It was Mother’s choice for us to move to the High Desert, claiming that housing there was much cheaper than anywhere else in the economic mess that is California. I had tried to convince her to find someplace else, someplace greener and healthier, but she would always ignore me, turning away to look at something with a blank, stoic expression, marine-colored eyes holding a wetness I didn’t understand. I gave up trying to convince her after a certain amount of time had passed; it made her cry, and Dad used to always say that a crying woman was the greatest kind of sadness, a “melancholy poem”.
The house we had moved to was located on an old dirt road called Del Rosa, which was positively the strangest and most uncomfortable thing to drive on, with rocks and bumps and dips at every which point. It might have been tolerable had we been closer, but our home rested fifteen minutes down the detestable street, and on ole’ Del Rosa, fifteen minutes felt like an eternity.
Our house was perhaps the standing personification of the road it resided on as it was just as rugged. There were chips in the sky-blue paint which covered the poor wooden walls, and tiles from the roof had broken off and now lay shattered upon the dusty ground. The door - once painted white - was dinged up, with the paint scratched off by some unknown animal and the hinges rusty and old. The inside wasn’t much better.
“This is only a temporary residence,” Mother said one day at the dinner table in a mask of forced optimism. Biting back a question that surely would’ve crushed her, I simply clenched my jaw and nodded numbly.
I prayed she was right. The desert seemed ugly and unforgiving, and I didn’t like it one bit.
- - - -
After three weeks had passed, I started complaining about the hideous living conditions we were in, that is, the ugliness of the desert. We had taken the thirty-minute drive to Phelan -- the closest city with a shopping mart -- on a couple of occasions to pick up some much-needed groceries, and everywhere I looked there was litter. Litter and dirt. No grass. No healthy vegetation. No kind people picking up the junk left behind.
I had never lived in a place that was so positively empty.
Mother quickly grew tired of my complaining and sent me out to go play. So I went outside. Did I play? No. There was nothing -- and nobody -- to play with.
I sat on the porch step with my back against the front door, staring out at the lifeless land before me. A part of me wondered if even the Indians would have lived here. There was nothing but dirt. Dirt dirt dirt dirt dirt. Dirt and the occasional weed.
The house that stood opposite of our own was smaller, painted brown and worn down. I didn’t think much about it other than the curious thought of “is it abandoned?”. Then someone came out, a flare of lively fire in a dead land.
And when I say fire, I mean fire.
She was a red-head.
I watched wide-eyed as she took her trash out, focused on that plume of deep red hair which cascaded down her shoulders like rivers of lava. There was a certain elegance in the way that she moved, an elegance which might have suggested some type of past in dancing. She was round in the face, with pale skin blemished with scars but still radiating the beauty of freshly fallen snow. I couldn’t tell what color her eyes were. I wanted to bet green but hoped they were blue, for the sake of completing the angelic looks of the stranger.
She looked up after she had disposed her trash and spotted me, a toothy grin spreading across her face. Unlike any normal neighbor, who would have simply waved and walked away, she made her way across the street. She didn’t even look both ways.
“Hey, kid. Just move in?” Mother had warned me against talking to strangers, so I didn’t say a word. Instead I looked into her eyes. They were a warm brown, like chocolate diamonds.
The lady smiled a crooked smile, one corner of her fine lips turning upwards. “Not much of a talker, are you?” No response. She shrugged her decidedly scrawny shoulders. “I wasn’t much of one either at your age.”
She sat down beside me. A part of me wanted to get up and go back inside, but that would’ve been rude, so I simply sat there still as stone, avoiding the warm gaze of the red-haired stranger. She leaned back on her arms awkwardly, looking upwards at the door. “You know, I used to live here in this house, back in my youth.”
Without caring about if I was interested or not, she went on to tell me of her imaginary adventures she had at this house. When she lived here, she explained, there was a big dirt mound she and and her brother would ride bikes down, along with a swing set and a wooden fence. There was a big tree in the backyard, a tree which she tried digging underneath in order to build an underground laboratory. Needless to say, it didn’t happen.
I was surprised when I found myself actually intrigued by her tales, tales of her imaginary friend Shy Sky, who died with her age, and of the bat-creature called Skittle, who flew away to be in the mountains. I was intrigued by her games she would play, where she would act as someone she had come up with in her mind and live their story, a story of heroics and sometimes villainy.
She looked at me through the corner of her eye, which shone brightly in the sunlight. “What’s your name, kid?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but Mother had beat me to it. She had opened the door, mouth hung open as to call for me, but stopped upon noticing the red-headed stranger.
