February
The land is old. The land is rumored to be full of vortices and voids, of paths into the underworld, and landmarks of landings from other worlds. We settled in by renaming the mountains. My father chose a mountain for me. It is known to everyone else as Fire Rock after its reddish hue. The mountain has jagged drops between rising peaks. From the hospital, I spot its silhouette as the last light escapes the valley, and trace the difficulty of its lines and wonder at my father for choosing such a broken mountain to call by my name.
Dylan arrived in our lives with the Phoenix Lights. The Lights were the lights everyone saw, and they appeared over the Superstitions in the east, the home of the Apache underworld, and disappeared over the Estrella Mountains. The week we met him, I remember that my mother had a migraine every day. She remained on the couch in the dark while my father juiced lemons on her temples and forehead. He read the Quran over her. She begged him for migraine medicine. “But it’s poison, pure poison,” he said. “Your migraines are a spiritual problem.”
The night of the Lights, my father’s taxi shift did not end until four in the morning, but by eleven o’clock, he was home. He told us to get in the car. It reeked of marijuana. My mother complained of the smell, said her headache would surely return. My father said she should try a joint herself and then drifted into Arabic. My father vanished from his own sentences. He muttered beneath his breath. He spoke to his hands as if to ghosts.
My mother opened the windows to freshen the air. It was winter. It was dry and cold inside the bones.
“You know,” my father said, “I’ve survived a lot. I’ve seen ghosts, angels. Gabriel once spoke to me while waiting for the subway. I almost drowned in the sea. I’ve seen a lot, but never something like this.”
We parked at an overlook near my mountain. In the distance, we saw Camelback Mountain, South Mountain, the thick orange pollution over Phoenix, one or two stars. The valley was always dead after ten at night, but this night we stood with hundreds of others. People had telescopes. It was an event, this longing stretched toward the night.
“I chased it to the end. It disappeared. Huge lights, ruby lights. A triangular ship. A cluster of stars almost, but moving like the sky falling. It rose up over the Superstitions and then just covered the city, covered the sky. Everything disappeared. Then the lights turned blue. Yes blue,” my father said.
I saw only Venus, burning white on the horizon. “Guess they just vanished, then?”
“You see, Yusef,” my mother said.
“Thousands of people saw it, Rachel,” he insisted.
“I’m not feeling well. Can’t we just go home?”
“I thought you didn’t have pain in the dark,” he said.
My father went looking every night after that. Once his taxi shift had finished, he would drive in circles on the outskirts of town, listening to the radio, looking up. Sometimes he asked if I wanted to skip ballet and join him. “Don’t you remember what happened to us and the coyotes? Don’t you want to find out where that light came from?”
“It was a meteor!” I said.
“How can you be my daughter and really believe that?”
Dance lessons lasted until nine or ten in the evening. Sometimes I would eat dinner, sometimes I would not. My mother prepared steamed broccoli and lean fish for me. My father insisted I eat red meat. “You’ll lose your brain without food,” he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.
I threw up at least one meal per day. Laura had taught me that with your middle finger it always works the first time. In the dressing room before rehearsals and performances, the smell of hairspray on everything, I watched the other girls undress with ease. They chatted in the nude as they applied their blush and their red lipstick. Most were petite, hairless. They were weightless, they could fly.
The first herald of Dylan for Laura was in Mexico. Once a month, she and her father would travel three hours south so he could build new beachfront houses for rich Americans and they could meet their psychic. The psychic only did her consultations on the beach, her clients huddled around her, and only at dusk or dawn. These were the hours, Laura explained to me, that the door to the afterlife was ajar.
Returning from Mexico, Laura’s hair lightened, aflame against her skin, she would don sombreros. She carried with her the cheap guitars she’d bought on the beach and strummed them, walking the great halls between classes, not noticing the glances or the snickers, not caring. Those days she walked with the full grace of a dancer, her footprint soft. It was what the ocean did to her, left her floating in its wake. She didn’t wash her hair for at least a week after leaving the sea.
We met in the wash beyond the bleachers of our school to smoke after third period. Laura gave the psychic a name, Maria, and said Maria had told her something interesting at last that didn’t have to do with her father’s business or her mother’s messages from the land of the dead.
