Clementine skins peppered the desert sand on the edge of I25. There was a broke down truck and all Hell. Lance’s fingernails were white and clogged with rind. He peeled and popped slices into his mouth, gritty citrus with each bite. 

“What do you say, Lance?” Harry asked, waist deep under the truck’s open hood. Lance had another mouthful of orange. 

Harry came out, and wiped his forehead with his arm. Wet, silver hair shimmered under new light, showcasing Harry’s heavy balding. It was a light Lance hadn’t seen him in before. “I appreciate all your help, kid,” Harry said. 

“What do you want me to do?” 

“Not a thing.” 

Lance tossed the rest of his clementine into the desert. 

“How’s that orange?” Harry asked, ducking his head back down into the engine. “It’s good,” Lance suggested. 

“Real good, I reckon. I told you I knew how to grow ‘em. Had that tree for over twenty years now. You even twenty years old, Lance?” 

“Yes,” Lance said. 

But, of course, he wasn’t. If he was a little older, then maybe he’d know better. The way it was, he was just a stupid kid dating Harry’s daughter, Harry’s daughter, who’d been out of the psych ward for a few months, and was just now realizing she may not want to be on her own. Lance figured he would have realized this sooner. But Lance wasn’t like Grier. He couldn’t see himself anything like her at all.

“Tell you what,” Harry said, peeking again his old head out of the shadow under the hood. “Get under the seat. Should be some coolant there. Bring it up here, will ya?” Lance took leave from his station guarding the desert. He stuck his front into the car and dug around under the seat. This isn’t something he would normally do. This was all new to Lance. He’d never known someone who tried to kill themselves before. He pulled out handfuls of junk from under the passenger’s seat. 

“You find it yet?” Harry pestered. 

But Harry wasn’t thinking about Lance. The overheating stop was a reprieve, if anything, from what was coming next. Grier was still at her dorm in Las Cruces. Would a better father have made her come home no matter the protests? Would he have stayed longer? Would a better father have a daughter like this at all? 

Lance appeared around the front of the car. He handed the old bottle to Harry, who took it, looked at it, double checked, and went back under the hood. 

“Give it some time to set. Another thirty and we’ll be on the road.” 

Lance was already away from the car, looking for his clementine. But it was nowhere. Just thick brush of New Mexico wildflowers, unblossomed and hiding. He was constantly impressed with how quickly the desert devoured. 

Just like Harry said, they were back on the road in thirty minutes. Harry didn’t use the radio, and Lance spent the time staring out the window watching it all pass by. First, small buildings, then, whole neighborhoods, then, the skip up to the highway. Before he noticed, they were out of Albuquerque, somewhere along the way. He wasn’t sure where, exactly, but it must have been somewhere.

Lance looked around. There were no road signs or power lines. No houses. No other cars. This must have been what it looked like before people. Except for the road, of course. This must be what it will look like when there are no more people. 

Lance thought of the little critters moving through the desert. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there from his biology classes. He thought of the wild ocotillo. The white-tails that fed from it. The cougars that hunted the deer. He had been hunting once, Lance. He had been hunting with his dad up north, but he hadn’t shot anything. Grier did not go with him. She said she felt bad for the animals. Lance wasn’t sure how he felt about the animals. He didn’t shoot anything, but he was sure that he could, had he been given the chance. 

When the deer or cougars die out in the desert, their bodies are swarmed by vultures. Lance looked hard out the window, but couldn’t see anything overhead. There’s something out there, he decided, behind all the native brush and hard rock. 

He was still alive. He must be somewhere, and not nowhere. 

This was the first time Lance had spent any sort of extended period with Harry, with or without Grier. It was weird, Lance thought, as if they might have something in common if they talked about it. Or, maybe he feared they’d be so alike. Or, maybe he was wrong, and really feared having nothing in common with the old man. 

