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Palm Springs

January 2, 2023

6:00 A.M.

The day after Grant went missing, I was still convinced that it was only a matter of time before he walked through the front door—chagrined, maybe a little dirty, certainly contrite. Others weren’t so sure. When he didn’t return from his hike, a pop-up command center topped by a satellite dish was set up in Indian Canyons faster than I could say REI. The park was buzzing with helicopters, drones, thermal sensors they called FLIRs, and rescuers in orange gear.

It felt as though half the population of Palm Springs was out searching the mountains, from the tribe’s rangers to volunteers with the Mounted Police—I couldn’t keep track of all the agencies or who did what.

What a spectacle, all for one man!

Yesterday, Grant had been planning to leave before sunrise for a New Year’s Day hike to Cedar Springs with Hobie, his hiking buddy, and our neighbor. He was gone when I woke up. I’d expected him home by lunch, but the minutes ticked by, and then night fell. As our dinner grew cold and my texts and calls were met with eerie silence, I became increasingly concerned. Then again, I’d had a bad feeling all day. Things were not good between us.

When I saw Hobie in the courtyard of our condo complex that night, I knew something was wrong. All day, I’d assumed they were together. But when Grant wasn’t waiting outside by the Jeep in the morning, Hobie figured he was still sleeping off a New Year’s Eve hangover. Hobie immediately insisted we call the ranger for help. Good midwesterner that I am, I didn’t want to trouble anyone, and I thought there was some kind of twenty-four-hour rule that applied to missing persons. But Hobie didn’t rattle easily, and his concern set off my own alarm bells.

Still, I assumed that the ranger, Brady, would think I was overreacting. Instead, after taking down some preliminary information about Grant’s age, fitness level, and what he was wearing, Brady asked why I hadn’t called sooner. “At this point, I’m afraid he’s going to have to spend the night up there,” he said. “I can’t create an incident within an incident by sending people out in the dark.”

At the crack of dawn, Hobie drove me to Indian Canyons to meet with Brady. I was expecting to retrieve Grant as though he were a lost dog picked up by animal control. That’s when I discovered that the vast thirty-one-thousand-acre hiking area and ancestral home of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, a major Palm Springs tourist destination with sixty trails that lead into the San Jacinto Mountains, was now closed to visitors. Hobie whistled, impressed. “Well, look at that. The entire canyon has been evacuated.”

I cringed, worried I’d created all this missing-person hubbub for nothing.

Brady was studying a Google Earth map on a giant screen. “Did you find the vehicle?” Hobie asked.

Brady shook his head no. “We sent some guys up to Morris Ranch Road again. Nothing there, nothing here.”

They followed the long red line running along the map with a circle in the middle to represent Cedar Springs, Grant’s supposed destination. I learned he could have gotten there from above by driving about forty-five minutes to the higher elevations, parking at the top of the trail near Pinyon Pines, and making his way down the Jo Pond Trail. His other option was to park where we stood in Indian Canyons and walk up the West Fork Trail from below. On a map, it looked easy.

Brady pushed his readers down his nose and gazed at me over the lenses. “Without knowing where the car is, he could be anywhere. The first thing we do is look for shoe prints outside the vehicle. Then we create a radius to determine how far he could have gone. Without it, we don’t even know where to start.”

“What about his phone?” I asked.

“Not much reception where he is,” Brady said. “Could be dead. Could be stolen. Maybe he left it in the car? Thieves can jailbreak or use activation unlock tools. We can ping it, but we need permission to get his info from his carrier. Could take some time. We’ll need your authorization, too. Did you bring what I’d asked?”

I handed him a small bag with Grant’s prescriptions.

“Xarelto,” Brady said, looking at the label with concern. “He’s on blood thinners?”

“Is that a problem?”

“I sure hope not, but could be. If he falls or gets cut, he could keep bleeding. On the other hand, if he hasn’t taken a pill for a few days, he could throw a clot, especially up in the high altitude.” Brady handed back the bottle of pills. “I’m sure he’s fine.”

I could tell that Brady had no such certainty.

The tribe charged a fee to use their trails, and Brady, while sympathetic, wasn’t too happy that their daily operations would be disrupted to search for another lost weekend warrior. He said that when they found Grant (I took comfort in the fact that he said when, not if ), he would be banned from the reservation for life.

