Nearer Than The Sky Read online

  The shuttle to Mountainview was almost empty. I put my suitcase under my seat and leaned my head against the window. Rich was standing outside, waving sadly. I felt bad leaving him there with Ma and Lily, but I couldn’t have stayed another second in that house. I figured I would get to Mountainview, go through the motions of getting the house checked, and then go home. I didn’t care about proving Ma wrong. She’d have some sort of explanation for anything the inspectors did or didn’t find. As the bus pulled away from the curb and then onto the freeway, I was glad that I was making this trip alone. I might even be able to turn it into some sort of vacation. This time of year in Mountainview wasn’t so different from Echo Hollow. The aspen leaves would be gold and there might be a dusting of snow up on the mountain. I could take long walks, maybe start writing something, visit some old friends. It wouldn’t be so bad, going home.

  The bulk of the trip from Phoenix to Mountainview is through the desert. Uneventful for the eye, and colorless. Paloverde, yuccas, and saguaros standing in clusters or alone. Cactus wrens swarming around flowers wilted and gone to seed. I know the desert is very much alive, even in autumn when everything appears dead. But through the window on the way to my childhood home, all I saw was a stationary landscape and all of the colors of barren.

  TWO

  I had not been to the Mountainview house in almost five years. The last time I was in Arizona I never left Phoenix. The last time I had been at my mother’s house, it was Christmastime, and the whole house was covered in snow. It looked pretty, draped in a crystalline cloak of white. But now the front yard was naked. The grass was burned brown from late summer sun, and Ma seemed to have given up on landscaping. I could see where the row of river rocks used to be, but most of them were gone now and the remaining ones were strewn out of any sort of order. The small garden of herbs and flowers was nothing more than a vague recollection. The soil here is so full of clay it takes patience to make things grow. From the looks of it, Ma had finally completely lost hers.

  I walked across the front yard and up the broken steps to the porch. It was cluttered with junk: broken furniture, cardboard boxes, and stacks of weathered newspapers tied into bundles with twine. I noticed that some of the furniture had price tags, white stickers stuck to bureau tops and chair seats with my mother’s estimation of what they were worth in ballpoint pen. Yard-sale leftovers that nobody wanted. I opened the drawers of a bureau that I remembered being my father’s. It was full of junk. Handkerchiefs, Chinese finger cuffs, coins, batteries, and crumpled receipts. She hadn’t even bothered to empty it out. No wonder no one wanted it. My father’s history in junk was in these drawers: mismatched socks he left behind, magic tricks, and bar napkins with disconnected phone numbers scrawled in his and others’ handwriting. I shut the drawer and reached up to grab the key from the door frame where Ma said it would be. Nothing. I ran my finger across the top of the door, waiting for the key to jangle to the floor. But it wasn’t there. Goddamnit, I thought.

  I used to break in when I was in high school. I remembered the pounding sound of my heart after I had closed my boyfriends’ car doors out on the main road and walked the quarter mile up our driveway, trying not to make a sound. I remembered the way my blood would thud dully in my ears as I slowed my pace at the front yard and walked quietly around to the back of the house where my window would be propped open with three quarters, just enough space for the paint stirrer I kept hidden in the bushes. Five years ago at Christmas I’d found both the quarters and the paint stirrer waiting for me expectantly, and it had made Peter laugh. Now I wasn’t worried about making noise. There was no one to hear anymore. Our nearest neighbor was still a mile away.

  The backyard was worse than the front. It looked like a junkyard, a playground for ghosts. The swing set Daddy had bought for us was still cemented down, but rusted. The swings were missing seats; rusty chains hung down crooked and loose. The slide was riddled with holes where rust had eaten away at the metal. The pink and blue paint was gone. There was more furniture in the backyard. The wooden headboard of my childhood bed, the decals I’d put there reflecting the sun. Propped up against the side of the house was our washing machine and a pile of chair legs. Benny’s purple beanbag chair, its zipper rusted and broken. Beans spilled all over the ground. The couch that had been in the backyard for all those years was gone, though, as if the wild sunflowers had finally completely strangled it. I imagined that if I dug deep enough, I might find soggy bits of green burlap upholstery in the dirt.

