West of Searchlight

In those days, we glided through the sands of the Nevada desert like we had magic carpets for feet. We walked into convenience stores barefoot, bought dirty magnets from roadside shops and stuck them on the dash, and threw old soda bottles in the backseat. In those days, our friendship transcended romantic love.

I will never forget the week that changed everything - somehow, it was a time that should have glued us together even more tightly than before. That was when I learned that these moments that burn like blue flames can come crashing down, like a car wreck you didn’t see coming.

“It’s 2pm, Birdie,” you scolded me, throwing a brown paper bag full of soggy fries at me from the backseat, where you were swinging your feet out of the window.

The sweltering heat caused beads of sweat to form on my forehead in seconds and dried them out in minutes, a cycle of endless misery. We’d slept in the car overnight after we got locked out of our run-down apartment again - keeping track of keys wasn’t exactly our strong suit.

“And?” I croaked from the passenger’s seat. My neck wouldn’t move to the right side. “OW!”

You laughed like a hyena, and I loved it.

“Call out sick.”

“I just got this job,” I reminded you.

“Ugh, I know. I understand…” you responded.

It was true. I had finally gotten a job after I took advantage of “buy one for the staff” a little too many times at the pub in Searchlight. “Searchlight” was a pretty ironic name for a town where nobody was really searching for anything at all except for their next drink and their next fuck. And dangerously hanging over a ledge just trying to reach for both.

You were never one to pick one job and stick with it. During that time, you were doing Friday-night stand-up comedy at the old pub I worked at, serving pancakes part-time at Sully’s Diner, and selling cheap beer to high-schoolers at a jacked-up price. Somehow, you managed to scrape together enough cash to put in our envelope for the landlord while still adding to your shoe and tattoo collection.

“It would just mean the world to me to have you there with me,” you added, speaking in a softer voice. One I didn’t hear that often.

Things were more serious now. Your mom was sick. She was suffering from liver cirrhosis in a beautiful hospital room that overlooked the Las Vegas Strip. She was only 42, 15 years older than you, and less of a parent and more of an older stepsister who worked as an “exotic dancer” on The Strip.

“I’ve been trying to visit her for a while now,” you went on. “But you know I don’t have a car and I definitely do not have enough money to rent one.”

I think the worst part was that you never knew her well enough to be as distraught as you wanted to be. How do you worry yourself sick over a parent you’ve never known? Neither you nor I understood what exactly was wrong with her at the time - the only bits and pieces either of us knew came from short phone calls that she made from a hospital room on the Las Vegas Strip.

I still wasn’t saying much back. Part of me felt angry at her for abandoning you and then asking so much of you when she was in need. What about your 11th birthday, when you get your period for the first time and bled out during the class trip to the movie theater? What about your first real breakup, when I talked you off a ledge at 2am in a McDonald’s parking lot?

“She stopped drinking, which is what the doctors said she has to do if she wants to get a new liver. They’re testing her blood levels every day. She said I might be able to give her part of my liver if I get there soon,” you informed me, with a serious look in your eyes. I was racking my brain over how exactly that would work. Surely this would require some kind of serious operation for you. And then I felt it again: that rage bubbling up inside of me. I didn’t want her to keep taking from you.

“Wren, I know you’re mad at her. You hold grudges. But I’m telling you that this is what I want,” you said with your voice cracking. I knew it was serious when you didn’t call me Birdie.

“Okay, let’s go, then,” I gave in, telling myself that I would at least try to understand.

And so by the time the clock struck 5, my old Volvo was all packed up, and we had a wad of cash shoved under the passenger seat floorboard. You were sitting with your feet out the window and tossing pretzels into your mouth, and I was breathing in the red dust from the desert like a cigarette I’d been waiting all day to inhale.

That was us. That’s the image I want to remember.

It used to crack you up when I walked barefoot into a gas station and then put my right foot right smack on the gas pedal when I sat back down. I would go out of my way to make the cashier notice that I stepped right on gasoline and pork rind crumbs and gave zero fucks. You’d be alongside me, laughing so hard you snorted Fanta out of your right nostril.

“Why - doesn’t - it,” I fought through laughter, “come out- of - your - left?”

That was us. That’s the laughter I want to remember.

The Las Vegas skyline began to reveal itself at 6pm on Thursday, October 11th, 1999, just 1 hour after we left Searchlight. That was how close it was - just 57 miles stood between you and your mother on any given day.

“If it’s okay with you, I’d rather go in by myself first,” you said to me as we were checking in at the hospital front desk.

I reassured her and took a seat in the waiting area, where a toddler was banging a metal spoon against a broken vending machine and a middle-aged woman was silently crying in the corner chair. I was so bored that I started drawing on my skin with a pen I found on the ground.

“Let’s go.”

“Birdie, let’s GO.”

Startled, I looked up and saw a red, wet, and puffy version of your face that almost broke me. I didn’t speak - I just took your hand and let you lead me back to the parking lot. And I complied with your request to drive to the nearest liquor store. I didn’t dare ask about the visit. I figured you needed to cope in the only way you knew how.

You were perusing the aisles with such concentration that I could tell something was off. You wiped tears off of your face intermittently and looked up at the ceiling in that way that we do, almost as if we are begging some spiritual being to make it stop.

I grabbed some tequila. “Here, we can get a margarita mix.”

“No, she likes gin–” you started to say.

