Oasis

While Rory talks with the investigator, Julie stirs lemonade in the kitchen, the wooden spoon knocking pleasantly against the glass pitcher, the ice cubes chattering at the rim. Appreciating these little riches helps her avoid fixating on the other reality: that this isn’t true lemonade, owing to the price of lemons in the high desert; that this kitchen is a huge step down from the one they had in their mountain home.

There’s a lemon tree in the backyard of the house next door, the only other home five empty lots in any direction. She supposes she could ask if she could borrow a few lemons, but she has yet to meet the owners. She tried to introduce herself, twice, but was greeted by short-term weekend renters, a mistake she’s not going to make with the current occupants, who are packing. She’s endured two nights of loud music and cackling laughter, has learned the names of all three couples, and even knows some of their allergies. She does not yet know the name of Host 34253 (speaks English, Spanish, Polish). All she knows is that the host doesn’t like pets, loud parties, uninvited guests, or anyone changing the cabling on the AV system. The Wi-Fi network is COYOTEHEAVEN.

Finding host 34253’s rental listing last month allowed Julie to view photos of the interior. She’s accessed the property’s amenities list, a guide for what she’d like her own house to contain. She knows she and Rory will get there. She’s in charge of the finances now, and tucks money away for different upcoming projects: new paint, exterior landscaping, upgrades to the A/C. She is working hard to make her life and her home more than a record of Rory’s mismanagement of their finances. But it will take time and supreme patience before their house will be anything like what’s available next door for $350 a night, $175 cleaning fee. You can’t always get what you want, her mother used to sing, as though the melody was a comfort to the words’ sting. Their couples counselor’s advice, back when they could afford to see Dr. Skow, before he went missing, was kinder: Dreaming is free.

There is half a lemon in the refrigerator. Julie cuts a fresh ring and lets it gnaw on the rim of the pitcher, giving the illusion that what she carries into the living room is freshly squeezed.

“Thanks, hun,” Rory says, rising on his haunches and taking the tray from her, then filling the three glasses far too quickly, a broken floe of ice cubes going over the curled spout.

“So no calls, no visits, no emails or texts?” asks Paula, the private investigator. She puts aside her steno book and accepts a glass of lemonade.

“We haven’t seen Dr. Skow since he stayed with us in the mountains, not long before we moved,” Rory says, then looks at Julie as if she might know something else about Dr. Skow’s disappearance.

“Not a peep,” Julie says. “We stopped going to his beach socials when we moved to the mountains, but I can’t believe he would drown. He was an excellent swimmer. He used to be on the Danish Olympic team.”

“That’s what everyone keeps telling me,” Paula says.

Julie notices that Paula has only taken a single sip of the lemonade; a PI can spot an imposter. She should have offered her coffee or tea instead.

Paula doesn’t look like a private investigator. She has a large batter-colored face and wears her blonde-gray hair in a bouffant that is both anachronistic and marvelous. Her presence gives Julie the confidence to feel that she, too, could be a private investigator. She might be good at it; she discovered Rory’s financial infidelities after all, snooping just a gutter word for the fine investigative work it really was.

“Did Dr. Skow ever prescribe pills?” Paula asks.

Rory shakes his head.

“I asked him once,” Julie admits. “But he said he didn’t feel it would be beneficial.”

“Straight shooter,” Rory says. “Not your typical shrink. Not that I’d know. First one. Only one.”

Rory doesn’t put his glass to his lips fast enough.

“How’s desert living?” the PI asks. “Maybe I’ll retire out here.”

Rory swallows. “Stars are amazing.”

The stars were even clearer from their mountain home, but Julie lets Rory launch into his list of reasons desert living is the best. They sold the mountain estate last year and bought into the only pricing tier they could afford and still remain barely solvent retirees. Reentering the workforce is not an option; Julie refuses to allow those many decades of sixty-hour weeks to have all been pointless. Because that… Julie takes a long, slow breath and another and another, I am here, now, here, now, here, now she intones, silently, safe in an ambulance driving her away from the mental landscape of despair.

What they could afford was this run-down house in the desert, fifteen-hundred square feet, two bedrooms, an astronomical $475,000. Which, had they bought it five years earlier, would have cost them less than a third. Still, Julie tells herself she is grateful to be here; it is a consolation to know that people pay good money to vacation right next door.

“Are you talking to all of Dr. Skow’s patients?” Rory asks the investigator, who hasn’t returned to her lemonade. “Is it something worse than drowning?”