It wasn’t easy to start a conversation with Harry. The old man liked things the way he liked them, and Lance felt that wasn’t always properly communicated. Usually, he had Grier to harshen the blow. Not that Harry was a blow, but he was intense. His presence, intense. He stood like a mesquite, skinny. Strong. Red, windburned skin, but unphased by a storm. He had eyes that went somewhere. Even when he looked at you, his eyes were somewhere else. Or, at least Lance thought.

But seeing Harry in the harsh New Mexico sun this morning, Lance thought he looked more and more like an old man, withering, and almost not standing or staring at all. Lance thought maybe Harry thought it too. Knew it. Knew he was a dying man of a dying kind, rocklike and somewhere else. 

Lance thought he knew what Harry might have been feeling too. That, like Lance, they were driving, dying, out of time, and hopeless. 

But Lance was wrong. He didn’t know anything. He’s just a stupid kid. Even lied about his being twenty. Not even twenty, and thinks he knows something about being nothing. And nothing at all after that. 

Harry was the one to break the silence. 

“I don’t much like you,” he said. 

Lance jumped in his seat. Not at Harry or what he said, but because he had forgotten that there was anyone else in the truck, that he was sitting in Harry’s truck, not speeding down an empty highway by himself and driven by nothing. 

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Harry said. 

“I was just startled. That’s all.” 

“Relax, kid.” Harry said. He laughed. “I’m not going to kill you or anything.”  It had crossed Lance’s mind. 

“You know where we are?” Harry motioned for Lance. “Look out over there.” Lance put his head to the window glass. The rumbling of the engine blurred his vision, but he was still able to make out the exit sign for Truth or Consequences.

“ToC,” Harry said. “You know what that means? It means you better tell the truth. Or else…” 

Lance nodded his head. 

“You face the consequences.” Harry said. 

“Right, okay.” 

“Lance kept his gaze out the window. Harry looked at him. Lance’s hair was cut just below his eyebrows. It used to hang in his eyes, Harry realized. Just like Grier’s, before she cut it, too. He didn’t think about it too hard. Went back to driving, his two hands always on the wheel. 

“It doesn’t really mean that,” Harry explained. “It's named after an old radio program.” “Really,” humored Lance. He looked back at Harry. “What was it about?” “How should I know?” Harry said. 

“Lance debated turning back to the window, expecting the conversation was over. “Grier and I used to make it a game when we’d drive past here. Whenever you see the sign, you have to say a truth. An honest truth. Or else.” 

“Or else, what?” Lance poked. 

“Consequences. Have you been listening?” 

“Yes sir.” 

Harry watched their car roll down the highway, swallowing the yellow lines as they drove. 

“Grier and I used to play this all the time. Did you know her mom used to live in Las Cruces.” 

“I think so.”

“We used to come down here every weekend. I’d take her after school, and pick her up Sunday. After dinner. She would fall asleep in that very seat. Her head up against the window. Leave a mark.” 

Lance looked at the window. There was a firm imprint of his head where he’d looked out the window. These fingerprints are not forever. 

“Is that why she went to Las Cruces? To be closer to her mom?” 

“No, her mom moved. I don’t know where she is. I thought Grier went there because her friends were going there.” 

“Our friends all go to UNM. Like me.” 

Harry didn’t say anything. He tried hard not to think about this either. 

“So, you really don’t like me?” 

Harry was glad for the interruption. 

“I see a lot of myself in you sometimes, Lance. And I don’t like it. Don’t like it one bit. You worry me. I worry about your decision making. I worry you don’t really know yourself all that well. I worry you’re going to do something, something that I would do, and no one would blame you for doing, but still something horrible. And with Grier…I think you can be good for her. I think you can be good for her in ways I can’t. She…she knows you differently. So, if you’re going to do this thing, this thing I know you’re going to do, just think about it some more.” 

Lance looked out the front windshield. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with this. Something in his stomach moved in a new way. 

“Your turn,” Harry said. 

“What?”

“It’s your turn.” 

The two looked at each other for a moment. 

“Tell a truth,” Harry finally said. “Christ.” 

Lance thought for a moment. 

“I don’t know,” he said. 

