Sonora

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  “You just said it yourself: ‘or we’re next.’”

  “Maria will help us. We’ll go to her. She’ll tell us what to do,” Laura said.

  We spent the months before Mexico smoking dramatically over chai lattes. I had cut off all my hair as girls do, believing it might destroy the past. Trevor’s mother still came every few days, speaking in a hushed voice to her psychics. Laura sat at the corner table with her violin, waiting for me to finish dance class. Sometimes when we stayed after closing, she would play and I would dance on pointe in the handicap parking spot.

  It was in the Starbucks bathroom that we took our first pregnancy tests. “Would your baby be, like, half dead?” Laura said as we waited over the pee sticks. She shook her minus sign several times even after the allotted two minutes had passed, half hoping, perhaps, for a different result.

  “And what would yours be?” I said. “Half alien?”

  Spring break came, and we drove to Mexico, Laura and I both in the backseat, her father driving. He played the Mexican stations and hummed beneath his breath. When we followed his trail those days in the desert, I never saw his face and figured it stern. But his eyes were watery and green and lopsided, and there was a sadness locked thick and old in them. No matter the season, his face was always burned. He drove as if he were all alone in the car, fast, pushing the speedometer to ninety miles per hour, paying no notice even when Laura rolled down the window to smoke a cigarette, the wind lashing our skin.

  Near the border, Laura used the bathroom at a gas station. Her father turned to me and said, “Laura, she takes after her mother.”

  We left Laura’s father at the hotel bar and walked down the beach. There were mansions being built, a luxury spa named Castle Sonora. A ship had wrecked and was left on the sand. The sun poured through its rusted hull. Locals passed us selling jewelry, ashtrays, clay pots, and holding signs of sunburned blondes with braids. Donkeys trailed after them. White teenagers zigzagged over the beach in their ATVs like mosquitoes. The engines drowned out the ocean’s smell and sound.

  “If all else fails, we could always live on that ship,” Laura said.

  “How would we make money?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s easy. We’d be blow job girls.”

  By nightfall, we reached the end of the peninsula and the only bar on the beach. It was full of people we knew. The same popular kids were sitting at a central table on the patio as they did at our high school three hours north. Laura ordered margaritas, and we took them and sat on a ledge that faced the sea. Locals on the beach played accordions and trumpets, muffled by the speakers’ top one hundred hits. I was sun-kissed, feeling drowsy, almost pretty with a tan, romantic.

  “Should we try to talk to anyone?” I asked.

  “These humans?” Laura gulped the rest of her drink. As she bounced off the ledge, a senior tumbled into her and vomited onto the arm of a child selling sticks of gum.

  “Fuckface, are you blind?” Laura screamed.

  “What, spic? You talking to me?” He wiped his mouth. “Here, chica.” He handed the child a nickel. “Gimme a gum.”

  “You know the most common phrase in the movies is ‘let’s get out of here’?” Laura had already slipped off her skirt and begun to run toward the sea. She screamed for me to follow.

  “What about the tide?” I had never been in the ocean. It was such a sweet tug, the pull of the sand beneath my toes. The sea purred. The music from the bar was reduced to a faint hymn beneath the wind. There were sailboats a short distance from us, docked for the night. I could see the trace of a man’s arm, the ember of his cigarette as he drew it to his mouth and ashed over the side of the boat.

  “Get in!” Laura splashed me. The salt stung my eyes. I slipped out of my jean shorts and dove into the water after her. Laura lay on her back and floated on the waves. I kicked my legs frantically beside her, desperate for the sea floor to remain in reach.

  “Just lie down. It’s like bathwater. Pretend you’re dead,” she said.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “But you’re missing the stars,” she said.

  I lay back into the waves and choked as the water poured into my mouth. “Going back to the beach.”

  I knew even then that the moment illustrated the essential difference between us—Laura could lie back and regard the stars as the ocean swarmed beneath her, and I could not, my feet unsecured from the sand.

