It happened in four parts:
1.
Driving on the 134, a whirlpool of leaves in the fast lane. Languid, suspension of air and oaks. 100 Animals! sound book shrill in the backseat.
Mommy! Guess!
A tapir? Lying in the lukewarm pool of the Los Angeles Zoo. Its heat radiant.
Ladybug? A series of noises chosen at random, a constellation of voiceover sounds. A friend demonstrated once. The way she recorded Target commercials from her coat closet.
Toucan? How does the color of its beak translate sonically?
Mommy! Guess!
Should I have taken her to school today? The car buffeting back and forth.
2.
A Zoom meeting with Ashley, who is nine minutes late. The requisite exclamation marks of apology.
I have never once opened a conversation with the weather except on camera.
Santa Anas. I barely know what they mean. She definitely doesn’t.
3.
Viva calls. I’m making flanken short ribs.
Are you okay?
The turmeric seeps into my hands, and I don’t know what she’s talking about.
Oh, right. Another world, I assure her, only accessible by finger roads.
4.
Bath. Let’s FaceTime Grandma! The best way to pass those thirty minutes on the linoleum tile, sweats soaked within the first five and kneecaps screaming.
Spelling out letters to my parents, explaining in code that my friend’s daughter’s fingers got cut off.
Mom’s forehead in full focus. Dad in the upper corner, chewing an under-salted snap pea. Holding the iPhone sideways is a generational impossibility. There’s a meme in there somewh—WE HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK
The water gets cold. She complains, thumbs pruning.
Everything ok?
We used to read a book about a bunny with a string. I don’t remember, but Mom refers to it all the time. The string attaches the mama bunny to the baby bunny. And when there’s trouble, the string lights on fire.
—
The plume lit up your phone. Across the grouted stones that surrounded your wedding dinner. The tablecloths were too short but it didn’t matter. Plates were licked clean, and the lights flickered, and your mom smiled like you’d never seen her smile before. Was she happier than you were? Was that the moment the word vibrant really made sense to you?
This was vibrant. Pixie tangerine.
She whined for you to get her out of the bath and the water pooled at your feet while you called. It went to voicemail. You texted:
Leave.
The windows like the sail of a boat. The first time you noticed they were made of plastic. They bowed, in and out, flexing.
Then they came. And the dogs came, and the duffel bags came, and the computer tower came, and the two photo albums came, and the two cars came. One trunk inexplicably empty.
And you drove past downed power lines, and stop lights that taught you how to drive all went out.
—
In those moments, or in the moments after, the red tulle of your wedding dress caught fire.
The step between the living room and your bedroom, where your golden retriever used to lay immobilized in the summer, splintered.
And the three steps to your parents’ bedroom. You taught her to hold onto the bookshelf lined with photo albums to find her way down. The glassine sheets encasing a single lock of your straw-blond hair. The plastic photo corners liquified, leaking down the last remnants of your brother’s face. She’s still confused when you tell her she has an uncle. There’s no way to prove it, anymore.
It’s easier to think of it as a combustion. A burst of light and embers. Carried from house to house on winds that bent a blazing palm tree horizontally across the McDonald’s sign.
But in truth, it was slow. The porcelain chickens hanging above the kitchen sink had a different melting point than the copper pots hanging above the stove. The armature of the chairs passed down from your grandparents lasted longer than their portraits hanging in the hallway. The crushed velvet Christmas dress that you wore that she would never have worn and now will never wear melted into the box it was saved in for thirty years.
And the house itself? The dimpled drywall above the bed, where rats danced over your head, and rainwater collected in a fat bubble during that particularly wet winter. You’d lay your arms on top of the duvet, tuck your body in extra tight. Snuggle down, Dad said.
—
It would happen in four parts, I imagine:
1.
My car drives itself. The Lake Avenue exit, notorious. My brother took me out on Christmas Day when I got my learner’s permit. I mixed up the brake and the gas.
2.
Past a line, like the equator. The CVS is below it. The Italian sandwich shop too. I asked my friend to return books to the library. He drove up, and the entrance was there, but the rest of the building wasn’t. Like it had been blown off.
3.
Gears shifting up the incline. The hardware store is gone. The ACE where I learned about centrifugal force while mixing paint. Where Dad and I would go, inventing things that needed to be fixed.
4.
And then, that particular wind of road. The way my tires would drift, like a mother tongue. The driveway that ate my knees when I was little. We always had to warn people. Don’t back down. You’ll get stuck. But not me. At the top, the horizon line of the Rubio Cañon.
And then?
Mommy! Guess!