ON THE EDGE OF BEAUTY (working title) is a 100,000-word, dual-timeline literary novel structured as a nested triptych: Johnny’s 1981 and 2022 road trips are braided through Part I, Carmelita’s parallel 1981 story occupies Part II, and the narratives converge in Part III, set in 2022. Framing this three-part structure is a second triptych of omniscient, Latin-titled sections centered on Maria—INITIUM FABULAE, MEDIUM FABULAE, and FINIS FABULAE—whose three sections span the novel from beginning to end.

Readers of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany and Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter will recognize its collision of the sacred and the profane — grace arriving, as it often does, through violence and dark comedy rather than around them.

At sixty, widowed and alone, Johnny is about to pick up the loaded gun on his desk when the phone rings. It’s Dave — the best friend he hasn’t spoken to in forty-one years. Dave wants to repeat the road trip they took at seventeen: North Dakota to Tijuana. Johnny says yes — the first brave thing he’s done in years.

What neither man expects is a reckoning neither trip can outrun: Carmelita, the woman whose life collided with theirs, the family she married into, and consequences neither of them knew existed.

On the day of Maria’s salvation, she looked down from the one-room apartment above the restaurant, waiting for her daughter to appear. Across a short span of grass grew the largest tree in Tijuana, la ceiba, the tree of life. It was sacred, so it was allowed to live even as over the years, all around it, other trees fell and painted buildings of concrete blocks and red bricks rose. A door slammed. Her daughter ran across the grass to the tire swing Mateo had hung from the lowest branch on her sixth birthday. Maria leaned out the window, taking care to not bump the jar of wax crayons on the sill. She watched her daughter climb into the tire, bare feet sticking out the front, thin bare arms hugging it from behind. “Carmelita…remember to wait…” she started to say but then stopped. Carmelita began to swing. Maria blinked slowly. The rumbling growl of a delivery truck muted. Her daughter, in the swing, receded. Only then did Maria turn around. She slipped from her nightgown into a low-cut, red crimplene dress, opened the door, and let Mateo in.

Like most mornings, Maria was on top, which she preferred because his sweat couldn’t drip down on her, and because she could see Frida Kahlo. She had hung Frida’s self-portrait on the wall above the bed for just that purpose. Frida’s painted frame of pink flowers with blue centers and red flowers with white centers, and blue-crested, pink parrots with golden wings bounced in front of her. Maria looked into Frida’s dark eyes beneath the heavy brows that looked like a blackbird flying. She put her hand to Frida’s full red lips, her red lips, the crown of yellow flowers in Frida’s hair, her crown, and all around her face, the quiet blue like a dark, dark sky, her sky.

The unholy shroud of stained and yellowed sheets beneath Mateo, the buzzing of a fly loose within the room, the aloe vera plant with one of the succulent leaves half gone next to the crayons on the windowsill, Carmelita’s excited cries wafting through the window, Mateo’s soured panting breath of his meal the night before—Mateo himself—was no more, and Maria arrived in that in-between place where bad things don’t happen, where sound is dampened, and movement slows to stillness.

Outside, Carmelita swung, singing “La Cucaracha,” her little legs pumping—sky, ground, sky, ground, sky—waiting for Mateo to come out with a lollipop, which meant that she could go back inside, but at the highest point of her highest swing, which was considerable given the height of the tree and the length of the rope, she looked between her feet into an alley across the street her mother had told her to never cross. “Flores bonita,” she said, and jumped from her swing.

Maria did not immediately see Carmelita standing next to the bed with a handful of white and blue morning glories, the white ones remarkable for blooming at dusk, through the night, and into the shadows of early morning, all the while releasing a sweet scent to attract moths. A scent remarkable enough to carry Maria back to the long-forgotten morning when her father told her she was the descendant of a Mayan princess. It had been her most precious memory—her family, all together in a field filled with white and blue flowers in the shade of a mountain named for the shape it made of a woman sleeping. And amid a honey-scented air filled with white and blue butterflies that appeared as flowers flying, it all seemed true—that she was a princess, that anything was possible.

