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Out in the desert we'll have no worries
Out in the desert just you and me
I came to see you up there in intensive care
Out in the desert we'll live carefree
The Mountain Goats, “Mole”
Jamie opens his eyes to the sideways world slowly. Cold sand under his cheek stretches away, blindingly white, until it merges with empty, blue sky. A few yards away Mija is sitting on her red, plastic toddler potty in the sand, Adam propped up on an elbow beside her, both of them singing some nonsense song at the top of their lungs. Their silhouette breaks the smooth line of the horizon, a comical aberration against the empty desert. Jamie lets his eyes fall shut and doesn't dream.
*
Her name was Mija and she was "this many."
Jamie had stared at her, holding up two chunky fingers, uncomprehending. He didn’t realize it, but he was waiting for his wife or Adam or one of the other people who was always around to jump in. There was always someone there to jump in and save him when he was having a failure to communicate.
But no one appeared to rescue him from the little human creature, looking up at him with her wide dark eyes and curly hair, so much like Eileen's. The CPS lady and the lawyer cleared their throats and shuffled their papers. Lots to do today.
"My name is Jamie and I'm fifty-two," he said, shaking her tiny hand with two of his fingers.
Jamie signed their papers, slung her little knapsack onto his shoulder, and let her into the house. Food, water, bed. It couldn't be that much different than taking care of a cat, right?
*
Going to White Sands was Adam's idea. He said it was the perfect place for Jamie to "get away from it all" and Jamie didn't protest as Adam strapped Mija's car seat into his suburban. Jamie didn't protest about much anymore. It felt like a whole part of his mind had shut down-- the part that had ideas and opinions and cared about things. It was just silent.
It was a plane crash. That was the thing that Jamie couldn't get over. He would have been able to accept cancer. One out of every two people in America gets cancer. You expect cancer. The odds of being killed in a plane crash are one in twenty-five million. You're more likely to be bitten by a shark (one in 11.5 million) or struck by lightning (one in 2 million) than to die in a plane crash. Even a car crash he would have understood (one in 6,500). Jamie knew the numbers, he understood the numbers. Numbers were facts, and Jamie lived by the facts; but he couldn't reconcile those odds with a world where Eileen and her sister, brother-in-law, and niece were the ones in twenty-five million. The facts didn't add up; it was a paradox.
Jamie laid down in the back seat all the way to White Sands. There weren't usually clouds in this part of New Mexico, so the sky out the back windows never changed. Jamie could almost convince himself he wasn't moving at all. The feeling of not moving had become a constant in his life, lately. In the front seat Adam sang "The Wheels on the Bus" to Mija for the hundredth time and fiddled with his sunglasses.
*
It gets blisteringly hot on the sand in the middle of the day, so they hike back to the car and load everything up, drive into Alamogordo till they find a fast food place they haven't been to already. Today they are at Arby's and Jamie is faintly pleased to be nibbling on their curly fries. He’s always liked their fries.
Adam is alternatively using their wifi to read his blogs and putting on a puppet show for Mija with some chicken nuggets. Jamie glances toward the pimply teenager wiping down tables and giving them a glare. His badge says he is the manager. His look says that he's already figured out that they're just camping out here for the A/C and the wifi and probably won't be buying anything more.
So far they have been at Taco Bell, McDonalds (took them several days to wear out their welcome there), Subway and Quiznos. Jamie keeps a mental list; it's the only way that he marks time passing.
*
Jamie woke up by 4:30, his normal time, for 37 days after the crash.
He went to work for 54 days.
He continued grocery shopping and eating something at least twice a day for 75 days.
He fed and watered Mija regularly, as often as she needed, for the longest: 89 days. Right up until Adam intervened.
Toward the end everything was a blur.
He rolled out of bed when he heard Mija stirring and stumbled around the kitchen in a daze, slicing a banana and carefully applying peanut butter to each piece. Things kept coming to his mind-- he needed to finish that prototype on the lathe, needed to reply to that email --but then he would remember that he wasn’t a man who worked anymore. He used to be that guy, competently holding all the threads of a complicated business, but now the show was on hold, the warehouse was shut down, and everything at his production company that needed his supervision was shelved indefinitely.
Jamie turned down the hall to his office to check something online, immediately forgot what he was going to look for and turned back. His foot landed on one of Mija’s little board books and went out from under him. He didn’t even try to catch himself, mostly because he didn’t figure out what was happening until he’d already hit the floor, halfway slumped against one wall of hallway.
