Edna in the Desert

  Johnny moved a lot as he weaved around the cactus and the brush. He was good at it. She tried not to hold onto him too tightly, but it was a fine line between that and staying on the bike. Going over a bigger bump, she felt his muscles flex as he steadied it. She became lightheaded. It could have been hunger. She hadn’t eaten a thing since she threw up the pistachio nuts.

  Soon Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin glowed in the dusk ahead. A battle unfolded in the sky as the blue night rose up behind the hills and devoured the glowing band of pink above it. With the vision, the bike’s noise and Johnny’s torso, euphoria radiated through Edna. She’d never felt this alive before. She’d never get lost in the desert again, but this one time it was worth it.

  Cars were parked around her grandparents’ cabin, and boys and men loaded dirt bikes onto a flatbed. As they got closer, Edna noticed a sheriff’s car.

  “Is that the police?”

  “Your grandmother had to call someone. She couldn’t exactly find you by herself.”

  Johnny sped up in a clearing. What Grandma would do when she found Edna missing hadn’t occurred to her because it wasn’t supposed to matter. She’d jumped way ahead to her funeral.

  As they pulled up to the cabin, a flash went off.

  “Hi, Tom,” Johnny said.

  “Great get,” the man taking pictures answered.

  They coasted past Grandpa, still in his chair on the dimly lit porch. Edna didn’t like that everyone could see there was something wrong with her grandfather, but it was a lesser concern of the moment; she had Grandma to think about. She didn’t have the energy left to be as afraid of her as she might have been earlier. Johnny remarked that it looked like Edna had made the newspaper on her first day in the desert, and Grandma replied that it didn’t take much to get into The Desert Weekly. She didn’t look at Edna. Edna found this unnerving. An older man in a sheriff’s uniform approached.

  “So you’re our Edna?”

  “Yes. Thank you for finding me,” Edna answered in a voice that sounded so sweet she wasn’t familiar with it.

  “I’m Sheriff Wegman, young lady, and I hope you’ve learned not to go out into the desert alone without telling anybody ever again. You got a lot of people very concerned, especially your grandparents.”

  It was not the congratulations for surviving that Edna had expected. Frankly she found it rude, considering what she’d just been through. People may have been concerned, but was that really important? She had almost died. Usually she would have pointed this out, along with the fact that it was not her “grandparents,” plural, who were concerned about her, because her grandfather was practically a vegetable and hadn’t been concerned about anything in years. Also, “a lot of people” depends on what you mean by “a lot.” There were only about fifteen people here, at the most.

  Instead, Edna took the reprimand silently. She was following her new strategy of shutting up, especially since this was happening in front of Johnny. Actually, she was hiding behind his shoulder. He didn’t step away to give them any privacy, and when she thought about it later, she decided that he was protecting her.

  “I won’t do it ever again,” Edna promised.

  “It’s a lot of trouble for me to round people up to go looking for somebody, and then other stuff that needs our attention, well, maybe it doesn’t get it, you understand?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “You’re lucky you were found, and before dark. Plenty of people die like that. Plenty of people! Don’t frighten your grandmother like that again,” he reiterated as he got into his car.

  “I won’t, sir.”

  She’d already said so, but she didn’t remind him of that. Edna had never used “sir” with any sincerity before. People who’d never met her before probably couldn’t tell, but her mother would have detected sarcasm. In any case, Edna meant what she said, and she was not particularly proud of herself. She got off Johnny’s bike.

  “Don’t worry about him, he has to say that stuff,” Johnny told her, and he drove over to the flatbed.

  Grandma did not seem at all emotional over Edna’s return, in spite of how worried Johnny and Sheriff Wegman reported she had been. She told Edna to come inside for dinner. Everyone was going home now that Edna was found, not celebrating like she somehow felt they should be. A party would have been inappropriate, but at the same time Edna wished for some way to rejoice over her miraculous rescue and meeting Johnny. He drove his bike up the ramp and onto the truck. He looked strong tying it off. Edna was impressed that he did it by himself. She didn’t know that many older boys.