“I don’t know the doctor’s current state, but my client is concerned about his welfare.” The investigator holds up a hand, blocking Rory’s curiosity. “Can’t say who’s paying me.”

The investigator opens an envelope and passes them a couple of photographs, both coated in fingerprints. “Can you confirm that’s him?”

Julie nods. In one photo, Dr. Skow is standing in an airplane aisle surrounded by passengers wearing leis. In another, he’s on a tropical beach. Hawaii or Tahiti, maybe, places she and Rory could once have afforded to visit, but didn’t have the time to—and now have the time, but not the means.

“Him alright,” Rory says. “Looks to me like you’ll find him at the airport. He didn’t swim to paradise—he flew!” Rory laughs alone.

“If you don’t have any more questions for me, I’m gonna lie down for a bit,” Julie says, tapping her temple. She gets migraines, but this isn’t one. She’s just tired. The neighbors played music until two a.m.

Julie closes the bedroom door and lies down. She hopes nothing bad has happened to Dr. Skow. She doesn’t want to think he drowned, nor does she want to hear more details about the shooting at his house that wounded an au pair. She wants, instead, for her life to simplify. Dr. Skow would disapprove. Or, rather, he would encourage her to empathize with others’ difficulties as a way of contextualizing and diminishing her own. Setting her challenges against the grand pointlessness of things could make her feel better. But Dr. Skow isn’t here, and perhaps isn’t even alive. He might have even been part of a love triangle, which would negate so much of his advice. So instead of empathy, Julie contemplates the private oasis next door and what her husband doesn’t know: two weeks ago, when Rory flew north to help his mother settle into a less expensive nursing home, Julie rented the vacation home for a single night.

As you enter, the vacation house reveals a vast, open kitchen. Beyond, woven sitting-nooks hang from the living room ceiling on either side of a monolithic TV. Tasteful desert art down the hallway leads to three well-appointed bedrooms. The master bath holds a turquoise-colored soaking tub. Walking through the house, Julie imagined that this is how it might feel to live in Portugal.

That night, Julie pretended she was in her promised retirement dream and not in the nightmare next door: the vaguely Spanish-style crack house-chic building with stuccoed arches and a single, desiccated palm out front that only looks green through the filter of one’s imagination. She disassociated herself from her house’s entry room with its bargain-brown tile, the paint both sheeny and gray as wet cement, the kitchen walls clad with cabinets in a honey-stained veneer from an expired decade, every room sadder than the last, the bedrooms especially, both of them holding thick carpet that is still giving off a chemical bouquet and hiding the cracked foundation beneath—which they had to acknowledge in the closing documents with their signature. She let all of that, for one night, be the setting for someone else’s life.

The rental’s backyard welcomed her with impossibilities: actual living grass, an outdoor grill, comfortable, stylish chairs in the color of Fiestaware. And trees! In the desert! A giant sycamore, a few palms, and a mature citrus grove of heavy grapefruit, loose mandarin, blinding lemons, plump limes. She watched small yellow-patched birds flit amongst the branches. In the middle of the lawn, ringed in ornate blue tile, sat a slender saltwater pool fed by a cascading sheet of water falling almost silently from the notched rim of a hot tub. All this, right next door. When she left the next morning, the two homes looked like a BEFORE and AFTER comparison of success.

Thanks to her one-night stay, Julie has the password to the COYOTEHEAVEN Wi-Fi, which has allowed her to cancel their fifty-dollar-a-month internet plan, saving them $6,000 over the coming decade. More importantly, she knows the lockbox code that holds the front door key. She didn’t find any cameras during her stay except for one mounted to the eave over the garage in which the true owners, she imagines, keep the better cutlery, private towels, electric bikes, the booze. After her stay, Julie set the property’s online availability calendar as her default homepage in her web browser. She waited to see if the unoccupied dates were taken by the real owners, or whether the house simply sat there vacant between weekend and holiday rentals.

It sat there, sits there, vacant.

Resting in bed, Julie examines the online calendar. No one will be in until Thursday. From her logs, she knows that the cleaners typically don’t arrive until Monday. She puts on shoes, then steps through the empty house and out the front door, where she finds Rory waving to Paula’s Corvette as it reverses, then grumbles away. It’s late afternoon and hot as hell, even though it’s getting on fall, even though she’s been told it’s going to eventually get downright cold.

“That’s some seriously bad karma,” Rory says, turning to her. “Ten years of back taxes owed, then your girlfriend tries to kill you but hits the au pair, and then you go and get yourself drowned? Can you imagine?”