I’d brought some photos so they could get a better sense of his appearance, prints that I’d made at Walgreens the night before. The picture of Grant on the top of the pile already seemed dated because he was no longer the pale, beardless, out-of-shape fiftysomething who’d left Wisconsin with me last fall. I’d taken the photo the day after we arrived in Palm Springs and explored the downtown for the first time. It was impossible to miss the giant twenty-six-foot-tall fiberglass statue of Marilyn Monroe from The Seven Year Itch, just off Palm Canyon Drive. The first thing visitors to the Palm Springs Art Museum see when they exit is Marilyn’s bulbous rear as she’s famously trying to hold down her billowing skirt as the wind shoots up from the imagined sidewalk vent. I watched some guys in baseball caps stand between the statue’s shapely legs and look up at her panties. Whoever had approved the statue hadn’t considered how uncomfortable it would make a woman like me feel to watch grown men openly point up at a female crotch.

“Perverts,” I muttered, fully intending for the men to hear me, in the same way I intended neighbors with pesticide flags on their lawns back home to hear me say, “Poison,” as I walked past.

Grant’s interpretation of the Forever Marilyn statue was louder, less passive-aggressive, and more intellectual than emotional. “This isn’t art. This is selfie trash begging to go viral. You know what this is, Kimmy?” He always had to sound like the professor he was. “It’s ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ beyond Walter Benjamin’s wildest dreams. Talk about the decay of an aura. If we tried to put this eyesore on a college campus, can you even imagine the outrage it would spark? Tell me, why is it okay here, smack-dab in the middle of a small, supposedly ‘progressive’ city?”

He didn’t notice that while he was gesticulating, I’d covertly taken that photo to send to our daughters. I knew they’d appreciate the odd juxtaposition of the mountains, palm trees, and Marilyn Monroe in the background, and sweaty Grant spouting off in the foreground in his New Balance sneakers, his windbreaker tied around his waist.

Brady frowned when he looked at that photo of Grant. It was not a good choice because it confirmed what I suspected the officer was already thinking—that he was just another stupid tourist.

“Let’s get a better sense of the man we’re looking for, okay, Mrs. Duffy?”

I am usually quick to correct anyone who assumes I share Grant’s last name. Even though we’ve been together for almost thirty years and have grown daughters, we never tied the knot, at first because he was still married, and the prenup I’d signed with my first husband, Basil, had specified that my alimony would end if I were to remarry within a decade. When Grant’s divorce was official and my alimony ran out, we thought about getting hitched, but never did. Weddings are expensive, and I didn’t think we needed a piece of paper to show the world what we meant to each other.

Lately, Grant wanted to make our union more official, but our arrangement worked for me—especially the separate-but-together routine we’d established when we spent most of our time living in different places. It provoked so much commentary from friends and family that it felt brave, even, to remain together but unmarried for so long. When people accused me of being commitment-phobic, I’d point out that we’d outlasted most of our friends. How many of them, if they were in our shoes, would make the decision to marry each other at this stage of life after all these years?

I liked to think we were like Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, who insisted that not being married meant that every single day involved making a choice to be together.

I did not explain this to Brady because it wasn’t anyone’s business but our own, and I worried that if he found out I was Grant’s mere “partner,” I could be cut out of the whole search.

Brady asked a series of routine questions that ranged from easy to hard, the way wine is listed on a menu from lightest to boldest.

“How would you describe his appearance?”

“Oh, he’s very appealing.” I’ve always liked the way Grant looks.

“How tall is he?”

“Average height, about five-ten, although he’d tell you he’s six feet. He’s in much better shape now than in that photo. He was even starting to get a six-pack. His cheeks are always flushed, and he’s very fair. He has to be careful here in the sun, although I suppose everyone does. His hair is more salt than pepper now, although I think of it as brown. He still has a lot of it.”

Grant had a child’s fear of getting his hair cut, so I learned how to use shears ages ago, but I did a terrible job because I didn’t know how to work with his cowlicks and waves. Our new friends in Palm Springs, Thomas and Raul, aka the Husbands, were aghast and took matters into their own hands. They insisted on giving Grant an edible and took him to a barbershop called Daddy’s, where they played Destiny’s Child on blast and a man named Strap gave him a fade, leaving a shock of hair tumbling over his forehead. It was the best cut he’d ever had, and it made me sad for all the years I’d missed out on seeing this more clean-cut and angular version of him. Thank God he let Strap shape the full-on ZZ Top beard he’d started growing as soon as we’d arrived in Palm Springs.

I tried to describe it to Brady. “His hair came in silver by his mouth, like fangs. I told him that he looked like one of those shih tzus with different-colored muzzles.” I’ve always been nervous around authority figures, and I was beginning to feel more worried about Grant. I overtalk when I’m nervous. I say stupid things I regret. “We used to have a shih tzu. His name was Milky.”

