In her new neighborhood, a subdivision of 1970s and ’80s homes on large lots behind the high school and town ball field, she set one foot on the gravel berm, one on the pavement, memorizing street names: Rojo, Blanco, Yucca, Dry Run, Bottlebrush, Alameda. Her street was Arrowhead; her white clapboard two-bedroom rental with puce-colored trim had belonged to an old woman who lost her mind and dug holes in her yard at night—this according to Laura’s mail carrier, Maud, a woman Laura’s mother’s age who stopped on the porch to chat and shouted questions as if boxing Laura’s ears. Laura skirted strangers’ yards, cataloging oddities: a mannequin head with a flowered swim cap; soda cans wedged into chain link in a Z shape; a three-legged dog cooling itself in a play pool; a man on a Segway pausing to peer into neighbors’ garbage bins; a child’s fire engine toppled on a wheelchair ramp.
She walked, and her mind whiplashed from present to past, trying to process the changes: small-town Sycamore, Arizona, instead of San Diego; 4,000 feet instead of sea level; gravel berms instead of sidewalks; lobed cactus instead of ice plants; bushy pines and junipers instead of eucalyptus and symmetrical rows of skinny palms; year 2009, almost twenty years out from her high school graduation. She walked, smelling dust and hot pine needles instead of the briny fog of the Pacific. She bent to collect rocks the way she used to collect seashells, and her pockets grew gritty with sediment in the seams. She walked in a land of strangers instead of in the land of her parents, her older brother and nephews, her colleagues and friends, her husband of eleven years. She walked in her alien landscape, in her ridiculous visor, and she told herself: Buck up, Drennan, you chicken shit. This ain’t summer camp.
When she stopped walking, she sat on the couch, ignoring her huge to-do list (unpack, tweak syllabuses for fall semester, reply to new department chair’s week-old e-mail about her IT setup, research and work on article, talk to neighbors? get shit together). Instead she watched baseball and tracked the pitches—sliders, split fingers, cutters—as she cupped her fingers around an imaginary ball. Nights cooled down enough to open the window, and she could hear cheers and the muffled voice of an announcer on the PA, remembering how she and her brother had narrated their backyard practice sessions (Drennan throws a nasty slider in the dirt, oh and he chases!). Through a slit in the blinds, she could see the glow of the ball field over the tops of the sycamores and cottonwoods, and she thought about walking over but didn’t. Instead she obsessively checked her e-mail, or read forums about venomous snakes, poison ivy, and black widow spiders, or investigated reasons for the new ache in her knee—arthritis? Baker’s cyst?—or she browsed social media for the friends with whom she’d lost touch during her marriage. She’d tried to block news of Charlie and the Girlfriend but twice stumbled on photos, and she zoomed in on the girl’s smooth face, looking for acne but finding only adorable freckles. The girl looked straight at the camera, her chin tilted upward, and Laura thought, Look at her. Standing there in her little jean skirt as if she had all the time in the world.
When she didn’t walk, she left voicemails on her parents’ home phone, sometimes twice a day, as she always had, but now they didn’t always return her calls as promptly; they were newly retired, busy traveling and sprucing up her childhood home to sell it. She called her brother but chatted with her sister-in-law because he was working overtime on a delayed bridge project as well as hauling his sons to music camp and swim lessons and Little League games. She heard her mother’s voice in her ear, a sliver from the litany of the past months: At least you’re young enough to start over. As Laura watched the Padres lose to the Giants again and picked at the dirt under her fingernails, it dawned on her that she and her parents were on a parallel path. All starting over. Except, of course, her parents’ do-over was part of a long-held plan—their fortieth anniversary was in two months. Hers was an attempt at an entire split from the past. Burn the whole fucking thing down and see if she could rise from the ashes. As she and Charlie had divided up and sold their sweet little ranch near Rose Canyon, as she took the only tenure-track job she was offered, her mantra was Tabula rasa, motherfuckers! But it turned out she had no idea where such a blank slate ended and where she began. She grew exhausted with dissecting herself, with seeing the shrunken, formaldehyde parts of her laid bare. So she walked. She walked because she knew how to do it without thinking: one foot and then another. There she found only immediate stimuli: heat, rocks, insects, trash bag nestled in weeds, maybe-a-snake. She walked, she walked, she walked.
