By Ramona Reeves

Simone and I squandered the cool morning hours cruising around town. We admired ropes of red chiles hung talisman-like near doors and speculated on the spirits they kept at bay. Coyotes. Bobcats. Unintended lovers, I didn’t say. The afternoon found us miles from where we started, the pavement cursing in dust while Simone steered and yammered about adobe construction. I heard only the sentences she punctuated by squeezing my nearest hand. She’d probably googled every word she was saying, just as she’d googled me early on to learn what she could about me: my thirty years of age, my girlhood years in Beaumont, the volleyball scholarship and my master’s at a state university.

We were hunting for a ghost town, the third in our tour of ruins. The route included two cliff dwellings Simone had added after I mentioned all her towns were built on stolen lands. Though I felt gratified by her additions, I couldn’t help thinking Simone excelled at stealing and that I was a sucker for thieves. I also couldn’t help thinking Simone and I had come from generations of thieves as far back as anyone dared to go.

“Imagine seeing and touching a real ghost town,” she said.

Her enthusiasm seemed odd. Our first two stops had led to a dilapidated carriage house outside Van Horn, Texas, and a busted-up pile of railroad ties near El Paso. Both places triggered memories of my former girlfriend Tara.

Simone jerked the wheel and swerved onto a gravelly cow trail, ridged along its spine. The unflinching desert claimed the earth for miles ahead, going on and on, until the Bronco skidded to a stop and a trailhead whispered through the windshield.

I grabbed our too-light plastic water bottle and soon lumbered behind Simone’s swishing braid of red hair. I was taller and more athletic but always followed, trying to catch up or catch her, never sure which. Each step sullied my flip-flops’ dark soles with tannish-red dust, but I pressed on in spite of the flagrant sun on my pale limbs. I pushed on because I believed in what we were doing, though doubt always crept in. “What if this trail leads nowhere?” I asked.

“Then we backtrack,” Simone said.

Our footwear and tank tops seemed outmatched, but I marched on with squinted eyes, in part because I’d convinced myself that she was the one. I held to this belief despite the fact that when I asked about her feelings, her typical response was Who else am I seeing?

Not everyone was a Princess Charming when it came to romance.

I stopped, drank, then crumpled our plastic bottle. “We need water,” I said.

 “We’re close,” she insisted and forged on, past fists of rocks along the trail.

My phone’s signal turned artifact, and I grew agitated thinking about the savings I’d squandered on this trip, savings meant to last until I began adjuncting again in the fall, yet here I was hunting for places that barely existed. I could only blame myself. I’d been unable to imagine Simone roaming the countryside without me or make peace with staying behind and running into constant reminders of Tara. Pursuing the one had seemed reason enough to leave her, though lately I wondered if my inconstancy in love amounted to a failure of imagination.

The trail rose and multiplied in rocks. “I think we should turn around,” I said.

Simone trekked forward without words. I found her silence strange. She wasn’t shy about speaking her mind if it suited her, even when the words she uttered bordered on fantasy. Like when she claimed to be an only child and her sister called, or when she said she was a native of Louisiana, where we taught first-year English, but turned out to be from Ohio. Sometimes I embellish, she’d said. Our affair already in motion, I dismissed the lies as exaggerations and focused on the tingling and falling part of love.

“We should get the hell out of here,” I said. I hadn’t meant to sound angry and tried to yoga-breathe through my nerves.

Simone trudged uphill, still silent, as though I didn’t matter, or if I did, as though I might be the flesh she consumed to survive. We shuffled past angry horned plants. The V of my flip-flops blistered the skin between my big toe and its neighbor. I felt too much pain to go on and reversed course.

“Guinevere,” Simone yelled.

Everyone called me Gwen. As much as I wanted the silence of this trail broken, I despised her tone. It was the voice of someone who could never admit to planting herself on my lap during office hours and initiating this faux pas.

“I’m going home,” I said and limped downhill. Pebbles rolled under my soles and irritated my feet, which were puffy and red, two swollen valentines.

“I knew you’d quit on me,” she yelled from behind. “Just like you quit on Tara.”   

I sped up, eager for distance, and wondered if I could catch a bus back to Lafayette. Simone was the reason I’d left Tara, left Lafayette and all the rest.

 “Wait,” she called. I felt her drawing closer until she yelped and chunks of quartz, ancient as the ten commandments, rolled past my feet. I looked back and found Simone grounded and hugging one knee. Without thinking, I climbed, bent and embraced.

“Maybe we should head to the next stop,” she said.

I could live without seeing these ruins but felt a pang of failure, like I couldn’t go on but couldn’t give up, either. “Ghost towns are overrated,” I said.

“Not to the ghosts,” Simone replied and smiled like she meant it.

I wanted to tell her ghosts preferred cities, places where haunting was not in vain, but I laughed instead to ease the ghost of Tara between us, Tara whose eyes had smoothed into glossy river rocks upon news of my leaving and then dried into a hardness that claimed furniture, changed locks and shredded mail.

Simone stood and leaned on me along the pebble-strewn trail that led to the Bronco. Her arm roped my shoulders, softening my resolve to return home, and I suspected I could carry on this way forever, living for the moments when she needed me.

“Our next stop is a cliff dwelling,” she said after the car’s hood glinted into view.

I had studied our route and knew this to be true, but I was too tired to say anymore. According to an online guidebook, the dwelling’s enormous slabs had once belonged to an ocean, just as we’d once belonged to our mother’s wombs. Yet here we were, taking what comfort we could in the desert. Taking what comfort we could.

~~~~~

Ramona Reeves won the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and 2023 Texas Institute of Letters’ Best First Book of Fiction award for her collection It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories. She was a 2024 judge for the Flannery O’Connor Award. She currently lives with her wife in Texas.