Is he being serious? She has no difficulty visualizing cascading tragedies. “I’m going for a walk,” she says.

“Too hot for me,” Rory says. He squints at the sun like he might see something new there, then heads back inside.

Julie passes their garage, then turns at the edge of their property. She skirts around the outside of their fenced backyard which is as barren as the land around her now: an endless wash of sand and gravel unbroken but for the thousand-year-old stubble of creosote bushes. She continues along the back fence where it joins the newish slats hiding the oasis next door, then she comes up around the far side of the neighbor’s house and makes one last turn to the rental’s front door, taking this long route simply to avoid the camera mounted above the garage. She thumbs the lockbox’s numbers, removes the key, and lets herself in.

She is immediately awash in the odors of the vacationers who’ve just left, a mix of sunscreen and perfume, bacon and cigarettes, the latter a no-no for Host 34253. She checks the guestbook, but they didn’t sign it. There are towels on the floor and a spill on the couch. The sheets in the bedrooms are tangled thickly, like they contain a body. In a bedroom that reeks of cigarettes, a window has been left open. There’s an un-flushed log in the toilet, potato chips in the sink. These people pay not to care. Animals, she thinks, and depresses the toilet’s lever with the toe of her shoe.

Julie has snuck into the vacation home a half-dozen times since the night she rented it, always when on her “walks,” or if Rory is out for a bit. Vacationers leave things here: cellphone chargers, pills, sunblock. She wouldn’t mind taking home some of these things, but she doesn’t want the cleaners accused of theft. She finds a pair of silver earrings on the bedroom floor between the nightstand and the bed, a baseball cap on a hook behind the bathroom door, and a pair of wireless earbuds, no case, in the kitchen. She places the forgotten items outside by the front door in case the renters return. If they come inside, she will pretend to be the cleaning service. She knows which closet holds the vacuum cleaner. She knows how to look weary.

Through the window, Julie’s eyes catch on the shimmer of falling water from the hot tub. She walks out back and turns off the jets and appreciates the comparative cool of the garden. She reminds herself that a visit to the nursery is in order to upgrade her own, barren, plot: the best time to plant a tree is ten years ago, the second best time, etcetera. She collects empty beer bottles and cans from around the pool and disposes of them after a brief pause in which she contemplates their redemption values. Behind the hot tub, she finds a large straw hat of the style usually worn by men with zinced-up noses. The band is too large, but maybe she can pad it and make it work. With the hot tub jets off, a bikini top floats to the surface. She wrings it out and decides to keep it. Indoor items she won’t touch, but anything left outside is fair game for a gleaner such as herself.

She sees the lemon tree, burdened with fruit the same color as the bikini top. She pulls one lemon free, then another, placing them into the upturned sunhat. She moves to the backside of the tree, where no one would notice any missing fruit, and picks a few more. The ripe lemons release easily from their stems, their skins waxy and firm. When she has gathered enough, she leaves the house, returns the key to the lockbox, then circumnavigates the perimeter again, from AFTER to BEFORE.

Rory walks into the kitchen at the sound of the lemons tumbling into the thin metal sink.

“Where’d those come from?”

“A box down the street,” she says, unwilling to divulge her personal oasis. “They were giving them away.” Dr. Skow was refreshingly ambivalent about kind lies, and she feels no compunction about telling this one.

Rory doesn’t ask about the hat, but nods approvingly. Julie pours out the artificial lemonade she served the private investigator, then rinses the pitcher and then the lemons. She sets water and sugar to boil, then drags out the heavy cutting board that was small in their mountain home kitchen, but which takes up the full depth of the counter here. She slices the lemons, then squeezes them, feeling the acidity burn her desert-cracked hands.

Rory picks up three of the lemons, but he appears to have forgotten how to juggle. The sound the fruits make, hitting the floor, is just awful. He keeps trying, then gives up and hands them back, where they meet her blade.

Within a quarter hour, a full pitcher of lemonade chills in the refrigerator’s darkness. Rory stands at the window, looking out at their barren yard. Julie hopes he’s not going into one of his sulks. She knows the script: he will act like he’s no good for her, that he’s let her down terribly, that she should do better. And maybe he’s right on all counts. But when he says this, it’s like he’s blaming her for staying with him. That there’s something wrong with her for not leaving him and his faults behind and starting over someplace new, like Portugal, where the nouveau-nouveau riche have all gone, and where, perhaps, there is still room for the no longer riche, like her. All of which will lead Julie to wonder, again, if there is something wrong with her. This—not the financial losses—is the throbbing pain in her marriage. If there is something wrong with her, Dr. Skow never came out and told her what it was, though he must have known. Was it being forgiving to a fault? Was it falling for the sunk-cost fallacy of faithfulness? She can’t really afford Dr. Skow anymore, but she hopes he’s alive and found soon and that she can call him for one more session once she’s set enough money aside—it can even be a phone session. Five minutes is all she needs. She will tell him this is her final contact. Please, please, please tell me what’s wrong with me, in one sentence, straight to the point. This time, you do the talking.