“Jah --Oh…” She bit her lower lip as to wonder who this woman was, whether or not she was to be chased or welcomed. Red-head stood up, still smiling, and extended a hand out in greeting. After a moment of hesitance, Mother shook it.
“Sorry for the scare, milady.” The stranger apologized, using that odd verbiage of a story. “I live across the street here and wanted to introduce myself to the new neighbors.
Mother glanced at me, and when I merely shrugged she turned her attention back to the stranger. “Well, that’s kind of you. I’m Cassidy, and he’s my son, Joshua.”
The stranger looked down at me and winked. “I’m Brecken. Pleased to meet you both. If you ever need me, don’t hesitate to come over.” When Mother nodded, the red-headed Brecken ruffled my hair and waved goodbye to Mother before going back to her own residence. When she had gone, I went inside and looked out a window at the back yard.
I imagined a mound of dirt and a towering tree with a laboratory underneath.
- - -
Brecken often visited us. Later I learned she lived alone, and I often wondered if the reason why she came knocking so often was because she was lonely. Mother appreciated her though. She was a helping hand. She pulled weeds, cooked, watched over me as Mother searched for work. She was a tiny bit of life in dead land.
“How do you like the desert, Josh?" She asked one day, cooking one of her personalized recipes for dinner: a salad composed of fresh greens, fruit, and cornbread chunks. I shrugged, grabbing a bowl of raspberries from the fridge and handing it to her.
"It's okay I guess." Brecken quirked an eyebrow at me as I said this, mixing in the berries without looking. She turned back to the meal before responding.
"Just okay?" She inquired idly, tossing the salad. Again I shrugged, pulling up a chair and sitting by the counter she worked at. She let out a sigh, a small smile curling her lips, soft with sympathy. "It's alright to say you hate it."
"I don't ha--"
"Don't lie, dear." Brecken walked over the the fridge, glancing through the contents before pulling out some apple slices. She avoided my gaze as she spoke. "Everyone hates it here. It's why I consider it the black hole of California."
One thing I had learned about Brecken was her use of metaphors, one of which being that very same black hole analogy. No one liked living in the desert, but they never seemed to escape. Even if they did, they were always sucked back in.
“You like it here.” I didn’t mean to sound challenging, but I couldn't bite back spiteful tone in my voice. To add to the many reasons why Mother and I appreciated her so much, Brecken just let out a patient sigh.
"I just like certain memories of the desert. That doesn't mean I like every memory."
“What do you mean?”
For a while she was silent, focusing on the salad before putting it on the table with a serving utensil. Her eyes were thoughtful, as was the slight frown on her face. She made her way over to one of the windows, sitting on the couch and looking out at the wide, bleak landscape. Instinctively, I sat beside her and did the same. All I could see was dirt and weeds, stretching out towards the mountains beyond. I imagined, though, that Brecken was seeing other things, like the swing-set, the dirt hill, the tree, and all of her imaginary friends.
“I like the memories of my childhood,” she whispered. “Specifically, at this house. I was happy here. No one else was; my family lived here by unfortunate coincidence. I was too young to understand that though, so it didn’t have much effect. However, when you get older, certain injustices become clear, and sometimes they can take that good feeling away. That happiness.”
I didn’t know what she meant, and didn’t have the time to ask when she stood up and returned to the kitchen. I watched her curiously as she pulled out some chips from the pantry and a bowl of salsa she had prepared earlier in the day, setting them beside the salad on the table.
“Remember what I told you about Shy Sky, about how he died with my age?” When I nodded, she continued. “Well, goodbyes are hard. I didn’t want him to go, but there was nothing I could do. There comes a time in every life where the loves of yesterday are nothing but memories tomorrow. I miss him, and Skittle, and all my imaginary friends. I miss playing in the back yard with my brother. Those memories, they’re good memories, but sad ones too when you realize you won’t ever repeat them, or see your friends’ face again once they’ve moved on.”
A delicate finger tapped the blue bead bracelet she had on her wrist. I leaned over, looking at it as best I could, and willingly she showed it to me. It was all a single shade of blue, cobalt, she once told me. Then there was the heart, red as red can be, right in the center of the beads.
“This here was made on Thursday, September thirteenth, and was given to me by my then-best friend that Friday, in honor of a young man who saved my life but lost his own. I’ve never taken this off since. It reminds me of him, my savior, and of all my other friends, imaginary or not, who moved on.”
When I was silent for a while, she grabbed my hand, a soft finger stroking my knuckles. I hadn’t realized I had been crying. I looked at her, red in the face and tears in my eyes, but all she did was smile.
