Sonora

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

I called Eli. I asked him to come save my life.

  Eli lived on a road called Via del Paraiso. The drive to his house is still my favorite, along Pima Road that runs along the reservation where once it was without casino or training stadium—empty and dark. Back then, there were no streetlights on that stretch. After Eli, I drove the road with my sunroof down and all my windows open in a certain ecstasy, imagining the dark expanse at my side was ocean, tempting fate by looking up instead of ahead, counting the stars.

  The perfume of candles wafted out of his house. Gardenia, jasmine. Always the scent of white blossoms and the sea. The sea still in your hair by night. Eli walked me to his room, so close I was trembling, as if the moon were something we held between our hips. It was full and splashed onto his bed. Eli said nothing before he took off my shirt, skirt, and slipped off my shoes. He kissed the inside of my arm, the burns smaller, paled. I heard the sea. He didn’t notice my scars. The gold cross he wore around his neck tickled my breast as we made love.

  When we were finished, I traced the circles of sweat along his back. The here-and-there mole. The back is such a canvas of wonders when you are in love. I could not sleep for fear he’d stop breathing. I watched his rib cage fall into the sheets and rise up as the night gave way to the dawn. I first understood why Christians prayed for a savior in the form of a beautiful man. He had absolved me of the blue-streaked blond.

  It was all so foolish then, as it is now, as it is forever. To be in love with beauty. To try to hold on to it.

  Soon after we finished, I said, “I feel so at home.”

  He never answered me. He was already asleep.

  Eli did not call the next day. Eli was not at school the day after that. I yearned to tell Laura what had happened, to scream it to the entire school, but Laura did not appear at the bleachers after third period, at the library, or at our window at lunch. I waited for Eli in the lot where he usually parked his jeep. I sat there until nightfall when a janitor told me it was time to go. On Tuesday, there was a crackle from the intercom right after we recited the Pledge of Allegiance. We could hear the principal coughing, the muffled sound of a suppressed sob. Everyone shuffled their papers. The teacher excused herself to the bathroom. Moments later, we heard the principal’s voice again, restrained, but clear. “Yesterday morning, students . . .” he began.

  An early morning April storm caused a flash flood that cascaded down from the mountains, filling the washes with rain. Eli lost his footing. He was caught, bones shattered, in the arms of a saguaro cactus thirty feet below. He was in a coma.

  I left school immediately. At the hospital, I saw his mother at his side, lying over his sleeping legs. I watched through the blinds, knowing I’d never say anything.

  The saguaro cactus accumulates its weight because it stores water. Much of the water the desert gets is housed inside that crucifix of a dead tree. Perhaps the needles that held Eli in his last sleep released rainwater. From above and below, he was covered in rain.

  I cannot sleep. I kiss my father’s cheek. I leave the hospital to smoke. The receptionist eyes me. I say hello. She tells me I should cut back. I nod. I use my phone as a flashlight once on the reservation. I draw a light show across the paloverde. I try to draw the faces of those I have lost. All I see are tree veins, the insides of us all.

  A raccoon appears. He sneaks between the trees. His eyes are red in the dark, his face thick as a carnival mask. I remain still. I throw my cigarette at him. “Don’t make me see,” I scream. I hear Laura’s voice explaining to me the shamanic power of the raccoon: shape-shifters, owners of secrets, messengers from the land of the dead.

  The reservation stretches on before me. I see no people. I see only the casino, the reflection of headlights from the highway scanning the desert like a warning. I long for people. I long to run into the desert and find a fire around which people are sitting. The Deir Yassin massacre took place a few days before my father’s birth. It was anomalous in its violence. Villagers, women, children, all were shot. Town after town from Jerusalem to the northern borders emptied as people left on foot with only their most important belongings, thinking they’d be back soon. Some were lucky enough to board buses, the way only a few years earlier, my mother’s grandparents boarded trains in the green woods across Eastern Europe toward a far worse fate. I look out at the reservation, still and glittering with casinos, and think of all the death dried up and buried in its dirt. Nightmares always recur but never our most beautiful dreams.

  I am a memory house for those I have lost, those I no longer know. I try to stop it, try to stop the vision of Eli through the blinds, but it persists like a compulsion. The yellowed skin, the latex sweat, the heart monitor beeps ensuring that Eli’s life beat on inside his sleeping body through the blinded window. I remember prom weeks after he died—mascara-stained face, grey dress, weeping in the bathroom, Laura in the stall, pouring me tequila and vodka and schnapps all mixed up in one water bottle, and I still taste the liquor, and I remember wanting to flee her, and being unable to flee her, so in need of her and half hating her for it, and I still am nauseous from it. I hear that beep still through the hospital blinds. I hear it resound from every room I pass. I hear it and fear every room in the hospital contains someone I love. Someone I’ve lost or will lose. This is my heaven. This is my hell. God keeping our hearts in check. Forever and ever, amen.

  I am no longer able to shut my eyes, no longer able to hide. I cannot flee the hospital room. I go into the last moments of the ones I love. The Rolodex of faces shuffles to the end and begins again. I pass their rooms. I want to be inside, not on the outside looking in. These are the cracks where all the ghosts live. And the cracks are everywhere. I go there with them, to their ends, again and again. I go in case they are listening, so they know they are not alone.