  “Dylan would have stayed,” she said as the calm waves urged me to shore.

  Maria lived in a small house on the side of town beyond the railway tracks where all the wild dogs roamed. Maria spoke only in Spanish and to Laura. She looked at me and murmured. Her face was impossibly white against her suntanned body. Her long ash-grey hair resolved at the hips of her dress. She held her palms open in her lap. On one was drawn the hamsa, the Arabic amulet against the evil eye. She pointed at it and looked at me and spoke.

  Laura turned to me. “Maria saw you coming. She says not to be afraid. What happens . . . happens. Maria says we are sisters. She says you may be afraid of me, but that I am here to protect and guide you in this life. And to teach you a lesson . . .” Laura drifted. Then Maria turned to Laura and spoke only to her, handing her a small purse. I understood only one word in the stream, Sonora.

  Maria took out a large piece of paper and some charcoal. She began to draw. With her hands, she motioned for us to leave her. I walked outside into the bright heat, waiting for Laura to follow me back onto the dirt road. “Not yet,” Laura said. “This is for you. Maria said they will protect you. And that we have to wait here.”

  The purse was full of stones. We sat down on a large boulder and kicked gravel at each other. The stones began to stain my hands black. A starving dog approached, searching a pile of trash for food, whimpering at us.

  An hour must have passed. Maria was so quiet that I didn’t hear her approach. She touched my shoulder and handed me the drawing.

  On it were two figures, two girls, hand in hand. They were both dressed in long-sleeved funereal gowns, everything about them the same, but the one on the left had a face like my own and the one on the right had the face of a skeleton. The rest of the drawing was filled with black birds and bottles, indiscriminate figures dancing, a swarm of arbitrary life.

  “I see soul,” Maria said in accented English. “Some of your soul in underworld, other soul here.”

  That night we lay in the humid hotel bed, and I listened to Laura’s breath rise against the ocean. I did not sleep. The image Maria drew stayed with me like a nightmare. I was afraid to fall unconscious for fear of what I might see.

  Toward dawn, I shook Laura. “You told her to draw that stuff,” I said.

  Laura’s eyes half opened, but she was still asleep. “Are you there?” she murmured.

  Our last night at the bar, Laura left me to swim once again. I ordered a Coke and played with the stones, watching my red flesh turn inky. I felt someone approach and then his elbow brush mine. “Hey,” he said. “I like your hair short like that.”

  “Thanks,” I said. He handed me his drink. The ice melted, the salt stung my lips. He was twice my height, healthy and broad shouldered and tan, wearing sandals and a backward cap. His hair was brown but lightened by the sun. He smiled with his eyes. He had a small mole on his cheek. He was the antithesis of Dylan, of the blue-streaked blond.

  “I’ve seen you around school,” he said. I nodded. “Aren’t you, like, a ballerina?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “I’m Eli.”

  “I know,” I said. I thought he had come to save my life.

  “Who’s Señor Guapo?” Laura said, returning from the beach.

  On the drive home, to the soundtrack of Mexican ballads, I daydreamed of Eli arched over me by moonlight. The sea at our toes. I was wind in the fantasy. I was not in the car. I choreographed an entire dance
in the backseat full of swirls and leaps and knee falls. At the end of it all, I’d just lie down on the stage. I’d float.

  “What are you dreaming about?” Laura said at last. The first saguaros had long since appeared.

  “Oh, just dance,” I said.

  “For a second you looked in love, but maybe that’s just because I am . . . helplessly.”

  That was the year I turned seventeen, that I got my driver’s license, the year the millennium changed over, the world didn’t end, and my parents bought a house.

  Every afternoon I sat beside the fountain in the garden. We could not afford a pool. I compulsively checked the tan lines between my lower abdomen and my belly. It was the first time in my life I felt pretty. Only the flight of movements could approximate my adoration for Eli, a grand jeté en tournant throughout the dry washes that ran through our new neighborhood, the fouetté by sunset, the fouetté so much like love in its dazzled spinning.

