Mornings that long-ago summer, the sun consumed the sky. The suburban air smelled of hot asphalt and absence. We wore nylon shorts and his-and-her sunhats on our miserable walks. We carried 30-ounce water bottles and our own immeasurable grief.

Along Windmill, the cicadas buzzed. Most of our neighbors remained cocooned inside their cool stucco homes while the two of us sweated and suffered, darting like lizards between patches of shade provided by the occasional palm or purple plum tree.

And then an ancient, stooped man would appear, out on a walk of his own. We would watch in amazement as he drew nearer in his faded dress shoes, shapeless trousers, dark corduroy blazer and derby cap.

This was in July, remember, in Las Vegas.

The old man's face looked dry as parchment, his expression serene, as though he had acclimated to this harsh desert climate generations ago, or discovered some secret to staying comfortable and eternally alive on this disinterested planet.

We forgot our discomfort—and sometimes even our despair—for a moment, our torsos like overheating engines. We slowed our pace and studied the old man as he shuffled toward us on the sidewalk. His small feet lifted almost imperceptibly with each tiny step, as though he were floating or dancing, without a care in the world.

•

Before we left the house those mornings, Lenna reminded us that we were still alive. "Your bodies need to move," she told us, the papery skin around her brown eyes crinkling. Then she handed us our sneakers, passed us bottles of water with mint in it, and shooed us out our own front door, the way our mothers had on summer mornings long ago.

Lenna saved us that summer, you understand, a lifetime ago. She left her airy, retirement-community condo across town, her beloved patio garden full of herbs and jasmine and purple hearts, to stay with us, her broken friends. With her she brought a knapsack full of tea, books, and chocolate, and she kept us alive during those brutal, bleary days after the baby died. She coaxed us to eat and drink and sleep, cooing at us as though we were a pair of reluctant pets instead of a long-married couple on the brink of middle age.

While our families, never close, remained preoccupied with their own lives back east, Lenna handled the arrangements, the cremation, the phone calls, and the flowers. She appeared on our doorstep the morning after we lost the baby—only a few weeks after we brought him home—and took charge of everything. She wiped our bloodshot eyes and stroked our ravaged faces. She fed us mysterious chalky pills and tucked us into bed in the middle of the afternoon. Later, in a trembling voice, she promised us that we would survive. Someday, she said, we would again gaze with joy upon the sky and mountains that surround this neon city.

We stared at her blankly. Her words were not words.

•

Each day, as the old man drew nearer, we marveled anew at his enduring handsomeness. His placid face featured a pointy chin, aquiline nose, and twinkly eyes the color of mountain ice melting in the spring. It was easy to picture his olive skin smooth before wrinkles, his chiseled jaw before jowls, his dark eyebrows before they went white and unruly as strips of wool. His ash-white hair, poking out here and there from beneath his cap, must once have been thick and black. Something about him—his peculiar clothing, perhaps—made us think he came from another country.

He carried a set of black prayer beads in his gnarled fingers, and his lips moved silently as he made his slow way east on Windmill. What had brought him from so far away, we wondered, to this particular desert? Almost everybody here comes from someplace else, you know, and everybody has a story.

•

We had met Lenna five years earlier, midway through a downtown charity walk to raise money for a good cause. We had neglected to check the forecast that day, and a rare summer rain shower caught us off guard. Lenna came along and found us huddled beneath a shuttered nightclub's leaky awning. She wore what we came to know as her everyday outfit, a bright polo shirt and jeans that fell an inch short on her long legs. She had tucked a few sprigs of fresh mint into her graying braid, and its pleasant scent reached us before she did.

"Join me," she insisted, beckoning until we agreed to share her enormous umbrella.

The rain quickly subsided but we walked on together while Lenna gave us a breathless summary of her life. She grew up an East Coast only child. Her parents died long ago. In college, she married a taciturn poet, who brought her to Nevada, where he had landed a teaching job. Their ultimately unhappy union had limped along until his death, a decade before. Their only child, a daughter, had moved to Portland for college, where she stayed after graduation. Lenna had retired early from a job in the accounting department of a Strip casino, and already had lost touch with her former colleagues.

"Such a lonely city," she said with a sweeping gesture that coincided with our passage through a vibrant corner of the homeless corridor. Nearby, a group of men squatted in a commandeered carport, playing a boisterous hand of cards and looking not at all lonely.