“Eye color?”

“Milky’s? His eyes were brown.”

Brady didn’t laugh. Instead, he shot me a look that said, Don’t you understand that this is serious? The thing was, I did, but even though Grant was relatively new to hiking, he was obsessed enough for me to believe he knew what he was doing. He subscribed to a California topographical site and routinely pored over the Google Earth images Brady, Hobie, and the other volunteers were now studying.

“Is he nearsighted? Farsighted?”

“He’s incredibly nearsighted, particularly in one eye.” His glasses were often crooked, weighed down.

“Right or left side? This can help us figure out which direction he might have gone.”

“Right,” I said. “Oh, and his eyes are hazel, like our daughter March’s. Dort’s are blue like mine. The girls are twins, but it’s easy to tell them apart.”

Everyone, including Brady, looked as though they’d misheard me when I said our daughters’ names aloud. When I was pregnant and we learned we were having twin girls, we couldn’t agree on what to name them. Grant’s mother had gotten pregnant in high school and was given no choice by her Catholic parents but to marry Grant’s alcoholic father. She named him after the Serenity Prayer, so that every time she said it aloud, she would be reminded: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” When I asked my mother why she’d picked the name Kim for me, she shrugged and said, “Because it’s easy to spell.”

Grant suggested we each pick a name and keep it to ourselves until we filled out the birth certificates. One child would be a Hastings, the other a Duffy. I picked the name March because that was the name of painter Milton Avery’s daughter, an artist herself. It was important to me to choose a name that was artsy and “different,” and I thought March Avery was the coolest name I’d ever heard. I was certain Grant would love March Hastings, and he did.

Then it was his turn. Grant was bursting with excitement, overjoyed to be a father despite the obstacles we’d faced with my complicated and unexpected pregnancy. He lit up. With tears in his eyes he said, “Dorothy. Dorothy Duffy, Double D.”

“Oh, honey. No.” I wanted to clean out my ears.

“It’s unique. Nobody names their kid Dorothy anymore.”

“There’s a reason for that.”

“It’s a family name.”

Grant hadn’t followed a trend in his life, and he was a sucker for tradition. He had a library of first-edition yellowed books that smelled like damp sawdust, and he refused to replace the cool-looking 1950s O’Keefe and Merritt oven that came with our house, even though it cooked unevenly and only two of the six burners still worked. He was incredibly uncomfortable with technology, and he often waxed nostalgic for times, and people, gone by. He once told me that he fell for me because he thought I was old-fashioned. He thought this meant that I was capable and unfussy, low-maintenance, and I’ve spent the last thirty years letting him believe this.

“We can call her Dort, like my nana,” Grant said. “She wanted the name passed down. She asked on her deathbed.”

I’d met the elder Dort shortly after Grant and I had gotten serious. Her name invoked the odor of the mothballs that had permeated her Victorian home in Virginia. She wore a hairnet when she cooked, and she once gave me a bag filled with her old nylons cut into pieces so I could use them to tie my tomato bushes to the cage. To me, the name sounded like dork , and wort. I thought it was ugly and strange, and I was convinced that our child would be teased relentlessly. But who was I to put up a fight? We had an agreement, after all, and I’d never felt more scared and vulnerable.

Our daughters had arrived early and with a great deal of crash-cart and ventilator drama. The NICU nurse called them pollitos, little chickens. The doctor explained we’d face tremendous risks if we wanted to have more children.

“At least you had twins,” everyone said, as though we were begging for consolation.

We’d talked about risking it again, or adopting, but as the girls grew more capable and independent and our days filled with activities and obligations, we put away the plastic toys and donated the car seat and stroller, and Grant agreed to a vasectomy. With our lives taking place mostly in separate cities at that point, it didn’t make sense to grow our family.

If only it were possible to pinpoint the exact moment when we’d moved beyond the luxury of being able to make a decision, when our uncertainty about raising more children calcified into gratitude or regret for choices we’d never actually made.

Once I was finally better, I told myself that the name wasn’t important; all that truly mattered was that we were out of the woods. Still, I couldn’t help but think that Grant and I were like two dented cereal boxes: we’d come from broken families, and we’d both been briefly married before we’d met. My pregnancy, only weeks into our relationship, had forced us together. As a new family, already we were weird.

