Bea sat on the edge of the playa and watched the fine sand of the dry lake kick up in short-lived swirling dust devils, at first excited and then dying down as though realizing there was nothing to be excited about. The ridge rose to her right, and in the far, flat distance tall banks of brown clouds hugged the horizon. Dust storms. They were so far away that she could distinguish the different storms from one another. Three in all. Their front ends curled out like snake tongues, hurriedly flicking to learn where they were. The back ends dragged across the land like sandbags.

Behind her she heard Agnes talking to the birds that were hiding in the sage. Agnes always talked to the hiding animals, even though Bea had explained that they were hiding from her because she was talking to them. “They want to think you don’t know they’re there,” she would explain.

“But I want them to know I can see them. So they know they need to hide better.”

It was not logic she could argue with.

She watched Agnes flitting about the bush, talking a blue streak and flapping her arms, while the birds, now trapped by her daughter’s manic actions, complained back in a high pitch. Incredible. Bea remembered when Agnes could not lift her head off of her bloodstained pillow. Those many frantic trips to the private doctor who lived in the building, the one who took on emergencies for a steep price. All the nights she lay on the floor next to Agnes’s bed, listening to each breath, her own heart stopping when there was a gasp. The number of times tears leapt to her eyes in the too-long pauses between her daughter’s labored breaths. It had been untenable.

She’d never forget the feeling around her conversation with Glen. Sitting at the small round dining table after another emergency visit, wineglasses half full, dinner mostly untouched, pasta still curled around her fork, lying where it had clattered to the table at that sound, “Mama,” through that hacking. The music was still playing, low. Agnes was asleep. Safe. Glen giving his brief history lesson about the convalescence movement that was once common but had been utterly forgotten about. Of sanatoria, of people escaping to far-flung places to get well. To take in the good air. To find health away from the place that ailed them. “What does this have to do with anything?” she’d snapped, half listening, half tuned for sounds from Agnes’s room. He and Bea weren’t married yet, though they knew they would. He was already in love with Agnes. And when he explained fully about the study and his idea, Bea had said, “It seems crazy.” “It is crazy,” he said. “But if we stay, she’ll die.” It came out so flatly, so unequivocal, she felt like he’d slapped her. They stared at each other, not speaking. She thought hours might have passed. She wished that she’d had better thoughts running through her head. Thoughts like, I don’t even need to think—of course that’s what we’ll do. Like, Whatever it takes. But really she thought, So, we have to risk all our lives just to save hers? Is this the rule, or do I have a choice? She looked at Glen and he had that resolute look. That no other solution look. And she knew her eyes were spinning, confused, everywhere. She was thinking of how much she’d looked forward to the three of them being a family here in this cozy apartment. She was thinking about the projects she had lined up and how she wouldn’t be able to do them now. Big contracts that had come in after the magazine spread. A career shift. She was thinking of her own mother and how she would have to leave her. If they did this, Bea knew already her mother would never come. She needed her mother still. Didn’t she? Did her needs not matter anymore? Bea shivered at her cold heart. She hit the side of her head to rattle her humanity loose. To think of her daughter first. She didn’t realize she’d kept hitting herself until Glen gripped her wrist and brought her arm firmly to her side, held her, and she felt the bitter tears on her face for the first time. She choked sobs into his shoulder. This is motherhood? she thought, furious and brokenhearted as she tried to let go of her own self so she could free her arms to hold up Agnes.

The playa dust devils were dancing longer and higher now, and closer to where Bea sat. She smelled dirt in the air. When she breathed through her mouth to escape the smell, her mouth gritted with fine, stale-tasting sand. She looked around. They seemed to be in a fog cloud, or was it already dusk? She squinted, looking for the sun, and saw its hazy imprint high in the sky. She looked toward the far-flung dust storms, and now there was just one large one. The searching tongue had ballooned into a cloud hovering on the horizon. But now the horizon was the whole cloud and the horizon was very close.

Bea stood.

She heard tinkering behind her from Debra and Juan making dinner. The rest had spread out for more kindling and for water. She turned quickly to run toward the camp, and there was Agnes behind her, hypnotized by the cloud, her hands making fists at her sides. She ran to Agnes and grabbed her clenched fist, and dragged her along toward the camp. Agnes stumbled and Bea looked down at her daughter. Her mouth was open and moving, and Bea realized she could hear nothing but a roar that had started so soft and risen so gradually she had noticed nothing but an increasing pressure in her ears. She screamed at Debra and Juan, but she couldn’t hear her own voice. They were already running. She slung Agnes by the arm up and onto her back, and ran in the direction where people had gone for water. She looked at nothing but right in front of her feet so she wouldn’t fall and the bushes ripped into her legs as she ran through them. Agnes pushed her face into her neck, her mouth so close to her ear she could finally hear her. She was crying. Bea felt hot tears and saliva on her neck. And then Bea could see nothing and she could not stand up straight and her skin was on fire with the pricks of a thousand needles and the shuddering knocks from stones. She fell over a sagebrush and onto her knees and Agnes flew over her shoulders and her face was one hollow scream but there was no sound over the scream of the wind. Bea crawled, reaching blindly for her daughter until she felt her feet. She pulled Agnes to her and covered her curled, quaking body with her own.

Twigs and dirt and stone whipped against Bea, and the roar became muted so that she thought her ears must have filled with sand. She bent herself so her back would shield their heads, and it felt to her there was a mound of debris around her, blanketing her, as though because they stopped they would be buried alive. She curled tighter around Agnes and gnashed her teeth against the onslaught. And then, mercifully, she stopped feeling anything.

*

Bea heard the muffled chirp of a bird near her head. She smelled stale urine from deep in her huddle with Agnes. One of them had wet themselves.

She peeled open a gooey eye. A towhee stood uneasily in front her, peering at her with a black inquisitive eye. It hopped and then puffed itself up, and a little halo of dust from its feathers escaped into the air. Bea lifted her head and groaned. The bird flew away.

Bea pushed upward and felt things tumble off of her. What must have been a wall of sand behind her collapsed. It had been a rare gift from the storm, something that stopped her from being pelted to death.

She felt Agnes squirming under her.

“You peed,” the girl’s muffled voice accused.

Bea rolled away to let her daughter up. Agnes scrambled up and dusted herself off. But when she looked up, her eyes widened and she froze.

Bea jumped to her feet in front of Agnes, assuming some threat was there, some herd of bison whipped into a stampede. But Agnes was looking at the land and sky.

The sun had sunk behind the ridge and the day’s light was in fast retreat. Across the sky, a reclining half-moon rose lazily, pink and pearlescent. It appeared so big it looked as though it was half of another earth rising. Around them were piles of sand, through which sage branches reached desperately. The land before them, where the playa had been, where the dry craggy land of bushes had been, now looked more like the surface of the moon, a moon where tufted tips of sage lay across its surface like crowns. The new dunes muffled the sound of the world. They listened for the ping of the bugs of dusk, for the trill of a towhee, for the sound of any of their companions, but they heard nothing, not even the storm, the back of which Bea could see on the horizon, wagging its tail goodbye.

She checked Agnes through the girl’s protests. Her daughter felt intact, while her own body felt pocked.

They walked the slow and exaggerated steps of moon walkers, their feet unsettling the sand. And when they reached ground that was hard dirt beyond the storm’s reach, they shot forward with ease as though released from a captor’s grip.

They walked past where Debra and Juan had been cooking and saw nothing but the turned-over Cast Iron, wooden bowls, ruined food.