By Celeste Amidon

Sylvia was a waitress at the Desert Jewel Casino in Scottsdale, Arizona. She wore a little black dress with a white bowtie to work every night, where she served food and drinks—pork dinners and Tequila Sunrises and cheddarstuffed meatballs and Irish car bombs—to bachelors and addicts and men with catheters snaking down their legs. 

She had just graduated from the University of Arizona Sierra Vista with a 2.4 GPA in psychology. Not knowing what else to do, she moved into her parents’ basement with the blind cat and the washing machine. Her mother said she was welcome any time, but her father wanted her to pay rent, so she got a job at the casino. When she wasn’t working, she was playing solitaire or combing the cat’s fur with a pink brush from the dollar store. Sometimes, she tried to meet people, at a live music event or on an internet date, but those nights always ended so miserably she could not eat the following day. She hated Scottsdale—the dialysis centers and the nursing homes and the golf courses and the dry heat—but she liked her job. She liked working the graveyard shift and sleeping all day. She liked how men stared hungrily at her from across the room. She liked how the black nylons made her legs look. She liked the endless music box noise of the games. 

Most of all, she liked Wes. Wes worked as a slot attendant. He had long blond hair and tiny diamonds in his earlobes and a blue sea turtle tattooed to his forearm. She liked to watch him walk on the casino floor, how he played the drums with his fingers in the air as he went. She liked to watch him in the break room, the way his shoulder blades hooked over the backs of the plastic chairs like bat’s wings.

They didn’t speak until one day in September. She sat at one end of the breakroom, eating corn chowder from her thermos. He sat at the other, listening to music in his old-fashioned headphones, the kind with wires. She was almost done with her chowder when he lifted his headphones off his ears and turned to look at her.

“Do you smell toast?” he asked.

“No,” she replied. “Maybe you’re having a stroke. That’s the first sign, you know.”

He laughed. “You’re funny. Why didn’t I know you were funny?”

After that, he started making conversation with her when they passed on the floor. They developed an elaborate inside joke about Hillary Clinton and Pepto Bismol and she began sneakily setting aside cheeseburger sliders for him to eat during his breaks. One morning, they left the blinding light of the casino together after their shift. It was only six am, but it was already so hot that the asphalt felt sticky under her kitten heels. He walked her to her yellow Civic, then leaned in and kissed her with his hands lightly grazing her back. She felt her vertebrae burst open.  

She went home and slept all day. Her mother woke her for dinner at quarter past five. Sylvia sat with her parents at the kitchen table, eating spaghetti with peas and carrots under the bright overhead light. Her mother told a story about a little boy in Minnesota who was dead for three days but came back to life when he accepted Christ into his heart. Sylvia’s father said: “Don’t mention God around Sigmund Freud over here,” motioning toward Sylvia with the sauce-covered prongs of his fork. 

When her mother got up to take the plates to the kitchen, Sylvia laughed.  “What’s that about?” her father asked, wiping his mouth with the bottom of his shirt. 

Sylvia wanted to say: “Can’t you tell I have finally been noticed?” But she just shrugged and said she was thinking about something she saw on TV.

*

The first time Sylvia went to Wes’s place was on a Sunday evening. He lived in Mesa, right off the Whispering Indian golf course, in a little apartment. He seemed embarrassed when he showed her around, scrunching his lanky body in a silent apology for the low ceilings, the oddly angled living room. But Sylvia thought it was lovely. It smelled like spicy incense, the kind people light in churches. The bedroom had a skylight that bathed the bed in a buttery yellow, and there was a tapestry with the moon on it hanging above the living room couch. In the bathroom hung a framed photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono sitting in bed, holding big flowers. Sylvia followed Wes to the kitchenette, where he took a bottle of Evan Williams from the cabinet and poured two glasses. 

“I don’t really drink,” she said when he tried to hand her one.

“Why not?” 

“My dad used to drink. And then he stopped. So we don’t drink.”

“I don’t wanna peer pressure you. Only drink if you want.”

She took the glass from him and studied the brown liquid for a moment, then took a sip. It tasted bad but felt good in her stomach. 

“What do you think the meaning of life is?” he asked.

She laughed. “Is this what you ask all the girls?” 

“Only the ones I think are interesting.”