But Dort made the name her own. She was squat and strong, the star of a Roller Derby team (they called her Dortorrhea). She accused her sister of being “basic,” even though, with her long blond hair and obsession with makeup tutorials, March played competitive chess and graduated at the top of her class. Both girls did well in school—it didn’t hurt that Grant challenged them with brainteasers and logic puzzles as soon as they could talk. When they were eight years old and wanted bikes, Grant bought bike kits and made them build them in the garage. They attended youth science and language institutes at the college because they were free for faculty kids. March was flu ent in Spanish and French; Dort spoke Russian and Arabic and was studying for the foreign service exam.

I’d been missing the girls terribly. And now I missed Grant terribly, too, which seemed especially ironic because lately I’d been imagining what life would be like without him.

Brady tapped the photo.

“Oh,” I said, as though I’d just remembered an important detail. “Grant has the most amazing eyelashes—the eyelashes of a child.”

I wasn’t yet afraid he was in real trouble, or, rather, I hadn’t allowed myself to think it. What upset me was the argument we’d had the night before he left. I didn’t want to mention this to Brady, who scratched his boot against the dirt like a horse anticipating bad weather. “Can you tell me what your husband was wearing?”

There it was, that word again: husband. “Sure, I can tell you exactly. A navy beanie, his navy sun hoodie, and a Montbell ultralight down jacket, also navy. And expensive.”

Grant had never cared much about his wardrobe until he joined the “ultralight revolution.” At first, when his shorts and pants had been torn up by rocks and cacti, he covered the holes with duct tape. After Hobie gave him a hard time, he joined a Facebook group of hiking gearheads and settled on a two-hundred-dollar pair of pants that were made out of a fabric called biomass balanced polyamide and had pre-bent knees, adjustable hems, reflectors, steel stirrups, and lots of pockets and zippers; they were his prize possession, along with his two-ounce backpack made of material called Cuban cloth. I often teased him about knowing how much his clothes and pack weighed right down to the ounce, but now I took comfort in the knowledge that he wasn’t bogged down. His fancy pants with space-age fabric were keeping him warm and dry, and his gear was keeping him safe.

“Tell me, does he have any distinguishing moles, birthmarks?”

I pushed up my sleeve and showed him the tattoo on the inside of my wrist. “We all have the same one.” The family tattoo had been Grant’s idea, when he was looking for a way to celebrate March and Dort’s eighteenth birthdays. “Grant’s is on his upper arm, right here. Dort’s is on her thigh, just above her knee, and March—well, she started crying because she thought it hurt too much. She’s such a baby. She only has the waves.”

The pier represented the memorable times our family had shared at Camp Jamboree, which my father had owned and run, and where I’d spent all my summers growing up. Grant felt it symbolized access, but also safety and security. “A pier is how you get out of the water when you’re in trouble,” he’d explained, “and how you get in when you want to swim. You tie your boats to it. You can rest on it. A pier, like family, is always there for you.”

What could be more incongruous than a pier in the desert? The reminder of Grant’s deep love for me, for the girls, brought me close to losing it for the first time since he’d disappeared. I hate crying, especially in front of other people.

Instead, I forced myself to serve up a false, cheery smile, in the hopes that I could charm Brady into working harder on our behalf (now that I was older, I had to work harder to charm a man). When my mother was briefly hospitalized after her stroke, I’d taped photos of her to the walls so that the nurses would know she was more than a patient, she was a person. Similarly, I wanted Brady to know that the lost hiker wasn’t just some tourist, he was the man I knew right down to the sound of his sneezes and the shape of his pinkie toenails. He doted on Dort and March—and he would have doted on me, too, if I’d been the type of person to allow it.

Grant usually checked in with me a thousand times a day, a habit I sometimes found irritating because every text felt like a call for attention. He would tell me that the line at the post office was long or share a photo that had popped up on his phone in our family group chat of Milky with a Frisbee in his mouth. His texts on the trail were much less frequent and usually included photos of what he was looking at.

“I told Grant that he shouldn’t go hiking that far away on his own,” Hobie said.

“Grant never listens. You know how academics are.” Did Hobie? I decided to clarify. “They always think they’re too smart to get into trouble. Too smart for everything, actually.”

Brady asked, “Is it possible he met up with someone?”

“I doubt it. He was into solo hiking.”

Hobie gave me a look of pity. “He’s asking if you think Grant has a sidepiece.”

“Oh no,” I said, defensive.

“Suspicion of foul play?” Brady asked.

Hobie laughed. “No way,” he answered for me. “Not that guy.”

