She asks me first about Guv and Essie May. I got nothing particularly good to say here but I try to make it sound okay because I have gotten on a flight and took a cab with a foreigner who laughed at my hat. I didn't kill him but I am on edge and it is noisy here. Every sound jars and it makes me angry because I can barely hear her voice. She's quiet as a mouse and I don't want her quiet. I want her to be angry, be happy, be my life, just be my girl again.

I tell her they are doing as well as can be expected. Guv got a walker, finally. "The cuss don't want to use it, but that cane was worthless anymore. It's for the best."

She takes my things upstairs but I stand against the building and fish for a smoke because her eyes are wet. She asks me to wait so I do. Alejandro eyes me and he says, sort of protective-like, "You the one, big man? You hurt her?"

"I didn't," I say, but I'm mad. He's five foot seven and nobody. He don't know her. Nobody out here does, not like I do. He's smoking some kind of stinky cigarillo and looking up at me like he wishes he had a matador's sword to run me clear through. "Fine," I say, flicking ashes. "I know. But I just wanted her to stay."

"She didn't, heh? And here you are."

"We won't bother you long. I come to get her."

The sun, though low, it hangs out there so much bigger even than at home. It feels like a movie set here, sort of unreal.

Alex shakes his head and looks up, way up, at me. "Hope you can feel your brain up there, bendejo. Start thinking with that."

I'm getting really fucking sick of being cursed at in my own damned country and I might say so, but Bella comes out in yoga pants with a pair of pink tennis shoes on.

"How bout a walk?" She's looking down. I hate it. I want to see her eyes. I want to wrap her up and run her home, back where things make sense, but she reminds me of a new colt, skittish and kind of wobbly. I take her elbow to keep from taking her mouth, and she leans into me so we hit the sidewalk. I can smell Mexican food and salt water, but mostly I smell the perfume she just put on to cover up the gravy and mashed potatoes. In the long slump of her shoulders and the way she lolls against my arm, I can feel it. She's bone tired but if she wants to walk, we'll walk.

If she gets too tired, I'll carry her.

We get colors back home, but not like this. Blues that are blue and green and gray and purple all at the same time. Red and oranges the color of kids' play-doh. Everywhere I look, it's excess and bright and too damned much, but she's an anchor I just want to hold on to. She's a new color, too, darker than before but still pale. Her hair's got red in it and I wonder if that's from this sun or if she done something to it.

We walk down this big boardwalk to the shore. There's a Ferris wheel and a fair number of beggars. She shakes her head but I stop with my billfold. There's a lot of them close together here but I pass out dollars until I'm out of ones and then we move on. They call behind us, "Thank you. Cowboy, huh? Thank you, cowboy."

I can't be this close to her and not so I reach down and grip her hand. That blue out there is burning now with the sunset. I think I may go up in flames too. "I know you needed time but I didn't know what to do when you didn't come home for Thanksgiving." I'm trying to tell her, and she's done closing her eyes and sighing at me.

"Don't."

Well, how can I not? She's right up there with the Redeemer and she's so close to me, her fingers in mine, Alpha and Omega, my beginning and my end. Lord, God, but she may end me yet.

"What then?" My voice is shaking and that makes me mad because I sound fourteen instead of my own age, and damn her anyway for telling me what's what all the time. "I lost the babies, too, you know. You don't got the market cornered on grief, Bella."

She stops, and the colors are behind her and on her skin, almost swallowing her. I've still got her hand but it feels colder, even though nothing here ever really gets cold.

"I know it." She says, and then she cough chokes. "I destroy everything. I mess up all the time."

I don't know how long we stand there after she reaches for me. I think maybe it's twenty minutes but maybe it's two hours. The sun is gone and it's dark, or it should be if it weren't for all the lights round here, by the time we walk back wordless. Inside her two room apartment, she hands me one of my own t-shirts shirts to change into because mine is soaked with the salt of her tears. Davy Pissed, a calico cat with a bad attitude, has urinated in the general area of my bag, so a t-shirt that smells like her laundry soap seems a good choice. She says he's been marking his territory since he come home from the LA shelter with her two month back. I hate this cat. I hate that he's a tie here for her, a nail in a door that makes it harder to reopen.

I want to just reach for her, but it's too wide a gulf. She finds a Gone With the Wind marathon on AMC, and we eat store bought pecan pie out of paper plates with Reddi Whip while Katie Scarlett throws a vase at a wall. Before Atlanta is burning, Bella has shoved the cat off her lap and is laying across her dumpy blue couch with her feet in my lap. She's so tired. I don't know if she's ever looked so tired, even after baby two's heartbeat vanished at eight weeks, bringing her to her knees with cramps and bleeding out back of Guv's biggest pole barn. She looks like that now, with the deep bruising shadows under her eyes, trying to hold herself together now like then so we could go in for Essie May's Easter buffet like everything was normal.

