On Going Home

Twentynine Palms, California, home to the largest military base in the United States, home to the famed surf guitarist Dick Dale, home to a national park of Joshua Trees, was not home to me. It was the last stop in my many moves across California, the final chance for my mother to start over, and where the distance between me and my family would grow exponentially, like the weeds that sprouted in the desert after a winter rain. What changed? Who changed? Do people change? Sitting in Pizza Hut three days after Christmas, I realized that perhaps there wasn’t a way to make up for ten years of lost time.  

I had suggested a Thai restaurant, or even the buffet at Casino Morongo, just off the freeway in Cabazon, but my brother worked at Pizza Hut and couldn’t get any time off. Over the phone, my mother had told me about my brother’s son, that he was having trouble in school, and that sometimes he reminded her of me because he liked to wear costume jewelry and pretend he was searching for buried treasure.

“You were always like that,” she said.

“Like what?” 

“Just fun.” The memories of my youth revolved around this “fun” self, the me who watched over my younger siblings while our mother worked, the one who told stories to keep them quiet in a car, the one who pulled her hair out just thinking of ways to keep them entertained.

There was a moment where I wished that I had done that very thing with my nephew, that instead of my mother, it was me he layered with shiny necklaces and thick bracelets. That it was me who laughed wildly as he marched around the house, scouting for his next loot. Instead, I was the aunt he never knew.

The reunion was long overdue and something I believed would never happen. People fall out of touch, but this separation is due to hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and the power of a grudge. Ten years prior, my mother called me in the middle of a September heatwave to announce that I was dead to her, that because I didn’t give her what she wanted, I was no longer part of the family. Money. It was all about money. A few thousand dollars was given to me after my grandmother’s death. Life changes on a dime, and there are days when I look back on that September and the phone call and wish I had just given in. Perhaps, I wonder, I could have done better.

*

 That September, right after Labor Day, I was twenty-two, just out of college, and renting a room in a house that was falling apart. I had nowhere else to go. There was no air conditioning, and the pipes leaked so badly that anytime I needed to use the bathroom or the kitchen sink, the task would involve walking along the side of the house, through bunches of ivy and overgrown weeds, to turn the shutoff valve for a few moments of water.

That September was a slow drip on my brain. In the weeks following my mother’s phone call, I couldn’t sleep, eat, or shit. I showed up to work in an afterschool program looking out at hundreds of kids, realizing just how alone I was.

My family was my life. I was their caretaker, the problem-solver. The expression “blood is thicker than water” influenced every move I made. I dropped out of college my freshman year when my mother couldn’t work after breaking her arm. She couldn’t keep up with her housecleaning business so it was me, the prodigal daughter, who had gone home and picked up where no one else could. This idea of no longer being a part of that unrooted me.

There were times when I tried to make it right. I mailed a check, and yet my mother always wanted more. It seemed hopeless to me then, a reconciliation, and what hurt the most was believing that all I had become to her was a dollar sign. Not her first-born, not her best friend, not a daughter to be proud of, but a means to an end. There was no longer a home to return to, no longer a family to call my own.

*

Even though it was three days after Christmas, it was warm in the desert, and my underarms were wet with sweat. There were a few cars in the parking lot, a motorcycle, and I wondered which belonged to my brother, or if he even had a driver’s license. He had only had custody of his son for less than a year, and in our last conversation, my mother told me of the epic court battle at the county courthouse, coincidentally only five miles from my home, and how it took years for a judge to finally release my nephew from foster care and into the arms of my brother.

“If only we were speaking then,” she said, her voice tight. “We could have really used your help.”

We weren’t speaking then, and because of this, I was unaware of so many things—the so many things amounted to my brother not marrying his son’s mother, and that because she was neglectful, the court had deemed her unfit. To the judge, my brother seemed no better. He had just been discharged from the military, and my mother had been driving him to any AA group she could find.

“Things were so desperate then,” she told me.  “The both of us just wanted to die.”

I could imagine them, both smoking in her rusted station wagon, driving along the highway, the windows rolled down, the sweat on their brows, just hoping that another meeting at another group would be what they both needed. That this act of change would bring my brother’s son back. Had I been involved, could I have made it happen sooner? Could I have helped my brother? Maybe so. In fact, probably so. Before our falling out, I had been my mother’s key supporter and cheerleader for years, often resolving her problems as much as I could. 

But things seemed better now. This job was a new beginning for my brother, and I was proud of him. He had done this on his own. Inside the restaurant, I looked for him. I looked at the tall teenagers near the jukebox, at the servers delivering food to a corner table, and I looked behind the counter. I scanned for his lanky frame and those eyes.

People never took us as brother and sister. With two different fathers, you’d never know we were related if you saw us on the street. But our eyes linked us, a most penetrating gaze. Clear and unflinching. The most serious of eyes. He came out from the back, wiped his hands on a towel, and gave me a nod.

When I last saw him, my brother was months shy of his eighteenth birthday, and his son was only a few weeks old. In my brother’s excitement as a new father, he messaged me on Facebook and told me how he finally felt like he could talk to me without the eyes and ears of our mother.