Something moved wrong against his hip and for a dizzy moment he was sure he’d broken something. He put his hand down to feel over the damage and was confused when he held it up and saw not blood but his cell phone, vibrating and displaying Adam’s name. He set it down on the tile carefully where he wouldn’t step on it and let himself slide the rest of the way down to the floor.
Nine-year-old Jamie lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling in his parents’ room. Every few seconds he thought he heard a board squeak down the hall and looked around guiltily. It wasn’t that he was doing something wrong, at least he didn’t think so, he was just trying to see whatever it was his father saw when he lay in bed for hours, staring up. Jamie saw roughhewn boards and a lopsided ceiling fan that whined when it turned and a dangling, crusted strip of fly paper.
Muffled, his mother’s voice floated up from the kitchen. His father was up for the first time in a week; Jamie had been told not to bother him so he’d taken the opportunity to illicitly try to discern what as so interesting about the ceiling of their bedroom. Jamie placed his hands over his chest like he’d seen his father do and tried not to move at all, blinking slowly. Jamie’s leg started itching first, then his nose. He was sure there was a bug tickling in his hair. He held still until he absolutely couldn’t stand it anymore and all the stifled scratching and wiggling broke out of him in one great convulsion. He sat up, scratching his ankle above his sock and sighed. The ceiling kept its secrets.
Jamie’s father passed away in 2006. He lay in a hospital bed for weeks, withering away silently (the doctors said he’d lost the will to live) until one day he spoke up, “sorry for all the trouble,” and then he rolled his head to the side and died. Just like that.
*
The stars are fantastic on the dunes. They throw their sleeping bags and pillows on the bare sand and fall asleep staring up at them. Adam says he has never seen stars like this before, stretched like a solid carpet from horizon to horizon, across the dome of the sky. It makes you understand why people sometimes call it the ‘blanket’ of the night sky. It really does look like you ought to be able to wrap up in it. It’s so clear, and so big, that if you watch you can actually see the stars move as Earth turns.
Jamie doesn’t bother to say anything, but he remembers crisp Indiana night air and the prickle of straw under his back, the mumbling animals in the barn. He rolls over, kicking at his sleeping bag, and listens to the sssssss trickle of the sugary sand over polyester.
The sand is dry, not like beach sand. Its pure gypsum crystals, blown from the top of the mountain which overshadows the dunes and piling up at its feet for years. It doesn’t stick to anything, just falls right off. Jamie digs his fingers into it and it’s cold and heavy feeling. He thinks it’s strange that the sand doesn’t seem to hold the heat of the day.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees something bright streaking down and it takes him a minute to realize that it’s a shooting star. Adam and Mija have been spotting them but this is the first he’s seen, mainly because he’s been sleeping so much. That’s why he keeps his eyes open instead of closing them when he makes his wish. The stars streaks relentlessly toward the horizon but Jamie’s mind is blank. He can’t think of anything to wish for.
The star disappears and Jamie stares, blinking at the points of light where it went down. He feels the cold sand under his hand and the night air against his cheek and the bone deep ache in his joints from sleeping on the ground. He never noticed before how hard the sand is to sleep on.
*
When Jamie opens his eyes the next morning the sun is already creeping high and Adam has packed most of their gear. “C’mon, time to get up,” Adam says and nudges Jamie with his toe again. He’s holding out a spoon with a glob of peanut butter on the end.
Jamie takes the peanut butter. “My father used to stay in bed a lot,” he says; it’s the first thought to pop into his head. Adam nods. He says it out loud because the psychologist, the one Adam drove him to see, said that it would help.
The doctor said that Jamie’s problem was that he was inarticulate—even in his head. He didn’t parse his world into words and as a result things tended to wash over him, passing him by or pulling him under. He’d said that if Jamie would say the thoughts that came into his head out loud, that would be a start. Maybe Adam could help him analyze some of it, he’d suggested. Maybe Adam could be the other half of his inner dialogue.
Jamie’s not a follower, particularly, of the soft sciences, but he knows that it is science. They have journals, they do research, and Jamie may not believe in much anymore, but if there’s one thing he believes in it’s science. So, he will try to do what the doctor suggested, because in a certain set of conditions, if you implement certain steps, you will achieve certain results and that is science. Jamie believes in science; he wants to see results.
