17

That night, the sound of the front door opening wakes me up.

Mom’s standing at the edge of the yard, her arms folded across her chest, staring at the mountains. The night is cold and clear. The stars look close enough to pick out of the sky. “We never hiked to the top, did we?” Mom asks.

“We can do it tomorrow,” I say, because why not?

“We could. There’s a trail to the top. We’d have to leave early.”

Dad comes up behind me. The door opening must have woken him up, too. To my surprise, he says, “I can take you to the trailhead.”

“You don’t have to work tomorrow, right?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “Let’s go.”

Mom twists her hands through my and Dad’s arms, and we look at the mountain we’re going to climb tomorrow. In some ways, I feel like I’ve already climbed a mountain.

“Mom …,” I start. I want to tell her that because of her, I’m so much braver. That even though she can’t remember everything she taught me, I can. That six months ago, I would never have been able to travel on a bus without Dad’s permission. To be the one who helped check the dream off her list. But the words get stuck.

“What do you think you want to take with us to eat tomorrow?” I ask instead. It’s enough for now.

The day’s cold, and there’s a breeze blowing. From the trailhead, gray clouds reach out over the valley. Mom starts to ask a lot of questions, whether we have enough food, water, whether we’d turned off all the lights in the house before we left.

When she first got sick, Dad thought that she was being paranoid. Now, on the trailhead, he just answers her questions and comforts her.

At the midway point, Mom stops and looks out over the valley. “Do you see that?” she asks us and points out to the desert floor. “Do you see the ocean?”

“Ocean?” Dad says. “What do you see, Kim?”

“Water,” she answers. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Dad just stares out across the desert, too. “Yes, it is,” he says. “Yes, it’s beautiful.”

We don’t make it to the peak. Three-quarters of the way up the trail, Mom turns around again and says she wants to go home. So we turn around and go back.

At the house, Mom doesn’t take off her jacket or her hiking boots. She sits right down in her chair and turns on the TV. It wasn’t one of her good days.

The deadline to enter the art show passes. The following Tuesday, our class gets a sneak peek. We walk to the building across the street from school, where it’s set up.

Mrs. G points to a blue curtain. “We’ll reveal the mural during open house.”

Most of the student art pieces are sketches or paintings, some in watercolor. Some are flowers, some are self-portraits, some are landscapes. One is a field of sunflowers with a red barn in the background.

Bailey’s at the end of the line. From the corner of my eye, I can see her waving her hand to get my attention.

Where’s yours? she mouths.

I shake my head.

At recess, she finds me sitting on a bench with my sketchbook and some sunflower seeds. I crack a seed and put the shell in my pocket.

“So where’s your art piece?” Bailey’s fingertips are red, covered in chili lime flavoring.

I’m surprised she’s talking to me at all. “Thought you were mad at me.”

“I am. But you’re changing the subject.”

“You’re not playing soccer today?”

Bailey crumples up her Taki bag. “You’re changing the subject again. Did Mrs. G forget to point out your art? Did I miss it?”

“No.”

“So …”

“She didn’t forget. You didn’t miss it.”

“You didn’t enter?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

From my other pocket, I grab more seeds and shove them into my mouth. I owe Bailey some kind of answer. “I wasn’t inspired.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” I spit the shells into my hand this time and walk to the garbage. It’s a good excuse to try and escape her questions.

“You’re supposed to be mad at me,” I remind her again.

“I can be mad and still ask why you don’t have anything in the art show.”

I throw the shells into the garbage can. “Okay. I made something, but it … it didn’t help my mom. And focusing on my mom made me forget about you. So I just want to leave it where it is.”

She seems like she wants to ask more, but she lets me continue.

“Bailey … I’m really sorry I forgot to tell you about not coming to the bus station. I’m sorry about a lot of things, like my mom getting sick and me not being a good friend …”

“You’ve already apologized. I believe you.”

The bell rings. When we line up, Bailey and I are both at the back of the line. She crunches Takis until Mrs. G tells her to put them away.

“If you made something, you should put it in the art show.”

I tell her I’ll think about it.

At the after-school program, between math problems, I take out my plastic dolphin bottle and move it side to side. My name, written on the dolphins’ flukes, moves with the motion, too.

I do the next problem. We’re back to multiplication, the math operation that Mrs. G told us reminds her of the word “possibilities.”

