It was five o’clock when she got home, and still hot. She pulled into the driveway, muscle memory guiding her mother’s car under an old mesquite. She had spent the whole day trying to escape the heat. She imagined it like a thousand hands pressing into her skin, wrapping around her forearms, her collarbones. When she looked down the long streets to the desert, she could see the shimmering heat moving like snakes over red sand. It was too hot. It was on these days that she remembered why she left Arizona in the first place.
It hadn’t been this hot in years. Or maybe it had been, she wouldn’t know. She had been in Boston, Providence, Burlington—anywhere she could feel the weather change from summer to fall. She couldn’t stand fall in Arizona, the way it dragged heat on its heels. That was why she left. Not really, of course, but that was the easiest answer to give to her aunts and uncles and her parents’ friends who stopped her at the grocery store. That way, she didn’t have to put words to the things she couldn’t explain, the itchiness that had chased her away. She had only been gone a few years before her father’s memories started slipping from him, before she was pulled back to her childhood home, to the desert and its snake-heat.
She let the air conditioning wash over her for a while, imagining the cold air sinking into her and collecting beneath her skin. If she sat here long enough, the coolness might cling to her when she left the car, turning the air around her cool too. She closed her eyes to feel it, blue air ribboning around her.
Her father was on the back patio, watching the surface of the pool. It was still and pockmarked with bugs and dust. She quietly said goodbye to the nurse, the one she didn’t like, who always lingered to watch the daily father-daughter reunion with sad, pitying eyes. She filled two cups of iced tea and sat down beside her father. He looked over at her and smiled.
“Thank you, Jane.” She turned to look at him. Jane was her mother’s name. He had never forgotten her name before. Up until now, it had been slow, bits of her father’s life breaking off like brittle rock, drifting away from him one by one—sometimes the name of the grocery store down the street, where she went to college, even the name of her sister who never visited, but never her name. Every night when she came home he had been ready with it, as if he had spent the day rolling the sounds around in his mouth, trying to prove he still had it, he wasn’t all that far gone.
She stared at her father, who took a long drink of iced tea. A few drops dribbled down his chin and landed in brown tear marks on his collar. She didn’t say anything. It was just a mistake, her father calling her Jane. She made them all the time. Just this morning at work, she had forgotten to give a customer their change, and last night she had forgotten to take out the trash. She slid her hands under her thighs, feeling the cool plastic chair under her palms. Their yard was dry and yellow from the sun, and over the fence she could see her neighbor’s clothesline, the light of their TV. Past that, she could trace the outlines of distant desert ridges.
“How was your day, dad?” she asked.
“Fine, fine,” he said. “It was too hot to do anything, really. I stayed inside with the kids and we watched movies. Or maybe we read books.” He rubbed his chin with the heel of his hand, his voice growing frantic. “Or maybe I went to the girls’ softball game.” He began ramming his palm into his jaw. “I can’t remember.”
She reached across the table and pulled his hand away from his face. “That’s okay, dad. I’m sure whatever you did was fun. I’m sure you had a great day.”
They sat quietly, listening to the first whippoorwill calls. The sun was slowly sinking towards the rocky crests on the horizon. She took a sip of iced tea and stretched her legs out in front of her. Soon, the heat would start to leech from the sun-baked land. Nights in the desert were cold. It was easy to forget that during the day.
“Jane,” her father said. “Maybe we should move to California. Get out of the desert.” She turned to look at him. His arms were crossed over his stomach, and he was staring into their neighbor’s yard. She imagined that he could see right through their sand-colored house, all the way through the nine blocks between them and the desert. Maybe he was seeing it now, the scrub bushes and the many-armed silhouettes of the cacti, darkness falling fast over everything.
“Dad,” she said slowly. “I’m not Jane.”
He turned to look at her. “Of course you are,” he said.
“Jane was your wife. I’m your daughter.”
He looked at her for a long time. “No you’re not,” he said, as if coming to a decision. “Don’t be silly. I don’t have a daughter. I’m too young for that.” He downed the last amber drops of iced tea and set his glass down on the table too loudly.
She peeled her hands from under her legs, the chair now warm from her body heat. On the horizon, as if some cruel reversal of nature, the sun began to rise again, orange creeping over the rocky hills. But it was just a desert fire, its light pooling and expanding over the horizon as if it had been spilled. She thought about how it must have started, somewhere deep in the desert. The air would’ve been glass-like, fragile and wavering from the heat. She rubbed her hands together and tried to see it, miles of sand now rust-colored and glowing in the night.
Next to her on the patio, her father sighed. “I always wanted to live in the desert,” he said to the dusk.
As quickly as the last sliver of sun disappeared over the mountains, she felt the last twenty-something years of her life condense into something hard and silvery. It fell into her palms, this weight she now carried for her father and herself. She traced circles in the condensation on the table and listened to the night insects and tried to think of northern cities and snowplows. But all she could think about was the desert, the vastness of it. Without looking, she could feel it around her, silent and heavy as the sky. She imagined herself walking into it, farther and farther until all she could see of the town and her father’s house was light. She would lie down and listen to the wind howl at the mountains, rock scraped into red dust.
This was what had pulled her back to Arizona, she knew, what she still couldn’t escape. In the deepening night, she watched it happen, time unwinding from between her father’s fingers and settling instead on her shoulders like sand. She felt it and exhaled softly into the dusk.