“First, Maria told me my dark friend and I are about to enter an era of true darkness. Also that a visitor is coming to us and that we should be careful,” she whispered, though we were alone.
“And I’m your ‘dark’ friend?” I asked.
“Then she told me that it is my Indian blood mixed with my Irish that makes me so dangerous. That I’m a witch like my mother, but I don’t understand my power yet. That my mother was always an outcast and that I take after her. She said I have vision, that my dark friend has vision too. She said yours travels in dreams. She said we found each other for a reason, you and I. Then right after that, we were driving home, and those aliens appeared.”
“She said I have vision?” I asked.
“Did you see the Lights?” she asked. I shook my head. Laura exhaled her cigarette dramatically and extinguished it on the heel of one of her cowboy boots. “It looked like a ship. And the sound it made was like wind, like rushing wind. The surface was like waves. There were seven lights, and I swear they were in the pattern of the Pleiades. They were blue.”
“On the news, they said they were red.”
“Blue. I swear.” She nodded solemnly and clutched her locket.
“What’s in there anyway?” I asked.
“My mother’s ashes.” She pulled at the roots of her hair at her forehead as if trying to make it grow over her face. It was a tic she had. “Library?”
“I’m done with my homework.”
“I want to check out a book about how to do a séance.”
I looked at Laura, her hair streaked magenta, her sombrero slipped fully from her small head, her eyeliner bleeding, smudged even on her cheeks, and wondered at how many lives before this life we might have known together.
It was in the library that we found him. Dylan was wearing a bow tie and a vest, but his dress shirt was cut off above his elbows. His jeans were splattered with paint. He was much older than us, but his cheeks were puffy as a child’s. On the table before him was a pocket watch. On his left arm, there was a trail of rose-hued burn wounds, some outlined in ink. I’d never seen anyone like him, so boldly himself, the jumble of centuries in his attire.
He looked up from what he was reading and stared into the back of a shelf as if he were peering out over a ship or promontory, looking for sea life and icebergs to rise up from the ocean. Encountering him there was like hearing a rattlesnake rustle in the bougainvillea. There was always so little warning.
“Who is that?” Laura whispered.
“Who cares?” I said.
“It’s him,” she said. I pulled her arm to leave, nodding toward the exit, though I wanted her to tug back, resist me. I always did. “It’s him,” she repeated.
“It’s some old homeless guy, Laura.”
“He’s our fate.” Laura was already moving toward his table.
She walked just past him, breezing his shoulder with her bag, begging him to look up and notice her, but he didn’t. She turned, confused, and opened a book from the medical shelf, pretending to intently read. She wouldn’t look up at me, though I was mouthing, Let’s go, let’s go. Finally she gave it up and dropped the book on the table where he was sitting.
“Oops,” she said loudly. Dylan remained intent on his reading but smiled at the pages, amused.
“Hi,” Laura said. “Do you go here?”
“The school, no,” he said. “I don’t go to school anymore.”
“I figured. I’m Laura.” Dylan nodded his head, licked his finger to turn a page. “And she’s Ahlam.”
“Does she know how to speak?” Dylan peered toward me. His eyes were light green but opaque as if covered in tinted glass.
“What are you reading?” Laura asked.
“Stuff on alchemy.”
“Why alchemy?”
“It’s one of the four magical suites,” he said.
“Why are you studying magic?” I asked.
“She speaks,” he said. “Why do you go to high school?” The bell rang.
“Laura, we gotta get to class,” I said.
“You go ahead.”
That night, my parents had a fight. The television was on in their bedroom. I put my headphones on and could still hear the news. There had been a suicide bomb, houses demolished. There had been talks, and the collapse of talks. “Incredible, these fucking Americans show the one Israeli dead and not the hundreds of children they’ve killed,” my father shouted.
“Are you blaming me?” my mother shouted back. “Can’t you have any pity? I have a migraine.”
“Why do you always have to play the victim?” he asked and slammed the door. I watched him get into his taxi and idle in the parking lot. Sometimes he just did that, sat in his car for an hour with the radio on. But that night he sped out and into the street. My parents always fought when the news turned bad. They fought about grocery receipts, phone bills, the rent. But they never spoke of divorce. If they separated, they would have betrayed the thing that estranged them, the thing that made them special, what made their unhappiness holy. What made our not having any money, the fact that my mother got no inheritance from her parents except a single set of china, exceptional. At least they were rebels in a world that, with age, always sells out.