“I have good memories, and I also have bad. I want you to realize that it is those memories that make home, home. Not the greenery of the gardens or the litter of the streets. Make best what you have. Memories are stories that should never go unspoken.”
She cradled me in her arms then, and gratefully I snuggled against her chest, feeling her hands run through my hair.
“The young man…” Brecken’s cheek laid against my head, and I couldn’t help but close my eyes as I told her: “Tell me a story about him.”
She told me his name was Jarod Alan Maxwell. When she was a youth, she had a great fear of talking, she said, and she would never speak to anyone, not even her own grandmother, and it got to the point where people of her past no longer recognized who she was. She had stayed like that for several years prior to meeting Jarod. She told me that he was the first to promise her that he would help her break out of her shell. He was the only to keep that promise, even after an accident took his life. She learned to speak, for him.
“Sometimes,” Brecken murmured, her hand drawing circles on my back as she stared out blankly at the dust, “I wish I could speak with him and thank him for his breath and promises. But even without litter and dust, the world can be ugly.”
- - -
Jarod and Shy Sky eventually became symbols in my life, models I wanted to be like. When I was outside, trying to think up of some game not unlike the ones Brecken sed to play, something crashed, a loud shattering of glass. Quickly, I ran back in, finding Mother on the ground, tears gushing from her eyes like waterfalls, a broken glass of water in front of her and her phone at her side. Her hands clutched at the broken glass in front of her, cutting her fingers and palms. Brecken, who was cooking dinner, quickly rushed over, taking Mother by the shoulders and guiding her to her bedroom hurriedly. Because Brecken was with her, I felt that Mother would be safe, and went back outside.
I sat on the porch instead of playing though, watching stray cats poke their heads out from under the old blue house in curiousity. Eventually, the door opened, and Brecken walked out, sitting beside me without a word leaving her fine lips. After a minute or two she looked at me through the corner of her eye.
“She’s asleep now,” she murmured quietly, her voice coarse. She rubbed at her bracelet.
“What happened?”
“A Blue call happened.” Brecken cradled me in her arms briefly, chin resting on my head, and instinctively I leaned into her. “Your aunt died in a car crash this morning, at ten in the morning. It was an accident; the other driver wasn’t paying attention. Texting.”
I remained silent for a moment, then: “I never knew I had an aunt.”
“No?” Brecken huffed lightly in mild, probably mocked amusement. Then things grew serious again within the blink of an eye. “Will you grieve for someone you never met?”
A pause, then, “I think so.”
Brecken let out a sigh, holding me closer. “Good.”
We sat like that for what felt like an eternity. I was happy to be wrapped in her loving warmth. Eventually, though, she let go, and I sat up straighter beside her. Her chocolate eyes stared urgently into my own.
“Have you found a game to play yet?” I shook my head. “Well, I have one for you.”
Brecken grasped my hands tightly, and for the first time a look of grim seriousness marred her features. “This is a quest from the Galactic Guardians.”
Galactic Guardians, the heroes of the universe, the heroes of Brecken’s imagination. I leaned forward closer, interested in the mission she had for me.
“I’ll be leaving soon, to do work in Africa. Your mother needs a hero now more than ever, and unfortunately I can’t stay to be that hero.” Her eyes flashed. “You need to be her Shy Sky and Jarod. Her friend and savior. Do you accept this quest?”
I thought on it for a moment. I quickly came to the realization that this ‘game’ was real, that it was a thing of imaginary play. Brecken was leaving. Mother needed a hero, and she had no one left but me. When I didn’t respond, Brecken repeated, “Will you be her Jarod?”
“Yes. I accept this task.” The words came out more shakily than I intended. She smiled, but it wasn’t her normal, friendly, warming smile, but a sad one. A farewell smile.
A blue smile.
She hugged me, and I felt her shaking against me. My arms easily found their way around her, my face buried in her bosom.
“When do you leave?” I asked, afraid what the answer might be. Her grip on me tightened.
“Tomorrow. My plane leaves tomorrow.”
A part of me me wanted to demand why she didn’t tell us sooner, give us a warning, but I said nothing, remembering how good Brecken was to us, how much she changed our lives. My life.
“I’ll miss you…” I choked out, forcing back the tears that threatened to come. Brecken pulled away slightly, hands resting on my shoulders. She forced a comforting smile.
“And I’ll miss you, dear. I’ll write you and your mom always. Remember to always be Jarod. Remember to be Shy Sky.”
The next day, she left. When I went to my room after she was gone, I found a note on my bed, written in her familiar handwriting and decorated with drawings of blue beads.
Remember, there’s beauty in everything bad, no matter how horrible or painful. There is beauty in the desert.
ns 15.158.61.12da2
