But Shelly says we’ll go for a week and come back.
So we go.
On the plane, I finish reading The Stranger. I grabbed it from the drawer because I knew Meursault had to make the trip back to Florida with me, even if I’d abandoned him. He was tucked away in my backpack again, but he kept calling me, telling me to get him off the beach. To get the gun out of his hand. So I do.
And now I know Meursault’s fate. The one that had seemed inescapable when I stopped reading and put the book away.
I wanted him to somehow get his freedom, like Andy. I wanted him to escape. I needed him to. But something warned me he wouldn’t and now I knew. He was going to jail to wait out the days before being executed. And worse, he’d lose his head.
I close the book and try not to think of Meursault on the chopping block.
I wish Meursault’s fate were different. I see him lying on his prison cot, surrounded by gray cement blocks, staring at the ceiling, and I almost cry because maybe it could have been different. He tells me it doesn’t matter, that none of it means anything.
I let him believe that, even though I don’t.
I tell this fictional character who seems so real that it’s okay to cry. I turn his head to the sun.
I slip Andy’s rock hammer and a rolled-up Rita Hayworth poster under his pillow, just in case.
And I leave.
I look over at Shelly.
My grandmother is with us. In a blue and green urn. Shelly, normally steady and no-nonsense, is a fucking mess, like she’s had too many Red Bulls or something. More than once, I grab her hand and hold it, which seems to calm her down.
She makes me think of the lady on the plane with bad breath and I crack a smile, but Shelly doesn’t notice.
She’s looking out the window and I feel like I should tell her, all we have is each other. I feel like I should tell her that when I look at her hands and see the blue veins in them, I think of her blood and my blood and how we share the same blood and how Mom did too, and her mama did also, and even my grandfather, who was terrible but now I can’t help but wonder what made him so terrible, and how we all come from the same place. The same place. But we all go out in different directions.
She turns and looks at me and I smile.
“You okay?” she asks, even though she’s the one who doesn’t look okay.
I nod.
And I hold her hand. And I see how she clutches the bag that holds Grandma.
Grandma.
I shake my head. And I start laughing even though I know it’s wrong, because I’m thinking, I’m on an airplane with Grandma, and it’s such a little-kid thought.
But I’m not a little kid.
And my grandma is in an urn.
The pilot tells us to prepare for landing.
Even in October, Florida is the same. Hot, sticky, and humid. We get in the rental car and blast the air-conditioning and drive to our hotel.
We settle in our room. And then we eat dinner. And we talk about what we’ll do.
We won’t go to theme parks.
We won’t see ridiculous characters.
We will visit my mother.
We will “tie things up,” is the way Shelly puts it.
But I know what it really is. It’s our last grand gesture of love. It’s us walking like Pérez until we pass out, until we fall. So we can get up again and go on.
I keep catching glimpses of Shelly out of the corner of my eye, walking next to me. I keep thinking it’s strange, the way we are navigating through the world. Months ago, she was a stranger, and now she’s the person by my side. She’s the person with me at my mother’s grave. She’s the person talking to my mom, telling her things I thought only I felt.
Like how she would’ve done anything for her.
Like how much she hates her and everything she put her through.
But how much she loves her.
And how much she misses her.
And how she wanted so bad to understand her.
But didn’t.
How she failed her.
And how she failed us, too.
I let Shelly speak because she has the words and because when I saw the small postcard someone had thought to wrap in cellophane and tuck against the headstone, I started crying too much and too hard to say anything other than I love you. And when I pulled from my pocket the miniature cross I’d bought in Mexico and placed it next to the postcard, I cried even harder. Because she had mattered. Her life had meant something. And her death hurt me more deeply than anything in my whole life.
Because she had been my mother.
Shelly takes out a large plastic bag full of sand and rocks.
I wipe my nose, take a deep breath. “What’s that?”
Shelly doesn’t look up. “Grandma,” she says.
I look at the little shell-like fragments of bone and dust that made up my grandmother. I hear the rolling pebbles from New Mexico under my feet.
“I found her, Mama. Here is Anna Ruby Falls,” Shelly says to Grandma as she pours her remains on top of Mom’s grave. She shakes her head. “No, actually, Anna Ruby came back to us.” She looks at me and I look at her and I think of all Shelly has lost as she reaches for my hand.
“We’ll get a new headstone,” she says. “We’ll get Anna Ruby Falls engraved on it.”
I nod, wondering when Mom must have legally changed her name. When had she decided she was Ruby? When had she stopped being Anna?
We stand there for a long while, until the sun shines through the tree branches and Meursault’s last words to the judge echo in my ears.
It was because of the sun, he answers when the judge asks him why he killed the man. That’s all he says, the only explanation he offers before he is sentenced to death. It’s a ridiculous answer. Nobody understands and they laugh at him. But his words aren’t ridiculous to me; they swirl in my head and my heart.
It was because of the sun.
Because it was hot and melted your brain. Because it was an absurd ball of fire in the sky that blinded us and regulated our days and nights, our seemingly senseless lives and random fates.