“Hobie”—Brady was irritated that he always chimed in—“can you make yourself scarce?”

“Why does everyone always want me to make myself scarce? Fine.” He sprinted to the trailer.

Brady got back to business. “Alcohol problems?”

“No. Grant only drinks occasionally. Both of his parents struggled with alcohol and drugs, and his dad died when he drove his car into a tree. He swore he’d never—”

“I don’t need his family history.”

I saw Brady’s eyes linger on my naked ring finger. “Trouble in your marriage?”

For once, I didn’t have a lot I wanted to say. I let out a nervous laugh. “I guess you could say we’ve been having some issues.”

“Issues?”

I didn’t like sharing the most intimate details of my private life with anyone, aside from my best friend, Octavia, and Basil. This guy was a stranger, not a therapist. Knowing that Grant and I were at a “hinge point” in our relationship, as Octavia called it, wouldn’t help Brady find him. “Oh, you know, we don’t really agree about how or where we ought to live and what our life should be.”

Finally, I’d succeeded in amusing Brady, although it pained me to admit to our seemingly intractable problems.

“Was he unhappy at work?”

“He recently lost his job. The college where he taught closed, just like that.” I clapped my hands together for emphasis. After years of declining enrollment and financial mismanagement, the president of the small liberal arts college announced at graduation that the lights were being turned off in the ivory tower. Everyone knew it could happen. Like losing a loved one after a long illness, it wasn’t a surprise, but it was still a seismic emotional shock for Grant, who thought of his colleagues and students as family, and the campus as his home. His work had been his life.

“He was depressed?”

“I think he’d say he’s been doleful. But being here has been good for him. He’s seemed better the last few months. A lot better. He loves hiking. He’s obsessed.” I felt a shudder go through me when I realized what Brady was getting at. “You aren’t trying to say Grant would—you don’t think—?” Suicide was something I hadn’t considered. “Grant wouldn’t do that. Not ever.”

I knew what Brady was thinking: That’s what they all say .

The warden tucked her walkie-talkie in its holster and ambled over to where Brady and I stood.

“He’ll be okay?” I asked, suddenly needing the assurance Brady seemed disinclined to offer.

She pointed out into the distance. The mountains, capped with snow, were reflected in her metallic sunglasses. It was an image I suspected was always there, no matter where she was looking.

“The farther back they go,” she said, grouping Grant with all the other hikers who’d ever gone missing, “the more trouble they’re in. Big, big trouble. It might be sunny and warm here, but you get as high as seven thousand feet and it’s easy to lose a trail in the snow, or fall in an ice chute. There’s hypothermia. Nights get very cold this time of year in the higher elevations. He’s not exactly young.” Grant would have hated to hear the warden say that. “He could have had a sudden cardiac event, a stroke. He could have slipped or crossed paths with drug traffickers. We see a lot of activity up there. Bobcats can be nasty. Mountain lions. Last week we found a young lady near Murray Peak, high out of her mind, naked as a jaybird. She thought she was dancing on the moon. She’s lucky she’s alive. Lots of kooks in the desert. You think it’s bad now, just wait until Coachella.”

The city of Palm Springs is tucked into the elbow of the San Jacinto range. From where I stood, the mountains appeared barren and rocky, dry and scabbed, like a scene from The Flintstones. I thought that it would be hard to get lost without dense foliage, but this is the steepest escarpment in the United States, rising to over ten thousand feet above sea level in just seven horizontal miles. As Hobie put it, the landscape “gets gnarly” the higher up you climb. As far as Grant was concerned, the gnarlier, the better.

Just then, some of the tribal members showed up on horseback, accompanied by an army of equestrian volunteers. This modern cavalry paused, and the ranger on the lead horse stopped briefly to consult with the warden. There was some pointing in the distance and discussion of trails, lots of stomping and whinnying, and then they were off. Despite the circumstances, I found it beautiful to watch the animals trot effortlessly from the Trading Post down into the crag of Palm Canyon and out into the rocky landscape. I thought of that Bukowski line Basil used to recite: The days run away like wild horses over the hills.

And there it was, the possibility now creeping into the corners of my consciousness, the voice I’d tried to hush because it was no less terrifying. Grant might be lost, as Brady and Hobie feared—or he might have run away. Again.

Had I manifested this situation? I was the one who’d felt restless, I was the one who’d pushed us to come here. Palm Springs had been my dream, not his. I rarely asked for much, and look what happened when I did.

It had seemed so simple: I just wanted to go somewhere warm for the winter.