Page 1 of Our Last Resort

1Escalante, Utah

The Fourth Night

There are times when joy settles perfectly inside my body.

I notice.

The world twisted out of shape around me, years ago. My brain rewired itself to keep me safe.Check your door before bed,it tells me.Once, twice, three times. Unlock the door to make sure it was locked. Then lock it again.

Look through the peephole. Make sure the stove is off. Is the dog okay? Is he breathing? Doesn’t matter that you’ve already checked. Do it one more time.

My mind: always anxious. My whole world like a dollhouse. I know where everything is, how everything works. No surprises.

Which makes the exceptions all the more vivid. Happiness sprouting in the unlikeliest places—a green spray of ivy curling around barbed wire, flowers blooming on the grassy surface of a shallow grave.

Like now. Gabriel asleep in our shared suite, me on our private patio. Above, the desert sky.

In a few hours, the sun will rise. The hotel, our unlikely oasis of straight lines and modern architecture, will flood with natural light. Morning smells will waft through the air, the rich aroma of coffee, the fresh bursts of perfume, the sweet mist of sunscreen.The pool will shimmer, golden blue, like a mirage. Guests will head to breakfast in a sleepy shuffle.

But for now, it’s all quiet. All mine. The insomniac’s privilege.

I reach in the pocket of my hoodie, pull a cigarette from the pack, click my lighter. Empty. I hesitate, then use the one provided by the hotel for the gas fireplace.

First puff. A gust of wind teases the hem of my shorts, lifts it at the edge of the three white stripes.

I’m not alone.

The thought cuts through my mind in a red slash.

Two voices disrupt the night’s quiet.

I know these voices. I’ve heard them intermittently over the past four days, rippling in hushed tones near the spa, in clipped sentences over the dinner table.

The young wife and her old husband.

I recognized them by the pool on our first day, from a60 Minutessegment I watched last year. Most of what I know about the world, I learned on TV.

“Look,” I told Gabriel, my elbow digging into his ribs. “That’s William Brenner.”

When he didn’t respond, I explained: “He’s a big tabloid guy. Wealthy. I think that’s his…third wife?”

What a pairing they make. Sabrina Brenner, not yet thirty, her skin already tightened by injectables. Her long hair, shimmery platinum. Everything about her delicate and airy, a cloud of sweet perfume enveloping her, something evoking a state fair, the wholesome aromas of sugar and vanilla.

Trailing her, the blunt shape of her husband. William Brenner radiates a bullish kind of confidence, from the shiny top of his balding skull to his professionally polished loafers. He’s got that smile, too—the sly grin of a man who has never wanted for the company of ladies. Who knows himself to be not handsome, but charming, and who understands thatcharmingis enough to get what he wants.

The60 Minutessegment was about the tabloid culture of the early 2000s, specifically the ways in which it ruined people’slives. “People like good stories,” William Brenner had said, his bulk perched on an ornate armchair in his Upper East Side apartment. “And we are here to give them exactly that.”

What’s he saying now?

My cigarette hisses softly as I stub it out on the sole of my sandal. The concept of tobacco does not exist at the Ara hotel, nor do ashtrays. Back inside, in the bathroom, I hold the cigarette butt under a thin stream of water, wrap it in toilet paper, and bury it in the trash can.

Gabriel is still sleeping, curled in a fetal position. Like when we were kids: limbs tangled at his front, a knot of a boy shielding himself from the world.

I grab my key card and slip away.

The voices lead me close to the edge of the compound, to the last patch of sandstone before the hotel ends and the desert begins.

Here they are. The Brenners.

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