  “How did you get lost in the desert today, Edna?”

  The local reporter was just doing his job, but Edna didn’t appreciate the interruption of her thoughts.

  “I went for a walk. I’m not from here.”

  “Oh, where are you from?”

  “Brentwood.”

  “Brentwood, California?”

  “Yes. L.A.”

  The interview continued without much of Edna’s attention, as most of it was on Johnny. If she’d thought about it, she’d have known he’d leave as soon as she was safely home, but it made no sense at the moment. Johnny finished rigging his bike. Edna wandered away while the reporter was mid-question and drifted over to the flatbed. She had to have another word with Johnny. She could only think of, “Johnny, thank you.”

  “No worries.”

  She added, “Thank you, everybody.”

  A few of the boys waved from the cab of a truck, and one said, “We’re glad you’re safe.” Johnny got into another truck. Moments later, tire tracks in the dirt were all that was left of the incident. It was dark and incredibly quiet.

  Edna was safe from thirst and snakes and dead coyotes. She’d learned that the desert was a threatening place. Her grandparents’ cabin might as well be an island she was stranded on in a treacherous ocean. She turned back to Grandma, but Grandma had already gone inside. Edna followed her. Her euphoric feeling completely evaporated once she stepped into the cabin. She noticed there were only two places set at the table.

  “Is Grandpa going to eat with us?”

  Grandma waved her hand to express that he would not.

  “Sit down, Edna.”

  Edna had been on an emotional roller coaster all day, but she’d just have to hang on a little longer for whatever Grandma had in store. Bracing herself, she kept in mind that she had a lot to be grateful for recently, like meeting Johnny, drinking water and not being dead, and she added the fact that dinner was not Spam to that list. Grandma sat across from her and said a barely audible prayer. Edna just sat there and waited. She was starving.

  “I don’t know what this stubbornness of yours is all about,” Grandma told Edna, then she went silent and started eating.

  Grandma didn’t say anything else. Given that Edna had ripped up Grandma’s list, run away and the police had to be called, Edna was expecting some kind of lengthy lecture peppered with examples of others who’d gotten lost in the desert and died. But Grandma just looked at her plate and ate her vegetables and ham. Not being “spoken to” was nice, if bizarre. Edna couldn’t wrap her mind around it. If there wasn’t going to be a lecture, then polite conversation during a meal was mandatory. And yet so much time passed since Grandma’s one uttered phrase, there was no denying it: that was all Grandma was going to say.

  Got it, Grandma. You do not know what my stubbornness is all about.

  It became a more interesting statement when Edna repeated it in her head, because she didn’t really know what it was all about either.

  7

  EXILE

  Edna decided against any further attempts at ending her life, though the suffering might be great. “I’m going to kill myself!” was a terrible figure of speech, and from now on it was as bad as profanity. Edna had learned from getting lost in the desert: No matter how dire things seem, they could always improve, so you might as well stick around. You never know when someone might drive up on a dirt
bike.

  But life at the cabin was challenging, even armed with a new philosophy. Edna faced empty stretches of time, broken up mostly by silent meals and reading stories about pioneer women before going to sleep. It hadn’t been made quite clear to Edna that her grandmother never went anywhere, even though those were the exact words her mother had used. “Never going anywhere” to Edna still meant going to school every day and to all kinds of activities, lessons, doctors’ appointments and shopping. She had no model in her life for “never going anywhere” as literally as it was meant in Grandma’s case. Grandma just ate and slept with Grandpa as the sun went up and down.