  After I left Eli at the hospital, I walked for miles into the reservation. The heat had risen past one hundred degrees. I had no water. I had no phone. I wept like a lunatic. I spoke to myself. There was no escape. I was cursed. I wanted the voices. I wanted a sign. I wanted to see something.

  I walked and walked and did not see a single person. I didn’t see any sign of life. No sign demanding I stay on one path and not another. The desert was silent as a graveyard. I was not thirsty. I was not tired. I came home after dark, my leg covered in jumping cholla needles, my feet raw with blisters. My father was sitting on the hood of his taxi, smoking. My mother was at the window. I saw her face was swollen from crying. “Don’t ever disappear like that,” my father said in a half yell. I knew he was getting old. He had spent his quota of anger on the broken china. “This pain, it will pass,” he said. “Trust me. It will pass.”

  Laura was on our couch. She had a yellow rose. “Well.” She paused. “Now we are together again.” Now we are together again.

  Laura and I snuck out for the first time since Dylan and walked to the cemetery. “I spoke to him only once,” she said.

  “I think I loved him,” I said.

  “I said, ‘Señor Guapo, don’t break my sister’s heart.’”

  We jumped the tawny wall that was the boundary between an apartment complex and the cemetery. The grass was well mowed and sprayed with chemicals so that it did not resemble a desert cemetery but a cemetery in New England or upstate New York, a cemetery that might look natural in another locale. There was a large pond that reflected the moon. We lay down as the sprinklers came on. Laura hummed and drew her nails down my arm as I cried.

  I heard the whoosh of a car that sounded like tires on wet asphalt. I looked up and saw a white Lincoln swerve off the cemetery road and head toward us. I screamed for Laura to get up.

  The headlights blinded me. Laura did not move. I stumbled and scratched my legs and elbows on the tawny wall of the complex. “It’s a cop!” I screamed.

  But when I turned my head again, perched on the wall, about to leap into the parking lot, the car was gone. “Didn�
�t you see that car?”

  “We’ve got to get you out of here,” she said. “It’s not just this. I’ve been seeing my mom lately in my dreams, but the weird thing is . . . in the dreams, she really, really looks like you.”

  IV

  August

  It was long past midnight. It hadn’t yet rained, but we could smell the sage and the smoke of creosote in the air. We could smell the honeysuckle and the dust. Laura and I drove off a side road into the mountains. We were leaving for New York in the morning.

  That last summer we were pizza delivery girls, and we’d drive to mansions and get tipped big by the husbands and eyed sideways by the wives. We swept the floors. We flattened the dough. We smoked pot with our manager in the parking lot. He spoke about Hamlet and how the East Coast was full of pretentious assholes—that this was why he dropped out of Brown. In the evenings, I would dance at a studio that had gone out of business a block from my house. No one bothered to lock up. Laura would come and play as I spun.

  That last night, I sat on the roof of my car chain-smoking and drawing original constellations from the sudden spread of stars. Laura pulled out a CD from her bag and put it into the deck. “Tell me if you like this,” she said. It was instrumental, at first all violin, laced with her voice humming a dark fairy tale. She got out of the car and stripped to her unmatched bra and underwear. “It’s too hot.”

  The music was of winter, true winter, the quiet blanket of the sky shedding itself in white. And her cooing, thick with spells.

  “You’re going to be famous,” I said. “You’re going to be my famous friend.”

  “Will you be my groupie forever?” She was walking toward the hills on tiptoe as if not to wake the sleeping desert.

  My mother returns to the hospital at four in the morning, shakes me awake. For a moment I am in high school again. I’m late for work, late for school. I’ve never woken well. My mother would pour ice water over me, strip the blankets off the bed, set four alarms.

  “Let’s take a drive,” she says.

  “Now?” I ask.

  “I can’t sleep.”

  We drive through the dark. We drive as we always did when I was a kid, me in the passenger seat. There is no traffic, not even police. The lights take five minutes to turn. The mountains hover in the distance, sleeping giants forgotten in the sweep of streets and homes.

  “Do you need a bra? Or your hair cut?” she says. “We can get our nails done.”

  I turn some music on. I watch her face from the corner of my eyes. I see the way in which her skin has closed in around her jaws. The crow’s-feet sharpened, her hair nearly all grey. She is trying not to cry. I see that it is true, that I’ve grown up to look like her. I recall the hundreds of drives in the passenger seat with her, an older version of the same Japanese make of this car, the same grey color. Me turning the music on, her trying to speak. Her asking me if I’d done my homework, why did I dress in such dark clothes, why was I so dark, why I couldn’t make a friend outside of Laura.

  “When will anything just be okay?” she asks.

  “No one is going to save us,” I say. I turn the music up and light a cigarette.

  “You should quit smoking,” she says. “You look worn for how young you are.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I say.

  She begins to cough. I hold my cigarette out the window but do not throw it out. For years, I’ve tried to catch the hourly differences, the day-to-day aging. But the only discernible difference is that my mother began to appear in my reflection. I was becoming less myself and more her, and more my father on the inside. One morning, I saw my mother in my silhouette. My face had narrowed, grown thinner.