“She just can’t know,” he had said, “that we even talked. She gets so mad any time anyone says your name.” It was two years after our estrangement, and I still couldn’t believe that in my mother’s mind, I was the enemy.

At the home of a family friend, we sat beside each other on a couch, his newborn son in my arms. He slept quietly, and I couldn’t tell if he had inherited our eyes. I hadn’t held a child in years. And as I looked at my nephew, I couldn’t help but think of the past, a moment like this, holding my brother just like I was now holding his son.

Back then, our mother was often out with a guy. When my brother couldn’t sleep, I’d sit with him in my arms, bundled in a blanket, and to calm his cries, I’d sing. It was close to Christmas then, and one of my favorite songs was “Silent Night” by The Temptations. It was something that sounded like a lullaby, and since I didn’t know any others, this is what I hummed. Even after he was asleep, his eyes closed, I never wanted to let him go.

My brother couldn’t possibly remember those nights. What would it matter now? The history between us seemed vast, and maybe that’s why we had so little to say. I hoped that by being there, we could connect. My brother wouldn’t look at me but out the window. The shades were pulled back, and he kept averting his gaze ahead of us. The house was on the end of a suburban lot, and from where we sat, we could see miles and miles of desert. Everything seemed so far away.

My brother wasn’t much of a talker, and neither was I, and this was something we shared, a reluctance to make small talk. I asked him about finding work and possibly going to college, and he answered in short phrases, never looking at me. When I left, I handed him a few hundred dollars. I felt an urgency to give him something that could make up for my absence, and because I had finally found work as a teacher, I could afford to. He quickly tucked the cash in his pocket. It was awkward then, how we embraced. I wanted to hold on forever, to be there for him like I was before, two children in the night. I wanted to be the someone who could control what was quickly unraveling, but we were no longer children. And it was no longer my place. 

*

We moved to Twentynine Palms in 1992. I was ten and my brother was just a toddler. That year, Twentynine Palms finally had a McDonald’s. It seemed like the only new building on Adobe Road, and to a child, there was nothing else of significance. Just desert.

Highway 62 cut through the small town and took travelers to Las Vegas and beyond, while left on Adobe took soldiers and civilian workers to the Marine Base. My mother belonged to neither group. If there had been a sign for wanderers, or lost souls, she may have found her direction, but poverty is what brought us there, and after living for months in a cramped bungalow with my aunt and her five boys, we finally settled in a mobile home at the edge of town.

 We had no furniture, just mattresses. I don’t remember where they came from; perhaps my mother had stacked a few in the bed of her pickup truck, but I remember packing that truck in the dead of night, my brother asleep in his car seat, and I don’t recall lifting or shoving anything of the sort. Just bags. Bags and bags of clothes and baby gear. Maybe a few toys, a stuffed animal, but mostly clothes.

The trailer on Encelia Avenue was centered between two other trailers, each bordered by a cement wall and a chain-linked gate. There was no park, and the school—so many miles away. A liquor store was the only destination we could walk to, and at dusk, this is what we did. My mother would strap my brother in his stroller, and she’d let me push him, the rubber wheels sometimes stalling in the dirt, stuck against a rock.

There were no other children on that street, and if there were, they never came out to play. There were no trees, either, and I found the lack of people unsettling. It was quiet in the desert. No police sirens, no music echoing in the neighborhood, just the sound of our feet crunching against the sand. Sweat pooled at the backs of our t-shirts and tank tops, and no matter how many times I tried, I could never stop sweating. Even in the dead of a desert winter, when the wind chapped my lips and fingers, a cold sweat remained.

No one remembers that street, or those walks. In fact, this home does not exist in my brother’s memory. Encelia Avenue is not somewhere he recalls even driving past. We were always moving to a cheaper place and had seven different addresses before I even entered high school.

 An hour before my stop at Pizza Hut, I drove to that trailer just off of Highway 62, the liquor store still standing, and parked along the dirt road. The windows were boarded up, the paint chipped and peeling. It looked as if we had been the last people to have lived there. The metal gate was wrapped in chains and padlocked, a NO TRESPASSING sign plastered on the front door. The place seemed so much smaller than I remembered. How my mother lived there with five kids under the age of ten, I’ll never know, and perhaps this explains why she always found a reason to leave us alone at night. I didn’t understand it then, her need to drive to the pool hall just further down the highway, why she had to get dressed up and leave us, my baby brother on my hip, but I do now. She just wanted out.

*

My brother walked me to the back of the restaurant, where my mother sat at the end of a table. My brother’s son sat beside her. He looked like his father, his hair curlier. But those eyes—he had in fact inherited that same lingering gaze.

We didn’t embrace, and before I had a chance to say much of anything, my brother raced back to work behind the counter, slinging the towel over his shoulder.

My mother did most of the talking. She talked about herself, how she had moved out of her house and into a friend’s, and that my brother had moved into her place, our last home of homes, a place she bought in the middle of town. My nephew was antsy, and he danced around us. He was tall for his age, and thin. When he smiled, he looked like his father, and his eyes kept studying mine. 

