Before the Mojave, when the uniform people came to take Mom and Dad away, we lived in a different kind of desert—still in the California no one thinks about when they think of California. Everyone called this desert SB, and it was just as dry and even hotter than the Mojave, because in this desert, there were too many cars and too many buildings, and the air felt thick like fog—only most people called it smog. Dad called it pollution and said this desert was a shit-hole. Those were his words, not mine. He said I wasn’t old enough to say shit. But I think he was right about this kind of desert.
The thing I remember most about this desert is that no matter where you went, you couldn’t see the mountains because the smog was like a heavy curtain. And on top of not being able to see the mountains, your lungs would burn. We moved around a lot in the smog-filled desert with the mountains we couldn’t see, because Dad said Mom could never stay still, and he was right, because she was always tapping her feet or bouncing her leg up and down as if she was trying not to step on lava. Mom said it was because of the bugs.
When we lived on Date Street, Mom would sleep in the recliner chair in the living room with her feet propped up so the cockroaches wouldn’t crawl on her. But one night, one inched up the side of the chair and crept across her hand, and she ran out into the yard screaming. I’d been sleeping wedged between her bones and the arms of the chair because I couldn’t stand to be away from her. When she shot up, so did I. I ran after her into the dirt yard and teetered from one foot to the other to avoid the fire ants and the stickers Dad called goat heads.
Dad came out and told Mom to shut up and stop acting like a lunatic. He said she was going to wake up the whole damn neighborhood, but Mom didn’t hear him. She was gasping and holding her knees like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on her head. I held the torn and tattered piece of Mom’s red lingerie that I carried around like a security blanket and waited in the dirt for her to go inside so I could go back to sleep. My eyes felt like heavy anvils, but I didn’t know how to sleep without her, so I waited. She never did go inside, and we slept in the backseat of the car that night. The searchlight moon shined through the dusty window and I could still see the purple eyeshadow Mom had swept across her eyelids with a paintbrush. She looked like a sleeping princess.
Mom, with all her screaming, would’ve woken up my little brother Brandon, but he was staying with my Grandma Linda because she said she found him crawling alone on the floor with people stepping over him like he was a pile of dirty laundry, people she called junkies, and her face looked sad when she said it, and I remember wondering why she took him and not me, but I was glad because I didn’t want to leave Mom.
Mom was gone a lot, but I wanted to be wherever she was coming back to. Sometimes she would be gone for days, only returning when her fingers were stacked with so many rings she looked like she had diamonds for hands or when she had fur coats or shiny silver and gold trinkets that looked like some kind of treasure to add to the ever-growing pile of things she kept in the corner of the living room. She’d always have Dad shake out the fur coats before she slid her long, toothpick-thin arms into the sleeves because she said the bugs liked to hide in dark places.
Mom complained to her mom, my Grandma Fields, enough times about the roaches that Grandma had us all move into her little house on Michelle Lane. It was in the same desert with the mountains we couldn’t see and the burning lungs, but there were no cockroaches. On Michelle Lane, there were five of us—me, Mom, Dad, Grandma Fields, and my Grandpa Steve, who was actually my step-grandpa. We were supposed to be six, but my brother was still staying with my Grandma Linda. But, on Michelle Lane, he was allowed to come over.
I liked living on Michelle Lane. Grandma Fields kept the house clean, even though she worked a lot. I loved how she matched my clothes in the morning and made me breakfast and combed my hair. She even made me brush my teeth, which I actually kind of liked. The toothpaste she used tasted like the green apple candy Dad would buy me from the corner store with the bars on the windows.
I liked living on Michelle Lane because Grandma always opened the window shades in the morning, filling the rooms with yellow light. When we were living on Date Street, Dad had nailed blankets over the windows so there was no sun.
I liked that on Michelle Lane, there was grass in the front yard like the houses you see on TV. I liked that Grandma always smelled like flowers, and Grandpa always listened to the kind of music that felt like a hug. I liked that someone was always home, even if it usually wasn’t Mom.
I liked living on Michelle Lane until the uniform people came. Sometimes, I’d see the uniform people on the street, at the corner store, or at the coffee shop that Dad said had piss-water coffee. At the coffee shop, Mom would stuff the pockets of her flannel, which was actually Dad’s flannel, with day-old donuts she paid for with the change we found in the car. At the coffee shop, the uniform people always smiled and even sometimes laughed, but when they came to Michelle Lane, they were not smiling or laughing.