  My obsession was fantastic. It smothered the year’s darkness. I hid Maria’s drawing in a closet with my old children’s books, praying for the day that so much time had passed I’d forget where I had stowed it.

  I cannot sleep so I walk to the window of my father’s hospital room. In the distance, I spot Eli’s old neighborhood. Somewhere, in a car, a young couple is driving toward their first night of love. I no longer know anyone in Arizona. There is no one I can call. In this hospital room, my father’s heart is the soundtrack of my unsleep.

  I try to imagine Laura here at the window, smoking a cigarette, the way she would between her middle and ring fingers rather than the way everyone else does between index and middle. She says something to me like, “Stop being so dark,” though she is the one who looks so sad. I think of the ocean. Of the desert as ocean. And this works to calm me. At least the ocean covers up all its death.

  My father turned sixty. We had a dinner at my house that included my mom, our newest kitten Sharmut, and my father’s only friend, the waiter Tomás from the restaurant Galileo, with whom he returned from the porch in a cloud of marijuana smoke. “I was showing Tomás the beautiful fountain,” my father said. “Oh, put this song up, Rachel. This is my favorite song. Dance with me, Ahlami . . . This is really a song about a love that will never be.”

  “Dad,” I said.

  “What, you don’t think once your father was very charming? This is The Cure. They like to wear all black like you.”

  “Stop!”

  “Don’t embarrass her,” my mother said.

  “Remembering you standing silence in the rain, as I came to your heart and felt love,” he sang.

  “Those aren’t even the right lyrics,” I said.

  “You are right. That is because I don’t understand English. I am an alien. I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies. The Middle East is like a big black hole,” he said, his eyes red, stoned. “Maybe they should have left me in the road on the way to Damascus. Maybe I would have been mistaken as a Jewish baby. That would have been better. Much better. Then you would have been a rich little girl, and I would know all the right words to the songs.”

  “Here he goes again,” my mother said.

  “Black holes—I have a theory about that,” Tomás said.

  “Can I speak to my daughter?” my father said.

  “You obviously can’t,” my mother said.

  My father turned to me. “You look too skinny again. You got sick in Mexico?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Sometimes I worry,” he said, shaking his head. “Sometimes I worry curses just go on forever. Do you know what a black hole is, Ahlami?”

  “I’m sure Tomás can tell us all about it,” I said.

  “They are places in the center of all universes, the places where all the light comes in and never escapes,” Tomás said. “But I have my doubts. There is no place where there is no light.”

  “Just give me a hug for my birthday,” my father said. “I’ll squeeze some of my fat into you.”

  I thought of Eli impatiently as I leaned into my father’s shoulder. I knew it was a moment that I should concentrate on, memorize, a moment I would one day miss. It was the first time I noticed my father’s smell had changed. Its briskness, the spearmint of his cologne had less power. It was moldier, muskier.

  Like faces, the smell of a person cannot be replicated. The smell of a fire in my hair from a particular party, the smell of a friend’s perfume rubbed into my shirt. The smell of lipstick and chalk soaking the dressing rooms at dance rehearsals. The smell of a lover in your fingernails the morning after. The smell of my mother: orange peel, suntan lotion, faint vanilla. The smell of Laura: lavender laundry detergent, danger, linger of red wine, sweat, cigarette. The smell of Eli: the smell of seventeen, of the beach at night, coconut, white blossom, salt, stars. The smell of Dylan: vodka, fire, dirt in autumn, February in the desert.

  The smell of my father: Ralph Lauren Safari, cumin, tobacco, spearmint, musk, red meat. Home.

  My father awakens for a moment. He is nauseous, in pain. He calls me by my mother’s name. I run down the hall for the night nurse. As I run, I remember my dream, of a mariachi band placing me in a coffin to sail on a dark expanse of water. Laura was with them, dressed in their costume. The songs they sang were intoxicating, the kind of songs you cannot help but dance to, the kind of songs that make you feel drunk, your head heavy and swinging. A song that makes you yearn to fall through the floor or soar on a carpet. A song that makes you want to smash glass.