“I’m not interesting.”

“That’s not up to you to decide.”

“What do you think the meaning of life is?”

“I’m a Buddhist. I think we’re all connected to nature. Reincarnation.

Dharma.” He studied her face. “You don’t buy it.”

“I majored in psychology. So it’s hard for me to believe in all that spiritual stuff.”

“Why’d you pick psychology?”

“I wanted to understand people.”

“And? Do you understand them now?”

“No,” she said. “But I got really bad grades.”

He took her to his bedroom and brought the bottle, which they took turns sipping as they undressed each other. It was not Sylvia’s first time, but it might as well have been. She trembled and giggled like a virgin. When he looked at her bare breasts, she wanted to cover them with a sheet and cry but didn’t. When he grazed a lip along her collarbone and told her she was beautiful, she did cry, big, childish tears, and he wiped them with the heel of his hand. And then he was on top of her, gentle and certain, and she wrapped her arms around his back and closed her eyes and prayed to God—something she had not done since she was fourteen—that this would never end.

She was so drunk when she got home that she could not figure out how to open the front door. She kept grabbing for the gold handle, but it eluded her. She ended up sitting on the porch steps with her head bobbing up and down.

Finally, her mother opened the door, wearing her waffle-knit dressing gown. 

“Jim!” she called to her husband. “Jim!”

Sylvia’s father appeared in the doorway, red-eyed. He grabbed Sylvia by her wrist and yanked her inside, where she stood on the floral carpet and made eye contact with the poorly painted Jesus above the mantel. 

“Not in my house,” her father said. 

“I wasn’t in your house,” Sylvia muttered, then backed into the potted windowsill fern. It fell onto the carpet, where it lay sad and broken in a pool of its own dirt.

“Look what you’ve done, Baby,” said Sylvia’s mother.

“I’m not a baby,” Sylvia snapped. “I’m in love.”

“In love!” her mother cried. “In love? Oh, God!”

And then Sylvia was on the floor of the upstairs bathroom with vomit all over her hands. Her mother sat on the edge of the tub.

“The meaning of life,” Sylvia said through hiccups, “is to do something incredible.”

*

Sylvia spent every day with Wes for the next week. They would go back to his place after work and fall asleep together, then wake up at odd hours and have quiet, lazy sex. He liked to drink more than she could stomach and would get up and take three shots of tequila in a row, then come back to bed and fall asleep with his head against her breast. She would lie awake while he slept and look down at his head and think about how she wanted to shrink into a tiny person and live inside his shirt. She wanted to cut open his hand and drink his blood. She wanted to have a baby with long blond hair and little diamonds in its ears.

One Sunday, he crawled into bed with a baggy of powder that looked like cornmeal.

“Would you wanna try something with me?” he asked.

She sat up. “Like what?” she said.

He wiggled the baggy in the air. “H,” he said.

She felt her eyes go wide. “You mean heroin?”

“I’ve done it before. Last year, at a party.”

“It’s addictive.”

“Only if you shoot it up.” He inched closer to her. “It’s better than sex.”  That hurt her feelings. She didn’t want anything to be better than sex with him.

“Come on, Sylvie,” he said. “I wanna share this with you.”

She thought of her parents, eating thawed freezer vegetables at home. She thought of the blind cat, who was always bumping into furniture. 

“Okay,” she said.

Wes poured some of the powder in a narrow line on his bedside table. He snorted first, then made her a line and put his hand on her back as she followed suit. The burning sensation made her jump up and paw at her nose. She felt a chemical drip travel down her throat, like swallowing Windex. She suppressed a sneeze, then lay down on the bed beside Wes and squeezed his hand. They looked up at the skylight together and she noticed all the bodies of dead moths. She was counting them when she started to feel it, in her feet, like they were lifting off the mattress. Then her knees, and something was melting against the cave of her chest, and there was light, a thread of it, and then an endless amount, and her eyes were heavy with God, and everything buzzed and tingled, and everything was almost unbelievably good. She turned to Wes, whose hair was like egg yolk, spilled across his pillow. 

“I love you,” she said.

A tear escaped from his eye and made a dark spot on the sheet.

“I love you so fucking much, Sylvie,” he said. “You have no idea.”