“It doesn’t have to be about me. It can just be a truth. Any truth.” 

“Well,” Lance thought out loud. “I think I’m scared to see Grier. I don’t really know what to expect. No one I know has ever tried to kill themselves before.” 

Harry pondered this. 

“I suppose it doesn't really matter what you expect, or even what’s real. As long as you do the right thing when you get there.” 

“What’s the right thing?” 

“Whatever it is that’s right.” 

Lance thought Harry gave out advice like an old man, where it wasn’t really advice at all. 

When Grier was admitted, Harry spent the whole time in Las Cruces. He saw her every day during visiting hours, whispered things to her, confirmed things to her, snuck her candy bars, and hoped she ate. He did everything he thought he could possibly do. 

But what was there to do? 

Grier spent two weeks without yard privileges. She sat on her bed, beneath a shatterproof window looking neither at a present, nor future that could exist. She remembered arrival. Sarah had taken her in her Corolla. The entrance to the hospital was like a hotel, with one of those carriage awnings that made it seem like she was somewhere far away from here, anywhere but here. 

Doctors and nurses all asked her questions. No, she supposed there wasn’t a real reason for doing what she did. Not any good one she could think of, anyway. She told them she felt completely, utterly nothing. That she was crippled by her thoughts. They said that is not any way to feel. 

She called it unfeeling. 

Grier met Sarah the day she moved in. They were paired through one of those online roommate services provided by the university. She didn’t know Sarah well, other than that she had friends at the college who lived in Mesilla. Grier had never known anyone who lived in Mesilla before. 

“It’s like a whole other word here,” Grier told Sarah. 

“My friend drove me,” Grier said to the doctor during her admittance. “I don’t know anything else about her.” 

Everything was so heavy in the ward. The furniture was all weighed down with sand so that patients could not throw them in a fit. How anyone could move at all was beyond Grier. She clutched her cup of water, and thought about how cold it was, no matter how many blankets they gave to her. Harry visited, yes. He visited every day, and for as long as he was allowed. They would sit in the common area, or, sometimes, a private room. Grier remembers him there. He would talk. Say things she couldn’t remember. When she would see him, she would go red, and become teary again, no matter how long she’d cried that day alone. Harry never once thought that she might be beyond humiliated to see him there, for him to see her there, to be associated with such a place at all. 

Grier was discharged with two new prescriptions, and a therapy routine. Harry drove her back to the university. He told her she didn’t have to go back, that there’s no shame in coming home, and that she would always have a home with him. 

But of course there was shame. Shame she wasn’t strong enough yet to face. Unsure if she ever would be. For Grier, all of this meant more than the end. It meant coming back from the brink of the end, and everyone knowing you were standing at the end, and turning around, coming back because, for whatever reason, it was not the end yet. 

Lance felt like he was the last to know. He heard about Grier from her friends back home in Albuquerque. He thought at first that it was some kind of sick joke. They were confusing her with someone else. That wasn’t Grier. Grier wasn’t like that. But when he called Grier, he broke her down. All of it was true. That, yes, it happened. And, yes, she was sorry. And no, she didn’t need the bandages anymore. And the scars weren’t beautiful. They were ugly, and made in haste. Like desperation. And, no, she wouldn't be coming home. She was okay. She didn’t want him to visit. See her like this. 

It took another three months before she called Harry to come and get her. She didn’t ask Lance. She told him she’d be coming home soon. And not to worry. And please don’t ask. Harry is the one who asked Lance along. And Lance, too dumb to know any better. To dumb to wonder how, or why, or what any of it meant.

“I still don’t know if I believe it,” Lance said in the car, fifteen minutes from Las Cruces. He hadn't thought about saying it. Just said it. 

“You don’t need to believe it,” Harry said. “I’m not sure if she believes it herself. But she sure as Hell feels it.” 

Lance was sick of his passenger’s seat, his forced view of the west. He’d been to Las Cruces a handful of times in the past, but one thing he remembered was the Organs, hard mountains that broke their way through the desert sand, and stuck naked rock arms far as they’d go into the air. The whole drive was mountains, but not like these. 