“Is this for your mom?” I asked, gasping. “I thought she can’t drink if she wants to get a new liver.”

“I need you to buy that handle,” you responded quietly, staring at the floor.

“You like gin now?”

“Buy. The. Handle,” you nearly snarled.

And then suddenly I was wearing a paper sticker that said “visitor” again and sitting in the cold metal chairs where the toddlers scream and the adults cry. You never came out that night, so I curled up on the bench by the window and shoved the cash wad and my car keys into my bra for safe-keeping.

I felt your hand shake my shoulder early in the morning.

“She drank alcohol and now she can’t get my liver,” you told me, your face like a pillow that your eyes were sinking into. “The alcohol you bought. Wren, she is gone.”

So you’d given her alcohol - the gin we bought at the liquor store. Why did you do that when you knew it would jeopardize her chances at life? You said she was supposed to be sober, right? That this was the make-it-or-break-it time?

I turned to hug you and expected you to fall into my arms and cry until your voice was gone and your tear ducts were dried out. I had no way of predicting that you’d respond the way you did.

“It was you. You killed her, Wren. If you had just told me that you didn’t have money, then we wouldn’t have been able to even give it to her,” you wailed, your quivering shoulders shaking your whole body like you were seizing.

You called me Wren. It was never good when you called me Wren. Especially not two times in a row.

“We came here to give her a piece of my liver, and now I am leaving with my whole liver as an orphan,” you continued, sobbing. I was so shocked that I was frozen in time and space. And you’d already made up your mind at that point: I’d killed your mother.

The drive back home was deafeningly silent. As we passed through the sleeping deserts, I felt them turn a cold shoulder to me. Nothing was the same. This wasn’t us.

You had your stuff packed up into black trash bags within 24 hours and didn’t leave as much as a note behind. Of course, it was 1999 and there was no way for me to contact you if I didn’t know where you lived and didn’t know your home phone number.

Me? What did I do? What do you do when you lose your best friend?

I stayed in Searchlight for 5 more months until our rent expired, working overtime at one of those touristy diners on Route 66 in Oatman and sleeping with my 50-year old landlord to pay the rest off. Then, I left it all behind and moved to Seattle, where the rainy weather was the opposite of everything Searchlight had ever been.

Seattle was a new beginning. I went back to college and studied library sciences, finding my peace in the woody smell of old books and the soft-spoken voices throughout the aisles. I met a law student with Harry Potter glasses who I helped find legal texts for 2 months before he worked up the courage to ask me to get coffee. I fell in love with someone who made things simple. I realized that boring was a good thing.

I got married. I had a child. And then another - two girls. My life turned into what you and I would have considered before to be a suburban nightmare.

I heard you talking on one of your comedy shows the other day in a bar outside The Strip. I was there with my 13-year old daughter and trying to keep her away from perverted men on the street (of which there were many). We were there for my husband’s law firm company trip, an odd choice for a location for people who kept their noses in books for most of their 20s and, quite frankly, preferred to do the same thing now.

I heard your voice coming from a speaker as my daughter and I were headed to the Bellagio. The deja-vu hit me like a strange heat wave, the kind that makes you feel like you’re about to pass out. I peaked in through the door and watched you, forgetting all about my daughter’s innocent ears. There you were.

I felt embarrassed, homely, and washed out, even in my thrifted butter-yellow dress I loved so much. Your hair was in dreadlocks - what? You wore jewelry like you lived out of your car and kept everything on your person so nothing got stolen. Maybe you did.

“I still remember sneaking her a handle of gin when she was waiting for the transplant team to come by,” she said, laughing with eyes as empty as a room in a well-lived-in house you’ve just moved out of. “And she slapped my wrist because it was the cheap shit you get at the liquor store. How the hell was I supposed to know? I didn’t drink fucking gin. My best friend bought it because otherwise I would have had to blow the cashier - that’s how broke and tough out of luck I was.”

“Mom?” She looked at me - not up at me anymore, standing at 5 foot 2. Her eyebrows were raised. But I was focused.

“She was the kind of friend who was going to ride with you and do anything for you - even kill your mother. Well, give her the last dying drink. But that’s real love. That’s grit. That barefoot kind of love you step on and wear on your soles until it wears down your soul - okay, I’m done with poetic shit.”

“Her name! Tell us her name!” The crowd was laughing and roaring.

You laughed your hyena laugh.“Well, I can’t do that. Copyright, or whatever. But I can say that I called her Birdie.”

You never saw me that night, as much as I wanted you to. As much as I didn’t want to want you to. And all I could think to do was take my shoes off and walk the strip, the pavement burning beneath me like the memories. My daughter was begging me to put them back on and to stop embarrassing her.

And I went back to my hotel room and took a bubble bath with a glass of white wine. I stepped out on the balcony and spoke to the outline of The Strip like it was you. Like we were back in Searchlight. Like I was 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, and 27 again.

Anyone who tells you that romantic love transcends platonic love and that the two are distinct entities are as foolish as a pair of kids in their 20s, driving drunk through the Nevada desert. Losing someone who still walks on the Earth is a unique kind of pain. The kind that lies dormant in your body until it comes out to sting you again and again.

I like to think now that you were just grieving in the only way that made sense. You wanted someone to blame. But even today, at 44 years old, in my old paint room in a 3-bedroom home with a husband and kids, your spirit comes out in scenes of whirling sandstorms in buttercream paint-strokes and blurry skylines smudged with spilled tears.