  She felt guilty for not at least calling Brit, but if people were having a good time, Edna didn’t want to know about it. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, and definitely not on Grandma’s landline. She was still new at her school; people would think she was weird. Everyone else’s grandparents were on Facebook. Edna couldn’t say anything about her grandparents’ cabin or explain why she was stuck there. The cabin wasn’t even in a town; it was in an unincorporated territory ineptly named “Dream Valley.” Edna thought this must have been some kind of joke, unless it referred to the fact that you’d hope you were only dreaming if you were there. It was more likely a nightmare. The whole situation was better cloaked in mystery, and that’s how Edna decided to leave it.

  Daydreaming was the best thing to do in Dream Valley, and Edna did it a lot. Mostly she daydreamed about Johnny: what his house was like, what he ate, if he was riding his dirt bike and if he ever thought about her. In what Edna referred to as “the real world,” she would have already friended Johnny on Facebook and found out everything about him online. She’d be able to see pictures of him and what his friends looked like. If he said where he was going, she might be able to go there too and see him again. Stripped of any electronic means of investigation and living on the edge of nowhere, Edna was powerless to create any such coincidence or even message him, if she dared. She had no idea what girls did in past centuries when they liked a boy.

  Unstructured time was foreign to Edna, and she sat on the porch, giving herself assignments like counting how many live scrub brushes she could see, as opposed to how many dead ones. Johnny was right: there were a lot of dead things in the desert. She’d never noticed that before. She thought about how the tall eucalyptus trees could only live by the cabin because where people lived, there was more water in the ground. Otherwise, Joshua trees were the only things around you’d consider a tree. They were scarce and short, as trees go. Their green spikes sprouted out in all directions, and they were more like little swords than leaves. Joshua trees were whimsical, but at the same time sad to Edna, who missed the kind of towering trees she was used to. A chubby cousin of the Joshua tree was the Yucca. Hedgehog and beavertail cactus looked like their names. Grandma had some in her garden of rocky paths surrounded by chicken wire. The creosote bushes added patches of green to the sandy flatness all around. The dry air felt clean. Edna liked that.

  This was the first time she was aware of having a relationship with a place and not a person. The desert, it turns out, has a will of its own and actively tries to turn everything in it into more desert by sucking it dry, sanding it down, bleaching it beige and blowing it away in the wind. It was like her vomit flaking off on the side of the road but on an infinitely larger scale, smoothing out the rolling hills in the distance as well as drying out Edna’s face and hands. Edna didn’t realize it at the time, but she’d abandoned any strategy to escape this aggressive landscape the moment she saw Johnny. She couldn’t believe she’d stay in Grandma’s cabin in the hopes of getting another glimpse of a boy, with the knowledge that she’d be bored, that she’d have to do chores and they’d be hard. The whole thing was crazy. There was no other way to describe it.

  When she made it back to the real world, she’d describe her summer as a spiritual retreat, even if she couldn’t blog about it. If something couldn’t be validated online, it was almost as if it never happened, but Edna thought spirituality might be an exception to this rule. In any case, spiritual retreats were popular, and everyone she knew called themselves spiritual, no matter what they believed in or how badly they behaved. Once it was over, if she presented this summer the right way, people might actually be jealous. Being spiritual for the purpose of making others jealous was not exactly the noblest reason, but Edna had no other reason at the moment. It was just that and fighting boredom.

  So, she imagined she was a Tibetan monk from the documentary, and without straining to evaporate this time, she challenged herself to sit still for as long as possible. She had no idea why monks did this or if it was any different than what Grandpa did. She brought a chair out to the eucalyptus trees because she thought she remembered that the Buddha sat under a tree, but she had to keep moving to stay in the shade. It broke her concentration. It wasn’t the only thing breaking it. Edna’s body may have been in a chair, but her mind never sat still. She was constantly dreading her circumstances and wishing they would change instead of peacefully reaching nirvana. She tried to remember that time was passing and no matter what, the summer would eventually end, but she couldn’t really believe it, and she sunk into panic attacks. Soon she learned that even within a panic attack, nothing was going to happen around here. She eventually got bored of her panic attacks along with everything else. The only other thing to do, besides freak out, was chores.

