I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  * * *

  —

  I was in LA working as a roller girl at the Puma store on the Third Street Promenade, discovering yoga and Al-Anon, failing to learn to surf, taking English 101 at the community college and falling in love with California’s legendary weed. One night, a Sunday, on my fifteen I used a calling card to call the Navajo house looking for Lyn and Lise. Ron told me Mom had taken them.

  Where?

  He didn’t know.

  How long had they been gone?

  Almost a month.

  The next day I called my old high school and the receptionist said Lise hadn’t been there in three weeks. Lyn’s elementary school said longer.

  I’d like to say I started packing. No one knew where my sisters were. I’d like to say I went home to find them. If it happened now I would get in my car and scream across the country and drive up and down every road in Pahrump kicking in every door until I found them. But this was my mother. I loved her and she loved me, loved us. I was eighteen years old, a roller girl at the Puma store. Their disappearance was somehow the Fates, the natural and inevitable culmination of all the accusations and secrets and blood, so the situation seemed somehow inevitable, maybe okay. I could not say to myself: she is a drug addict and she has kidnapped your siblings. It was that and it wasn’t. I did not drive home to the Navajo house. I did not go looking for them. I had class in the morning. I had to wake up early to find free parking close to campus. I had to finish Heart of Darkness.

  * * *

  —

  In the rental Lise and Lyn slept together on a mattress on the floor, Lise stroking Lyn’s hair to get her to sleep. Lyn was in the third grade. Lise was a senior in high school. The rental was a two-bedroom duplex. Mom had her own room. Before she left for school, Lise told Lyn, Do not go in there. Lyn begged Lise not to go to school. Lise stayed as often as she could without dropping out. There was no food except what Lise’s boyfriend brought from a gas station. Lise made sure they kept their shoes near.

  One night, Mom passed out and Lise took Lyn’s hand and whispered that she was to run and not to stop. Even if you get scared, she said. Together they ran into the desert night. It was dark. They stumbled over bushes and rocks. Lise pulled Lyn and together they ran toward the glowing neon tubes of the Mountain View Casino and Bowl.

  Lise’s boyfriend had snuck her a calling card. Trembling at a pay phone in the vestibule of the casino, she used it. She had to be quick, had to make the call before a security guard came and said you kids can’t be in here without a parent. Lise called Ron and he cried and said where were they and to wait. They waited between two sets of black-tinted glass double doors, hoping security wouldn’t come. They did not know whether Mom had woken up, and if she had, whether she would beat Ron to Mountain View. The slots chimed. Maybe some of their classmates were inside, bowling. If it was a Saturday the fluorescent lights would have been off, the black lights on, disco balls and rainbow lasers spinning crazily at a ritual we called cosmic. If it was a Thursday it would have been league night, every lane full. If it was a Tuesday it would be youth league, where in another life Lise and I had bowled on a team called Bob’s Corner Store in identical royal blue T-shirts with pins screen-printed across the back. Lise found these shirts stuffed in a drawer at the Navajo house the night Ron brought them back. She and Lyn slept in them.

  * * *

  —

  Mom was soon evicted from the rental. She moved somewhere with some man none of us knew and shortly thereafter went to jail. The Navajo house was repossessed. Ron, Lise and Lyn moved into a double-wide trailer on Mesquite Avenue. When Mom got out of jail, she joined them.

  We always took her back. We always believed her (insofar as we were capable of belief) when she said she was sorry, that she would get better. There was another stay in rehab, a place in the mountains, as Lise described it—I never went. I came back from LA for the summer. For a few weeks we all lived together one last time in the trailer on Mesquite. Mom and I fought; Lise and I fought. I bullied her, but she rarely got angry. When she did it seemed involuntary, a spasm, mostly physical, like a crack went through her and her limbs spazzed out and one of them, her arm, her hand, grabbed a knife from the wood block and threw it at me.

  The morning after Lise graduated from high school she moved to San Francisco for art school. She left before the sun came up. Only Lyn and I saw her off—Ron was already at work and Mom was not getting up. The dawn was violet. Lise threw two garbage bags of clothes into the bed of her boyfriend’s truck, ready to put some miles between her and all these houses. I was leaving again in a few weeks.

  Lyn held Lise and asked her not to go. “Please,” she said. She was eleven. “Please don’t leave me.”

  What could Lise have said if not what she did say, the most humane and honest thing she could say?

  “Get off me.”

  Lise remembers it violent but I heard the gentlest mercy. I remember she said it and it soared: Get off me. As in, You cannot be on me because you are on your own.

  * * *

  —

  One way to say all this is, My mother was an opioid addict and she overdosed.

  Another way is, My mother was suicidal and she killed herself.

  Another way is, My mother was poor and ignored, dismissed, called hysterical and hypochondriac by doctors who believed instead their well-paid colleagues who spoke on behalf of Purdue Pharma, believed the FDA who renewed and renewed Purdue’s patent, and so despite her history of addiction, despite the fact that she was in recovery, that she had all those years sober, that she did not even have bananas flambé on Mother’s Day, her doctors put her on legal and extremely profitable heroin.

