The Retreat

The retreat sat at the end of a dirt road in the high desert east of the city, a compound of adobe buildings and a big sky, with a sign at the gate that said NO SIGNALS in hand-painted letters and a gate that was never closed. It was run by a man named Brother Ambrose, who had been a studio executive in another life and had spent the twenty years since making rooms where people came to unplug, and it took guests for weeks at a time, artists mostly, people who had come to the desert because the city had stopped working on them.

Jace had heard about it from Blair Fontaine, who had heard about it from a woman who had spent a month there after her divorce. He had not planned to go. He had woken up on the fourth morning after Owen Cross's death with the headline still in his head and the note still in his chest, and he had looked at the city through the glass and known, with a certainty he could not explain, that he could not stay in the house on the hill another day.

He drove out on a Tuesday, alone, in the borrowed silence of the desert roads, and the city fell away behind him, and the sky got bigger, and by evening he was standing at the gate of the compound in the failing light, watching a girl feed the chickens.

Her name was June Vasquez. She was twenty-one, the daughter of a man who had worked for Brother Ambrose for years, and she had grown up in the compound the way other girls grow up in houses, and she had never once, in all her life, left the desert for more than a week. She was small and brown and quick, with a laugh that came up out of her like a spring, and she looked at Jace the way she looked at everything, with a direct, uncomplicated curiosity that he had not seen on a face in years.

"You're the actor," she said.

"I'm Jace."

"I know who you are. There's a magazine in the kitchen with your face on it from last year. You look the same." She said it the way you say a fact, without wonder. "Are you here to unplug?"

"I think I am."

"Good. Brother Ambrose will want to talk to you about silence. He talks about silence a lot. He believes it's a muscle. I think it's just quiet, but I don't argue, because he feeds me."

The compound was quiet. That was the first thing Jace noticed, and then the second thing, which was that the quiet did not press on him the way the city's quiet did. The city's quiet was a room full of held breath. This quiet was a room that had let all its breath out. He was given a room at the end of a long adobe building, a cell of white walls and a bed and a window that looked out on nothing but the sky, and he lay on the bed that first night and listened to the wind and felt, for the first time in seven years, something like the inside of his own skull.

He stayed. He did not know he was staying. The days were long and empty and they filled themselves: meals in the common room, walks in the scrub, the sky doing its slow theater, the silence doing its slow work. He did not call anyone. His phone sat in a basket by the gate, in the basket where everyone's phone sat, and it did not ring, because no one knew where he was, and it did not matter, because there was nothing in it he needed.

June was everywhere in those days. She was in the garden, in the kitchen, in the workshop where the compound's artists came to work, doing the small, necessary labor of a place that ran on no money and much care. She had a way of being present that Jace had not encountered in the city, where everyone was present like a camera, recording. June was present like the weather. She was just there, and she was not watching him, and that was the thing that undid him.

"You're looking at me," she said, one afternoon, in the garden, pulling weeds.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Everyone looks at everyone. It's what the desert's for, I think. To give you time to look at things properly. You've been looking at things your whole life like they were about to leave."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you look at a thing the way you look at a car you're about to sell. You're always appraising, Brother Ambrose says. He says you're the first guest we've had who came here already gone." She sat back on her heels and looked at him with her clear, uncomplicated eyes. "You're not gone yet. That's the thing. You're still here. I think that's why you came."

He did not touch her. That was the thing that would come to matter, and he did not know it at the time. He sat with her in the garden, and he walked with her in the scrub, and he listened to her talk about her father, and the desert, and the artists who came and went, and the small, fierce life she was building out of nothing, and he felt the city's ledger in him grow quiet, as a wound grows quiet when you stop touching it, and for six days he did not think about the locked room at all.

On the seventh day, Brother Ambrose found him at sunset, sitting on a rock above the compound, watching the sky go red.

"You're going to leave," Ambrose said. It was not a question.

"I have to go back."

"You came here with something in you, and you've been here a week, and you haven't let it out, and now you're going to go back and carry it home again." Ambrose sat down beside him on the rock. He was a thin, weathered man with the eyes of someone who had seen a thousand guests come and go. "I've been where you are. I had a life in the city, a life that looked like a life, and I carried something in me for years, and I thought if I just kept moving it wouldn't catch up. It always catches up. The only question is whether you let it take you with it."

"I can't stay."