I heard my mother shut off the television and begin to cry.
There was a knock on my window. I flipped open the blinds.
“Hey,” Laura said.
“Hey.”
“Come on. Dylan’s waiting.”
Dylan drove a Chevy pickup from the 1970s. One of the windows had been shattered, the fender hung from the frame of the car, and a side-view mirror was missing. The floor was filled with cigarette butts and empty beer cans. I squeezed in beside Laura.
“Where to?” Dylan asked.
“Wherever,” Laura said.
We drove in silence until Dylan put a cassette in the deck.
“Are you serious? Frank Sinatra?” I said.
“It’s classic, Ahlam.” Laura rolled her eyes at me and elongated my name. She hated Sinatra.
Dylan was singing, paying us no attention. Then he released his hands from the wheel. “Know how to drive?” he asked. “Need to roll a smoke.”
“Fuck,” I said. Laura began to steer. I put my hand on the wheel with her and began to shake. The voices converged from nothing at all. I heard my parents’ argument all over again. The car was vibrating, we’d lose control of it, it could go in any direction, we’d go off the road, hit a saguaro. I saw the saguaro right before us, entering the windshield. I braced. The winter lashed at me through the shattered window.
I saw myself in the night beyond. I was crouching at the base of an ash-covered mountain. In the distance, fireworks shot up and burst apart over them. There was a boy walking out into the night, gun in hand. His hair was so white it could have been blue. He was vaguely familiar to me, though I could not see his face. Laura and I were on either side of him. Another firework shot up over us, and the boy collapsed, dead.
“Are you okay?” Laura touched my hand, bringing me back to the car. Dylan was steering now, singing along to “New York, New York.”
“Can we turn the heat on?” I asked.
“Doesn’t work,” Dylan said.
It was dark by the time we parked beside a small hill. I splashed water on my face from a half-functioning fountain. I shadowed Dylan closely as he and Laura trudged up and up.
They kept walking. On the hill there was a swing set and a slide, set on a rubber tarp atop rocks and snake holes. Below us lay a lot of half-constructed homes. Dylan sat on one of the swings and pulled out a flask from his jacket pocket.
“What’s in it?” Laura asked.
“Bourbon,” he said.
I took a sip and choked. Laura snatched it from me and held it over her mouth. “You shoot it directly back into your throat.”
We beheld the entire valley. The smog, the dark etches of mountain in the distance, the communication towers flashing red over South Mountain, the planes dipping low into Sky Harbor Airport, and just beyond where the city ended, the Sierra Estrella.
“You see that mountain range over there?” Laura said. “It’s called the Gateway to the Stars.”
Dylan rolled a cigarette, his two pinky fingers delicately pointing upward as he licked the paper and sealed it.
“Four kids disappeared there the night of the Lights. They were off-roading. And that’s exactly where the Lights disappeared. Right in those mountains.” Laura’s face was animated, and she was speaking in a higher pitch than usual. “No one has found them.”
“What if they just got drunk and killed themselves like everyone else?” I asked.
“Did they ever find their car?” Dylan asked.
“Maybe the aliens took it with them. Or maybe you are an alien. Just appearing out of nowhere,” Laura said. “Maybe you killed them and used their body parts to make yourself look human.”
“Stop that,” Dylan said and put out his cigarette. His face changed so completely from the one singing Sinatra. He looked out over the mountain as he had in the library, peering for something in the distance, in the past. Laura flushed and squeezed my hand.
“Let’s go swing?” I said.
“I’ll tell you a story. This was back in New York.” Dylan paused and began to roll another cigarette.
“You never said you came from New York,” I said.
“You never asked,” he said. “Well, I had these birds, and before I began, you know, traveling like I am now, I knew I had to get rid of them, but I didn’t just want to leave them in another cage.”
“You smoke a lot,” Laura said.
“This one’s for you. Maybe it will help you shut up when people are talking,” Dylan said. Laura clapped both hands over her mouth jokingly but her eyes were wet.