Harry had the most wonderful view, if only he cared to look out his window. Lance resented this. That Harry got the Organs, and refused to look. That he, himself, was forced to stare at some sprouting hills of sand and dirty brush, lest he fall into another talk with the old man, accidentally provoking it. Lance resented a lot recently. He didn’t know why. 

The university was on the south side of the city. Compared to Albuquerque, it wasn’t much of a city. Lance looked out his window, and pitied everyone who lived here, mad at them for picking it, calling it home. Mad at himself for coming, for not knowing why, or what he’d say, or what he’d do. Mad at Grier for not telling him, for making his ask, demand, for it happening at all. 

The closer they were to her, the angrier he got. 

When they pulled into the parking lot, Lance flung his door open. He threw his head out, ready to vomit. 

Harry hung a moment in his seat. He turned the car off. Made his way around to where Lance was learning out the door. Passed the kid, and kept walking.

Grier was sitting on her unmade bed when they came in. The last thing she wanted was to come home, to show her face around these people, but there wasn’t much of a choice. She felt often that she didn’t have much of a choice. 

She didn’t choose to go to the psych ward. But Sarah found her in the bathroom, and made her go. “We’ll go together,” Sarah said. But Sarah left, and Grier was all alone again. When she imagined telling Lance, she imagined saying she spent the winter at a behavior hospital. No, it was not a big deal. Yes, it really wasn’t. 

That was the nice way of putting it, the way she wanted it tol, if it had to be told at all. And it did. 

But, she did not get to tell Lance the way she wanted. He’d called. Yelled. On the verge of tears, she imagined. 

And now he was here. Here in her dorm room, filled on one side with boxes, unlabeled, and poorly retaped. 

“Lance?” she said. He was standing there, right there, in the doorway. 

Even though her head was hung low in her hoodie, Lance could see that she’d cut her hair. He wondered if this was something she did before, or after. 

Harry passed between them. He went to her, wrapped his hands around her, said something. Then, he picked up a box, just one, and left. 

Lance was still standing in the doorway. He’d moved a step to let Harry through, but he was back. Standing. And staring. 

Grier remembered when they’d first gotten together in high school. In between classes, they’d run to each other. Embrace deeply and never long enough. To be separated was a nightmare. Now, the space in between them felt like it went on forever. Grier felt so much older. But, she thought, I am still young. Young, and dumb, and so much older. 

Lance looked at her like she was an animal in the zoo. 

“He’s always been more of a doer than a talker,” Grier said, wishing he’d stop looking at her like this. She’d meant to tell him sooner, she told herself, about what happened. The time just never seemed to come around. And when he finally called, came for her, she felt worse than ever about it, denying until there was no more room behind her, and even then denying. She didn’t need him, his saving. 

Or did she? 

She wasn’t sure of anything anymore. 

“You should have seen him in the car,” Lance said, wishing he wasn’t there. It all seemed different when they met. Things were easier then. Or, at least they seemed easier. But even still, this was wrong. Felt wrong. Wrong for him to be there, now, with everything that happened, how little they were talking. 

He thought maybe it wasn’t his place to bring it up. It should be her. But even then, what does he know about someone like her? It all felt so wrong now. So different. Forever changed, and forever worse because of it. 

If it was anything, Grier wished, anything but this. 

She got down from the bed. They inched closer. Not looking at each other. Talking past bodies. Away, deeper into the room. 

“Was it a bad drive?” 

“Your dad brought you some oranges from your tree.” 

“It’s not my tree.”

“I had one.” 

“You ate one of the oranges?” 

“Yeah,” Lance admitted. “I had a few bites. And then, I threw it into the desert.” “Why’d you do that?” 

“I don’t know. He gave me one.” 

They looked at each other, closer now than ever. Further than ever. 

“He’s such a dad,” Grier tried to laugh. 

“He’s your dad.” 

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s my dad.” 