*

They began snorting heroin every day. Sylvia liked to take it and stand in the shower. She liked to take it and kiss her fingers and knees over and over. She liked to take it and share secrets back and forth with Wes. He told her he would get random panic attacks at work that made his vision melt. He told her he was saving up enough money to go to California and get a job at a turtle sanctuary. “I’ve always wanted to work with turtles,” he said. “They’re so ancient and wise. I’m pretty sure I was one, in a past life.” 

Sylvia told Wes she had only been with two men, and neither of them loved her. She told him about the time her father was drunk on beer, and she said she thought God was stupid, and he hit her so hard she had to get a stitch on her tongue. She told Wes that she had never in her life felt like a whole person. She often had dreams where she was completely flat, like a cartoon character that’s been peeled off the sidewalk. 

Her parents were worried. Her father texted her threats: Come home tonight or your clothes are out on the lawn. Her mother sent her quotes from Bible Gateway: Those who guide these people mislead them! And those who are guided are led astray!!!

But Sylvia didn’t care. Her birthday was at the beginning of October, and Wes surprised her that morning by taking her to a museum full of live butterflies. They got so high that Sylvia began to weep with joy when a black swallowtail landed on her foot. Wes kissed her under a tree branch covered in chrysalises like green teardrops. 

“You are a whole person, you know,” he said.

“I don’t think I am.”

“That’s not up to you to decide.”

They started snorting lines in the breakroom at work, under the security camera’s blind spot. They’d go back out onto the floor and Sylvia would feel like she was underwater in a pond of love as she handed out cocktail napkins and asked the kitchen if the fried rice had shellfish in it and dumped a rainbow of liquid waste into the black bucket. The heroin made them both curious and they would strike up deep conversations with the customers. The man in the red beret at the blackjack table believed the rapture was coming on Thanksgiving Day, and the woman who sat with her tiny service dog in the high stakes room was planning to kill her husband’s mistress. The man who came in every day to play craps was running for mayor of Scottsdale, and the woman with the bandage on her nose at the Wheel of Fortune was going to use her winnings to buy a teacup pig. 

In the middle of October, Wes got an email. The Turtle Island Restoration Network in Marin County, California, which he’d been writing to for years, had written him back. He stood on his bed and read it over and over.

“They want to give me an entry-level position,” he told Sylvia. “They were really impressed, they said, by my knowledge of turtles, my passion. I’m thinking two weeks, and then I’ll go. Get my stuff together here, tie up loose ends—” 

“You’re going to California?” said Sylvia.

“You can come,” he said. He got off the bed. “I need you to come.”

“My job, Wes.” 

“There are jobs in California. There are a thousand trillion jobs in California.”

“My parents. I can’t.”

When she found out he had already given his notice at Desert Jewel, she refused to speak to him. She walked through the next two days of work in a fatigued, delirious haze, so high she could barely keep her eyes open, giving corncolored Bud Lights to bachelor parties and pulling out trays for poker players to eat their chicken piccata on. She went home and slept in her old bed and ignored her mother’s pleading questions, her father’s threats. She was at the roulette table, delivering a piece of dry trout with blanched broccoli to an old woman wearing a blue, leopard-print jacket, when she decided. The woman kept insisting that her date was coming, but it was clear that he was not. Sylvia set down the trout, then went to her boss’s office. She unclipped her bowtie and put it on his desk and left the building without a word.

When she entered Wes’s apartment, she found him lying in bed, smoking a cigarette. 

“I’m coming to California,” she said.

He got up and came over to her. He bowed down and kissed her neck. “It’s gonna be incredible,” he muttered into her collarbone. “I’ll work with the turtles. And you’ll do what you’ve always dreamed of doing.” He looked up and studied her. “What do you want to do?”

“I want to be with you.”

They celebrated by sneaking into the Desert Botanical Garden at night. They huddled by the prickly pears and smoked heroin for the first time instead of snorting it, which made the high come on so fast their eyes were already closing on the exhale. They had slow, quiet sex on the stone path. 

“I’m willing to buy into this Buddhism thing,” she told him afterwards. “If you promise we can come back as turtles in the same pond.”

