Page 39 of Our Last Resort

“I left you a note,” he says.

There it is on my nightstand, in Gabriel’s choppy block print: “Went to dinner. Call if need anything.”

“I see it now,” I tell him over the phone. “Did I really sleep this whole time?”

After I spotted Harris at the pool, I told Gabriel I was tired and would be heading back to the cabin for a nap. It was onlyhalf a lie. Iwastired. I’m always tired. But really, I wanted to get away from Harris and his stare.

“Apparently.”

Guess I’m finally paying off that sleep debt.

“I’ll bring you back a plate,” Gabriel says.

“Don’t. I’ll come over.”

I hang up and kick the covers, as if to prove something. My head swims; my eyelids are heavy. But I’m standing up. Quickly, I peel off my pool clothes and my bathing suit. I pull on a linen jumpsuit, gather my hair into a bun.

It’s okay.I’mokay.

A woman came to the desert and died, and her husband has been arrested.

This is how those things are supposed to go. The justice system will do its thing. William Brenner will be punished.

I search for my key card, slide my feet into my sandals.

Everyone is moving on already.

I can do it, too. It’ll be easy.

There’s one small thing I need to take care of before I join Gabriel in the dining room.

Catalina didn’t lie. There are coyotes around us. I’ve seen them from our patio, while everyone was asleep and I was smoking secret cigarettes. One of them ventured surprisingly close to me on our first night.

That’s how I saw it was injured. One of its front legs had a gash, the skin an angry red. The coyote was limping. It seemed to have been suffering for a while: It was skinny, tired.

The next day, I made some calls. Someone from a wilderness service told me they knew which coyote I was talking about, that there was a den off the main hiking trail, the one closest to the hotel. The person said they’d send someone to look, but it might take a couple of days.

It didn’t feel good to wait and do nothing.

There was a coyote on the compound, one summer when wewere kids. It started lurking near the cafeteria, poking around, disturbing our piles of compost.

We were fascinated. A new animal! One we’d never encountered before! The coyote became a subject of hot gossip. Those of us on cafeteria cleanup duty started dropping potato peels, making a trail to our compost piles. Updates were shared in hurried whispers—Delphine from my cooking class had seen it, Simon swore he’d managed to touch it.

We woke up one morning to three missing chickens and a trail of bloody feathers. Émile deputized a group of fathers, ordered them to secure the chicken coop. After meals, the mothers scoured the cafeteria for detritus.

Our coyote went away.

We’d been sad for the slaughtered chickens, but we missed the coyote more. We talked about it for weeks. It got to the point that Émile used one of his assemblies to forbid coyote talk. It wasn’t good to dwell, he said. Not good at all to live in nostalgia.

But I never forgot. It was the closest thing we’d had to a pet at that time. And that night at the Ara, it was impossible to look at the injured coyote and not see a shade of my Charlie in it.

So, on our second day at the hotel, when Gabriel said he was getting hot and left me alone by the pool, I went to the bar, asked for a water bottle, a paper cup, and a bag of crackers, then headed for the main hiking trail. A few feet from the main path, I found the coyotes’ den.

“My” coyote was nowhere in sight. I poured some water into the cup, set it on the ground, scattered a handful of crackers next to it.

When I turned to look at the den again from the trail, I saw it. My coyote, drinking the water, eating the crackers.

I knew I wasn’t supposed to feed it. But the coyote was already in bad shape. I couldn’t just watch it suffer.

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