By July, she began to vary her routes and walked in the mornings to beat the afternoon storms, which Maud and others called the monsoon—a debatable term, according to the Internet, for the storms that rolled up from the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever they were called, they flayed the sky with lightning and carved channels into the dry earth with ferocious bursts of rain. Some days, though not often, she rose early enough to see a man on a bicycle deliver copies of the local newspaper, tossing them from his basket like wrapped fish. She walked down Main Street, where she memorized the stores in what Maud called the District, a stretch of shops and eateries bordering the college, where her new office and new students awaited. She walked on the brick sidewalk past the Snip and Clip, Pie in the Sky Pizza, and Wolf’s Den Books, close enough to run her fingers along windowpanes. She walked past the Patty Melt Diner with its red vinyl booths and whiffs of onion rings, past Casa Verde Restaurante and its apple-green door, past the tinted windows of the Pickaxe Bar and Grill. She stopped at the Woodchute Motor Lodge to admire a parked car decorated from hood to tail with bottle caps and colored glass; she waved to an elderly couple lounging in a vintage red-and-white metal glider outside Room 8. At Alligator Juniper, the one coffee shop in town, she dug change out of the rocks in her pockets for an iced coffee, heavy on the cream. She splurged on a bear claw at the bakery next door. She walked to the grocery store, using her credit card for soup and generic granola bars and veggie burgers and peanut butter; she wouldn’t get her first paycheck until the first of October, and the divorce and move had drained her dry. As she walked, locals glanced up, smiled; she imagined they whispered once she passed—New history and Latin American studies professor, lives alone in Ms. Byrd’s old house behind the high school—details delivered, no doubt, by Maud. Soon she would see students everywhere: no doubt they would wave and call out, Hey, Professor Drennan! Hey! Is our paper still due tomorrow? She walked, and she pulled her lime-green visor low over her eyes.
One day she didn’t walk and instead hopped a train, the scenic railway that ran on tracks once used to haul supplies and passengers up to the mines of Jerome. She made her way through the vintage cars, back and forth, engine to caboose, past elbowy tourists wielding camera phones; she paused to lean on the open trolley railing, taking in the slopes tufted with shrub oak and junipers, the giant mining slag heap pushing through its rusted containment fence like a hernia. The craggy red canyon walls were so close on one winding pass, she could almost reach out and touch the rock. Other days, she hopped in the car, covered now with rain-spattered dust and cat prints, and drove to nearby destinations to walk—Sedona, Jerome, even once to Flagstaff. On her thirty-seventh birthday, she walked up the red, sandpapery sides of Bell Rock, where, according to Maud, thousands of nitwits once gathered to wait for the mothership—“Harmonic convergence my ass!” Maud had shouted, her eyes glinting. Laura sat at the top of the rock and tried to call her parents, who hadn’t called yet. They’d never forgotten her birthday before. She didn’t leave a message; instead, she found a sharp gray stone and scratched the sandstone into a fine red powder. As if she were playing dress-up, she smoothed the powder on her cheeks like blusher, rubbed it into her temples and jawline and the backs of her hands. In Jerome, on a mountain made of Precambrian rock, the abandoned open pit mine in the side like an open wound, she walked up long narrow stairs and rattled the bars of an old jail cell and ate a grilled cheese in a converted brothel. When she caught a glimpse of herself in a window—stringy and tanned, collarbones l
ike a scythe—she stopped and thought, And who the hell are you? Standing there in your stupid hat, as if you have all the time in the world.
Back in Sycamore, she walked a dirt path the town had cut along the river, where fluffy cottonwood seeds floated across her vision and stuck to her sweaty forearms. Shrubs and low trees crowded the banks and obscured her view of the river, but on Sycamore Bridge, she could lean on the railing and take in the stretch of brownish-green water. She thought of the strong and lovely Crystal Pier, whose railings she’d leaned on throughout her life, watching the surfers and sky, salt and wind in her nose and eyes. Here all was still: the heat seemed to shimmer off the ground. The water meandered, sluggish, nothing like the relentless push and pull of the ocean, that enigmatic expanse with lurking fault lines and reefs, the tectonic scarred ridges of continental drift, the answers to the Earth’s beginnings. If the river’s surface rippled, she jumped—a harmless water snake? Or a water moccasin, a member of the pit viper family known to climb into people’s canoes?—but it was usually the fat twitching tail of a fish.