They woke in the morning, half naked, to a woman with frizzy orange hair, wearing purple rainboots and holding a watering can that looked like a toy, pointing at them and screaming. They got up and ran back to the safety of Wes’s car, laughing so hard they struggled to breathe. They smoked the rest of the heroin as they sped back to his place. He took an empty Red Bull can from the center console and raised it in the air. “To California,” he said.

*

But to go to California, they needed money. And a week after they quit their jobs, they were out of it. Wes sold his diamond earrings for sixty dollars at a pawn shop. Sylvia sold clothes and cheap jewelry and even the American Girl dolls she’d saved from childhood. They sold a Le Creuset that Wes’s grandmother had given him and some silver-plated brooches they stole from a thrift shop. But every time they almost had enough money for the drive to Marin County, they spent it on heroin, which they bought from a guy named Cud who they met on the “Scottsdale Heroines” Reddit—tall and skinny, with a soul patch and breath that smelled like vinegar.

 “You guys are gonna need to start shooting this stuff sooner or later,” he said, standing over them while they snorted line after line from the edge of his bathroom sink.

“No,” said Sylvia. “Needles are for junkies.”

Cud was the one who told them about the copper. They were at his place, a narrow duplex in Paradise Valley, sitting on the sunken couch and watching Big Mouth. Cud told them about some copper tubing on a construction site on the Salt River Indian Reservation. “Copper goes for five dollars a pound,” he said. “You should see how much they’ve got lying around there. That’s five hundo. Easy.” “Sounds risky,” said Wes.

“Gotta risk it for the biscuit, baby,” Cud replied. He rubbed his hands together, then got up and went to the bathroom. “Let’s go,” said Sylvia to Wes. “Tonight.”

“It’s a bad idea,” Wes replied. 

“What else are we going to do? How are we going to pay for California?” Wes chewed his thumb. On the TV, a cartoon lobster wielded a scalpel. 

“What if we got clean?” he said. 

“What?” 

“I don’t know if I can do this long-term, Sylvie. I’m craving it all the time. I’m not sleeping. I’m not eating. Showering hurts. I don’t want it to be like this in California. I wanna do yoga and drink tea and meditate. I wanna have a baby. With you.”

Sylvia’s heart thumped. “Will it have blue eyes, like yours?”

“No. Brown, like yours.”

“I don’t want him if he doesn’t look like you.”

“Fine. One brown, one blue.”

Sylvia stuck her finger in a cigarette hole on the couch pillow.

“We’ll get the money from the copper tonight,” she said. “And then we’ll have enough for California. We’ll leave in the morning. And we can get clean once we’re there.”

Wes put his hand on top of Sylvia’s and nodded. Sylvia had the sudden and certain feeling that she did not want to get sober. She did not want to be anything but high and bedazzled with Wes. She wanted this life, and only this one. 

Cud came back in, zipping up his pants. 

“We’re in,” said Sylvia. “Tell us where to go.”

*

At half-past-midnight, they entered the Salt River Reservation. Sylvia felt a palpable shift in her gut as they crossed into Indian land, as if her internal temperature had dropped, as if the volume inside her ears had been turned lower by a manual switch. Wes drove them up a narrow dirt road called Bloodless Drive, which was lined with towering saguaros and shriveled chollas and senitas that looked like arthritic fingers. A tumbleweed skittered across their path. The moon above was like a fluorescent bulb. They drove past a Target and a graveyard and a landfill and a trailer with sheets hanging on a line out front. As they passed the shining river, they spotted a javelina, cowering by a gnarled desert broom. Her babies stood behind her, and they flinched as they were suddenly bathed in the car’s headlights. 

Wes turned onto Wolf’s Peak Road and drove up to the construction site. It didn’t look like much, just rubble and metal and an empty tractor, bordered by a chain-link fence. They got out of the car with their Hefty bags and approached the site. Wes scaled the fence first. He got to the top and leapt onto the dirt below. Sylvia followed him up, the chains hard and painful against her palms. She reached the top and took a moment to gaze at the landscape beyond the construction; the flatness, the purple clouds, the stars, scattered as though they had been carelessly flung.

“Jump,” said Wes.

She did. Warm adrenaline washed through her limbs. She landed on her feet and dirt cascaded around her ankles like a swarm of fruit flies. She stood, and a light blinked on suddenly, casting the construction site in a yellow glow.