“Anyways, I had to get rid of them because I was leaving. So I drove out of the city a bit with them and parked beside some woods. I sat the cage on the hood of my car and then opened it.” He lit the cigarette for Laura and pinched her cheek. She pushed his shoulder and stood up as if to run away.
“And for the longest time they just stayed in the cage. The father would fly up a bit from his perch and peek his head out for a second, then fly back down. And then one of the little ones would do the same, but basically they all just sat there chirping a little, confused. Finally, I shook the cage a bit, screaming, like, ‘Get the fuck out!’ Finally one flew out, but he just flew to the roof of the car. Then one by one, they followed. And then one went to the nearest branch, and the others followed. Until they were gone.”
“They were finally free,” Laura said, stilled in her attempted escape.
“Not free. Dead. Dead in a matter of minutes. No way they’d survive the wild,” Dylan said. “But at least they got to fly.”
The three of us lay back with our hair in the red mountain dust. I felt as if I was suddenly older. Older in one night. As if by being in proximity to Dylan, I knew things about freedom and death, drinking beers while driving, rolling cigarettes between sips of bourbon, the subway and the woods and the buildings and the parties he must have gone to in New York and sex. I felt I knew even about sex. We had something no one else did in the valley. We were special. We’d found Dylan.
A grey sliver darted through the paloverde. Dylan jerked up and onto his knees.
“Just a coyote,” I said.
“That was not a coyote. That was something walking straight up. Looked like a girl, a woman. She was limping. Come on, we gotta get back to the car.”
“It was a skinwalker,” Laura said. “But only you saw it.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” he said.
“It’s a ghost that takes the shape of an animal. They only come after certain people and not others,” she said quietly.
As we drove back onto Shea Boulevard in the predawn streets, Sinatra playing, the winter with us through the broken window, Dylan rolled another cigarette and released the wheel for Laura, who steered us without fear or hesitation while I sat in the back watching the darkness depart.
Coyotes stayed out of the roads, but when injured, they lost their sense of place. They limped slowly across the dark roads where no lights were, forgetting that the feel of asphalt on their paws meant that, in mere moments, a car would be speeding toward them from around the bend at ninety miles per hour. When the Lights passed over our desert, the coyotes returned to the banks of the canal, ever briefly, howling toward the night as if returning its call.
When I got home from the drive with Dylan, I saw a limping coyote in the parking lot. I feared the animal was the one Dylan had seen, a ghost returned to warn me.
The month the Lights passed over the desert and took four boys with them, there was a slew of suicides at our school. The boys that went missing in the Sierra Estrella appeared only once on the news, and in the months that passed were forgotten in the onslaught of homemade videos and photos of the Lights themselves, appearing always red and orange and never blue. The case of the missing boys was eventually closed, though no evidence of their remains or their car had ever been found.
Four years later, a bear attacked a campsite two hundred miles south of the Sierra Estella Mountains. That same bear was cited as the culprit for the boys’ disappearance and death.
The year of the Lights, the suicide rate in Arizona surged three times higher than the national rate. The Lights appeared to my father and Laura and to thousands of others rising up from the east over the Superstition Mountains, disappearing into the Estrella Mountains. But they never returned for me.
The first suicide at our school, Thomas, dove into his backyard pool just as the midnight tarp was closing. He was captain of the swim team but had just been defeated at the state competitions.
The second, Brad, whom no one seemed to know or remember, hung himself from a tree on the now shut-down elementary school playground. On the grass below him there was an empty bottle of Georgy vodka. And in his pocket, there was a note warning that the Lights were a sign, but he never said of what.
On the school bus, Sweet’N Low stood up and performed reenactments of the two deaths, whining in a girl’s voice about not being able to swim like a man or about giving blow jobs to aliens. I shared my headphones with Laura, and we put the volume up.
One morning that suicidal February, I missed the bus so my father dropped me off at school. When I exited the car, he rolled down the window and called my name. “Three things I must say to you. One, you are a beautiful dancer, but the piano will remain with you longer. Two, don’t fall in love or let anyone’s life become more important than your own.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Some women I loved, some women I left, I left in a bad way. I left because I had to leave. Maybe you have a brother somewhere,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe worse things. If my sins come back to me through you, I won’t be able to breathe. That’s history, Ahlam. It’s cyclical. Like a curse. Think about what happened to the Jews for decades, then think about the Palestinians. Find someone who loves you more than you love them.”
