Gone at the Gas Station

Madison sat in the cracked vinyl chair and laughed out loud, because what else could she do? Three years of dating Carlotta, one engagement, one wedding planned down to the napkin colors, and here she was in a cracked vinyl chair at the Diamondback Motel in the middle of nowhere Nevada. The wedding dress was two blocks away at a little shop called Roadside Alterations. Two blocks! They had walked the dress over that morning like it was a sleeping baby, and now the rental car had died in the gravel lot with a sound like a dying robot, and Carlotta's wallet was gone, and it was getting dark.

Who plans for this? Nobody plans for this. You plan for rain on the wedding day, you plan for a drunk uncle, you plan for the caterer cancelling. You do not plan for your rental car making a noise like a dying robot outside a motel with a swimming pool that hasn't held water since sometime last century, with an actual shopping cart in it, which felt as if somebody was playing a joke on her.

Madison was twenty-eight, and until today she had thought she was a pretty calm person. She was a data analyst. She made spreadsheets for fun. She had a whole tab in her wedding planning file called "Contingencies" and it had forty-one rows and not one of them said "fiancée disappears into the desert on foot."

"Okay," she said out loud, to nobody. "Okay, okay, okay."

The room was the kind of motel room where the bedspread had a pattern that hurt to look at directly. There was a painting of a horse on the wall. The horse looked as worried as Madison felt, which honestly she appreciated.

* * *

Two hours earlier, everything had been fine. Better than fine! Carlotta had been humming in the car, some made-up song about wedding cake, her long fingers drumming the steering wheel. Carlotta was thirty, a trans woman and a field geologist, the kind of woman who thought nothing of hiking twelve miles through rattlesnake country but had never once planned her own birthday party. Madison did the birthdays. Madison did the spreadsheets. Carlotta did the rocks and the laughing and the driving way too fast on empty roads.

They had stopped at a gas station maybe twenty minutes back for snacks and gas, and Carlotta had paid, and they had driven off, and then the car had made the dying robot noise, and Carlotta had patted the dash and said "come on, girl," like the car was a horse, and then the car had died completely.

And then Carlotta had reached for her wallet to look for the roadside assistance card, and her hand had found nothing.

"No," Carlotta had said. "No, no, no!" She had torn the car apart. Under the seats. In the door pockets. In her boots, which she had actually taken off in the parking lot, which Madison would have found funnier under any other circumstances in her entire life.

"Carlotta, breathe," Madison had said. "When did you last have it?"

"The gas station! I had it on the counter while I paid. I had it, I know I had it." Carlotta had that look, the geologist look, the one she got when a hillside was doing something it shouldn't. "It's a twenty minute walk. Twenty-five."

"I'll come with you."

"No way. Somebody has to be here when the tow company calls."

"It's a gas station, not a jungle!"

"Madison. My love. Light of my life." Carlotta had held her face in both hands, which was cheating, honestly, because it was very hard to argue with those hands. "Stay. Guard the room. I'll be back before you finish worrying."

"I'm already finished worrying. I'm finished worrying in advance."

"Then you're early. Sit tight." And she had kissed her, quick and warm, and jogged off down the shoulder of the road with her thumbs hooked in her backpack straps as if the whole thing was an adventure. Carlotta had that quality. A crisis on the eve of her dress fitting was, to her, just terrain.

So Madison had carried their bags into the motel room, because the front desk guy, a tired forty-five-year-old named Brad who had clearly seen everything and cared about none of it, had said the room was fine and the lot was fine and also "if it's got the card in it, that's the only wallet that matters," which was weirdly comforting. Brad had worked there ten years. He had the energy of a man who had watched ten years of sunsets through the same window and would watch ten more.

* * *

Now it was dark. Full dark. Nevada dark, the kind where the sky goes on forever and every sound outside is something.

Madison paced. Six steps, turn, six steps. Her overnight bag sat on the bed like a patient dog. She kept glancing at it. "We're fine," she told it. "She's coming back."

The bag did not answer, which Madison chose to take as agreement.