But we understood how she felt. We had only each other at the time. It wasn't until later—years after we had given up—that we managed to conceive the baby, despite our advancing age, low testosterone, and unpredictable ovaries. A perfect baby, we thought, born with a firm grip and a full head of copper hair. A miracle baby, Lenna said. We had no reason to suspect the hidden imperfection that would soon develop and reveal itself too late: the faulty, inflamed heart.

We too felt lonely and longed for friends. But we had difficulty making and keeping them because of our social awkwardness and abhorrence of small talk. We worked in IT, for the government. Something about us stoked Lenna's instinct to nurture. She told us we shared her dead introvert husband's few good qualities.

The three of us grew close after our chance meeting that rainy morning. We even shared quiet holiday evenings together, lingering over Lenna's chocolate-silk pie and tea, while her daughter stayed in Portland with a boyfriend who soon became her husband. Over time, we came to think of ourselves as a makeshift family.

•

You have to understand, during those early days, we saw no one other than Lenna and that inscrutable old man. And unlike Lenna, the old man knew nothing about us or our recent devastation. For all he knew, we had a healthy baby—maybe even a whole brood. At first, this brought us a moment of relief, a daily respite from pain and crushing existential dread. We could briefly pretend everything hadn't fallen to pieces. Not long after we began our walks, we even managed to joke about the old man's origins. Imagine our disappointment if he turned out to be from Cleveland, we said. Or Lubbock.

This evolved into inventing entire histories for him, which we whispered to each other as he drew nearer. He had served as a decorated commander in a long-ago foreign war. He had relocated as part of an international witness-protection program. He had retired to the desert, after a celebrated career in philosophy, to play poker professionally.

Soon we began to fixate on the old man, attributing to him flattering qualities he may not have actually possessed. An extraordinary wisdom. A sixth sense. The power to heal, or at least comfort. The ability to provide reassuring answers to the impossible questions that tormented us. Had the baby suffered? Had he understood how much we loved him? If matter never disappears, as they say, but instead transforms into something new, what had the baby become, and where could we find him?

•

The first few days after we lost the baby, Lenna let us wallow in bed so long as we took a few bites of the eggs and potatoes she brought on a single platter, with two forks, atop a simple wooden tray. Obediently we choked down the warm, fragrant food, our eyes watering with effort, before turning away from it to face the walls.

Late on the morning of the third day, we heard her start the shower in the master bathroom. Seconds later, she swept into our darkened bedroom in her jeans and a yellow polo. She threw open the curtain, flooding the room with unwelcome sunshine. "Hand them over," she said, tugging off our twisted sheets.

One by one, she led us into the steamy bathroom, helped us remove our pajamas, and nudged us into the hot shower. We resisted at first—our skin felt inexplicably tender. Then we surrendered, sobbing into the falling water.

Afterward, in matching robes, we migrated to the twin recliners in the family room. Lenna brought us tea, turned the television to an old romantic comedy, and let us sit there until nightfall.

On the morning of the sixth day, she prescribed a half-hour walk. She steered us to the workout gear she had laid out, then refused to join us. "You will manage one thing on your own," she said. "And then another."

•

Lenna gave us a template for living that soon became automatic. Walk, bathe, eat, dress, eat, sleep, walk. Try not to think about any of it.

She began assigning us simple household chores—a load of laundry, a stack of dishes. We failed at these at first. She found a pile of dirty clothes in the dryer, sprinkled with soap. In the silverware drawer, a few unwashed forks among the clean. We could not organize our scattered thoughts long enough to accomplish anything.

At the beginning of the third week, she added work back into our template. She drove us there each day in her creaky minivan, sticking around to make sure we entered the windowless building next to the Air Force base instead of creeping onto the train tracks, say, or crawling behind a dumpster to hide like the terrified, fragile creatures we were. Inside, our boss and coworkers kept a respectful distance, spoke softly, and expected little of us.

The rest of the time we spent in our recliners, slack-faced and bewildered, as Lenna prepared dinner or relaxed on the couch with one of her romance novels. Sometimes we said to each other, "We lost the baby," testing the words. This was what they told us in the hospital's frigid waiting room, the words they used that terrible night. "I'm afraid we lost the baby," the whitecoats said, their faces damp and drawn, less than an hour after we rushed him there because of a sudden high fever. "We lost the baby." As though we all shared the responsibility, the guilt. As though we had simply misplaced him. Left him someplace we shouldn't have. Forgotten him at daycare or the grocery store or aboard a cruise ship. If we hadn't lost the baby, he would still be here, gurgling into our hot necks, demanding a diaper change, learning to laugh at our protruding tongues and stupid faces.