Usually she turned around at the bridge, but one morning she walked farther than normal, though she had drunk most of the melted ice she’d brought. The path curved beyond the bridge, and she wasn’t sure what waited around the bend. In the short distance, she could see rows of trees, which must belong to the pecan orchard she’d read about. Farther still were the curls of smoke from the cement factory on the far outskirts of town.
When she rounded the river’s bend, she was surprised to find a concave stretch of land on the path’s left side. She shielded her eyes. The surface, parched and scratched with fissures, had also been covered with stones in spiral patterns. On the far side was a pile of stones about the size of a small car and what appeared to be a wooden dock. She remembered then from her Internet research: this must have been the small lake that disappeared when a sinkhole opened up overnight. Arroyo Lake.
She walked around the lip of the old lake toward the dock. The cracked mud looked like map markings, a crisscross of boundary lines and highways, streams and county roads. She remembered reading that the Verde Valley had been an ancient freshwater lake, layers of limestone and mudstone and volcanic deposits. She climbed onto the wood dock and walked to the end. At the lowest point was a five-foot gash about the width of a tree trunk. Large, smooth stones curled around the hole, as if protecting it, and then spiraled upward along the sides.
From behind her, a voice called out, “Hello.”
Laura stifled a scream and turned around so fast she lost her balance, throwing her arms out to catch herself. A woman wearing a large yellow sun hat stood a few feet away, pushing a green wheelbarrow filled with stones.
“You scared me,” Laura said.
The woman shrugged but said nothing. At the pile of stones, she tipped the wheelbarrow until the rocks tumbled out and then leaned for a moment on the handles. She was short, her tanned arms and legs ropy with muscles. When the woman took off her hat and wiped her brow, Laura glimpsed a streak of purple dye in her fair hair, as well as a reddish-brown port-wine stain birthmark on the right side of her face, spreading along her cheek and jawline and down her neck. The woman was closer to her own age than she’d first thought.
Laura pointed at the stones in the old lake. “Is this yours? I mean, did you do all this?”
“No one comes here anymore,” the woman said. She turned around and pushed the wheelbarrow toward what Laura saw was a sloping ravine. Laura had read about these dry washes being carved by rains throughout the desert. They could be as wide as bedrooms or as narrow as hallways, the sides as short as porch railings or as tall as rooftops. During flash floods, walls of water gushed through, pushing tons of mud and sand, ripping out trees, and tumbling boulders. She’d clicked through to multiple stories about unsuspecting hikers, campers, and migrants killed in flash floods in and around washes like this one. Swept miles away, buried in mud or never found at all.
Laura followed the woman, who had climbed up the other side of the wash and was pushing the wheelbarrow along a well-worn path. A car whizzed past, and with a blink, Laura realized that the District was only a hundred feet or so from where she stood. She could see the sign for the Woodchute Motor Lodge, a flash at the intersection. She shook her head, disoriented.
“Hey!” Laura called out to the woman, although she wasn’t sure why.
The woman turned and looked at her.
Laura swept her arm at the space behind her. “It’s beautiful. What you’re making.”
The woman nodded and seemed to smile. “Nice hat,” she said.
Laura bent the brim of the visor and watched the woman disappear through the scrub. Then she stomped her way home past the snakes in the weeds, brushing at cobwebs that draped like bunting across the path. The rocks in her pockets clacked like marbles, and the sound gave her the shivers even as the sun blasted down.
One evening in July, she opened the window after the summer storm-monsoon-rain event-thing had blown through. Through the buzz of cicadas she heard a distinctive metallic ping: an aluminum bat connecting with a ball. She turned off the computer and walked toward the sounds of the game. She crossed a wooden footbridge that connected the ball field to the neighborhood, and as she walked closer, she could see men and women leaning on the fence, the toes of their tennis shoes in the chain link, cheering for kids up to bat. She could smell the stale popcorn and hear the clang of hard soles on the metal bleachers. Memories rushed in like high tide, foaming at the edges.