She froze.

“It’s okay,” said Wes. “It’s automatic. There’s nobody here.”

They made their way through the site, which smelled rancid and oily. As they passed under a web of scaffolding, Sylvia grabbed Wes’s hand and stopped.

“It’s kind of romantic, isn’t it?” she said. 

“Let’s find this copper and go,” he replied.

“No. Kiss me first.”

He leaned in and kissed her. She pressed her hips into his. Something howled in the distance.  

They continued toward a pile of white rubble and that was where they found them: dozens of copper pipes that stretched at least eight feet long, thin and yellow like exotic snakes. 

“Shit,” said Wes. “He didn’t say they were this big. Fucking Cud.” Sylvia squatted down to lift one. 

“Help me with this,” she said.

He went over and grabbed the other end. 

“We’re not gonna be able to fit even one of these in the car,” he said.

“We are. We can put the seats down.”

“And the other thirty?”

She laughed so hard she almost dropped her end.

“It’s not funny, Sylvie.” 

“We can figure it out. What if we strap them to the top? Like a Christmas tree—”

She was cut off by a faint crunching noise. They turned to see a pickup truck grinding to a halt outside the construction site. They both let go of the pipe and it clattered loudly to the ground.

“Who the hell is that?” Wes whispered.

The car parked, and a man with long gray hair and a potbelly got out. He whistled, and a dog leapt out of the back seat: white, squat, all gristle and muscle.

The man shaded his eyes with his hand and looked at them. 

“Howdy,” he said.

Wes raised a hand and waved. 

The man used a key to open the gate. The dog followed him in, snorting dust and sneezing frantically. The man shut the gate behind him and used the key to lock it. He motioned to the dog.

“This is Big Daddy,” he said. 

Sylvia and Wes looked at each other.                                                 

The man put his hands in his pockets.

“What are y’all doing in here?” he asked.

“We must’ve gotten lost,” said Wes. His voice sounded small, boyish. “We were looking for the river.”

The man motioned with his head. “River’s that way.” Big Daddy sat. His ears stood up.

“Sorry for the trouble,” said Wes. “We should go.”

The man smiled. “You junkies can keep breaking in here. I’ll keep catching you.”

“We’re not junkies,” Sylvia heard herself say.

The man laughed. “Right,” he said. 

Big Daddy yawned. A siren began to moan in the distance.

“Police are on their way,” said the man. 

“This is some kind of mix-up,” said Wes. “Maybe you can just let us go, sir?”  “Don’t make this harder on yourselves,” the man replied. “You’ll be all right. Police will lock you up for the night. You’ll be fine. Judges don’t care about trespassing when it’s on Indian land.” He twisted his large body from side to side and winced. “Just do me a favor, okay?” He motioned to Big Daddy. “Don’t run.”  The siren got louder. Sylvia twitched with nervous energy. Her heart pounded in her gut. She thought of California. The turtles.

She ran.

She ran away from the man and over the rubble and leapt over a gap in the dirt. Before she knew it, she was springing onto the fence and scaling it. She looked to her left and saw Wes beside her, climbing madly. They locked eyes and she found herself smiling at him as they scrambled up the fence, her heart pumping so hard she felt like blood was going to come out of her mouth. Wes leapt over the fence and onto the other side. Sylvia’s arms burned as she neared the top, and then there was a tug on her pant leg, and she was on the ground. And there was screaming—Wes, on the other side of the fence— shaking it, yelling her name—the man, saying Big Daddy, heel, Big Daddy—and a shrieking from inside herself. A hot wet feeling all over her body, a dark smell, and then a weight was off her. Blue and red police lights poured onto the dirt, and the man was holding Big Daddy by his tight black collar, Big Daddy who had blackish blood on his face, who howled with the sirens. Sylvia spat out a mouthful of dirt and watched Wes run deep into the glittering black of the desert.

*

She woke under a cold light. Her lips hurt. Her hands itched. There was an IV line in the crook of her elbow. Her mother sat in the corner of the room, holding a mug of tea with both hands. Her father stood in the doorframe, muttering into his phone.

“Where’s Wes?” said Sylvia.

Her mother approached her bedside and put a hand on her forehead. 