I look up from doing math, and Bailey’s standing in the doorway. I drop my pencil. “Why are you here?”

She ignores my question and reaches behind her. She’s holding my collage. “Mrs. Collins let me in. I figured you probably put it under your bed, where you put your mom’s self-portrait.”

“The deadline was last Friday,” I say.

“It’s worth a try to see if they’ll still take it. I can ask.”

“Why are you doing this?” I know she said she accepted my apology, but I let her down.

“Because you’re my friend, and friends help each other out,” she says. Then she adds with a smile, “Plus, I’m getting tired of riding my bike alone on Saturdays.”

The only thing left to say is “thank you.”

The night of open house, there’s a knock on our door. It’s Mrs. Collins.

“Did you forget something?” I ask.

“No.” She sets her purse in the regular spot. “I’m here to stay with your mom until you get back.”

Oh. “I thought she was going with us.”

“I don’t know, sweetie. Your dad just asked me if I could come back and stay with her.” Mrs. Collins usually doesn’t give her opinion; she says her job is just to take care of whatever needs to be cleaned up or anything Mom needs.

But she can tell I’m sad. She places her hand on my shoulder. “Maybe talk to your dad?”

When Dad comes out into the living room, I tell him I really want Mom to go with us. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when he says he doesn’t think it would be a good place for her to be, “In case she makes a scene.”

“Then, we’ll leave. I want her to come.”

Dad’s going to try to convince me that Mom should stay here, but I’m prepared to play the what-if game. “I want her to go. It might be the last …”

He gets a sad look in his eyes, and I feel bad for saying it. But I think it worked. “Okay,” he says. “Mrs. Collins, I’m sorry you went through the trouble of driving back here.”

Mrs. Collins grabs her purse and goes to the door. “It’s okay. Don’t worry. Kim should go.”

Dad takes Mom to the bedroom to change her clothes. She comes wearing her favorite red dress. She looks beautiful.

We visit my classroom first. Dad looks through the work on my desk, and I show him and Mom some computer projects I did on my Chromebook. Mom stares at the screen for a few minutes, then wanders through the desks and around the classroom. She stops at the Revolutionary War projects on the back counters and tables.

Dad follows her and is soon joined by Mrs. G. “Hello, Mr. Rodrigues.” She shakes my dad’s hand. “And hello, Mrs. Rodrigues,” she says, gesturing at Mom. “So glad you both could come tonight.” There’s a weird quiet. I can tell Mrs. G isn’t sure how to react to Mom not saying hello back, not shaking her hand.

“Mrs. G,” I say, “it’s okay. She does that to us sometimes, too.”

She places her arms around my shoulders and bends down. “Thank you for telling me that,” she whispers.

“No problem.”

As she turns to go greet other parents, Dad tells her to wait for a moment. “Cassie’s told me how much she loves your class,” he tells her.

“It’s a pleasure to have her,” Mrs. G says.

I spot Bailey coming in through the back door with Grandma Lorena and Sonia in tow. They all come up to say hello, then Grandma Lorena looks around and finds Mom staring at the poetry hanging on the white board.

“Kim,” she says and gives Mom a hug. I hold my breath. I’m not sure how Mom’s going to react to Grandma Lorena hugging her. I’m not sure she’ll remember who she is.

But Mom smiles, and Grandma Lorena talks to her the way she always used to. “I’m going to bring you some soup and some tortillas. I’ve been meaning to do that for a long time, but you know how time slips away from us …”

She pauses and looks over at Dad. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to say …”

“It’s fine,” Dad says, “and we’d love some of your soup.”

Bailey nudges me. “Have you been to the art show yet? What’d your mom and dad think? When my grandma saw your work, she said, ‘Cassandra has bared her soul in this. That’s what good art does.’ ”

I smile. “Your grandma’s art is cooking. She bares her soul in a pot of beans.” Now Bailey smiles.

I tell her we haven’t gone over yet. I’m a little nervous.

“The mural came out pretty good, too,” Bailey says. “Everyone’s piece is different, but the colors and images connect to one another.”

“Guess that was Mrs. G’s goal, huh?”

“Definitely.”

Mom, Dad, and I say goodbye, and we walk across the street to the art show.

“Here it is.” I stand to the side of my piece. “What do you think?” Which is a silly thing to ask, because Dad always tells me.