She didn’t think of the ball games with Charlie, although those were legion, those old date nights full of hot dogs and peanuts and beer and sex, or of the nights when their relationship began to fray and she’d sit in the bedroom and watch the game alone. Her mind went farther back—to long days at the beach when it really did seem she had all the time in the world. When she, tomboy girl child dreaming of becoming a ballplayer, would shag pop flies and throw pitches with her dad and brother in the low surf. Her dad squeezed and shaped her hand around the baseball, bent her pliable arm. His reedy voice in her ear: Throw hard, the more speed the better. Find your balance, there’s a girl. Plant your feet, get grounded. Focus. Work from instinct, from the heart, don’t think too much. For the first time, as she watched those parents lean on the fence, she recognized the larger life subtext of his advice. And she had done none of those things.
Laura wanted to join the crowd, get some stale nachos and a soda and climb to the top of the bleachers, but instead she turned around, full of a sudden unnamed fear, a gripping force that made her keep her eyes on her feet. She walked toward the house of a woman who had lost her mind, and she thought of one of the final moments with Charlie: he’d grabbed her by the shoulders, his eyes narrow, and said, “You’re such a goddamn little girl, Laura. You’re such a fucking child. An infant.” Then he began to sob, and watching his puckered face, she’d thought, Well, there’s irony for you.
Midstride, she hauled off and kicked a rock, sending it skittering across the pavement. As her knee twinged again—bone cancer? bursitis?—she wondered if he wasn’t right. She certainly felt childish in her homesickness, in her creeping fear of darkness and creaks in the house and the eerie yowl—coyotes? cats in heat? starving mountain lion stalking humans?—she heard each night over the clanking evaporative cooler. She called her parents and brother too much because it seemed as though they were the only part of her she recognized anymore.
She tracked the rock she’d kicked and scooped it into her pocket. She rubbed the rock’s pitted surface with her thumb and gazed at the darkening sky, still luminous at the edges. An image of the ocean rose beneath it like a palimpsest. She missed it as if it had died. Or as if she had. And part of her had, hadn’t it? Where was that fearless young girl on the beach, baseball in hand? Who was this woman in the near dark whose walk turned to a run? Who was this woman who flew up the sidewalk to her front door, keys in hand, belonging nowhere and to no one?
When she fin
ally slept, she dreamed a spider had eaten a hole in her knee.
On the last day of July, Laura timed the walk from home to her new office at Sycamore College: twelve minutes, door to door. She walked in blue cross-training shoes with books stuffed in her pack. She walked through the iron arches of the renovated entrance where just beyond, the Black Hills flexed with sun and shadow. She walked the no-frills cement paths of the young campus, built in the early 1960s to serve the fast-growing Verde Valley. She walked through the buildings’ breezeways, admiring the sandstone walls and benches. She walked inside the linoleum halls of the stuccoed Humanities building, stopping to read the comics and notes and news clippings on office doors. She paced at the front of the lecture hall, still nervous at the prospect of all those eyes on her, though she could lecture on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in her sleep.
Back home, she called her mother, who told her about her father up on the goddamn roof despite his limp—his retirement is going to kill me, she said. Her mother talked about the Padres losing to the goddamn Dodgers, about their upcoming trip to Taipei, and when the Realtor called on the other line, she hung up before Laura could ask, “When are you going to come visit?” She tried not to cry, like the fucking child she was.
She decided to tackle a few moving boxes. Much of what she’d packed in haste was crap, anyway, cheap tin pots from college days, tattered gift baskets, expired medicine she should have tossed, but today she slung clothes into drawers and shelved a few books. On that last day of July, she slit open a cardboard flap to discover she’d accidentally packed the box Charlie had put next to the dryer as a trash can for lint. Inside was a soft bluish pile: fibers from their clothes, scales from their skin. She reached in and grabbed the wad, squeezing the sloughed-off parts of a past life, and she was struck by an oceanic wave of grief. She dropped the lint back, folded the flaps down, and went to bed. She did not walk that day, nor the day after, nor the day after that. She did not get out of bed, and she left the TV on all night, the brittle laugh tracks reverberating on the tile. When she finally checked the mail, Maud had left a note in the box: “Everything okay in there? Holler if you need anything.”
Sycamore Page 2