We left Oakland on a drizzly morning in September. The lock on the back of the U-Haul truck rattled as we drove down the narrow streets of my neighborhood, but the sound was drowned out once we reached the freeway. I had done this drive many times before, though never at the wheel of a truck and never with my mother, who had a mortal fear of accidents and frequently asked me to slow down. In the glove compartment, she found a map of California, candy wrappers, an old magazine—things left behind by strangers. She leafed idly through the magazine, then put it back and looked out of the window. We passed vineyards, citrus groves, industrial feedlots whose smell lasted for miles, signs that blamed Congress for the drought, billboards that advertised restaurants at the next exit. Sometime in the afternoon, my mother pulled out the magazine again and started reading me clues from the crossword puzzle in the back. Haunting spirit, five letters. Elephant’s strong suit, six letters.
Late at night, we finally reached the desert. As soon as we took the exit for the 62, my mother turned on the radio and looked for KDGL on the dial. “Claudia Corbett is about to start,” she said, raising the volume. An elderly man was calling to say that he was worried about his son, who had a well-paying job with a mortgage company in Denver, but was always struggling with money. “No matter how much he makes,” the caller said, “he always spends more. I don’t get it.” I expected Claudia to suggest that the son cut up his credit cards and go on a strict debt-payment plan, but instead she began to ask questions about his childhood and upbringing, confident that the root of his financial problems would be found there. My mother listened raptly. She loved this talk show, and it came to me that there was a voyeuristic element to it: this show broke open the door between public and private, a door she kept scrupulously closed in her own life. I waited until the episode had ended before I turned off the radio. “I need to tell you something, Mom,” I said. “About Dad.”
“What is it?”
How to go about this, except bluntly? I had waited long enough, I needed to stop carrying my father’s secret. “He was having an affair,” I said.
I let out the breath I’d been holding and waited for the uncomfortable questions that I knew would follow—what was I talking about and it wasn’t possible and how would I know something like this anyway. It wasn’t easy to accept that the man we loved had done terrible things, because love itself is a singling out of one person over countless others. My mother turned away from me and stared at the road ahead. We were driving through a dark wilderness of creosote, mesquite, and yerba santa, guarded on all sides by mountains. It took another moment for the truth to dawn on me. My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “You knew?” I said. “You never said anything.”
“Why would I say? This was between us.”
So she had seen the ugly face my father kept hidden behind a mask, and yet she still loved him. All my life, I had found her to be uncompromising, sometimes even unforgiving, and it stunned me to discover this side of her now—in a moving truck. A brown, furtive shape crossed the road; I lifted my foot off the accelerator. “Who is she?” I asked.
I could see how difficult it was for her to say the name, but after a slow, uneasy moment, she did. “Beatrice Newland.” The name rang no bells for me, and held no meaning. But speaking it seemed to have released something in my mother, because her voice was deep with emotion now. “She’s so young. She looks about your age.”
How tawdry, I thought, until I remembered my time with Max. “Why did you stay with him, then?” I asked. I was still trying to reconcile the mother I had always known with the woman sitting beside me now.
“I was sure it would pass, I just had to wait. We spent thirty-seven years together, you know, and to throw all that away for that woman—I couldn’t do it.”
“What about after he died?” I asked. “Why didn’t you say something then?”
“Talking about it wasn’t going to change what already happened. It wasn’t going to turn him into someone different.”
“I see.” And I did. But even though my mind agreed, my heart rebelled. She had never been this gentle or patient or understanding with me. If she was capable of this kind of love, why not with me? Why did she fight so hard to mold me into someone else? All I ever wanted was for her to take me as I was. By then, we were coming out of the valley, and the road narrowed as it rose through the canyon. One of my ears popped. An irksome feeling. “Mom,” I said after a moment, “you never even asked me about Silverwood.”
“I did. You said it was a big festival.”
“And you weren’t curious to find out more? Or ask me what piece I played or anything?”
She turned to look at me. “I don’t understand that stuff.”
“It’s music. It’s not supposed to be understood. It’s supposed to be enjoyed.”
“Oh, Nora,” she said, and reached across the seat divider to touch my arm. “That’s not what I meant. I like your music. I just meant, I don’t understand festivals and competitions and grants and things like that. That’s all.” The road dipped and flattened, and after a little while we reached the first grove of Joshua trees. “So what was Silverwood like?” she asked.
Maybe something had finally shifted between us. By talking to her about the secret she had kept hidden for so long, I had begun to chip away at her other defenses. She had to let go of her fantasies about me, and accept the fact that I was only a musician, I would always be just that, and nothing more. Now that she seemed willing to listen, I began to tell her about my time in Boston, the drummer and bass player I had met, the plans we had made, the good things I had learned, and the bad ones, too.
Afterward, I lowered the window and rested my elbow on the sill. The air was warm and dry. Soon, the Santa Ana winds would begin to blow through the passes, bringing with them fury and fire. How often had I lain in bed, dreaming of leaving the desert someday? This place had been filled with quarrels and recriminations, and it would be a while yet before they ended. I still had to face A.J. in a courtroom. Three days from now, when the time came for his preliminary hearing, I would watch in disgust as he walked out, a free man on bail. But there would be other times, over the next few months, and one day I would finally have a chance to speak, tell the judge and the jury about my father, and honor his memory in this small way. At every court date, A.J.’s lawyer, an attorney from Orange County who specialized in hit-and-run cases, would file motions or ask for continuances, and it would not be until three and a half years later, when I was pregnant with my first child, that A.J. would finally be convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to five years in prison.
And I would still be here. The desert was home, however much I had tried to run away from it. Home was wide-open spaces, pristine light, silence that wasn’t quite silence. Home, above all, was the family who loved me. Only now, after my father’s death, did I come to understand that love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving, and that it would deliver me from grief and carry me out of the darkness.