Red. You’re dead, the red dot above the trigger guard says with its one-eyed stare from the top of my desk. I had never kept guns in the house before because I always recognized the capacity to use them on myself because I’m a loser, but then Hannah fixed me for a while, and I thought it might be fun, so I bought a Beretta 9mm because it was big and had a double action trigger.

I let myself touch it, just cupping the grip right on the desk, not picking it up. The cool textured surface fits into my palm like it’s made for it. It’s time.

I look down at my book. It’s opened to the last page. In addition to being a loser, I’m also a coward. I couldn’t even do it after she died, like I should have. Nope. I started reading instead. I told myself I’d read one book before putting the world out of its misery of me, so, being a coward, I picked a long one that just happened to take up seven volumes. It was the one she’d given me on our twentieth. She knew I liked to read. “Thought you’d like this, honey,” she had said. Then I opened a long, heavy box and pulled out the complete leather-bound set of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. If that wasn’t enough time for me to fix myself on the inside…then I’d do it. It seemed somehow symmetrical, like a promise I made to her, only this time, a promise I actually kept. Since I couldn’t read all day, I threw in running and bike riding, anything that kept me moving, hurting, anything taking me out of my head so I couldn’t think of anything else, especially of how I made her cry, how I hurt her, how I hurt everybody else that ever mattered.

I look at my phone. Fri Jun 3, 3:33. She died April 24th, so six plus thirty-one plus three equals…Fuck it. What does it matter?

Red. You’re dead.

Pick me up you fuckin’ loser. Nobody wants you here. Nobody calls, nobody cares, you have no friends, the sky is black, you don’t belong here, you stink, you disgusting piece of shit, you make me sick, I hate you, I hate you, I hate, hate, hate you. Me. I hate me. The gun is in my hand like it picked itself up. It’s warm now, the handle is wet. The double action trigger means you don’t have to cock the hammer. The first pull of the trigger does that, so the first pull is all stiff, because of the spring, and you pull it back almost a country mile before the hammer falls. The second pull is easy because the hammer’s already cocked. But there won’t be a second pull.

Heavy bastard. Always surprises me when I pick it up. I’ve only held it a few times, so every time’s like the first time. I’m leaning over my desk, squeezing my left hand, breathing fast and all panicky like. Sweat is running off me. I smell myself in the tee shirt I’ve been wearing for I don’t know how long. The blue catches my eye over the top and to the side of my monitor. It always does. There’s a smattering of whitecaps on the lake. Evidence of wind. All the way to the horizon where I see the ghostly outline of a thousand-footer. Water as far as the eye can see. It’s my favorite view from my office at the back of the house. I’ll miss it.

Sorry Hannah. So fuckin’ sorry I wasn’t better. Sorry I ruined everything. Sorry you never heard me say how much I loved you before you died.

The leathered surface of my desk is blotchy and dark where it’s wet. It’s not all sweat. I’m surprised I’m crying. Thought I was over that. I don’t hear myself. It’s just a roar. I don’t recognize the sounds I’m making.

Red. You’re dead.

Oh God. The spring behind the trigger pushes against my finger. Almost a country mile—

My phone vibrates on a part of my desk that’s still dry. My finger lets up.

Do it! Do it, you piece of shit! Don’t look down.

It vibrates a second time. Nobody’s called in a month. I already don’t exist.

I look down. The Beretta does a sweaty slide up my right temple.

Unknown Caller.

I start to shake because I don’t believe in signs anymore.

It vibrates a third time. One more to go. “Do it!” I scream at the blue lake.

I set the gun down, pick up the phone. I hold it to my ear.

There are two beats of silence, then…“Johnny?”

I know instantly who it is, and I’m seventeen again, on a sandbar in the middle of a river. My best friend is looking down at me, his face silhouetted against a starry sky. Then he sees it’s me with the girl he loves, even if I love her too. Then we break, like we never were friends.

It’s too much for me. The two people I loved the most, the two people I hurt the most, in my head at the same time. Perfect. This is the sign. It’s meant to be. I shouldn’t even be here now. “Dave,” I say, setting my phone on the desk. I pick up my gun again. “I’m sorry.” I try to think of someone I could ask him to give a message to, like, tell someone I love them, but there’s no one. I close my eyes. I pull the trigger. A country mile isn’t long at all.