I was in bed with Mom when the uniform people came. It was morning, but neither of us knew it, because Dad had nailed the blankets over the windows again. Grandma told him not to, but he did it anyway. The uniform people didn’t knock or ring the doorbell. They just barreled inside and through the bedroom door like a bulldozer and took me out of bed. Mom screamed and yelled a bunch of the words she usually said through her teeth. She thrashed around like a dust tornado, and it took three or four of them to put her hands in shiny silver bracelets that were held together by a fat chain.
Dad was wearing those bracelets too by the time we made it out to the living room. One of the uniform people was rocking in Grandma’s black rocking chair—the one I always rocked my baby dolls in—and it was making a squeaking sound like a mouse screaming. He was rocking and talking to Dad, saying, “Looks like we got you now,” and “You’re going away, buddy.” Going away where? I wanted to ask, but my throat had closed up, and I felt like Ariel in The Little Mermaid when the sea witch took her voice and gave her legs. Only I couldn’t feel my legs either. One of the uniform people was still holding me, so I wasn’t even sure if I could still walk.
The rocking continued, and the mouse kept screaming, and the uniform man was sweating and laughing and Mom was calling the sweating uniform man bad names, and Dad told him, “We’ll see about that,” and started to smile, so I thought maybe they were friends. I thought maybe they could take Mom’s bracelets off so she could hold me. Then a man who was wearing black and not a uniform pointed to Mom and said, “It’s her. Not him.” The rocking uniform man stopped laughing but he kept sweating, and his mouth opened like a cartoon fish. The whole room went quiet except for Mom, who was calling the rocking uniform man, who was no longer rocking but still sweating, a cross-eyed bastard.
The man who was wearing black and not a uniform said for Mom to get dressed. They took her bracelets off, and she went into the bathroom. She changed out of her green housecoat that she always wore in the morning. She’d wrap me inside like a cocoon, and her skin always smelled like smoke and sugar cookies. When she came out of the bathroom, she was wearing jeans and a tired face, and I put my arms out for her to hold me, but the uniform people put her bracelets back on.
One of the uniform people was a girl, and she was the one holding me, and the one who was asking me questions now. Questions I couldn’t answer because the sea witch took my voice. Mom told her to stop talking to me because she was going to make me cry. I didn’t cry until they put Mom and Dad in the back of one of those cars with the lights on top and the cage in the back. It looked like a cop car, but I thought the cops were the good guys. I thought they were supposed to protect you from bad things happening, and this felt like a bad thing. And it felt like it was their fault.
Grandma was holding me now. The uniform people had called her at work and told her to come home. She smelled like a beauty salon and her hair was piled on top of her head like the yellow bouquet of flowers Dad sometimes bought for Mom from the guy on the corner selling them out of a plastic bucket. Grandma’s shoulders were shaking as if she were laughing, but she wasn’t laughing; she was crying, and her makeup made black rivers on her face. The car with the lights on top that looked like a cop car drove away with my parents, but Dad came home a few days later. He said the cops couldn’t prove he did anything wrong, but they found Mom’s fingerprints in over three hundred houses that had been robbed by burglars.
After that, we moved out of the house on Michelle Lane because Grandma said there were too many people in the neighborhood who could get Mom in trouble when she got out of what she called prison. Prison is where grown-ups go when they’ve done something bad, like a time-out. Grandma said Mom took something that didn’t belong to her, and now she was being punished for it. I heard Dad say that Mom was so bad she even made it in the newspaper, which sounded like a grown-up version of Santa’s naughty list.
So we left the desert with the mountains we couldn’t see and the burning lungs in search of a better life, as Grandma put it. We went to the Mojave where a lot of the roads were still made of dirt and nothing else, and the sky was wide and blue, and you could always see the mountains. I counted tumbleweeds and jackrabbits and the days until Mom came home.
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Jessy Easton’s writing has been published in the Good River Review, Beacon Quarterly, Rappahannock Review, and Marrow Magazine. In 2022, her story “The Things We Leave Out” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net Anthology. She holds a BA in Communications from Vanguard University of Southern California.