“Dad, I’m late,” I said.
“The third thing is that no one leaves a place for a good reason. They leave because they are fleeing from something or because they are being forced to leave. Remember what I am telling you.”
He turned the radio up after that and sped away. I heard the fading report that another bomb had exploded in Jerusalem.
My father never quit his search for Lights in the sky to take him elsewhere, as if the Lights might be a time machine, a way to pace backward through the snowbanks of time. My mother got a new job as an office secretary. In the early evenings, she played tennis. At night, while my father was out searching, my mother sat before the muted television, a movie from the fifties playing, the bashful scenes reflecting in the darkened windows that kept the desert out of our house, a bottle of wine emptied, one glass left a quarter full. I tried to wake her when I returned from dance class. She’d call me by my father’s name. I shook her again, tell her she had fallen asleep, that it was time to go to bed. It was never lonely when we all three were together. It was only lonely when it was just two. Two is the loneliest number. One can house a crowd.
The doctor retrieves us in the waiting room. My mother coughs in her sleep. The sitcom has ended. There are only the news and commercials, bombs and psychiatric drugs and airplane crashes and celebrity divorces. I shake my mother. She calls me by my father’s name. “It’s time,” I say. “He’s awake.”
The lights are off. My father’s eyelids shake. His voice is different. His accent is thick. He speaks as if he’s drunk. “It was all ocean,” he says, and then he closes his eyes again.
I beg my mother to go home and get some rest. I tell her I’ll stay. She says she’ll come back in one hour. When she returns, we will switch. I fall asleep beside my father. He stirs in his morphine sleep. And I dream for the first time in months. And in my dream we are walking, my father and I. He is leading me on a path I’ve never been on before. A path directly through a wash hidden from the roads and the subdivisions. The desert is barren, empty of cactus and brush. It is a place I’ve never seen and yet it is so close to somewhere I’ve known. My father mounts a horse and I continue walking beside him. The horse is regal, white as snow, healthy and tall. A horse fit for a prince. Gradually, as we walk, the horse weakens. His legs buckle. He grows cancer spots. The horse becomes frail as a baby until my father has to dismount and carry the horse in his arms. My father nods me on. There is still so much farther to go, he says to me.
I jump out of my chair. He stirs. I throw up acid. I vomit nothing. I thought often that it was his curse of hope to name me Ahlam, “dream,” but perhaps it was his despair at waking life.
Instead of going to the Winter Ball, we met Dylan by the reservation. Laura was wearing a short skirt and a crop top. I’d never seen her in heels. “I’m going to kiss Dylan tonight.”
“He’s so old,” I said.
Dylan was waiting for us in his truck with the lights turned off. “Get in quick,” he said. “I can’t be parked here.” Laura opened the door, got in beside him, and winked.
We took a dirt road that led into the darkness of the reservation. There were no homes or streetlights. The moon was waxing, nearly full and orange like a jack-o’-lantern. Laura pulled out a joint that she had tucked into her bra and blew smoke rings into Dylan’s mouth.
“I’m getting out,” I said. “Give me a cigarette.”
I left them in the car and squatted beneath a paloverde. I couldn’t think right. I’d never known desire, envy. I didn’t even find Dylan handsome.
I put my cigarette out on my arm. I held it for a second and then made another burn. I wanted him to know I could wound myself too. I made three in all. A star cluster.
They were blue that night. They did not hurt until morning, infected and full of puss. They have faded to the color of my skin with the years. Now one is so faint, it is barely there. But the first two remain, wilted circles in my skin.
When I returned to the car, Laura’s lipstick was smudged. But I had a scar Laura didn’t. “Wanna go to a party?” she said. She was smiling like an idiot.
“Not going to a party with children,” Dylan said.
“Please,” she cried.
They passed a bottle of something between them while I veered my head to the right and to the left and into the rearview mirror to make sure no cops were around. Then we were merging onto the highway. “This is stupid far,” I said.
“Look, the Superstitions!” Laura said.
“Look at the fucking moon. It’s red,” I said.
“Red moon apocalypse,” Dylan said. He lifted Laura’s locket from her chest. The locket was gold with a spiral of small sapphire jewels. “What’s this pretty thing?”