  Another way is, Medicine tossed her to the Sacklers and they sucked her dry, destroyed her and everyone around her, and blamed her for it.

  Another way is, She needed help and no one gave it to her.

  Another way is, She had her mother’s pain swimming in her blood and her mother’s and her mother’s and her mother’s and she was fat with it.

  Mom always said Lise got her Dutch parts. I got our dad’s fun Irish, his mean English. We both got the crazy because it came from both sides. She said we three girls had the same hands, artist hands. She taught us jewelry making, photography, breaking and entering. To scavenge and build and refurbish, to scam and steal and to bullshit. She taught us names of plants and rocks and the names of every part of our body. She taught us where the water came from. She died the way the Amargosa River dies, not so far from where it was born. Her whole life passed in the dusty outposts along the Old Spanish Trail. I see them now from above: Las Vegas, Tecopa, Trout Canyon, Pahrump, the dry and indifferent town where she died on the couch, or possibly on the floor in front of the couch, in the living room of a trailer too close to the road.

  Her roads were Fairway and Tropicana, Stampmill, Lola, Navajo and Mesquite, where Ron and Lyn found her. Lyn was thirteen.

  In the trailer when they found her: dozens of try-on eyeglasses from Walmart with the anti-theft sensors still on. A pack of six mail-order self-help cassettes about depression, tape number two missing, found later in the boom box in the bathroom. Books I had read in college and passed along, telling myself they would cure her. The House on Mango Street and Love Medicine. Every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on VHS, every episode of The X-Files. In a dish on her dresser a coin stamped PAUL LOVES MARTHA, Disneyland, 1989 and a bb chain looped through a plastic fob with Lyn’s school picture on it.

  In the trailer when they found her: a hole where the flooring in front of the front door had rotted away from beneath, covered with carpet badly sagged and torn in one corner where many over the years had tripped. My first love fell in this hole once, rolled his ankle pretty bad. We are not a subtle people. This was the last time I saw her. She got him some ice. He tuned her guitar. She looked good. The trailer was clean. She had plants
.

  In the trailer when they found her: a dark stain on the living room carpet.

  A couch with many eyes burned in.

  An answering machine with no daughter’s voice on it.

  Plants in the bathtub. She must have watered them right before.

  If It Isn’t Grown It Has to Be Mined

  My plane touched down with a screechy jolt, pop rocks of wifi dopamine vanishing all these ghosts. One of the white boys from the trailer school had messaged me.

  You prob know no one is living in your house anymore, he began. It took me a moment to know he meant the Tecopa house. After we moved to Pahrump my mom had rented it to an elderly Timbisha woman named Nadine for a hundred dollars a month, money Mom spent on gas, cigs and ice cream. At my mother’s lurching funeral, held in a Quonset hut, Nadine had asked where she should send her rent. Lise was living in San Francisco, and I was moving every year, always in August, to another apartment or another college in another city or to live with another man. Neither of us had much of an address. And then there were the Paiutes scalped by Kit Carson in Tecopa in 1844, the one thousand and thirty-two nuclear bombs detonated on and in Newe Sogobia between 1951 and 1992. One hundred dollars a month seemed like a small price to pay to alleviate our white guilt. Lise and I told Nadine she could live in the Tecopa house as long as she liked for free, on condition that we be permitted to visit the garden there, where our mother had scattered our father’s ashes and where we would scatter hers.

  I wanted to be some kind of filial for once, bring some sort of serenity to someone. It had brought me genuine comfort since then to imagine Nadine living rent-free in the peaceful seclusion of the Tecopa house for all her years. But now I learned that Nadine had relocated to San Diego some time ago, to be with her sister. She had moved her body and belongings freely to the sea without regard for my white savior fantasies. I was nobody’s savior, for in the years since my mother’s death I’d unearthed no title, deed or mortgage, nothing in the way of paperwork demonstrating any ownership of the Tecopa house. If my father had pulled off another gold record swap, it went unrecorded in the ledgers of Independence, the county seat some two hundred miles away. There the property belonged to the federal government and always had. Squatters, I suppose that made us, nested squatters within the Great Squat.

  BLM says if no one’s living at the Watkins ranch they’re going to tear it down, my classmate wrote. He needed a place to live and wanted my permission to move in. Although the permission was not mine to give, I refused him. I told him that the Watkins ranch did not belong to my family, had never belonged to my family, was public land, a place no one could live on or own but anyone could visit. I added that in my opinion my parents would have been happy to see the property restored to the commons and thereby contribute to the preservation of our beautiful desert, a place itself stolen. (This despite the fact that my mother considered the Desert Protection Act a land grab and Dianne Feinstein a carpetbagger.) If Nadine living at the Watkins ranch for free was an act of decolonization (a notion I secretly entertained), then the prospect of my white former classmate moving in on what turned out to be BLM land had I guess a Bundy vibe for me. I was suspicious of the boy though for no better reason than that he’d stayed. His social media phantoms suggested he rode dirt bikes, wrecked one, had no insurance and no car. These details could be wrong—in truth I had long ago erased this person from my feed because the occasional yowls from his difficult life interfered ever so slightly with me enjoying my comfortable one.