  The nurse pours some water, gives my father a pill. “He needs another painkiller,” she says. My face changes. “It’s normal, hon.”

  I try to remember the song, the singing still in my bones, but I cannot remember the words. My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war.

  After Mexico, I saw Eli alone only twice. The first time he picked me up from school, I told Laura that I was helping him with his math homework. “That’s cool. I’m going to go home and respond to Dylan’s letter,” she said. I knew there was no letter.

  In Eli’s roofless jeep, we drove up into the seat of the McDowell Mountains and parked yards away from the playground where Laura, Dylan, and I lay and smoked and spoke of the disappeared boys in the Estrella Mountains. I followed Eli on a trail that wound steeply uphill until we were halfway up the mountain. His hand stretched behind his body, expectant for mine. We stopped and looked out at the valley, streaks of sun piercing the hump of Camelback Mountain. He swiped my cheek affectionately. “There’s a smile,” he said.

  Farther up, there was a sign: do not go off the trail. sensitive habitat. Eli leaped off the path into the crevasse.

  “It says don’t do that,” I said.

  “This scares you, and cigarettes don’t?” He laughed.

  I peered into the ditch. At the end of it was a small cave. Eli kept going on into it, ducking from the brush, his skin perfectly tanned, turning for me with a teasing smile, his gait long and elegant as a horse in ceremony, hardly making a sound in the rocks.

  I watched him and thought with this man I will have three babies. With this man I will have a beautiful home. A beautiful car. With this man I will never want. With this man I will never be sad again.

  I sat on a rock in the shade. My hands began to tingle, my cheeks. I wanted to batter my head into the mountain wall. Water began to rush around my feet. It roared forth. The boulder above the crevasse was quaking. A mountain lion thrashed up the mountain in the distance. Eli was nowhere. Hundreds of rattlesnakes had slipped out from their homes in the dust.

  I was still on the rock when Eli kissed my forehead, the smell of his skin and his shirt stirring me. “I found an arrowhead for you.”

  The arrowhead was just a stone with a sharp point at one end, not chiseled. There was nothing special a
bout it. It did not matter. He had taken his shirt off, and I was filled with desire for him. I yearned to run my hands over him like cool marble, his body so chiseled but for a single scar on his lower abdomen. “That looks like a barbwire fence.”

  “My appendix,” he said.

  With Eli, I betrayed Laura. I fled our pact with sadness, our pact with blood. My parents too had a pact with sadness. I knew, even so young, that bliss couldn’t last. After my parents bought the house, they fought even more. We finally owned land. We belonged. The Second Intifada was on the television. Ariel Sharon’s face was constantly in our living room, in sunglasses at the Temple Mount surrounded by soldiers. When they fought, I went into my room. I practiced my steps. One—two-three. Two—two-three. Three—. Échappé, chasse, grand jeté. Eli’s hands, Eli’s lips, Eli’s voice. Repetition as a means to block out the wreckage.

  My father resumed painting on his new porch. He liked the sound of the fountain. He said it was almost like being at the sea. It helped him think. He made a painting called Indian in the Woods. The painting was a swirl of beige and blue, the colors of the sea and the desert. He said his Indian was trapped. He didn’t recognize anything in the forest, the Indian; he didn’t recognize himself.

  “All you can see wherever you go is where you came from. This is the torture of exile,” my father said. The paint stained the porch of our new garden. My mother scrubbed for days but couldn’t get it out. One afternoon, she stood in front of the television for an hour without saying anything. This was her only protest. My father walked to the living room and crashed the bureau of china onto the floor. “You and your fucking people, Rachel. You are never satisfied,” he screamed. “When will my suffering end?”

  My mother lunged, trying to save her inheritance. Her feet already bled from the shards. She sat there all night among the broken plates murmuring, Why me, why me. From forty, there were three that remained intact.