Harry’s truck was packed with everything from the room. He was long gone. Lance was still too stupid to see. 

Lance and Grier wandered through the student lot, looking for her car. The sun was somewhere in the sky, neither rising nor setting, but present. It felt extra heavy on Lance’s shoulders. He chalked this up to moving all those boxes down a flight of stairs in who knew how many trips. What he’s refusing to acknowledge is this is the first time in months he’s spent any time with Grier, and now they are together, and hopelessly, desperately, alone. 

“I don’t understand how people forget where they park,” Lance said as they made their way through the open lot. He regretted it. 

“I haven’t driven in months. Give me a break.” 

They wandered through lanes of parked cars. Overhead, a crow rang out in two short bursts. Lance didn’t notice, but they were the loudest thing in the world to Grier. Some people think crows are harbingers of death. Others think they’re good luck, kind, and intelligent. Grier looked up at Lance, wondering so many things about him, and not being able to ask. She was not Lance. She was not just some idiot kid. She knew why he was here, even when she didn’t ask him to be here. She knew why Harry had brought him along. Still, Lance didn’t know. 

He wasn’t there for emotional support, or kindness, or patience. He wasn’t there because he loved her. He was there to drive the car. Because she couldn’t be trusted to drive herself. Grier swallowed. She thought Lance looked like the fool in this light. He couldn’t save her. She didn’t want him to. But even if she did, he couldn’t. He walked, dumb and sweating, through the lot. She felt a million things, and felt them all at once. 

They said nothing as they walked. And eventually, with enough nothing said, no more nothing in the world to say, they came across Grier’s car: an early 2000s, silver sedan. “It certainly has a way of blending in,’ Lance said, unsure if Grier could hear him at all. She stood behind the trunk, not moving. Lance walked up to her. She knew what had to happen, and neither made the first move. 

“Here,” she said eventually, not looking at him. She stuck out her hand with the keys. “You drive. I don’t feel like it.” 

Lance took the keys and unlocked the car. He sat in the driver’s seat, the chair still where Grier liked it. He barely fit, his knees smashed against the wheel. He slid the seat back, wondering if she’d ever find that perfect place again, hating himself for having to do it, and hating her for making him do it.

Harry wasn’t sure what to do with the boxes, situated rather unselfishly in Grier’s room that now felt so old. He didn’t know if he was supposed to unpack them, make it one less thing for her to think about, or if he should leave them, give her privacy. He knew that by knowing anything he had already stolen so much from her. Harry settled on washing her sheets, making her bed. And when that was done he sat on the fresh laid sheets. He rubbed his hand over them, flattening the crease he made by sitting there. 

Six months earlier he was doing the same thing, making a crease, and she minded then, too. He sat on the bed and watched her pack her things. 

Now that he was sitting here again, in the same room but so different, he regretted watching her in the first place. He thought it was goodbye. He was sorry it wasn’t, that it couldn’t have been more. Harry rested his head on her bed, curled his feet up to his stomach, thought about a million things, none of them fair things to think about, and began to sob, quietly, like an old, pathetic man. 

Grier curled up in her seat. She put her knees on the seat, her head down between them, her arms covering as much light as they could. Her whole body hurt, organs heaved. And she thought; she thought so much, though she tried so hard not to think. 

She thought this is the worst it’s ever been, that the worst feeling is not that you wanted to die, but that you failed doing it and now have to face it, have to face everything you wanted so bad to leave behind. She grew sick, kept her hood over her head, and leaned on the door, closing her eyes, but seeing everything behind her eyes and regretting it all. 

When she opened her eyes again, it was somewhere between past sunset but before total blackness. They were driving through waves of purple. An unsettling and broken fog began to roll its way across the headlights and out into the desert where, no doubt, it became whole again. Everything looked the way it ought not to, but the way it was. Grier knew this was the way it would always be: just a little wrong, but not enough to worry anyone or set them off. This is what happens when you fail suicide. In failing to leave one world, she entered it again, forever changed and ugly, worse than when she decided to go. She was in a state of unfeeling, tired beyond her skin. Her eyes hurt, but she couldn’t look away. It was all too horrible. 