  Anyway! that’s how I came to learn that the so-called Watkins ranch was empty and awaiting demolition by the federal government. I thought, absurdly: What about the bobcat? What about the voles? I saw my father’s spring run dry, the cane grass dead, the stone chimney rubbled. I saw the garden scraped away. I should have thought: Lise, who lived not far from Tecopa now, in Las Vegas, and would want to know. Deserved to know—our parents’ ashes were there. But if Lise knew she would want to do something about it, and this I could not bear.

  Besides, I reasoned, the informal demolition of the house was doubtless already under way. Rocks smashed through windows and the swimmy glass of the greenhouse. The warped green linoleum peeled up in strips. The chimney toppled. They’d spray-paint the place, tag it, shoot it up, burn it down. People do these things to desert ruins and I don’t blame them. They tug us.

  Consumed by my feed, I gathered my things, waited my turn, moved down the aisle, through the jet bridge and the terminal, lifting my head finally where the exit used to be. Instead, a bighorn sheep stood before me, glass-eyed and gray on some fiberglass rocks. A stuffed black bear reached eternally for a beehive like birchbark nearby. I turned around and tried the opposite direction. A mannequin in a hard hat reminded me If it isn’t grown it has to be mined!

  It appeared I was trapped in the airport of a city where I’d once lived. I passed a classy McDonald’s and a pub planked in reclaimed barnwood encouraging diners to Ski in, ski out! Slot machines went ping ping ping. Jesus pizza, how I’d missed them! Following a stream of purposeful-looking people, I finally came upon the exit: a frosted glass door with a severely highlighted sign warning that reentry was impossible beyond this point. Yet it was through this very point that I reentered the city of Reno, which was, for me, reentering the past.

  Ty Chen, my oldest friend, was to meet me at baggage claim. Ty had been valedictorian of our high school, not exactly a feat in a rural Nevada county whose cultural resources include Yucca Mountain, Area 51, sundry abandoned mines, and a clown-themed motel oft featured on listicles like “12 Real Haunted Hotels That Should Not Exist!!!” Ty’s overachieving and my friendly rivalry with him—a rivalry he hardly noticed except in AP Lit, where my essays were always xeroxed and distributed as exemplar—ended with both of us getting full rides to either Nevada university from a soon-to-be sabotaged slush fund the state created with the settlement from a major lawsuit against the tobacco companies on behalf of us Nevada children who enjoyed so much secondhand smoke while growing up, to say nothing of our cancer-dead parents.

  Ty went to UNR right away. I spent a year in Los Angeles while my mother downspiraled, then I followed Ty and my boyfriend to Reno. We three shared a carriage house on Lake Street with two other roommates, lovebirds called Rust and Ivy. In fact, we were all in love with each other in different configurations and durations and to varying degrees of intensity and, very rarely, consummation. I don’t want to get into the weeds here. Anyway, that was the college group, the five of us within a wider assembly of first-generation country mice, white trash would-be artists and musicians, emo Basques from Elko with radio shows and columns in the paper, snow bros whose parents insisted on college so they’d picked the one closest to Tahoe, metalhead dropouts who liked the pole and the hole, self-described alkies in combustible codependent relationships incinerated at every house show and rebuilt every industry night, for beyond all else what bonded us was our work, the tender and nostalgic upkeep of the city’s decrepit casinos. Front of the house, back of the house, valet, buffet, hostess, cocktail waitress, concierge, sports book, dealers, all of us side by side with the lifers. Soon Ty would drive us north past the Hilton where I’d been a lifeguard, and just the memory of the shape of the building from the freeway, the silhouette of it against the treeless hills, brought me the taste of the pink cake cubes demoted from the buffet to the employee cafeteria, and like a flavor my old, forgotten worry returned. Money, I mean. I remembered now the way I distinguished the economic strata of the old gang—I let myself think that phrase, going down the escalator to baggage claim, “the old gang”—you could afford to fuck up or you could not. Either you had parents waiting in the wings to remortgage their house for rehab, therapy, a gap year, or you were one DUI away from living under the bridge with the Juggalos.

  Ivy could afford it. She had parents, rehab, backpacked through Tibet and married Rust. Ty and I moved away to our respective grad schools. Ty finis
hed his PhD in mechanical engineering at Purdue, but instead of following the rest of his cohort into a lucrative life of tinkering to improve upon the horrors known as industry, he accepted a cushy post-doc in Boulder. He focused on various interests gone dormant while he’d been away from the West, among them psychotropics, backcountry skiing and the topknot. After Boulder, Ty moved back to Reno to work at Tesla. I published a coming-of-age novel set at the clown motel, swept the little kids’ table at awards season and got a tenure-track job, the hardest thing I’d ever done and an accomplishment that meant next to nothing to the people I wanted to impress most in the whole world, namely Ty, Rust and Ivy.