“Do you think you’re afraid of becoming like your father?” Adam asks.
“So Jamie,” the interviewer said, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward. “It seems like you’ve come so far in life, since growing up on a farm in the heartland. Why do you think that is? Do you think you were running away from something?”
Adam turned in his chair and propped his hands on his knee like he was really interested to hear the answer. Jamie cleared his throat, “Ehm. Yes.”
They all sat in silence for a second, waiting for Jamie to continue, before the interviewer realized that that was his answer. She chuckled and the audience tittered uncomfortably. Adam let out a loud guffaw and slapped him on the shoulder. Jamie, to his credit, blushed slightly.
“Well, I mean, I think everyone knows that, uh, I did run away. Literally. When I was a teenager,” he shrugged. “And I think, kind of, I never stopped running.”
“And do you think that’s a good way to do things?” she asked, winking at the audience. “I mean, it seems to have worked out for you. Do you think it’s better to be running toward something or running away?”
“Ummm,” Jamie said and Adam snickered. Jamie was known for having trouble with long, complicated interview questions.
“I think, well, I can certainly say I’ve gone farther. Because I was running away.” He paused and this time everyone waited in silence, anticipating more. “I mean, when you run toward something, you get there and then you quit, right? But when you’re running away, there’s no finish line. So you just keep going.” He stopped and looked up from his hands, looked over at Adam like he wasn’t sure he’d said the right thing.
“Well said,” the interviewer nodded and the audience broke into applause.
*
“Finished!” Mija shouts proudly, jumping up from her sprawl on the rug and waving her latest drawing at Adam. Jamie looks over, momentarily distracted from gazing out the café window at the empty, downtown street.
“Wow!” Adam exclaims, as if the scribbles on the page were a particularly good explosion. “Tell me about your drawing,” he says pulling her into his lap.
“This is me, and this is you, and this is Uncle Jamie…” she explains, pointing to the crayon figures. Across the room the manager waves at them and gestures to a couple of sandwiches sitting on the counter. “Used the full fat mayo instead of the lite stuff, customer refused them,” he says when Adam comes up. Adam thanks him by name and carries the free food back to their little corner of the store.
Jamie waves his thanks to the man. He obviously recognizes them and he’s let them spend their days in the little shop for over a week, often passing them a bag of day-old bread and cookies for Mija at the end of the day.
Adam lowers himself back into his chair with a groan and lifts Mija into his lap. “My knees hate me,” he says, and Jamie almost smiles. He pushes one of the sandwiches across to Jamie and starts deconstructing the other. He tears the sliced turkey and bread into bite-sized chunks and puts them in front of Mija. “Here we go, Mija-girl. Turkey! Gobble gobble gobble.”
He tickles her and she giggles wildly, grabs up a piece of bread and smears mayonnaise goo across her chin before getting it into her mouth.
“She’s messy,” Jamie says, carefully wiping his fingers on a napkin.
“She’s a kid,” Adam deadpans, chasing her with a napkin which she dodges.
“Are all kids like this?”
Adam gives up and moves Mija to her own chair beside him. “For a little while,” he watches Jamie watching Mija.
“Eileen and I never had kids,” Jamie says without preface. Adam already knew that, of course, but Jamie felt like he needed to say it. He isn’t quite sure where he’s going with this.
Adam starts shredding his napkin. “You said you had fertility problems.”
“Maybe.” Jamie picks the tomato off his sandwich and Mija drops a hunk of turkey onto the floor and the conversation is over.
It's late already when they're making the trek back into the dunes to camp. The sky has turned a rich shade of cobalt blue and the ever-present wind throws stinging sand against Jamie's ankles. Pointing in a straight line from one way-post to the next they find their way every day in and out of the maze of dunes but no matter how many times he's done it the desert never starts looking familiar to Jamie. It's always in motion, always changing, even while they're asleep.
"I like how the wind erases our footprints," Jamie says, looking behind at his trail of scooped impressions and ahead at pristine, unbroken dune. The sand right at the surface is in constant motion and it makes the ground look alive, like crawling static interrupted by the meandering dot-dashed trails of the white dune lizards. "It's like we were never here. Like it's reminding us that we can't hurt it."