Merely lost, the baby might one day come home again. He might still exist somewhere out there.

We stared out the windows, at the purple Spring Mountains in the distance, our feet elevated in the recliners. We sipped Lenna's milky tea, nibbled sweet squares of chocolate. Sometimes we held each other's hands so they wouldn't be empty. In the middle of the night, we asked each other: "How could we have lost the baby?"

•

Other people might have gone to a quiet church, lit some candles, and prayed. But we had enough of that forced on us as children; even then we suspected nothing would come of our prayers.

Instead, we turned to that preternaturally wizened, floating man in the old-fashioned getup. A man, we suspected, who held every secret. You don't have to tell us: this was absurd. It made no sense. But neither did anything we had lately experienced. In our vulnerable state, magical thinking came easier.

We looked forward to our morning walks, though we dreaded the searing heat and the incessant drone of the cicadas, the reminder that our bodies still existed, our hearts continued to pump blood, our lungs to take in and expel unpalatable desert air. That we somehow remained alive, despite having lost someone we could not bear to live without.

Our breathing quickened whenever we spotted the old man. Always he stepped into the dusty street as we approached, conceding the entire, wide sidewalk. This gesture embarrassed us. We should have yielded first, made way for him. But one morning, when we tried preemptively moving into the street, he stubbornly drifted still farther into it, ignoring our protestations and insistent hand signals. This landed him in the path of oncoming traffic. A water truck swerved, blaring its horn. We had no choice but to let him win this daily, high-stakes game of chicken.

We longed to speak to the man, to ask him our questions. But something tied our tongues. Having suffered a great crisis of confidence, we lacked courage. And so we said nothing, even when he looked expectantly into our flushed faces as he passed, bestowing upon us a breathtaking, toothless grin. Part of us resisted breaking the captivating spell he had cast over us. Another part feared his answers.

•

Lenna told us we were lucky, in a way. Losing a child sometimes drives people apart, turns them against each other. "But you two have always been fused," she said, gazing at our linked fingers.

This was true. The day we met, on a college help-desk, we looked at each other and saw ourselves: two small, bespectacled people in drab clothes, with equally rigid postures, removed from the world while somehow remaining part of it. At last we belonged somewhere—together. Those who thought of us at all began to think of us as a unit. To this day, as you have heard, we speak as if with one voice.

Besides, it takes a certain amount of energy to tear something apart. Back then, we had none to spare.

•

We gathered courage as the summer wore on. When the old man stepped into the street, we tried to engage him in conversation. "Greetings!" we called from the sidewalk, our voices full of false cheer. "Couldn't get much hotter!"

Sometimes we risked a direct question. "Do you have the time?" or "Where you headed today?" We hoped to build on these, to segue to our real questions. Could we have somehow saved the baby? Is there any point in survival, now?

He grinned at us, that winner of a grin that cracked open his withered face. But he said nothing in reply. Just nodded and then offered a stiff, two-fingered salute that traveled from his derby cap to his slim waist. Had he been a soldier, long ago? Was he hard of hearing? Did he even speak English? Why wouldn't he answer? How much did he know? He must have known everything.

•

Lenna told us we were talking nonsense. That it was silly to ascribe special wisdom to the old man merely because he had white hair and unusual sartorial habits.

"It's unfair to saddle others with our own desires and expectations," she said one broiling Saturday afternoon, stirring a pot of potatoes while we set the table. "I'm sure your old man is as foolish as anybody else."

"As if he possessed some supernatural foresight!" she continued a moment later, laughing. "What if everybody thought so? Imagine all the people lining up, asking should they divorce their wives, or move to El Salvador. As if he's some kind of fortune teller! How is it that you two share even the same delusions?"

And here she slammed the lid onto the pot.

We blinked guiltily; she had a point. She had also hurt our feelings, laughing at us that way, the only time she had betrayed frustration since moving in, though we must have exhausted her with our helplessness.

"My advice is to focus on what's right in front of you," she said, handing us a stack of napkins. "Getting through today. And then tomorrow."

She turned off the stove and faced us, arms akimbo.