“Did it rain?” she asked, if only to assure the boy beside her who was so scared and embarrassed to be here that he might have the better sense to drive the car right off the road and deep into the desert to be consumed by a fog. 

“Just the fog,” Lance said. “I don’t know if it’s too hot or too cold, but it’s not raining.” They blew across clouds crawling along the road. Through the windshield wipers' grace, Grier could just make out the exit for Truth or Consequences. 

“I know you don’t love me anymore,” she said. “I don’t blame you either. I wish things were different, that I didn’t do what I did, but I did it, and now I have to live with it. You’re lucky. You don’t have to live with it. And I think that’s my greatest burden; it’s not what I would have left but what I have to come back to that really scares me.” 

“I really don’t mind.” he said. 

“You shouldn’t lie to me. I know what happened. You know, too. We all know and should stop pretending. Would you like to see them? My scars? I’m sure today was a terrible burden on you, being here with me and not even being able to ask or see. I’ll spare you that burden. It’s the least I can do. You don’t even have to ask. I’ll ask you. Would you like to see my scars?” “I don’t think that’s a good idea, with me driving and all.” 

“You could pull off the road.”

“In all this fog?” 

“You could pull off the road and turn off your lights. You could turn off all the lights and I could show you my scars. And then we could decide what to do.” 

Lance thought about the old man he’d seen this morning under the hood of the truck. He thought about the way his old man hair clung so desperately to his head, about what it meant to hold onto something that was so clearly gone so long ago, before you ever knew it was there to begin with. Lance knew Harry hated him. Knew that whole business at Truth or Consequences was bullshit, a clear and easy lie, that Harry really knew nothing about Lance, nothing about his life, what he knew, what he did, who he was. Lance knew more than anyone and he knew next to nothing. He gripped tight the steering wheel and felt like the stupidest person who ever was. 

“I don’t blame you for how you feel,” said Grier. “Sure, I wish you felt different, but I more than anyone should know that it’s not right to blame someone for how they feel. No one really knows why they feel, sometimes. I know that real well now. Sometimes I think I know so much, so much more than I ever knew, and then I open my mouth, see the words come out and count them as they go and realize that I’ve been a fool. I’ve been a fool my whole fucking life, and it’s only gotten worse.” 

Lance thought about Harry and his stupid old head. He thought how pathetic it must be to grow old and weak and still, after all that time, be so meaningless. He thought about Grier and her scars, how much they meant and would always mean, even when they meant nothing at all and she only wished they would go away. But they wouldn’t go away. Lance knew he was stupid, stupid for thinking, stupid for a million reasons, and why not? Why not be stupid? 

“You ever try to do something impossible?” Grier said. “I think I try to do the impossible too much. I usually fail. But then I look around and don’t feel so bad. I look around and see people trying so hard just to do something simple and failing. We can’t even do the simple things. What are we when we can’t do anything? Less, I think, than when we try to do something. And even less than when we try to do the impossible. I’m trying to do the impossible now. Do you see how much I’m talking? I haven’t talked to anyone more than a few words since that night. But here I am, being me, and trying to do the impossible all over again. Don’t you see what I’m doing? I’m trying to keep you from doing what you have to do, what you’ve known you’ve always had to do. But you don’t have to do it, Lance. You don’t have to do it, even if you do.” 

“You should close your eyes. It’s been a big day. Don’t worry about me, I’ll get us home just fine.” 

“Please don’t do this, Lance. Please, just wait a little longer. Give me something to hold onto. String me along, cheat on me, call me less and less and then not at all. But not here. I can’t do it now.” 

“Just close your eyes. And when you wake up, you’ll be home.” 

Grier shut her eyes. She closed them harder than she knew she could. She shut them so hard that she began to see stars bleed through. She saw stars in her eyes, stars under an endless escape of cold black that never really gave anyone a chance. She closed them harder still. And then she slept.