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Where’s Wes?” Sylvia repeated. 

Her mother looked at her husband. 

“What do we do, Jim?” she asked.

Sylvia’s body felt heavy. Warm. Not good, but not bad. She felt like nothing. 

“She needs to know,” said her father.

“Is it Wes?” said Sylvia.

Sylvia’s mother turned to her. “Your leg, Baby,” she whispered.

Sylvia sat up. Her legs were covered by a starchy white blanket. She peeled it back to find that her right leg had been severed below the knee. It was swaddled in tight bandaging. Her mother wept, holding a Kleenex to her chest. 

“It got all ripped up by a dog,” she said. “They couldn’t save it. They tried, Baby.”          Sylvia thought she should probably cry, but her face felt stiff and motionless from whatever they’d given her.

A nurse with bleached eyebrows came in to change the bandaging on her leg. The smell wafted up to her then, like spoiled meat. The stump was webbed and bright pink. The nurse used light blue liquid to soak the wound. Sylvia’s father watched in disgust, then left the room. 

When the nurse was gone and her mother had fallen asleep, Sylvia found her phone on the bedside table and texted Wes: 

Where are you?

The message did not deliver. 

*

She spent nineteen days in the hospital. The doctors put her on an epidural to manage the pain, but did not allow her opiates. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. Her vision was so blurry she couldn’t focus on anything to take her mind off it; the TV was simply a mass of moving colors. The nurses gave her paper cups of Suboxone, but those barely helped. She texted Wes eight more times.

Nothing. 

“Maybe it’s better,” said her mother.

“Don’t say that,” Sylvia snapped. “He’s coming.”

“You’re lucky those Indians dropped the trespassing charges.”

“I’m lucky? I’m fucking lucky?”

“Do not curse, Sylvia,” her mother said, and crossed herself twice. At night, Sylvia saw things that were not there: a cartoon toadstool in the corner of the room. A naked child with a painted blue face. Wes, eyes wide and frantic. A sea turtle, hooked to an oxygen tank, gasping for breath. In the middle of the night, Sylvia’s heart monitor would turn into a slot machine before her eyes. 

When the withdrawals began to subside and she was done with in-patient wound care, Sylvia’s mother drove her to an addiction treatment center half a mile away. After her mother left, weeping as she waved goodbye, Sylvia sat on the couch in the common room. As she watched a muted episode of Kitchen Nightmares on the old-fashioned TV and ate table crackers from a box, she realized that Wes was not coming back to her. She clutched the gauze-covered stump of her leg, stunned, and felt a burning sensation so profound in her missing foot that she leapt up and fell to the floor. Her right leg, which lay in a biological waste bin at the Scottsdale Medical Center, burned and trembled with a miserable, insatiable pain. 

*

What Sylvia never told anybody was that she did not miss her leg. In the years to come, she would finally get sober after six separate attempts. She moved to a duplex in Surprise, Arizona, with an old woman she met in Narcotics Anonymous. She mixed her methadone with apple juice every morning. She searched for Wes—on Facebook, on obituary sites, on the Arizona Judicial Branch website—but gave up after a while. She spent half a year giving motivational speeches to high school students about addiction and recovery. But she was not a good speaker. She was fidgety and distracted and didn’t know how to answer questions that weren’t included in her script. She got nervous around the teenage boys, whom she’d been warned by other female speakers might hit on her, but who never did. So she gave that up and got a job as a teller at a bank, depositing checks and setting up accounts and balancing the cash drawer and sometimes hoping a man wearing a ski mask would come in and point a gun at her head. 

Each morning before work, Sylvia covered the stump of her leg with deodorizing salve. She let her fingers linger as she touched the familiar ridges from the skin graft, the spot in the center of the stump that was soft like the back of a baby’s head. She would think, in those moments, of the butterflies and the copper pipes. Of sharing a glance with Wes on the casino floor. Of running from the junkyard dog with its glowing teeth. Of pawn shops. Of sea turtles. She would slip her prosthetic leg on and admire its cream, inhuman color and know it was the greatest part of her. 

---

Celeste Amidon is a Leslie Epstein Global Fellow in the Boston University Fiction MFA Program. She has had her work featured in Gulf Coast, Polyester, Broad Sound, and elsewhere.