  The dirt yard turned slowly into a field of dying sunflowers. A waist-high sea of fading, yellow miniature suns. You could drown in that ocean; this I knew. There was an undertow in this field.You had to be careful or it would pull you under.

  I didn’t know what I might find inside the house. I was almost afraid to pry open the window where my three quarters were still allowing midnight entry. The paint stirrer was gone, but I found a piece of wood that did the trick, and the window rose slowly until there was space enough for me to crawl inside.

  My old room was empty. The bed frame that matched the headboard was nowhere to be found. The floor was darker where the bed used to be. The wallpaper was also darker where the headboard used to lean up against the wall. Each step I took echoed and resounded. It felt strange coming into the house this way. I felt like an intruder, moving in the backward way of thieves.

  Remarkably, the main rooms of the house looked normal. The living room was tidy. The plants were drooping in the windows, but there were pillows propped up on the couch, the carpet was clean and bright, and the curtains were ones I didn’t recognize. The refrigerator was full of food, though much of it had turned bad in the time that Ma had been in Phoenix. I emptied out the containers that looked suspicious and poured a chunky carton of milk down the drain. To anybody who might visit, this would look like any other single woman’s house. A welcome mat for wiping the mud off your feet, ceramic figurines, and a clock with batteries that hadn’t died. But when I went down the hall opening doors, every bedroom was empty. And in the room she shared with Daddy, the floor was scarred. I pictured her dragging the furniture, too heavy to lift, never minding the scraping of bureau legs on the wooden floor.

  I closed all the doors to our empty rooms and went back to the kitchen, which at least resembled a normal home. When I picked up the phone to call Peter, I half expected that there wouldn’t be a dial tone. That the receiver would be glued down.

  “I made it,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. He must have gotten the phone in the office ; there was no noise behind him.

  “Ma didn’t come with me,” I said.

  “What? I thought that was the whole reason why you went.”

  “It’s complicated. Ma’s staying in Phoenix to help Lily with Violet, and I’m getting the house checked for lead and asbestos. Don’t ask. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I plan to get out of here as soon as I can.”

  I thought about telling him about the furniture wasteland in the backyard, the empty rooms, and my father’s drawer. But I couldn’t figure out a way to talk about it that didn’t sound ridiculous. And so instead, I said, “I miss you.”

  “Esmé wants to come here for Thanksgiving weekend, after dinner with my folks. Is that okay?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “That would be great.”

  “She’ll be so happy,” he said. “She says all she wants to do is sit on the porch swing and read.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” I laughed.

  I stared out the kitchen window at the rusty swing set and thought of the swing that Peter had built for us.

  “Well, I’ve got to decide what Joe’s going to make for entrées tonight,” Peter said.

  I didn’t want him to hang up. I held on to the phone and listened to him breathing.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I nodded, hoping the motion of my head might convince us both that I was telling the truth. “I’m fine.”

 
After we hung up I went into the living room. This room looked nothing like it did when I was growing up. The black-and-white TV with the aluminum foil–wrapped antenna had been replaced with a wide-screen TV inside a pressed-wood entertainment center. The walls were papered in a yellow and blue instead of the eagles of my childhood.

  I felt something like hunger deep in my stomach, and decided to go into town to get some groceries. The car keys, unlike the house keys, were where Ma had said they would be. I got a sweater out of my suitcase and went out to the garage. It was getting chilly; heavy clouds had moved across the peaks of the mountain. Some days you wouldn’t even know there were mountains looming over this town for all the clouds. These looked like snow clouds. Maybe it would snow in town soon, too.

  Ma’s car wouldn’t turn over. I sat patiently so as not to flood the tank, and then tried again. The engine roared to life and the stereo was turned on full blast. Talk radio. Doctor Somebody condescending to a weepy-sounding man. I turned the stereo off and let the engine warm up. The car, like the living room and kitchen, was immaculate. The ashtray was clean, the upholstery and floor mats looked recently vacuumed, and it smelled vaguely of artificial pine.