  Fortunately chores, according to Grandma’s rules, were self-assigned. The main chore was sweeping-everywhere-all-the-time. It wasn’t fun but it was easy, and if there was any doubt as to whether she should be doing something, Edna could rely on the fact that there was always sand to pick up. Five minutes after she swept it, there it was again. She could lounge on the ugly couch daydreaming about Johnny and then spring into action if she heard Grandma coming. When Edna appeared “productive,” Grandma’s stern gaze slightly softened. It could be minutes or hours between Grandma’s comings and goings, and sometimes Edna fell asleep in the middle of the day. If Grandma noticed, she never said anything. Edna was completely in the dark about Grandma. She had no idea why she preferred a girl to be sweeping rather than reading, or if it was just that she preferred it for Edna.

  Between chores and daydreaming, Edna spent time gazing into the fridge while trying to think of things to do. It was an absentminded habit that was tolerated at home, as her father also indulged in it excessively. Grandma had fruits, vegetables, milk and meat. Her fridge was so uninteresting; it had nothing from an amazing deli and no exotic condiments.

  “Are you crazy? You’re letting the ice melt,” Grandma said, discovering Edna immersed in fridge gazing one morning. “Ice has to last. Groceries only come once a week.”

  The refrigerator looked normal, if extremely old, but it was actually an icebox and not electric. In the heat of the desert, their food staying cold depended on a block of melting ice. Her grandparents’ lifestyle was more like camping than Edna had guessed and probably more than her parents knew. Her mother would never have agreed to leave her there if she knew there was no refrigeration. Jill was terrified of salmonella.

  When the phone rang later, Edna was sure it was one of her parents calling, because her grandparents’ phone never rang. As far as Edna was concerned, she wasn’t on speaking terms with those monsters, but she picked up the phone anyway. Nothing had happened that day after she was yelled at for looking in the fridge.

  “Hello…Mom?”

  Her father’s voice put a lump in her throat. It was annoying that her emotions were so strong lately. Determined to make her parents feel terrible about leaving her there, Edna was conflicted. She had to complain, but if she made too good a case against the cabin, they might change their minds and come get her. She might never see Johnny again. She had no idea if she would anyway. Edna had no idea what she was doing.

  “It’s Edna.”

  “Hi honey, how’s the summer so far?”

  Edna expressed concern over the fact that s
he’d been left in “a slave labor camp” with “no refrigeration” and “no running water,” referring to Grandma and Grandpa’s water that sat in a tank next to their house. She obsessed about what would happen if the water ran out.

  “You don’t sit idly by while water runs out, Edna. It gets delivered,” her father informed her. Edna tried to come up with more things to scare him, like “There are no doctors around here. What if I get hurt?” and “I don’t think Grandma can drive.”

  “She can.”

  “What if the car doesn’t start…and then the phone goes out? The service comes from a cord that runs on poles. It could break. A bird could peck at it.”

  Edna didn’t mention that she’d put herself at greater risk than any of these possibilities by wandering out into the desert, but Edward saw no point in bringing that up or letting on that he knew about it. He replied to all her concerns with variations of “Edna, that’s not going to happen.” He could have a helicopter out there in ten minutes if he wanted, but he let her think she was stranded.

  “Did you grow up in this shack?”

  “That’s not nice, and no, we lived in a house in San Diego. Grandma and Grandpa like it out there.”

  “You realize I’m only thirteen. I think this is against the law.”

  “I don’t think it’s against the law for you to stay with your grandparents for the summer.”

  It was enough to put an end to the subject. Edward hated to do this, but he’d had enough of Edna the way she was. She cried as a last resort, and she was mad at herself for it later. Her performance didn’t make a dent in her father’s hardened heart. She always got lost in the drama, determined to get her own way. She wanted to know that she could go home if she really tried, that she could win, but Edna wasn’t getting much of what she wanted lately.