Still, Liv drove the thirty minutes to Jaiq’s elementary school, wondering if there was an after-school activity she’d forgotten about. She arrived to find the lights out and the janitor locking up. She drove cross-county to Jaiq’s friend Anne’s house, hoping Jaiq had gone home with her. Anne’s mother came to the door braless, her nipples pointed in opposing directions as she told Liv that no, Jaiq wasn’t there. “But Venus is retrograding, you know,” she said. “She’ll turn up.”
Liv was still on the road when the sun started to go down. A bright sunset; red and yellow and spreading. One that Liv would have admired if she’d found Jaiq, if that panic wasn’t blooming up and up inside her. But all Liv could think about was the venom in that sky. All she could think as she called Jeremy, then the police, was: Red on yellow kills a fellow.
The next day it was 97 degrees and Liv and Jeremy went out with the police, searching. They searched the ghost town’s abandoned buildings and the renovated ones that’d been turned into bars and chili joints. They hiked up the bare, wrinkled mountains, questioned everyone they saw. By 3 it was so hot that sweat was leaking to the ground from Liv’s elbows. She was feeling faint and nauseous. “You’re sunsick,” Jeremy said. So, Liv let him take her home. He poured her a tall glass of the sun tea and she sipped, wanting it to taste bitter and brackish, needing some other sensation to feel, if only a second. But as it washed across her tongue, the tea passed smooth. Mellow.
Before twilight, Liv got a call. The police had found Jaiq’s pony-patterned dress in a dry creek, a drop of blood baked onto it. They were testing to see whether it was animal or human, from Jaiq or something else.
That Saturday night, Liv and Jeremy sat together, silent, in the dark of their living room. Eventually, Jeremy fell asleep on Liv’s shoulder.
At 9 pm, she heard a pack of coyotes in the distance—the ones that always came around, yowling and yipping on weekend nights, searching for scraps from dumpsters behind the restaurants in town.
The coyote cries almost sounded like children laughing. Their tones were nothing like Jaiq’s, but Liv wanted to pretend she could hear her anyway. Wanted to imagine her baby running around with the pack, naked as the mountains; cackling with her new brothers and sisters; suckling her new mama until her belly was full and sloshing. It was a wall against the tide. The only way Liv wanted to picture Jaiq now. The only way she could convince herself that Jaiq was out there, somewhere, feasting on wild snakes and cold french fries.
Not dead—just feral.