Wreckage

THE DESERT’S FIERCE LASSITUDE—Frank Lloyd Wright’s phrase. The swell of cacti after rain, shrink-back during drought, powdered green skin between spines puckering like fingers after a bath. Topography of stasis. No leaf piles for jumping, no flowers for cutting. The desert’s gifts require human collaboration: mesquite seed pods, ground into a sugary flour and combined with water, yield a kind of hardtack cookie; the plum-colored fruits on the prickly pear can be de-thorned and strained into a cranberry-colored sun tea. The paloverde’s chartreuse trunk is worth pointing out to tourists and children learning Spanish. Our Arizona schools didn’t teach us Spanish. What did we learn, at ages six and seven? How to cut out paper snowflakes, what happens to oak leaves in the fall, to seeds when you tuck them into Dixie cups packed with store-bought dirt. Lessons in mythology for those of us hosting swim parties in January.

Inside the miniature pineapples clustered on top of the barrel cactus is a black caviar suspended in milky mucus—hardly edible, though many of us, as children, sampled the bitter juice with the tips of our tongues.

THEY MEET IN THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. Tucson, July, three weeks before classes start. She is nineteen, a journalism major; he twenty-one, American history, though he wants to do something corporate. Tucson is her hometown, her parents eight miles from her dorm, her grandmother in a Spanish monastery converted into an independent-living facility. He’s from Ann Arbor, works as a bartender at night. During the heat of the day, he stays in the library or sleeps beside the a/c unit in his apartment.

Her parents live at the crest of a roller-coaster swell along Skyline, in a brick ranch on seven acres. Black-bottom saltwater pool with rock waterfalls; four horses, two ranch hands; a tennis court and five-car garage, half of which her parents converted into a master suite. Her father keeps the refurbished Malibu in the remaining two-bay; his Escalade, her mother’s Land Rover, and, when she’s there, her own BMW line the circular driveway, hoods open at night to leave possible pack rats exposed.

Her mother is a former kindergarten teacher, now philanthropist and cultivator of rare plants. She owns a cactus called the Peniocereus greggii: Queen of the Night. A blossom that opens for only a few hours once a year, in summer, after sunset. An invisible trigger, chemical, related to lemmings and migration of butterflies, signals plants around the city to bloom all at once. Her mother keeps a call list, people who’ve asked to see the flower. At its peak it’s the size of a dinner plate, with layered petals and center filaments that reminded the daughter, when she was a child, of a sea anemone. She used to imagine she could see the filaments wave, indolent, as if caught in a slow current.

Her father is an orthopedic surgeon. Her younger siblings, eleven and fifteen, attend the same K-12 Christian school she did. Her parents are immersed in the life of their church, not superficially but in ways that matter, hands-and-feet-of-Christ acts the daughter admires and hopes to one day emulate: trips to villages in Ghana, inaccessible during the rainy season, in which her father’s medical team carts in drugs, and villagers line up for various nonemergency surgeries, mostly for cleft palates. Her father is absent from the lives of his children and makes up for it in monetary excess. In elementary school, he would give her twenties for lunch money; now he keeps her supplied with hundred-dollar bills.

The money allows the daughter and her boyfriend a certain freedom when they begin dating. He quits bartending and they spend days poolside, nights driving the city streets, top down in her father’s Malibu—still above 100 degrees, the kind of heat that gives her chills when she steps outside—east to west on...