Laura quickly batted it down again. Somehow she believed the quarter-sized locket covered her scar. “It was my mom’s.”
“Was your mom’s?” he said.
“Yeah, before she shot herself.”
“What? You told me she died of cancer,” I said.
“I didn’t want you to think I was a freak,” she said.
“What was her name?” Dylan asked.
“Grace,” Laura said slowly as if remembering something.
“Epic scar you got on your chest.”
“I know,” she said. “I was struck by lightning.”
At the party, there was no furniture, only a single couch. The carpet smelled of liquor. There was a palm tree in the yard which waved innocently in the pale night wind. We didn’t know anyone. They were all seniors.
Laura pulled me into the bathroom as soon as we entered. “You like Dylan, don’t you?”
“I told you, he’s old,” I said.
“Good, because I’m afraid I like him so much I’ll die,” she said.
Everyone was drinking shots. Laura was already drunk and laughing, falling into Dylan. One of the boys pulled out some crumpled foil. He inhaled some powder from it. He looked elated with a secret. The foil was passed around to Laura.
“Here we go,” Dylan said.
I grabbed Laura’s wrist to pull her away, and she stuck her tongue out at me. I turned to the boy, his blond hair streaked blue. “What’s it feel like?”
He looked at me as if I’d blared a flashlight in his face. “Midnight,” he said and rolled his eyes.
Everyone began doing Jell-O shots. I realized that Laura and I were the only girls left. I finally took a shot, the cherry flavor faint against the cheap vodka, and tried not to gag. Someone shouted that the house was dry and who was going to make a beer run?
Dylan raised his hand. “But someone else has to drive.”
“Please, please come with,” Laura said to me.
I could follow the course of the night, or I could sit outside alone and wait for it all to unravel. I followed the plan. One night was longer than a week in those days. One night wasn’t like all the other nights, the way it was later when I’d known the night too well and too hard.
In the car, the boy with the blond hair streaked blue ranted on about Jesus and crystal and the desert. In her hummingbird voice, Laura sang the song on the radio, “Blue American.” She rolled down the window to smoke a cigarette. “No one is dying,” she said to me. “You can stop being so serious.” Dylan kept turning from the passenger seat to stroke Laura’s thigh. I cringed when his forefinger shot up beneath her skirt.
The boy was swerving, driving his parents’ Mercedes over curbs and nearly into a stop sign. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head. I could hear her disappointment, which was worse than her anger. I wished we had gone to the Winter Ball, that I was dancing with some boy whose voice still squeaked, who had no burn wounds, no car, no stories about birds dying in the wild of the woods.
Back at the house at last, I went into the kitchen and poured the rest of the Bacardi that was there, 151 proof. It burned going down. I liked the feeling. I liked it like I liked the burns I had made on my arm. I felt carved out. I covered my eyes. Four shots in and I was blind.
It began with that first vision of Laura. The voices uttering inarticulately in my head. The violent hiss would rise and send my entire skull into an underwater uproar. It was a nightmare orchestra of the mind. I heard them again beneath the palm tree outside of the party that night of the Winter Ball. They were voices longing for a body, the voices of the dead.
When I learned to drive, the voices would erupt suddenly. I had to bear the screaming through my urge to run my car off the road. The voices commanded me: Join us. Make it quiet. It happened always at the same bend, the one I can see just ahead from the hospital room window, where the highway curves away from the reservation and the last view of my mountain is subsumed by the road walls. The desert, its darkness, was as inviting as the ocean. If you could just dive into it, you could also disappear. I tried to dance these voices off, lose my mind inside of the fierceness of a turn. Only alcohol faded the voices, as if a fan was turned on.
But I’ve survived. I know only to survive.
They took us into separate rooms. Dylan and Laura on one side of the house. The blond, blue-streaked boy and I on another. I blacked out. When I came to, shortly past dawn, the stranger was staring at the drawn blinds that led to the porch, his face clenched. He was not crying. Not speaking of Jesus and crystal and the brilliant endurance of the saguaro without rain and the coldness of February. He was still, as if asleep with his eyes open.