"Certain questions cannot be answered," she said, looking at each of us in turn. "Certain things cannot be understood. They can only be endured."

•

But we could not give up on that mesmerizing old man. We thrilled to see him each morning. How did he stay so dry, so unflappable, in that blistering heat? How did he remain at perfect ease, his movements effortless, while we panted and moaned? He must possess some kind of magic, we thought, though we had never before believed in magic. He must have so many answers, having lived so long—maybe forever. Why did he refuse to share them?

And then, one day, he stumbled.

It happened just as he stepped off the sidewalk into the street. His foot just missed its mark, landed short, and he fell forward. As he extended a hand to catch himself, he dropped his prayer beads.

We rushed to him, gripped his thin arms, helped him to his feet. He smiled and nodded at us, not at all shaken. Up close, he smelled of talcum powder and tobacco, regular human smells that disappointed us. We picked up the prayer beads and handed them to him. Then found ourselves unable to let go, unwilling to break this new, physical connection. He glanced at the beads and then considered us with pale, puzzled eyes.

"We're your neighbors," we said, clutching the beads while nodding in the direction from which we had come. "We see you every morning, and we've been wanting to talk to you."

The old man just tilted his head, smiled again and pulled, pointedly, on his beads. We reluctantly released them and then watched him amble away. He gave us his usual two-fingered salute before leaving us behind.

•

Lenna slept on our foldout couch for thirty-two nights after we lost the baby. On the last night, she crept into our moonlit bedroom in a creamy knee-length nightgown, her hair loosed from its long braid. We were not yet asleep, though it was well past midnight. We hardly slept then; it's a mystery how we survived. We lay side by side, two inanimate slabs of meat, staring up at the white ceiling.

Lenna hesitated at the open door, watching us. Then she sighed and climbed into bed with us. We made room for her between us on the big mattress, a space in which the baby had a few times slept. Lenna stretched her long legs, filling the empty space. Her coarse, minty hair fanned out across the pillows. We buried our noses in it. She stroked our arms tenderly, the way a mother might. Then she hummed a low lullaby, beautiful and haunting. It brought tears to our aching eyes. Lenna reached to the nightstand for tissues, sat cross-legged between us, and wiped our faces, humming until we drifted to sleep.

The next morning, she gathered her books and left, though we implored her to stay. "You're ready to manage on your own," she declared, with enough confidence to nearly convince us. Then she returned to her condo, her patio garden and herbs, back to the life she had neglected for us, her needy friends. But she continued to check on us, making sure we followed the template she left behind.

•

Then the old man disappeared.

That particular morning, the heat felt weaker, less punishing, as though about to break. The cicadas had at last gone silent. We lingered, circled the block a few times, stood for ten minutes at the corner of Windmill and Rainbow, watching children make their leisurely way back to school. Still, no old man.

That first day, we tried not to worry. Maybe he had an appointment at the dentist's or the barber's or the Department of Motor Vehicles. Maybe he had a breakfast date or a head cold or a visitor from out of state.

But he didn't show up the next day, either. Or the next. Or the day after that.

What if he had died, alone in his house or apartment? What if he had finally succumbed to the heat or old age, loneliness or an inflamed heart? What if he had been struck by a car or a criminal or the water truck when he stepped into the street to make way for somebody else?

We checked the morning paper, the news briefs and obituaries. We stopped by the police substation and asked a sympathetic young man behind the counter if he knew anything. We walked the full length of Windmill, from the private golf course to the railroad tracks.

Day after day, the old man failed to appear. Each morning, the temperature dropped a little further. Without the old man—or Lenna—to distract us, our obsessive thoughts soon became too much to bear. We abandoned our template, taking to bed after the morning walk, skipping work, forgetting to eat or shower.

When we stopped answering our phones, Lenna drove over. She took one look at our sorry faces and announced she would be moving back in for a while. She called our boss to smooth things over.

"A little setback," she said, clicking her tongue and rummaging through the cupboard in search of sugar for tea. "No big deal."

She decided to drive us miles from home, to a big park lined with palo verde trees, for our morning walks. She said we needed a change of scenery, and that we must stop searching for the strange old man. This time, we agreed.

Lenna read bodice-rippers in her minivan while we walked through the pretty park and climbed the rocky hill at its center. Here, we could see all the way from Red Rock Canyon in the west to barren Sunrise Mountain in the east. The glittering Strip rose from the valley floor, full of gamblers from elsewhere, winners and losers, testing their luck.

