“Are you sure this is the first call you want to make with your new cellphone?”

Nooshin glances over from the passenger seat of my truck.  A headscarf is tied loosely around her beaming face.  There’s an open Telcel box in her lap.  Finally – a replacement for her crappy pre-paid cellphone.  Plastic shrink wrap has been plundered, the manual already tossed aside.  Her long fingers tap excitedly at the new phone.  “I would call you, but you’re sitting right across from me.”

Following the highway signs that say PLAYAS – beaches – I can only groan.  Calling the same family that supports a forcible reconciliation with Saman?  She got up on the dumbass side of the bed today.  “Think about it, Nooshin.  If your family really wanted to talk to you, they would’ve called you on your old phone.  You’re supposed to be dead to them, remember?”

“I wanted to get the black version,” she says breezily, pinning the silver rectangle to her ear.  “But black in Spanish is negro, and I felt weird about buying a negro phone, so – ”  She breaks off with an apologetic gesture.  “Um, hey?  Nasrin?  It’s your sis.  This is my new number in Tijuana.”

I steer the Ford into a parking lot that snakes along the side of the road.  We’ve arrived at a beach of grayish kelp-dotted sand.  Beyond it the Pacific is a million broken mirrors.  A rust-red cargo ship struggles across it in the general direction of Japan.  Towering thunderheads hang on the horizon like artillery bursts.

“No I haven’t talked to him.  I’ll never talk to him again.  I’m divorcing him, Nasrin!”  Nooshin pauses, a stricken look on her face.  “What?  How can you say that?  You think I deserved to get my stupid nose broken?”  Another pause.  “That’s so not fair.  You leave Nick out of this.  He’s the only one who supported me!”  The conversation devolves into angry back-and-forth Farsi for a while.  Then she lets the cellphone drop and bursts into tears.  Immediately it begins ringing in her small fist.

Time for me to say something emotionally pitch-perfect.  But I can only manage a fake-cheerful “We’re here!”  Oh well.  At least it’s better than I told you so, which is what’s actually going through my mind.  The faint tang of saltwater floods the truck when I open my door.

Nooshin starts crying harder.  She’s trying not to – I see her ribcage strain as she tries to choke off the sobs – but it doesn’t work.

“Wow.  Look at that incredible view.”

More sobbing.

“Fucking A.”  I reach into the back for our beach gear.  “You stay here and cry your eyes out.  I’m going for a walk on the beach.”

She joins me reluctantly, still sniffling a little.  We leave a meandering line of footprints in the sand.  Tanners on beach towels are crowded behind anything that serves as a windbreak.  Families orbit around grills, their shirt sleeves and pant legs rolled up.  Teen soldiers in ill-fitting fatigues patrol back and forth, M-16s slung over their shoulders, defenders of a country you couldn’t give away.

We arrive at the ocean’s edge.  A few idiots are swimming in the 57 degree water.  The wind flecks me with salt spray and blows Nooshin’s headscarf loose, turning her into a medusa of thick whirling locks.

“What’s a nadadora?” she asks.

“Huh?”  I’m busy drop-kicking shells into the surf.

“Those kids that just went by, I heard them call me a nadadora.  Except I thought a nadadora was a swimmer.  I’m not even wearing a swimsuit.”  And she isn’t.  Her hoodie sweatshirt is riding up on her waist, revealing a slash of caramel skin puckered with her navel.  Drainpipe jeans fall in long scarecrow lines.  One of her Nikes is untied and trailing its shoelace.

“Nadadora is slang for skinny.  Like, even skinnier than flaca.”

Nooshin twists around, watching the kids stroll down the beach.  “I don’t think they were calling me skinny.  Does nadadora mean anything else?”  She turns back to me, her right eye jerking with suspicion.  “It can mean something worse than skinny, can’t it?”

Sure it can.  It can also mean boobless, which is what the kids were actually laughing about.  Nooshin is flatter than the pubescent girls in the group.  But I’m not telling her that.  “Let’s walk down the beach a ways.”