My grey panties were ripped and lying beside me. There was a pain between my legs that resembled hunger more than soreness. We lay on nothing but a sheet. His jeans were crumpled at his ankles, and his wife-beater was stained with sweat. I grabbed my underwear and stuffed them into my bag.
“What’s your name?” he said when I got to the door.
“Ariel,” I said.
I ran across the house. One door was cracked open. Laura was alone, awake. She pushed down the covers and rolled over naked to reveal the sheets below. I saw the scar on her chest for the first time in the light. It was scarlet. I saw the blondish-reddish hair tangled at her groin, contrasted against her caramel skin. So little of her seemed of her father.
“Is there a lot of blood?” she asked.
“Only a few drops.”
“He left this,” she said and crumpled a piece of paper into her bag. “And some money.”
In the afternoon, it is said that a woman’s face with long, flowing hair emerges on the rocks of the mountain my father named for me. Others say that it is the face of Jesus. It is a desert upon which each of us projected a different delusion. Laura told me that the tribe her mother descended from would not utter the names of their children from age ten until marriage, and would never utter the names of the dead, and that this was why Indian graves were unmarked. She told me she learned of this too late, while wandering into the reservation and meeting three young boys who told her in the middle of hide-and-go-seek she’d come to a terrible death if she told them her name. And so, she told me, it was that day she went by Laura and not her birth name, and she would go by it until betrothed.
But Laura was never married. Laura was never Laura.
The morning I found those grey cotton panties beside me, I began to go by another name, a name once used for cover on the Superstitions where my father and I found ourselves lost years before. I thought this might mean I would never be hunted again.
Laura and I took anything we could find in that house. We counted thirty-seven bucks, a CD collection, a pager. We called a cab. I wanted her to get in ahead of me. To wave me in. There was only one taxi service I knew, my father’s. For a moment, through the window of that house, I thought I saw him in the driver’s seat, though I knew his shift was long over.
I walked out onto the porch and saw everything from the night before. An empty pack of cigarettes on a lawn chair, bottles on the counter. I hid behind the palm tree.
“Come on,” Laura said. “It’s okay.” As we drove away, I watched the Superstitions disappear in the rearview mirror.
“Laura, look,” I said. “There’s snow on the mountains.”
“Don’t look back,” she said. “It’s bad luck.”
I wished I could reverse time, erase the night. I wished for a fata morgana to reveal itself floating above the desert, another land to which we could go.
Laura interrupted my thoughts. “Can’t believe it. No goodbye, nothing.”
“What’s on the piece of paper?” I said.
“An address in New York,” she muttered.
“What an asshole.” I touched her arm. “Leaving money like you’re some whore.”
“It was for the cab, stupid,” she snapped.
“I didn’t have a great time, either. Thanks for asking,” I said. We remained quiet until the cab pulled off the highway.
“I’m sorry. Sometimes it feels like some crazy beast lives in me,” she said. I rolled down the window and wished the cold air on my face was water, washing the night off me.
“What do you remember about New York?” she asked. I stuck my head out and let the wind take my hair and drown out her voice.
“Please tell me something, anything,” she said. “I’m dying.”
“There it’s really February,” I said at last, and then, thinking of my snow globe, my only false memory of New York, added, “and right now there is a woman, and she is walking between the tall buildings through a snowstorm. And it is quiet because the snow quiets everything. Someday she will be me. Someday I’ll get the fuck out of here.”
“Let me come with you,” she said.
The cab dropped us off at the entrance to the reservation. We walked into it. I puked red in the lifting lavender. Laura held my hair back. “I want to die,” I said.
“Did you finally earn your blow job girl title?” she asked and put her fingers to the creases of my lips, cleaning away the vomit. I pulled my sleeve up my arm to reveal the burns I had done. “Did he do this to you?”
I shook my head. The pain suddenly announced itself everywhere. Laura kissed my skin just beside the wounds. “What day is it even?”
I knew it was Sunday.
“You ever heard of that song ‘Gloomy Sunday’?” Laura said. “It was this really beautiful song. So beautiful it caused, like, a hundred people to commit suicide in the thirties.”
Laura began to hum as she had the night I met her. As she did every day I knew her.
“Be quiet. Did you hear that?” I said. “Sounds like a firework just went off.”
“Or a gun,” she said gazing toward the mountains in the east. “Look, it’s another day.”