  I backed out of the garage and turned around in the driveway. Our driveway winds downhill for a quarter of a mile before the turn onto the main road into town. In the rearview mirror the snow clouds had completely enclosed the peaks. It was like a magician’s trick. Making mountains disappear.

  It’s only a couple of miles into town; the car hadn’t even warmed up when I pulled into what used to be the Foodmart parking lot in almost the exact spot where I’d been struck all those years ago. I had marked this place in my mind, remembering even after all this time. Of course, the Foodmart was bought out years ago by Smith’s, whose neon sign glowed eerily in the prematurely dark afternoon. But the way the giant oak’s shadow fell across this space at this time of day was like a compass. Even with the newly paved lot, I knew how far away the cart I was in was from the doors to the store. I knew how far away Ma had been from me.

  Inside, I got a cart and started to fill it with groceries. I didn’t plan on staying long, but I also didn’t plan to starve. If it did snow and I couldn’t get into town, I certainly didn’t want to be stuck in that house without food. It had happened to us once; we’d been stranded and hungry before.

  A Navajo woman wearing a traditional dark velvet dress and rows of turquoise beads laced around her neck was ahead of me in line. She was reading a National Enquirer, and the child in the baby seat of the shopping cart was restless. He twisted and turned, trying to reach for something, anything, from the candy rack. His face contorted with frustration when his small hands wouldn’t reach. His large black eyes grew wet, and I felt the storm that was about to burst. Then, without moving her eyes from the newspaper, the woman reached out her hand and touched his cheek, halting the tear that was about to fall. She shook her head gently, no, and his bottom lip quivered.

  I had to write a check for the food, but they wouldn’t take an out-of-state check without a guarantee card. Listen, I wanted to say. I’m from here. This is where I grew up. You might not know this, but I was struck by lightning in your parking lot. As if this might entitle me somehow. But instead, I reached into my wallet for a credit card I’d promised myself I wouldn’t use and paid for the groceries. I wasn’t a local anymore. I hadn’t been since I was seventeen.

  In the parking lot, the Indian woman was unloading her shopping cart into the back of her pickup truck. Her long braid swung like a rope when she picked the little boy up out of the cart and put him inside the cab of the truck. It was almost twilight now, dark and cold, and the growing wind rustled the handles of her plastic bags. As I unloaded my groceries into the backseat, I watched her. Her engine wouldn’t start. She tried three times before I opened up Ma’s trunk to look for jumper cables. Nothing. Not even a spare tire.

  I ran across the parking lot anyway and knocked on her window. She looked startled, but then she rolled the window down.

  “If you have cables, I can give you a jump,” I said.

  “Nah, that’s okay. She’ll start soon enough.”

  “You sure?” I asked.

  She nodded and stared straight ahead. The little boy was sitting quietly in the front seat, sucking on the ear of a worn purple Barney.

  “It’s really no problem,” I said, hoping she would take my offer.

  She pumped the gas pedal a couple of times and then turned the key. The engine trembled and then turned over. She smiled and turned to me.

  “Good, good,” I said as she rolled up the window.

  As I walked back to Ma’s car I felt embarrassed. I crossed my arms against the cold and got into the car.

  By the time I pulled into Ma’s driveway, it was completely dark. It took two trips to get the groceries into the house. Inside it was quiet. I turned on all of the lights except for the ones in the bedrooms and turned on the radio on the kitchen counter. No stations were coming in, though; it was too windy. I could almost taste the snow in the air. To fill the silence, I turned the TV on really low, and let the voices keep me company as I got dinner ready.

  I’d gotten some Chinese food from the deli. Little cardboard cartons with greasy noodles and batter-dipped chicken inside. They weren’t warm anymore, so I filled a plate and put it in the microwave. The plate spun around and around, the noodles crackled and hissed, and then I used oven mitts to carry the hot plate into the living room. Ma would kill me. Little plastic containers with hot mustard and bright pink sweet and sour sauce threatened stains on the upholstery. But Ma wasn’t here, and I was hungry. And the living room was the only place in the house that felt even remotely cozy.