"The desert has no memory," Adam agrees. "The wind blows relentlessly, has blown for thousands of years, and slowly by slowly, little by little, it's moving that mountain down to this valley," Jamie can tell by his tone that now Adam is speaking for Mija's benefit. Sleepily she raises her head from Adam's shoulder and looks across the sea of sand to the mountain. "...and it pushes the dunes along, fractions of an inch per day, like slow motion waves at the beach. The sand rolls over and over and over..." He trails off.
“I admire the desert,” Jamie says.
“I have always thought of you as a pretty desert-y kind of person,” Adam says. He says it carefully, like he’s has the same feeling of gravity that Jamie has but can’t put into words. Adam has always been the one with the gift of gab. He catches up and Jamie can see him out of the corner of his eye. He glances over at Jamie and then looks back down at the sand crunching under his feet. A little sad sounding he says, “You never let things leave a mark on you.”
Jamie is quiet for the length of time it takes them to trek one and a half way posts before he says, “I think I thought that, too. But maybe I just didn’t let it show.”
*
“Make a snow angel with me Uncle Jamie!” Mija shouts. She runs a circle around Adam, who’s packing up their gear, and flings herself down in a patch of clean, smooth sand besides Jamie’s sleeping bag. Jamie stares up at the clear blue morning sky. His limbs feel made of lead and Mija’s voice sounds far away.
“Make a snow man with me, Dad,” Jamie stood tip-toe in the doorway to the bedroom and leaned in, trying to see if his father was awake. “Dad? Dad?”
Jamie jolts out of a daydream and with his heart beating fast and glances around. Mija is absentmindedly swiping at the sand with her hands and giving him her best pouty lip. He’s almost shaking but he doesn’t let it show as he pushes himself to his hands and knees and crawls off his sleeping bag, “All right, how do we do this?”
Jamie sees Adam freeze and do a double take but Mija, bless her heart, doesn’t bat an eye. “Well first you lay down on your back,” she demonstrates, delighted to have a captive audience. “And then you move your arms and legs so it makes your wings. Like an angel!”
The sand gets inside Jamie’s collar almost immediately and it’s scratchy on the back of his neck. He feels the grit working its way into his jeans and his socks as he waves his arms and legs against the sand. It’s exactly the kind of sensation that should irritate him to no end.
“That’s good Uncle Jamie, that’s good.” Jamie feels her little fingers knock against his as she makes her angel. “Okay, now we get up and see our snow angels,” she tugs on his hand and Jamie rolls away from his ‘snow’ angel, careful not to smudge it.
“See our snow angels, Uncle Jamie?” Jamie sits back on his knees and looks at the two angels side by side on the dune.
“I think they look great,” Adam calls.
“Do you think they’ll still be here when we come back tonight?” Mija presses her handprint into the sand under her angel.
“Probably not…” Jamie wishes he had a camera so he could capture the angels for her.
“The wind will blow all day, remember?” Adam asks her. “The wind blows and blows, it never stop, and it makes the whole desert smooth, like we were never here.”
“That’s okay,” Mija says cheerfully. “We can make more.”
“What if the reason Eileen and I never had kids was because I was afraid?” Jamie asks as the parking lot and their car comes into sight from behind a dune.
“What if it was?” Adam asks.
“My whole life I thought that I had gotten away. That I had escaped. Like childhood was something that only happened to other people.” Jamie stops at the edge of the crusted, hard sand of the parking lot.
“I know it’s trite, but you can’t change the past” Adam says turning back toward him. Mija, in her carrier, leans over his shoulder and shakes her curls out of her eyes. “Regrets are pointless,” Adam shrugs. “Just do better the next time. Start today.”
And of course it’s easy for him to say that, because Adam is the happy-go-lucky one and Jamie is the uptight one. Things have always seemed to come easier for Adam while Jamie has been struggling and fighting. He only became a perfectionist out of necessity for--
Mija cracks a smile at him, interrupting his train of thought, and ducks behind Adam’s shoulder, playing peek-a-boo. Jamie pauses, “I-- Okay. I guess I can do that.”
The dunes rise high on both sides of the road out of the park and the wind blows little flurries of sand across the pavement in swirling patterns. The closer they get to the gate the more life they see. Gradually the blank white sand gives way to clumps of grasses. From her carseat Mija says something about the “snow flowers.” Jamie smiles, and sees the blooming yucca for the first time.