"No. You can't. That's the thing about the ones like you. You can't stay, and you can't go back, and you spend your whole life in the space between, and the space eats you." Ambrose looked at him for a long moment. "You're the first guest we've had whose face doesn't match his eyes. I don't know what that means. But I know it's not good."

The next morning, Jace packed. He stood in his white room with his bag, and he looked out the window at the sky, and he knew that he was about to do a thing that would either save him or finish him, and he did not know which.

June was at the gate when he came out, standing in the dust with a cloth bag in her hands. She had made him something, a small painting, a desert landscape in blues and browns, the colors of the compound, and she held it out and said, "So you remember the quiet."

He took it. He looked at the painting, at the honest, unskilled brushwork, at the love in it, and he felt the thing in him that had been sleeping for seven years stir, and he said, "June. I have to tell you something."

"Don't."

"I have to. I came here, and I watched you, and I—" He stopped. The words arranged themselves in his head, Whit's words, the smooth ones, and he did not say them. He stood in the dust at the gate of the compound, with the little painting in his hands, and he said, "I was going to ruin you. That's what I do. That's what I've done my whole life. I meet a good thing, and I ruin it, and I came here to do it to you, and I've been sitting with you for a week doing it, and I can't. I can't do it. You're the first thing I've ever met that I don't want to spend."

June looked at him. Her face did not change. She was twenty-one, and she had grown up in the desert, and she had watched a hundred people come to the compound with their city faces and their city ledgers, and she said, "I know."

"You know?"

"I've known since the third day. I've known what you were doing. I'm not a child, Jace. I've been watching you watch me, and I've been deciding, and I decided that if you tried, I'd let you, and then I'd leave, and you'd be the one who was ruined." She smiled, a small, clear smile. "You're the first one who didn't try. That's the whole thing. You're the first one who didn't try."

She stepped back. The dust settled. The sky was huge and blue above the compound, and the gate stood open, and Jace stood in the middle of the road with the little painting in his hands, and the understanding came to him without any clarity at all — he had done a good thing, the only good thing he had done since Lena, and it had not cost him anything, and he did not know what that meant.

He drove back to the city through the desert and the passes, with the painting on the seat beside him, and the city rose up out of the haze ahead of him, and the house on the hill took him back, and he stood in the hall with the bag in his hand and the painting under his arm, and he knew what he had to do.

He went up the stairs. He unlocked the room at the end of the hall. He stood in front of the painting in the walnut frame, in the gray light of the single window, and he looked at the old, terrible face that had been keeping his ledger for seven years, and he looked for the record of the thing he had done in the desert, the good thing, the free thing, the thing that had cost him nothing.

And he found it.

The face in the painting had softened. It was the same old, terrible face, the same sallow skin, the same graven lines, the same cruel mouth — and there was something new in it, something at the corners of the eyes, a gentleness, a warmth, a thing that had never once been in that face in seven years. It was the face of a man who had done a good thing. It was the face of the man he might have been.

Jace stood in front of it, and he felt the thing he had felt in the desert, the quiet, the free thing, and he reached out, and he touched the frame, and he thought: it's true. It's all true. The account can move the other way. I did a good thing, and it moved, and I can do more, and I can—

And then he looked again.

The gentleness was gone. In its place, at the corner of the mouth, at the edge of the eyes, there was something else, something he knew better than he knew his own reflection. It was cunning. It was vanity. It was the look of a man who had done a good thing and had been watching himself do it, who had kept the receipt, who had gone to the desert to be good as you go to a spa to be rested, and who had come back with a proof of virtue to hang beside the proof of sin.

Jace stood in front of the painting, and he stepped back from it, one step, as if the canvas had exhaled on him, and he remembered the desert, and June, and the good thing he had done, and he saw, with the whole weight of the seven years, that there had never been anything in the desert but him, that the good thing had been vanity, that he had spared her like a thing he meant to own later, and that the account did not move both ways, and that it only ever moved one way, and that he had been moving it, all along, with the same hand.

He went down the stairs. He stood in the living room, in the dark, with the city burning below, and he thought about the knife in the locked room, the knife that had killed Theo, the knife he had cleaned and put back, and he thought about the only way to close the account, and he knew that he was going to do it, and he knew that he had known it since the desert, and he knew that it was not courage, and it was not remorse, and it was not anything a man could be proud of. It was the last thing a boy does when he discovers that he has been spending his life.

He went back up the stairs.