I make smalltalk to distract her, explaining that this beach extends all the way down the coast to Rosarito, 10 miles away.  That’s called the “suburban” beach, which I describe from memory – timeshares staring down from the coastal highway, parking lots choked with California license plates, tourists snapping tons of pictures.  Not my kind of place, since I’d rather avoid my fellow Americans than put up with them.   That’s why we’re at the “city” beach.  Just follow the border fence west.  You can’t miss it.

I toe aside kelp to spread our makeshift beach towel, just an old blanket, while Nooshin watches a dog fight gulls for god only knows what.  Then we settle ourselves, her sitting Indian-style, me lying propped on an elbow.  Nearby an old lady is seeping out of her one-piece and reading a novel with a lurid cover.  Little kids – her grandchildren, probably – are building sandcastles.  Their voices carry on the wind, a blur of Spanish with English words like SpongeBob and Batman thrown in.

I lay back and settle my Kangol hat on my face.  The sunshine seeps into my clothes, slowly toasting me.  My arm hairs stir in the cool gusts off the ocean.  From the other side of the blanket I hear a sob, then another.  I clench in irritation.  “Why did you want to call your sister anyway?”

“I feel so alone here, that’s why.”  The sobs are quickening.  “I miss my family, especially Nasrin.  I even…”

“You even what?”

“Maybe you won’t understand this, but – I even miss Saman, sometimes.”

That revelation sinks in like groundwater contamination.  “Listen to yourself, for chrissake.  You miss the shitbag who broke your nose and tried to drag you back to Kansas City?”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”  Nooshin sniffles wetly into her arm.  “I must not be a very good person.  Otherwise I wouldn’t be in this position.  I wouldn’t be hurting the people I love.  My husband has lost his family’s respect and maybe even his green card for all I know, and my parents are screwed because they have to repay the mahr, and I’m not even allowed to talk to my niece and nephew anymore.  Oh god, it’s all my fault…”

“Nothing that’s happening right now is your fault!  You stayed in your marriage for five years, which is about four years and 364 days longer than anybody else would’ve stayed married to Saman.  You even went back to him and tried to work things out.  And the way your family is treating you, don’t even get me fucking started…”  I blow a calming breath into my hat.  “Take it from me, Nooshin.  There are two things that make family bearable – time and distance.”

“But it’s different for you!  You don’t need people the way I need people.  The way most people need people.”

Another of her laser-guided observations.  I bristle, accused of lacking the full spectrum of human emotion.  “Well, that was your New Year’s resolution, right?  To be more like me.”

She snatches the hat off my face and peers down at me in tear-stained anger.  “I know what it’s like to be you, Nick Roberts.  I can see for myself.  You act all buddy-buddy with everyone, but you don’t have a single real friend.  You break up with Phoebe after four years together and you don’t even miss her.  You never call your family, not even on Christmas or New Year’s.  Now you’re alone in a foreign country where no one knows you, and you can’t stand the thought of bumping into a fellow American because it would ruin your isolation.  That’s what it’s like to be you.”  She rolls away, onto her haunches.

I struggle onto an elbow, feeling sand shift beneath the blanket.  “I’m not alone, Nooshin.  I’m here with you.  And, shit…what do you want me to say?”

“What do you want to say?”

“Argh!  What is it with you today?  Are you premenstrual?”

“You’ll never know what it’s like to need someone like I need you.”

Nooshin bounces to her feet.  Her boy-butt snaps back and forth with furious strides.  She marches through a spread-out line of elderly fisherman tending to their poles and the occasional dark wriggling shape.  I expect her to stop when she reaches the curling line of surf, but she just keeps going – into the ocean fully-clothed, deeper and deeper, until the waves knock her over.  When she surfaces again, shivering like a drowned junkie, I’m already knee-deep in the Pacific and holding open the blanket for her and yelling motivational shit like “Get out of the water this fucking instant!”