  There is lightning in the distance. The sky is purple for a moment. I am lost in thought with nothing so beautiful. That I am not close to thirty, and that I have a face people might describe as charactered.

  “It’s going to storm, Mom,” I say.

  “Can I get a cigarette?”

  It was long past midnight. Laura’s music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from the constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.

  Laura was nearly naked in the dark, and the moon cast a sliver of light across her thin chest. She disappeared into the hills. When I looked up, she had hiked atop one of the hills that emanated from the higher peaks and spread out her arms. Her hair fell back with her head. The breeze purred through the brush and up through the mountains. “You should come down!” I yelled.

  In Laura’s purse, I found a large envelope. In it was a stack of photographs bounded with one of her scrunchies. I flicked her hair from my hands. She took the photographs the day we decided we were going to New York. It was the day my ballet teacher Françoise called to tell me the bad news about a video I had sent to a company in Los Angeles. Françoise had said, “We must be honest. Your legs are a few inches too short. Your turnout is not perfect. I think you must begin to think about modern companies.”

  Laura was lying beside me in the hall of our school beside the window, the long legs she inherited from her father sprawled ungracefully. Her body, effortlessly thin. I grew up wishing I could change my bones into hers, wishing I could change the only thing of myself that would last.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Didn’t get the audition.”

  “Let’s just leave,” she said as if it were the simplest thing in the world. As if that was the solution to an imperfect turnout. “We’re almost eighteen. We can go to New York. In New York they will love you. They will love us.”

  In the photos, Laura and I were dancing in the desert. The mountains were in the distance. The day was grey. We were caught mid-movement, our edges blurred. In the images, the skin was not my own. Laura superimposed her lightning scar all over my body and spread it throughout her own. In the images, we shared identical surfaces, identical alien skin. She titled each image after a constellation. My favorite was Cygnus in which our surfaces were blue.

  On the mountain, where we stayed long past midnight on our last evening in Arizona, there was lightning in the distance. “It’s going to storm, Laura,” I shouted.

  “Just one last cigarette here,” she said.

  Watching her there, her arms spread, I recalled the way I saw Laura as a child on the Superstition Mountains, crucified upside down from a cactus. Watching her, her body posed like a scarecrow, I remembered something else—a sudden fact from a history class, that it was in those same mountains, a hundred years earlier, that a colonel staged a siege on the Yavapai community. Trying to escape the rain of gunfire and shrapnel, hundreds rushed into a cave to hide. The colonel and his soldiers pushed boulders in front of the entrance, killing by starvation whomever their bullets did not reach. When the boulders were at last removed from the cave, decades later, all that remained were the skeletons of the hundreds who had perished. I remembered too that this was where we had come with Dylan, but the playground was gone.

  My mother turns the music down. “I want to speak to you. We never talk anymore.”

  “We’ve been talking all day,” I say.

  “Tell me something about your life, anything.”

  “You know all there is to know.”

  “Fine.” For a moment she is quiet. “Fine. I’ll talk about me. Soon I’ll be fifty. I have not been on a trip in twenty years. Your father is in the hospital. I only have you. No brothers, no sisters. No parents. I can’t keep the pounds off anymore. I keep thinking where did I go wrong, why did I choose this life? Why did I choose your father? Why me? And I know wha
t’s going to happen to me: in a few years I’ll get Alzheimer’s or something worse, and I won’t care that the weight won’t come off, and I won’t feel sad, and maybe I won’t remember how much it hurts that you and your father prefer your silent spells while all these years I’ve had no one to talk to.”

  “Mom!” I shout.

  “After all that we gave you, how could you let Laura destroy your life?”

  Laura finally descended the mountain. We sat on the hood of the car. A coyote appeared in the distance, sniffing the dust. Laura howled. The coyote vanished into the hills.

  “The playground’s gone,” I said.

  She bent down and scooped up a pile of sand, let it fall from her hands. The rain had begun. She swayed in the wind. “Get up. Last rain dance,” she said. “One last bloodbath.”

  We cursed the desert. We cursed the years. We cursed the high school. We lured the storm to come on stronger. We demanded more. We were howling with want, jumping cholla sprawled about us.

  For a minute, the sky was purple, the dust rose. Laura kept screaming, whipping her head in the breeze of branches. I wished at that moment I could stop it. I wished I could make us quiet. Stop our want.

  “Fuck,” Laura screamed.

  Water rushed down the mountain. We leaped into the car. The rain was thick. We could not see the road through the dust. We switched the headlights on and off. The car skidded from the force of the water. A branch from a saguaro was struck by lightning right ahead of us. The rain finally extinguished the fire. I clutched Laura’s hand.

  “This is it,” Laura said. We watched the violent dance of the trees, enraptured. It only ever lasted a few moments, the rain. Its brevity was its magic.

  “Dylan thinks we’re just staying a few days,” Laura said and lit a cigarette, puffing pretty circles, testing me.

  “How are we going to pay for somewhere to stay?” I said. The last lightning turned everything purple, then returned us to the night.