I don't know if she's asleep first or if I am but sleep we do, as together as we have been in so long.

The movie has restarted when I wake to her lips at my throat. The scent of turkey still hangs in her hair, and it reminds me of where we'd be at home now. I want her home so much. I want to give her entries in a family Bible of our own, with no ending year written after the birth date on the lines. Our lives feel like that sometimes, at least mine does, like it's stuck on the dash, unfinished, on hold.

Her fingers are cold still and shaking like leaves, so I tuck them into my fist, and kiss her back. Her tongue slips against me, biting at my lips, licking my jaw. I want to be gentle, but she doesn't want that. She pulls at me through my jeans, bites my neck.

"Bella," I say, trying to warn her. "Not like this. Let me love on you."

She rocks back on the couch, the balls of her feet under her ass. She's naked except for her shirt, and her bra is in the floor with her pants, a shapeless pink blur in the glow of famine and soldiers on the TV. "No," she says, hair escaping from its plait. She almost seems angry. "Take me. Mean it."

I do mean it. I'm pulling her back with my hand wrapped in her hair. Every kiss is brutal, and I hope I'm not making it, making her, worse, but she moans and drifts, opening up for me like a morning glory to a new dew. My fist closes around one breast and I suckle the other, hard, trying to pull the bud of tight nipple down my throat. At once she comes to life, pushing me back, wrenching at my jeans, and she's on her knees on the worn carpet, sucking me down, hollowing me out as her mouth latches on with the venom of a snake that won't let go. She bites and I claw at her throat. I want to shake her but instead I hold her at the shoulders and fuck her little mouth, push and buck till she's nearly gagging, and then her eyes open, deep bruises beneath changing them from brown to black in the orange flicker of the TV. I let go of her, just for a second, unsure.

She lays down in the floor, and I fall on her, grabbing her ass, pushing the fingers of my other hand up into her, one and two and three, and she's squirming, biting my chest, licking my nipples, and heaving up against me as I push and push and thrust into her with my hand, wishing it was me, wishing I could take her, lay waste to her and build us new from the ashes. The shivers seem to come from inside her belly, fanning across her body like the ripples on a pond, if the pond were fed from a volcano. In a minute, she'll blow. I have brought her here and home so many times before, and I know.

The heat of her eyes come back to me, and she pulls at my hand, urging me over her. "No." She grabs me by the dick. "No, I want you. Give me you."

Everything is wrong and yet it's right. She wants to be possessed and I want to hold her down and make her stay, and so I do, pushing her flat beside the coffee table and driving my cock into her hard, one thrust to home, and pulling it out almost to the end, before ramming her again. I drive into her, wanting her to know, wanting her to feel me tonight and tomorrow and always know that no one possesses her, no one reaches her the way I do. She reaches up to me, leaning up on her elbows to thrash against me and bite at the veins in my neck, while her heels come around my ass and pull me into her. "Harder," she says. "Deeper."

"Shut up," I say, and it's a growl. "You're trying to make me mad. I know what to do."

"No." Her heels rock against my ass. "Hard. Fuck me. Please." Her hands come around and pull me even as I bottom out inside of her, and my thoughts seem to bleed away between my ears. I drive like a rack and pinion, grinding deep into my other half, willing her to feel me, to know me, to love me. I reach for her throat and pull at her hip, too, twisting and slick, deep and hard, and on and on and on until the shivers travel between us and I can feel her tightening against my cock, her body sucking at me, pulling me the deepest inside even as she goes to pieces in my arms.

I put my head against her forehead and go with her.

I get up to pee around three in the morning. She's wrapped in a quilt on the couch, hair in her face, and going into her room to find the bathroom without waking her is difficult but I manage it. I feel around inside my bag when I come back for the airline ticket I brought with me, the one for her, and I prop it up on the bar that runs across a half wall between the living room and the postage stamp of a kitchen. There's a letter, too, in a plain white envelope. I don't know if I said the right things. I tried to tell her, to let her know that I love her, that I need her so, so much.

It's my boom box in the driveway, my big proposal moment, my grand gesture. It's all I've got.

I wake up in the floor by the couch stiff legged with a crick in my neck. Davy Pissed eyes me warily from beside a half dying lemon tree on the kitchen counter. I call for her, but she doesn't answer. Her shoes are gone.

On the counter, the ticket has been removed from the envelope but it's stacked neatly on top of my unopened letter. Beside it, she's written carefully on a purple post it, in clear, precise script.

"Please go. I won't be back until you're gone."

There's no love, no postscript at all. She hasn't even signed it.

My beginning. And my end.