Rory, at the window, sighs. Maybe he’s not going into a sulk after all. Maybe he’s just trying to work out how he could have forgotten how to juggle.

“Honey,” she says sharply, then tosses him three shrunken limes, one after the other. She bought them weeks ago and never used them, the skin reptilian and hard. “It’ll come back to you,” she says.

As Julie rinses the cutting board, the cleaners pull up next door, earlier than expected. She dries her hands, picks up her phone, and makes a note of the exact time of their arrival. She thinks of the two women as her cleaners, preparing her vacation home for her next getaway. Enjoying a little luxury at the expense of someone else’s ignorance is a perfectly delicious minor crime. All those years she and Rory ran the agency—matching employees with employers, greasing the cogs of medium-sized industries and endeavors—not once did they cheat on their taxes. She feels she is owed a trespass or two.

“Look. Look,” Rory says, juggling.

“Still got it,” she says.

He keeps the limes in the air. “I wonder who hired the private investigator?” he says, multitasking. “Think it was one of Dr. Skow’s patients? I’d say Leo, the lawyer.”

“You’re probably right,” Julie says, though she has no opinion. Dr. Skow taught them the importance of peppering small agreements into the course of their daily conversations, and this is just one of them. She hopes the juggling, plus a glass of fresh lemonade soon, will do wonders to Rory’s mood.

“You don’t think it’s some kind of test, do you?” Rory asks, lunging to catch an errant toss, then settling back into his simple juggling rhythm. The limes, in motion, look fresh. “He could be funny, that Dr. Skow. Remember how he had us stand at the beach until we could notice the tide changing. I can’t believe we paid to just stand there. The farther we’re away from Dr. Skow…” The limes veer, then fall to the floor. “Sometimes I wonder,” he says, and picks them up with three grunts.

No, he’s going into a funk. She wants no part of it. When they lived in the mountains, she could always take a walk in the woods. There were thousands of acres into which she could escape. The desert is a different story. Heat pins you down, and she can’t spend all her time in the fantasy house next door. Perhaps it’ll be better come winter.

Julie drops ice into a glass, pours herself fresh lemonade, and brings it with her into the bathroom. She pulls the yellow bikini top from the hamper, takes off her shirt and bralette and, after a sniff, puts the damp bikini top on and turns in front of the mirror. She hasn’t worn such a bright color in ages. If Rory didn’t notice the straw hat, he might not notice the bikini top. This old thing? she will say, if he does.

She brings her glass of lemonade outside to the swipe of fallen shade beside the shared fence. She takes a seat on the cheap plastic reclining chair that was in the yard when they moved in. Sunlight pierces the knotholes in the fence and burns bright oval spotlights onto the shade. She puts on the hat, big but perfect for blocking the sun. She pretends that if she were to put her feet on the ground they would touch the soft prick of grass, like next door. She hears the faint sound of a vacuum cleaner, imagines a wet mop going over the tiles, mirrors getting a spray and a good wipe, toilets sanitized, toilet paper folded on the roller into a point. She feels blindly for her glass of lemonade, then tips up the brim of the hat and takes a long swallow until she’s left with just ice. It’s divine. She lets Rory deal with dinner and drifts into a half-dream that begins with her wondering how long it would take to make a copy of the key to the house next door.

That evening, long after the cleaners have left and while Rory is doing the dishes, Julie returns to the backyard. She throws emptied moving boxes over the fence, then hoists herself up and over. She strips and dives into the pool and feels the water steal away the heat, making her cry out as she comes to the surface. She pushes off the far end and swims back, then climbs out, feet on warm tile, then on the cool grass. She fetches the boxes and carries them to the citrus trees.

By the time she’s picked them clean, the stars are out, her skin is dry, and she is lost in thoughts of marmalade, curd, potpourri, zests, mimosas, vinaigrettes, invisible ink:

RORY RORY RORY I LOVE YOU BUT RUIN US AGAIN AND I WILL KILL YOU DEAD.