He’s silent for a moment. He reads the title: The Space Between Lost and Found.

He leans forward, focusing on the center photograph. “It’s your mom, swimming.”

His eyes start in the middle, then look at the photographs that surround the blurred version of Mom. Then out to pieces of images of us as a family and then to Mom when she was young. Just as I planned.

“It’s beautiful, Cassie,” Dad says. “Different than what you’ve done before. Still has depth, but it has—at least for me—more layers of emotion. It’s more realistic, but it also has a dreamlike quality to it. It’s really something.”

Mom moves to another watercolor, this one abstract. The title is Blue Tornado. The paper is covered with wisps of swirling blue brushstrokes. “Lots of movement,” Dad says.

Then he goes back over and stands in front of my collage. “I think we should hang this by Mom’s portrait in the living room. What do you think?”

“I think we’ll have to get another frame for Mom’s portrait before we do that. It broke.”

Now Mom’s looking over my shoulder at the collage. She steps around me and reaches up, like she did at home, and caresses the blurred photograph.

Her eyes follow the path of images. I wait. I wait for her to say, “Cassie.”

Part of me was expecting the collage to be a final magic wand. Abracadabra. Poof. All of a sudden, pieces would slide back into Mom’s brains cells, connecting bit by bit until she remembered.

But the pieces aren’t enough, not anymore.

“That’s you.” I point to the blurred image. “Swimming.”

I point to some of the other photographs, telling her about them, telling her about where we were and what we were doing. “This is the campfire we built on the beach. It was our first trip to the ocean. This is when we went to Disneyland and you said, ‘We can’t come all the way to Disneyland, buy a Mickey Mouse hat, and not get our names sewn on.’ This is when we hiked the Black Desert Trail, a ten-mile hike.” And, “That’s a trophy you won when you were my age. You were an amazing swimmer.”

“She still is.” Dad’s voice breaks a little. “We took some great trips.”

“We did,” I say. “We still can,” I whisper. But this time I’m not sure I believe it.

The last thing we do before we leave the art show is look at the mural. In the middle of my saguaro cactus is a lone elf owl. On her half, Bailey’s drawn saguaro cacti, too, except hers are small. Everything does blend well together. The other panels show desert landscapes with desert animals, but in the middle of the mural is a panel where someone’s drawn our school and part of our town. The colors are a balance of cool and warm.

If I’d drawn an ocean scene, it would’ve been one part disconnected from the whole. This is better.

When we get home, Dad turns off the ignition, and Mom opens the car door. She takes off down the sidewalk. It’s dark out, only a crescent moon in the sky, but streetlights shine, casting silhouettes on the ground.

“The house is this way,” Dad says and gently grabs her arm.

But Mom pulls away. “We’re going on a trip.”

We follow her to where the roads ends and where the desert starts. She still doesn’t stop.

“It’s too dark, Kim. We’ll come out here tomorrow.”

“We used to go on trips,” Mom says. I wonder if she overheard me before.

Dad walks right beside her, looking on the ground, making sure her path is clear so she doesn’t trip over anything. The sagebrush where I hid the folding chairs is lit by the moon.

“The canyon is up ahead.” Mom takes off her shoes but leaves on her socks. Lying down on the desert floor, she spreads her arms out to the sides and makes a sand angel. Dad seems to think of stopping her, telling her to get up, but he doesn’t. He lays down right beside her and mimics her movements, and when she stops, he holds her hand, and they close their eyes.

I sit down and rest my chin on my knees. Out here, the canyon swallows sound and turns it into an echo.

The sky is a dark, dark purple, and stars shine. The echo of the river at the bottom of the canyon carries up through the space and rocks, the movement of water sounding almost like voices. But other than that, it’s quiet.

Since Mom got sick, I’ve tried to imagine what the house will feel like once she’s not there. It’s impossible.

I think of the desert, the sand, and how right now it’s breaking down to the smallest of particles. We don’t notice because it takes so long and there is so much.

Dad sits up, leans back on his hands, and stares out toward the canyon. “It’s beautiful out here.”

“And it’s in our backyard.”

“It is,” Dad says and smiles.

If I had to draw a sketch to end our story together, it would be just this. The three of us, lying on the desert floor at the edge of a canyon, holding hands, the stars doing what they’ve done for millions of years, infinitely shining.