“That’s your aunt,” my mother said, pointing at me.

“Huh?” he grinned. “So, that’s who she is!”

My mother had her arm draped over his shoulder, and he whispered in her ear, before running off to play in the arcade.

“He’s been excited to meet you.” My mother was eager and in a good place. I could tell that she was trying. I could tell that she had missed me and that she had her regrets.

“He’s a great kid,” I said. And it was true. I could see it. I had known kids in the foster care system, and they were the hardest to reach. But whatever happened to my nephew when he was younger, whatever experiences he had in foster care, I couldn’t tell. Perhaps he was good at hiding it, or perhaps it was part of the reason he was having trouble in school. I wondered how different he would have been had I not been out of the picture.

My nephew wandered back from the arcade and put his arms around me. “For you!” he smiled, opening the palm of his hand to reveal a sidewinder tattoo he had won in the quarter machine. My brother brought out a vegetarian pizza. He had remembered that I had given up meat years ago, and this gesture felt like approval, as if he was letting me know that it was good to have me back. His son looked at him. “Did you give your aunt a hug?”  

He nodded and gave me another. “But does she like snakes?” he asked. My nephew’s arms were like tiny twigs wrapped around my chest. Maybe it was because of his time in the system, maybe he had been underfed all those years. That feeling of guilt, and what could have been, kept gnawing at me, a reminder of the damage my absence may have caused.

My brother shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

And there was a look in his eyes, a moment of vulnerability. The way he studied his son, a deep stare, it all conveyed what he just couldn’t articulate. That maybe all that mattered was that we were together.

*

My brother and I were never especially close. With six years between us, we were never at the same school at the same time, and more often than not, our interactions were brief. Sometimes there would be a moment of levity, a Friday night horror movie marathon where we yelled at the actors, a game of Zelda where I had no idea what I was doing, or just watching him skateboard in the street. My brother.

At my college graduation, he was there in his skater jean shorts and sideways baseball cap. He suffered through the two-hour drive, in our mother’s station wagon, the a/c on the fritz, with our younger siblings yelling in the back. Our family never much celebrated accomplishments, and I didn’t expect anyone to attend. But that day, it was the best gift. Even though he didn’t say it, I could tell that he was proud.

So many years later, I think about my own presence in his life. There are so many if onlys to haunt me: if only I had made a different choice, if only our mother had never made that phone call, if only I had encouraged my brother, if only I had taken him on a college tour, if only I had been there when he needed someone. How would his life with his son be different today?

People say you have to let go of the past in order to move forward. I know this to be true, and so I will, but still, I wonder.

*

Before long, my brother was back in the kitchen, mopping the floor. I stood by the counter, waiting. I didn’t want to leave without him. It felt unnatural. I hoped that he’d reappear. 

He came over one last time.

“He’s a great kid,” I told him.

“Don’t let him fool you.”

“I mean it. You should be proud. You’re good with him.”

 It was like talking to a stranger, but a stranger I felt intimately connected to. Even though the years of separation had taken a toll, he was still my little brother. And yet, he was no longer that same boy. For right now, he was where he needed to be. 

Outside, my mother and nephew waited under the dark sky. They were huddled together, the wind cold and fierce. The stars flickered. I walked them to her car, an older white sedan, the paint faded. The interior was torn, and in the back sat a child’s seat. My nephew hopped in and looked up at me, just like his father had as a child. It was another flashback to my youth and all the times I buckled my brother. It didn’t really hit me until then just how much I had been like his mother, just how much of the mundane I had taken care of: a warm bottle, a diaper change, a walk to school, and I wondered how much of that he even remembered, if it was something he would ever recall.

“You want to stay with me tonight?” my mother asked my nephew and his eyes lit up. I could tell that he loved her as much as I did when I was his age, maybe even more. She was his grandma, and I noticed the way she touched him, the way her fingers grazed the back of his neck, the way she looked at him. She loved him, and he knew it. She was no longer fiery like before, no longer quick to hate and hold a grudge. She was the mother I wished that I had had.

I drove by my mother’s house in the center of town, the last home of homes in the desert, the place I thought was too small for all of us with its one bathroom. Back then, we had painted it a bright yellow, and I pulled weeds in the evening. My mother kept a garden, and my brother raked the dirt. Now that it was his, things had changed. It was run-down, the weeds overgrown, and there was no garden, just bags of glass bottles in its place. Two chairs of different heights sat on the front porch, an ashtray between them. My brother was probably a smoker, and after a day in a hot kitchen making minimum wage, smoking would feel like heaven.

It was his now, and to his son, it was home.

Here was the start of a new beginning. I looked up at the stars and finally felt like I was catching a piece of my past, a piece that wasn’t laced with remorse. At that moment, I was no longer torturing myself for the things I could not change. That desert night sky—it took me back to the trailer on Encelia Avenue, how I used to sit against the cement wall out front while everyone slept, and how for a moment the future was promising. Back then, I believed that the sky offered all kinds of hope, of something beautiful emerging from the darkness. All these years later, I believe it once more.