She called Carlotta's phone. Straight to voicemail, which meant the battery was dead or there was no signal out there, and both options were terrible. She called again. Voicemail. She considered calling the sheriff and then imagined trying to explain it. "Yes, hello, my fiancée walked twenty minutes to a gas station to find her wallet and she's twelve minutes late and I'm spiraling." They would laugh. Brad would laugh.

Six steps, turn, six steps.

That was when she saw it. On the nightstand, half under the lamp, this ugly little gray brick of a thing with a clip on the back and a screen the size of a saltine.

The pager.

Carlotta still carried a pager. An actual working pager, because some drilling site she consulted for had terrible cell coverage and issued them to everybody, and she'd never bothered to take it off her belt. Madison had teased her about it for two years. "It's a fossil," she'd said once. "It's reliable," Carlotta had said, with the smug face of a woman whose fossil had outlived three of Madison's phones.

Carlotta had left it clipped to her belt, except apparently not, because here it was on the nightstand, which meant she'd clipped it to her pack instead, no, wait, she'd unclipped it in the car when her belt kept catching on the door, Madison remembered that, and it must have ended up in the bag and then on the nightstand when Madison unpacked. So Carlotta was out there with no phone and no pager, walking through the dark, and the pager was here.

Great. Fantastic. Wonderful.

Madison sat down on the bed and stared at it, and that was when it buzzed.

She jumped about a foot. It buzzed again, a long rude rattle against the wood, and the little screen lit up green.

A number. Just a number, ten digits, no name, no message. She didn't recognize it. Not Carlotta's cell, not the gas station (she checked the receipt), not the motel's own number (Brad had given her the front desk line on a card with a cartoon diamondback on it wearing a tiny cowboy hat, which was a choice).

Madison picked it up like it might bite her.

Who pagers a pager that's sitting in a motel room? The drilling site, maybe. Some automated thing. She told herself that three times. Some automated system pings all the pagers at night, that's a thing that happens, that's normal, that's a normal thing.

The number sat there glowing at her.

She tried to reason with herself. She was a data analyst! She dealt in facts! Fact: the pager belonged to a geology outfit. Fact: automated systems pinged things all the time. Fact: Carlotta had been gone almost an hour when she said twenty-five, and Carlotta did not get lost, Carlotta had a compass built into her brain, Carlotta once navigated them out of a canyon with no trail and no signal and a flat tire.

So where was she?

Madison stood up. Sat down. Stood up again. The horse painting watched her. Outside, the wind was doing something in the gravel lot, a low dry hiss like the desert clearing its throat.

She looked up the area code on her phone. It was a Nevada number. Local. Local to here, to this exact stretch of nothing, which somehow made it worse than if it had been from the moon.

The pager buzzed again.

She fumbled it up and looked. Same number. And this time, under the number, six characters: 4 9 1 R D.

"Four nine one R D," she read aloud. "Fourth nine... one road? Four ninety-one..." Her stomach did a slow cold flip. "Fourth of nine, one road? What does that... Carlotta, what did you get into?"

There was no reply, obviously, because the desert outside was empty and the horse painting was useless and her fiancée was somewhere in the dark without her phone, and a pager that had been left behind was getting messages meant for somebody.

Madison grabbed her jacket.

The number was ten digits and Madison's thumb hovered over it like it was a snake. Calling a strange number in the middle of the Nevada night. That was how horror movies started, right? But she was already dialing, because the alternative was sitting in a room with a wedding dress and a horse painting until she lost her mind completely.

It rang four times.

"Diamondback Motel, this is Brad," a man's voice said, flat and tired, the voice of someone who had answered that exact phone ten thousand times.

"Oh. Hi, yes, hello," Madison said, way too fast. "I'm in room twelve. My fiancée left a pager here, or the pager's here, and it just got messages, and I saw your number on the card, and..."

"Slow down, honey." There was a creak, like Brad was leaning back in a chair. "Pager?"

"It buzzed. Twice. With your area code."

