Her mother reached over and squeezed the girl’s arm. “Try. Okay? For me? Come on, it’ll be an adventure.”
Her mother fell silent, and she did too, knowing that had been one of her father’s favorite phrases; he’d say “adventure” with a goofy French accent. She revved the engine and checked her mirrors before pulling the car to the parking lot exit. She started to flip the turn signal but realized she had no idea which way was home. Home. A house on a street she didn’t yet recognize. She put her forehead on the steering wheel and blinked hard.
“Left, J-bird,” her mother said, reaching over and cupping the back of the girl’s neck.
Her mother’s palm, warm as a sun-heated window. She had the strange sense she was hearing a secret, the universe whispering hot into her ear: Don’t blink.
The girl sat up. She pulled her shoulders back and pressed her spine against the seat. Okay. No more hiding. From here on out, head on.
Standing in the dark, her breath slowing, the girl marked an X in the air, over the town in the short distance. You Are Here. She leaned against a stop sign and pulled her notebook from her jacket. She rolled off the rubber band that kept the pen wedged inside and then put the band in her mouth and bit down. She liked the pressure of the rubber between her teeth, the slight squeak and resistance. She liked the oddity of writing when she could barely see her hands, the words sprawling crooked and unruly across the page. When she finished her thought, she snapped the band around the book and zipped it inside her coat. Then she walked to the center of the road and lay down on the pavement. The rocky asphalt dug into her scalp, scuffed her jacket and jeans. She drew an X across the sky. You Are Here. And where in the world was here in relation to all that? What were the soldiers in Iraq, the Iraqis themselves, seeing right now? How easy it would be for her, for everyone, to disappear. If they even existed at all. She thought, It’s thoughts like these that make you so fuckin’ popular. Where’s your school spirit? Rah rah rah. She laughed, breaching the quiet. Her father’s laugh. But her mother’s looks and humor. And all her own, too.
Seventeen. Who would she be then? Who would she be here?
She opened her eyes as wide as she could. Don’t blink, she told herself.
Something rustled in the bushes next to her, and she jumped up fast. Too cold for snakes and lizards. A jackrabbit? Javelina? Or a mountain lion—weren’t they nocturnal? Or, she thought as she scuttled backward, a human? She turned and ran home in her gangly lope. Elemental, rushing, a force to be reckoned with.
The girl let herself in the house, the soles of her canvas shoes squeaking on the tile. Home. Same worn plaid twill couch with grandma’s quilt across the back. Same shelf of faded green A–Z encyclopedias, the dictionary, Big Red, open on top. Same rocking chair with her old one-eyed teddy bear in its seat. Yet nothing was the same.
In the bedroom, her mother hadn’t budged, sleeping on her right side with her hands tucked under her cheek, her brown curls obscuring her bad ear. She’d been sleeping a lot these days, climbing into bed soon after dinner, staying under the covers on her days off. She slept hard, seemingly immune to slammed cupboards or clanking dishes or thudding doors. The girl stood close and watched her. Her mother began to whimper, and the girl saw a glint of wetness. Crying in her sleep again—the only time she really ever saw her mother cry. She sat on the bed and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Her long hair brushed her mother’s arm.
Her mother stirred. “Jess? Is that you?”
“It’s me,” the girl said. “I’m here.”
In a Crevice of the Earth
Though it was late June, with temperatures climbing into the 100s, Laura Drennan walked her new town during the afternoon, the heat pressing right through the soles of her tennis shoes. She slathered on sunblock and wore the only hat she could find in the moving boxes: a stupendous lime-green foam visor emblazoned with a cartoon frog slamming a tequila shot, which emerged from under a pile of shoes, a faint tread mark on the brim (her best guess: it had belonged to the Girlfriend, she of the jean skirts and pencil hips, acquired on a little clandestine trip down to Tijuana with Charlie). And so Laura wore it—why not!—as she walked in a high-stepping stomp to ward off the diamondbacks she knew were coiled in the foxtails (though so far she’d seen only skittish lizards and grasshoppers, plumes of gnats, quail darting under the brush). Despite the sunblock, her arms and legs darkened to the color of a terra-cotta bowl—even the tender band of skin on her now-ringless ring finger had faded. Dust nested in the cuff of her sock, leaving a geologic circle above her anklebone.
In her new neighborhood, a subdivision of 1970s and ’80s homes on large lots behind the high school and town ball field, she set one foot on the gravel berm, one on the pavement, memorizing street names: Rojo, Blanco, Yucca, Dry Run, Bottlebrush, Alameda. Her street was Arrowhead; her white clapboard two-bedroom rental with puce-colored trim had belonged to an old woman who lost her mind and dug holes in her yard at night—this according to Laura’s mail carrier, Maud, a woman Laura’s mother’s age who stopped on the porch to chat and shouted questions as if boxing Laura’s ears. Laura skirted strangers’ yards, cataloging oddities: a mannequin head with a flowered swim cap; soda cans wedged into chain link in a Z shape; a three-legged dog cooling itself in a play pool; a man on a Segway pausing to peer into neighbors’ garbage bins; a child’s fire engine toppled on a wheelchair ramp.
She walked, and her mind whiplashed from present to past, trying to process the changes: small-town Sycamore, Arizona, instead of San Diego; 4,000 feet instead of sea level; gravel berms instead of sidewalks; lobed cactus instead of ice plants; bushy pines and junipers instead of eucalyptus and symmetrical rows of skinny palms; year 2009, almost twenty years out from her high school graduation. She walked, smelling dust and hot pine needles instead of the briny fog of the Pacific. She bent to collect rocks the way she used to collect seashells, and her pockets grew gritty with sediment in the seams. She walked in a land of strangers instead of in the land of her parents, her older brother and nephews, her colleagues and friends, her husband of eleven years. She walked in her alien landscape, in her ridiculous visor, and she told herself: Buck up, Drennan, you chicken shit. This ain’t summer camp.