Because smaller suns found their way into the wombs of women. Who knows why or how they chose which wombs, which mother, which father to whom they were ultimately delivered.
Yes, it was because of the sun. The ones that found their way into her womb and released me into the world.
It makes sense to me; Meursault makes sense to me. I think of him in his jail cell, waiting for death, refusing God and religion and the world, convincing himself everything is for nothing, and even that makes sense to me. Because his heart is dead. Because he refuses to grow another one.
But I have to believe there’s more. More than just burning. More than just blind apathy. I have to believe that sometimes there is relief and a little bit of goodness.
I look at Mom’s grave and the sea of headstones around us and the trees standing tall, their branches full and slightly swaying, and I realize Sometimes there is shade, there is respite, there is beauty and love.
Remember to seek shade, I tell myself. And we stand there and I tell myself over and over, Remember to seek shade.
Shelly takes a deep breath and looks at me. I stare back at her and think if Mom had never died, I would never have known Shelly. And I feel bad because I’m glad I do; I’m glad I know Aunt Shelly. That’s how I think of her now, as my aunt, my blood. My mother’s sister. I’m glad I’m with her and she’s next to me. So what does that mean? I shake my head and start crying again. Because I loved you, too.
I close my eyes and I think I feel my mother telling me it’s okay. And I wonder if making sure Aunt Shelly and I found each other, even though she never told us that the other existed, was somehow Mom’s last grand gesture of love. A love she never knew how to show when she was alive.
I don’t know if it’s wishful thinking, but I decide it’ll be what I believe.
“What now?” I ask.
“Now?�
� Aunt Shelly says. “I guess let’s get the hell out of here.”
And we do, we get the hell out of there. But before we go, I take a good look at Mom’s grave because I don’t know when I’ll be back.
Ruby Falls. That’s who she was to me. She kept Anna hidden. But Anna was always there.
We spend the rest of the week “tying things up.” We visit Helen. We look at the outside of the house where Mom and I lived. Where she died. And we take the boxes that Helen packed up and stored at her house, filled with my and Mom’s whole life, and drive back to New Mexico in a U-Haul.
Aunt Shelly seems tough as she navigates the truck. The nervousness I detected in her at the airport is gone, and she’s back to the way she usually is.
“Is it weird, Aunt Shelly?” I ask her as we head onto the highway.
“What’s that?” she asks, and I don’t know if she hears me call her Aunt or if she’s responding to the question I’ve asked.
“Knowing where she lived, where she existed without you?”
Aunt Shelly is quiet for a while. “It is weird. It makes me miss her.”
“What was it like afterward,” I press on, “when it was just you and Grandma?”
We hit a pothole and the truck shakes violently. We bounce up from the seat and crash down again. Aunt Shelly’s hands grip the wheel tighter and she takes her time before she answers.
“It was like the silence after something very loud. An eerie kind of quiet that fills your ears. And stillness. Everything was so still that we both got in the habit of doing everything carefully, more carefully than before, whether it was turning the faucet on so the water barely trickled out, or closing and opening a door with only the faintest click.” She shakes her head. “Our secret, their absence, was so thick in the air, Mama couldn’t breathe. She just ran out of air.”
I look at her. “What about you?”
“I don’t know….” She keeps her eyes on the road. “The same, I guess,” she whispers, and she keeps driving.
I nod and then we turn on the radio.
On the second night, when the roads aren’t too full and it’s dark except for the bright light of the headlights on the road in front of us, Aunt Shelly asks me how bad it was.
When I tell her, it somehow seems really bad and not so bad. I wonder if that’s how survival works. Like a bad dream that seems so real. Or something so piercing and real, it has to get hazy and blurry around the edges before you can stand to remember it.
“She just wasn’t happy,” I say. “I couldn’t make her happy. And then I stopped trying.”
“That wasn’t your job,” Aunt Shelly says. And I think about that until we reach a gas station, where we fuel up and get back on the road.
We drive into New Mexico as the sun is coming up. And I’m surprised by the comfort the brown landscape brings. I’m reminded of the first time Aunt Shelly and I drove through here together, when she picked me up from the airport.
I look over at her. She’s familiar. She’s family. She’s my aunt and my mom and our whole past, where there’s too much bad but also some goodness.
“Aunt Shelly,” I say.
“Hmm?”
“I love you.” I say it fast, before I can stop myself or change my mind or my mouth can stumble over the strange, unpracticed words.
She looks at me. “I love you too, Dani. I’ve loved you since you were born.”
“You didn’t know I existed.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she says.
And somehow I know what she means. “I’m glad I have you. I’m glad I found you, Aunt Shelly.” She smiles and her face and eyes are so bright.
We drive into Columbus, past the abandoned film set where Paulo showed the movie he made for me, past border control agents who check the cars coming in the opposite direction, past Paulo and Doña Marcela’s trailer, toward the barn that houses our past, toward a house that holds our future.
We get out and I hear the pebbles rolling under our feet as we walk toward the door.
