic she nicknames Carmela. Carmela encourages listeners to develop a "spirit language," a personal system of signs or messages from the dead. On the trail, the narrator discovers a giant cactus, apparently a Saguaro, impossibly growing wild in California. It blocks the entire path, with a long wound down its trunk resembling a sideways smile. She pushes her whole body through the opening into a hollow, cathedral-like chamber.

Inside, she hums "Sh-Boom" by the Chords, her father's favorite song, and notices a small child playing in the sand with a red bucket. She recognizes the child as her father at age five, from a family photo. Love floods her, but the child does not need her; he waves shyly and returns to his sandcastle. She realizes he has always been a self-contained universe, and to wish otherwise is to ask him to be someone else. They sit in parallel play until she falls asleep. When she wakes, the child is gone.

The narrator decides the cactus vision will become her novel's inciting incident. She returns the next morning with collected rocks she has begun talking to, assigning them personalities: Pink, Gray, The Egg, and Door. Inside the cactus, her father appears as a 13-year-old in bar mitzvah clothes, playing Bob Dylan on a record player. They smoke cigarettes lit with matches from her father's army jacket. A wheezing toddler appears: her husband as a small child, coughing and frightened. She rocks the boy until the coughing stops, then keeps rocking until she is alone.

Conflict intensifies. The narrator and her husband argue about empathy versus compassion. Her father, reached by video call, mouths "GO RELAX." Distraught, she confides in Jethra, who shares her own story: Her father, Viktor, was a prideful man who refused to let her see him weakened in the hospital. Jethra explains the five love languages and suggests the narrator's father expresses love through acts of service, protecting her by telling her to relax. The narrator recognizes the parallel.

At dawn, she checks out. Zip, the young night clerk, reveals he hiked the trail and found no giant cactus. She drives east toward the trail instead of west toward Los Angeles and finds the cactus completely gone, though her rocks remain. She ventures into unfamiliar terrain, takes a wrong path, and becomes lost. Her phone loses service. She falls climbing a rocky hill, injures her ankle, and slides down the mountainside bleeding.

Over the following day and night, she rations her last water, builds a fire, and sleeps on the ground in her father's army jacket. She dreams of the cartoon bighorn sheep, who tells her the trick to not being afraid is not to resist fear. She nearly eats a possibly poisonous flower but lets it drop, realizing she wants to live. She tracks desert cottontail rabbits to a prickly pear cactus and eats its flesh, burning off spikes with her last match. The moisture sustains her, but ingested spines cause severe stomach pain. In imagined exchanges, the rabbits tell her suffering does not justify unkindness, and she reflects on how her husband has never once treated her unkindly despite years of illness.

Near collapse on the mountainside at night, the narrator sees a yellow-bellied bird with a mustache-like streak on its beak. She feels calm and knows intuitively that the bird is her father. The bird extends a wing and carries her up the mountainside, responding to her questions not with words but with energy. She understands, through Jethra's lesson, that her father was not dismissing her in the hospital but telling her she was already doing everything she could.

The bird deposits her near the trail, where the cactus has reappeared, its wound a silent-scream O shape. Inside, she senses her father holding her, and words flood her mind: "Wounded little bird. Firstborn. Why would you poke yourself with a stick? An injury is not a defect" (206). She understands there is nothing she can say to make him love her more or less. When the vision fades, she finds a shrunken body beside her, her father the dead, and buries it. Her tears fill the grave and become an underground river. In the river, she sees her husband young and healthy, easily desirable. But she hears distant voices and envisions her husband the sick alone in a store, examining a candle. His sigh echoes through the desert, and for the first time, it feels sweet rather than frightening.

She crawls out of the cactus, unable to speak, and throws her rock Gray at Zip's neck. He turns and sees her collapsed on the ground.

The narrator wakes in a hospital room, her ankle in an Aircast. Her mother reveals her father is still alive; the vision of his death was a projection of her own grief. Her husband had called her mother after two days without texts, and Jethra found the narrator's car at the trailhead and convinced Zip to search the trail. On a borrowed iPad, the narrator FaceTimes her father, conscious and with his mustache growing back. He reassures her: "You are my firstborn" (223).

That night, alone in her hospital room, the narrator converses with a dying rose in a bedside vase. The rose tells her not to fear the "unbecoming," that it will crumble but become part of everything. She articulates her deepest terror: Life keeps going, and also it will end, and also it keeps going. When her husband arrives, she notices his faint wet inhale has returned but without the exhale that once enraged her. She invites him into the narrow bed. They lie together watching the starry sky reflected in the vase of roses. She fears being pulled into the vortex of his illness, but they are breathing. They are not sinking. She asks, "Like this?" He replies, "Like this." They lie still together. Nobody dies.