"Huh." A long pause. Madison could hear a TV in the background, some game show. "Well, I didn't send nothing. Only phone I touched all night is this one and my sister's in Reno."

"Okay, but someone from this area paged it, and my fiancée is missing, and..." Madison's voice cracked on the last word and she hated it. "Have you seen her? Tall woman, dark hair, thirty, she'd have walked past your office toward the highway, carrying a bag?"

"Dark hair, tall, kind of a serious face?"

"Yes. That's her, that's Carlotta."

"Saw her go by maybe half an hour ago," Brad said. "Headed toward the highway like you said. But listen, you want a weird one? Couple of the guys in six saw somebody that looked like her back by the pool. Maybe twenty minutes back."

"The pool?" Madison looked at the window. The pool was a cracked concrete bowl in the middle of the gravel lot, and it hadn't held water since last century, and there was a shopping cart in it. "Nobody's at the pool."

"That's what I'd figure too," Brad said. "But the guys in six are drunk and they swear a lady in a nice coat was out there standing at the edge, looking in. Then they looked away and she was gone. I figured they saw a mirage or an owl. We get owls."

"Thank you. Thank you, I'm going to look right now."

"Want me to send somebody?" he asked, and he sounded genuinely willing, which surprised her.

"No, no, just... call me if a woman in a nice coat walks through your lobby, okay? Room twelve."

"Room twelve. Got it." He hung up without saying goodbye.

* * *

The night air outside was cold in that way the desert gets, like the day never even happened. Madison crossed the gravel lot fast, her sneakers crunching loud in the dark, arms wrapped around herself. Room six's curtains were open and two men sat watching TV with beers, one of them raising a hand at her as she passed. She did not raise one back.

The pool was exactly as terrible as it had looked in daylight. A gray concrete crater, dry as bone, weeds growing up through the cracks in the deep end, the shopping cart sitting in the shallow end like some kind of art installation nobody asked for. The moon lit it all up in a flat silver that made everything look like a photograph of itself.

"Carlotta?" she called. Her voice went out over the empty lot and came back with nothing attached to it.

Then she saw the jacket.

It was draped over one of the plastic lounge chairs at the pool's edge. Carlotta's jacket. The green one, the one she'd worn every day this week, the one with the zipper that stuck halfway up that Madison kept telling her she'd fix. It was folded, actually folded, laid flat over the back of the chair like somebody had done it carefully. Like a note.

Madison's whole body went cold.

"Oh no. No no no no no." She picked it up and it still smelled like Carlotta's shampoo, and that made it so much worse somehow. "Carlotta! CARLOTTA!"

Nothing. Wind. Gravel. A dog barked somewhere far off, once, and then quit.

She turned in a slow circle. The motel rooms glowed dimly. The highway was a ribbon of far-off headlights. The desert was black in every other direction. Where did a person go from a swimming pool at eleven at night with no wallet, no phone, no pager, and no jacket?

"Why would you take your jacket off," Madison whispered. "You hate being cold. You wear socks to bed in July."

And then her brain, her stupid data-analyst brain that sorted facts for a living, laid them out in a row for her like items on a scantron.

Fact: Carlotta would not leave her jacket. Fact: the pager got a message from a local number. Fact: the message said 4 9 1 R D. Fact: Brad's card said the motel address, and Madison had read it a hundred times waiting for the rental car guy to call.

4 9 1. She pulled the card out of her pocket with shaking hands and there it was. Room four. Room nine. Room one. No, wait. A building number? She flipped the card over. The front desk, the diner, and, in small print, an address for Roadside Alterations. 491 Ridge Road.

"4 9 1 R D," she said out loud. "Ridge Road. Carlotta, you absolute genius."

The dress shop. Two blocks away. The dress was there, the fitting was there, and Carlotta had somehow paged herself from... no, wait, that didn't work, because the pager was in the room. Unless. Unless somebody at the shop had paged the pager. Unless Carlotta had gotten to a phone and dialed the pager's number and typed that in, because her phone was dead and a pager message was the only way to leave a note that Madison would actually see.