Aunt Shelly opens the door and we go inside. It’s still as bare as the first day I got here, but it feels like coming home. And I see it like a movie. I see us filling it up in the next few days as we unpack the boxes in the truck and in the barn that reveal what we’ve been through, of those who have come before us, who don’t scare us, who don’t haunt us. Of the things we have kept hidden and are no longer afraid of.
I don’t want to believe it was all for nothing.
It was for something. It meant something, all of it. Because it was us. Because we survived.
I feel a shuddering in my chest and wonder if it is my old heart reviving or a new one being born. I look at Aunt Shelly dragging in a suitcase, and when she looks at me, she smiles, and I think about her heart. Our hearts. The possibility of them growing. Infinitely.
“We survived,” she says to me, and I know she must mean more than the long trip home.
Because we survived the burning sun,
and the past,
and vicious bears,
and even ourselves.
“We did more than survive, Aunt Shelly,” I tell her.
Now we’re like the flowers sprouting from the bear’s mouth.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I read The Stranger for the first time as a senior in high school. It was a class assignment. Maybe that was just the right time for it to stick, because it is a book I have never been able to shake. I was pretty jaded at seventeen. The world seemed confusing and hopeless and absurd. When I met Camus’s Meursault, he was the kind of fascinating character I couldn’t ignore.
I wanted to figure him out. I wanted to make sense of and understand his detachment from the world. I especially wondered about his relationship with his mother. We never learn much about her or how she and Meursault interacted in life, but his reaction to her death immediately made me wonder, what could make him so detached from his mother, from her death, that he can’t grieve for her? Some part of me thought maybe she was a terrible mother to him, though there’s no evidence she was.
Over the years I’ve read and reread the novel. I’ve daydreamed and imagined Meursault as a child living with this terrible woman. I believed I knew how she must have made him feel, even while I understood that most likely she was never meant to be anything other than a typical mother. No better or worse than most. The idea of a complicated and fractured parent-child relationship never left me, however.
One day I found myself writing about a girl who was disturbingly detached from the reality of her mother being mauled to death by a bear. Suddenly there was Meursault. He was lingering in the shadows of my story, hands in pockets. I imagined him looking over at Dani as if he understood her. And when she picks up the book she’s supposed to read over the summer for school, it’s The Stranger. Immediately, I thought, Okay, you two, let’s see what will happen here. Let’s see how you are similar. And perhaps more importantly, how you are different.
Because Dani and Meursault had to be different. I knew that.
I’ve carried Meursault with me for years, in various backpacks and tote bags. I’ve kept several copies of The Stranger on my bookshelves because sometimes I can’t resist buying it again with a new cover.
Meursault speaks to the part of me that is at odds with the world. He’s the one who says, “Come on,” and shows me the world through dark-tinted glasses. Somehow that view helps me make sense of it. He points to numbness and despair, injustice and apathy. He shows me rejection. These things are valid; they exist.
But when I was writing Because of the Sun, I realized that the problem with Meursault is that he never takes off those glasses. So even his enlightenment is dark. Or is it enlightenment at all?
It was important that Dani’s story be honest, and not only that she recognize the tragedy that was weaving itself into her life long before she was born, but that she see and experience goodness. For me, goodness, beauty, and hope can exist even in the darkest places, and I wanted readers to know th
is. So Dani becomes someone who ultimately sees the world in its juxtaposed glory: pain and relief, hate and love, cruelty and kindness. And the perfect setting for her to come to this understanding was a place I feel embodies that juxtaposition: the border town of Columbus, New Mexico.
Columbus has burned itself into my mind ever since I first visited family there many years ago. Like many border towns, it can look bleak, a place for outsiders and the disenfranchised. But it is in fact a place where great beauty and strength exist alongside harsh realities. I knew then, and each time I returned afterward, that someday I would write a story set in Columbus, much like Paulo knew someday he would make a movie of when he first met Dani. It was only in this place that I could imagine Dani meeting people like Paulo and his grandmother, who have lived through unspeakable tragedy but find strength to go on. And kids like Jessie and Chicken and Yolanda, who understand what it is to be seen as an outsider, to be openly disparaged, and who live on the fringes of a society that doesn’t seem to care about them, but who still dare to hope and dream. This setting, those who live there and who offered their wisdom, friendship, and aid to Dani, were essential in her journey.
There is power in seeing and knowing that even if we are locked in a self-made prison, as Meursault is, as humans, we don’t have to stay there. The only inescapable prisons are the ones we lock ourselves in. Yes, there are bears walking this earth and waiting for us even before we are pushed out of our mothers’ wombs. But we can fight the bear, whoever or whatever it may be. We can strengthen ourselves, create new families and relationships.
We can hope.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest and sincerest thanks to:
Kerry Sparks and the whole team at Levine Greenberg Rostan, who continue to be so incredibly supportive of my work.
Beverly Horowitz for knowing what this book needed to be, and everyone at Delacorte Press/Penguin Random House who helped it make its way into the world.
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