At some point, we accepted our new reality. After a few weeks, we began taking ourselves to the park and to work again. We let Lenna box up all the toys and leftover diapers, the bottles and formula and blankets, the baby books and lotion and unworn clothes, and haul them to the downtown shelter for homeless women and children. It came as a slow relief, surrendering the search for answers, our misplaced faith. It turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. Relinquishing hope, you'll one day discover, makes everything much simpler.

•

Sometime that winter, we stopped driving all the way to the park for our morning walks. We felt steadier on our feet by then. We felt resigned. Lenna had left weeks before, though we still spoke to her every day. On Sundays, we drove to her condo for potluck dinners. We had begun to feel hunger again. We managed to carry on conversations, as well as we ever had.

Those winter mornings, our neighborhood was crisp and beautiful. A friendly sun hung low in the sky. A dusting of snow dressed up the distant Spring Mountains. The purple plum trees had grown substantially. The cool air caressed our dull skin as we walked. We did not feel terrible.

Children with backpacks raced by on skateboards. Men in hardhats pieced together wooden frames for a new apartment complex going up on Windmill. Other couples in workout gear and hoodies greeted us in passing. The streets buzzed with an energy lacking in summer, when the whole city hibernates.

To tell you the truth, we had all but forgotten about the old man and his disappearance, the reason for moving our walks to the park in the first place. Our minds felt so muddled during that entire period, our brains like damaged machinery grinding its gears.

And then, one morning, we saw him, in his dreary outfit, rounding the corner at Rainbow. Somehow the sight of him didn't shock us. Seeing him suddenly, after so long, felt natural, even mundane. We nudged each other silently, as if to say, Of course.

As he drew nearer, we saw that he had grown slimmer, more stooped, and had acquired a slight limp. In his left hand, in lieu of his usual prayer beads, he held a red leash. Attached to the leash was a small white dog, a blend of terrier, its long, pink tongue dangling halfway to the ground.

When the old man saw us, he grinned, raised his free hand in the air, and gave a little half-wave before reverting to his usual salute. The dog, its eyes as sparkly as its master's, pranced alongside him.

We expected them to step into the street together as we approached, to embarrass us by yielding the sidewalk. Instead, the old man stopped before us and loosened his grip on the leash, giving the dog enough slack to reach us. We crouched to pet its soft fur, to coo at it. We let it lick our salty hands with its spongy tongue. The dog's very tangibility moved us. Then we exchanged pleasantries, as best we could, with its mute owner. On that day, when we looked at him, we saw a mere mortal, luckier than most in longevity, showing off his new dog.

"Maybe we'll see you tomorrow," we told him, and then continued on our way.

•

But we didn't see the man again. We sold that house soon after; it had begun to feel haunted. Lenna helped us pack. We moved to a smaller place not far from her condo, near the wetlands that feed Lake Mead. Here, the years quickly accumulated. Eventually, we retired.

And Lenna grew old. Her bones ached. Her energy flagged. She kept losing her balance. In separate falls, she fractured a wrist, an ankle, her skull. Meanwhile, her daughter had her own children to manage, a divorce, and a demanding job in Portland. We spent more and more time at Lenna's, simmering great quantities of soup. We stayed in her guestroom, beneath a skylight, watching the yellow moon arc across the sky.

We tried to stay positive, to focus on our abundant gratitude and the opportunity to repay some of Lenna's care and kindness. But on a few occasions, when we sat with her in the patio garden on milder afternoons, we could not control our stupid faces. They crumpled, betraying us.

Lenna clicked her tongue. She asked us to bring her a glass of water, a pair of sunglasses, the orange bloom from a nearby lantana. She handed us her book and demanded we read scandalous passages from it aloud so she could laugh at our embarrassment. She drew our attention back to what was right in front of us, reminding us that she had already taught us how to weather grief.

We lost her on a clear morning in spring, her favorite season in the desert. Her daughter was aboard a flight from Portland at the time.

Now, all these years later, the grief has mellowed, sweetened. We have warm memories. Lenna, laughing beneath her giant umbrella. The brief presence of a baby, gurgling into our necks. Years spent doing useful, if unglamorous, work. That old man on Windmill, surely long dead by now, immortal in our imaginations, where those we have lost live on. We are all memories now, most of them good.

We rarely talk about that time anymore. But here you are, asking.