  I sat down on the couch. It was stiff. Too stiff. I set the plate on the coffee table and stood up. I pulled the cushions off one by one. There was no bed hidden inside the couch. And there were no beds in the bedrooms. I wondered if my mother, like Lily, was no longer sleeping. And I wondered where I would lie down tonight. I ate two platefuls of food until my lips were slick, my stomach was full, and there was a small monument made of white cardboard on the kitchen counter. Then I lay down on the unforgiving couch and waited for snow to fall.

  NOVEMBER 3, 1999. Mountainview, Arizona. No witnesses have been located concerning the living conditions of Judy Brown, 55, a thirty-year resident of Mountainview. Neighbors would have made complaints, had she any. However, the nearest neighbor, one John Dexter, has “not been up that way since her boy died” when his wife, Eleanor, “brought the family there a pot roast.” Complaints were filed not by neighbors, but by her daughter, Miranda (Indie) Brown, who returned to the residence after nearly five years of remaining safely away. Indie apparently sat down in the backyard shortly after her arrival, reading a newspaper from early July 1978. Staring out at a sunflower skyline, Indie shouted out at the trees. The newspaper was yellowed and fragile with time, and the words crumbled in her hands.

  I walked carefully around the back of the house to find Benny. He discovered this hiding space by accident one day, but now he used it every time we played hide-n-seek or whenever he just needed a place to hide. So I knew now without seeking that he was under the porch, lying flat on his belly where I wouldn’t even put my hand for fear of what might live there. What might appear to anyone else as cowardice (this slithering on the ground and under the broken latticework of our house to get away) actually showed incredible bravery.

  “Benny,” I said. “Come out. It’s over.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Benny, you can come out now. Daddy went to work.”

  I could see Benny through the lattice. His face was in his hands.

  Ma came around the corner then, still wearing her nightie. She was holding Lily on her hip, even though Lily’s feet nearly touched the ground. She and Daddy had been fighting about the Miss Desert Flower contest again. This time Daddy gave in. He was tired. I could see it in the way he finally just shrugged and threw up his hand
s. He didn’t even bother slamming the car door this time.

  “Where’s your brother?” she asked, looking around the backyard. Then she saw the soles of his dirty sneakers. His feet were as big as Daddy’s now. Bigger even.

  “Benny,” she said, leaning down as far as she could with the extra weight of Lily.

  I bent down too, sticking my head near the opening where he had crawled, and whispered, “I’ll take you down to the creek if you come out.”

  His feet moved and then he was shimmying backward out from under the porch. When he stood up, he was covered with red clay. It would take Ma an hour to get it off of him, and it wouldn’t ever come all the way out of his clothes.

  “We’re going swimmin’?” he asked, probably forgetting why he’d gone under there to begin with.

  “Sure,” I said. “Go inside and get your swim trunks.”

  “We’re going swimmin’,” he was clapping his hands together and hopping up and down on one leg. “I gotta get my new trunks. I gotta find my new swim trunks.”

  Benny hopped awkwardly through the back door into the house. He’d grown almost five inches since the summer before. He didn’t know what to do with all that height.

  “Indie,” my mother reprimanded.

  “What?” I asked, imitating her annoyed tone of voice.

  “He needs to learn to mind without bribing him.”

  “I was going anyway,” I said. “It’s hot.”

  Ma could fight with Daddy, scream and slam doors and throw things until she was almost blue, and then suddenly allow this certain peace to descend upon her.You never knew when the yelling would stop, but when it did, her voice went gentle. From bitter to smooth warm milk within seconds. And today she’d won, and she was happy.

  “Okay. Be back in a couple of hours,” she smiled, rocking back and forth with Lily still on her hip.

  I grabbed my backpack and Benny found his trunks, which were still soggy from the last time we went to the creek. I made him put them in an old bread bag to keep them from getting my stuff all wet. I had suggested that he put them on and let them dry while we walked, but there was no arguing with Benny. He did things his own way, even if it didn’t make too much sense to the rest of us.