My mother's name was Iris. She was beautiful like the flower, with deep violet eyes and rich brown hair that traced her spine all the way to her tail bone. Her wide eyes probed with an intensity that bordered on uncomfortable. She made people feel naked, as if all of their secrets were written in their features and only she knew how to read them. But rather than causing the intensely observed to squirm, this naked perception made people spill their most private fears and stories at my mother’s feet, as if the intensity of her gaze made them throw their arms up in surrender; here, have it all. I’ll give you everything, they said. You can see it anyway.
A deep river of intuition ran through her veins too; she could always sense when something large loomed. The month before the great drought hit--the one that no one expected after a waterfall of spring rain--she refused to drink water, as if in solidarity with the parched ground. When she was seven, she made her best friend Lara promise to stop swimming in the little creek that ran between their old farmhouses. The next day two little girls drowned in the Rio Grande, twenty minutes down the road. And then there was the day before her mama left. She woke with a nightmare. Her father had been hanging on the edge of a cliff, the saving link in a chain of Iris and her mother. He had looked toward the sky and away from the abyss, and Iris’ mother slipped through his fingers, falling into the darkness. Iris awoke, screaming, Papa, don’t let her go.
She seemed special to people, I guess. Attracted them like a magnet. They thought her quietly powerful; mysterious, too. It probably helped that she was so beautiful.
When she was ten years old she ran away from home, her light-up sneakers struggling to keep up with her bony little legs as they pounded down the dirt road. Soon they gave in, freeing themselves from her bare feet and pausing to take a rest alongside the dirt road to nowhere. Soon they were forgotten to a life of thirsty repose. But my mother, she never gave in, just kept running as if perpetual motion was an easy reality. She ran until the sun had dipped below the horizon and darkness swept over the desert, until the coyotes and rattlesnakes awoke and began making music.
He found her the next day sleeping in a ditch. Her thick hair was matted with dust and sweat, hiding her face like a veil. My grandfather had come looking for her in his rusty Ford pick-up and was about to send for the local sheriff when he spotted her tiny figure curled up like a rattlesnake, heaving peacefully from one breath to the next. At first, he hadn't even noticed her disappearance. He'd been so busy repairing the fence, and besides, she had always been one to glide around in an almost ghostlike fashion, often disappearing for hours on end and reemerging as discretely as she had vanished. But when she didn't show up for supper, he began to worry.
That night he drove all over Pesa, leaving no stone unturned. By the time the sun came up, every household in that tiny town had heard of his plight, and several had even hopped into their pick-ups to begin their own search for the beautiful little ghost. As the day wore on he drove further and further from town, eventually settling on the dirt road his wife had sped down just a month before, fleeing to God knows what kind of freedom. And, of course, there he found her, curled up in a ditch, smelling of his wife's perfume.
My mother ran away weekly after that, and she stopped bothering with shoes. She used to tell my grandfather that leaving her bare foot print in the desert dirt was the only way she could be sure of her own existence. It was her way of checking that she was real, that she could actually alter the ground underfoot with her own gravity. She burrowed inside herself often and had a hard time distinguishing between the reality of the world around her and the textures of the world she created in her own mind. Her footprints were real, she knew that much. Her own mother’s flight only exacerbated her ghostlike qualities. By the time she hit thirteen, she barely spoke, and nobody could get her to stay in one place for very long. My Grandpa Joe tried hard to stand sentry, especially at night when the inky black of evening spread a safe blanket for unnoticed escape. But he had such a deep respect for personal freedom and independence that he couldn’t push himself to lock her into a house from which she only wanted to be free, a house filled with the smells and echoes of his wife. So when he woke to find her gone, he would trace her footprints in the light of dawn, inching along the road in his rusty Ford. Each time, he found her asleep, curled up like a baby, wearing her mother’s clothes and emanating the sweet scent of her forgotten perfume. His friends gave him unsolicited advice in droves. Find a new mother figure for her, they said. Or put bars on her windows. Take her to a therapist. Send her to juvie. They warned him of the dangers for a girl so beautiful and so small to be wandering the desert at night: a rattlesnake, a dirty old man, a clumsy driver. But my Grandpa Joe knew there was nothing he could do but keep retrieving her from the cradles that she dug in the sand. Except maybe to bring his wife back, but he thought that might be even more impossible than trying to keep Iris from her weekly escapes.
---------------------------------
By fifteen, she left Pesa and Grandpa Joe for good, and no one heard from her for five years. A desert rainstorm of rumors dusted the town like snow, the permeative nature of small town gossip. The speculation was endless: an unplanned pregnancy, a search for her lost mother, a secret lover. Or maybe she was looking for the words she lost when her mother left. None of them could understand why anyone would ever want to leave their sleepy bubble. The same families had lived in the same houses for over a hundred years. The spool of time spun more slowly in Pesa. The fabric it wove was predictable, safe, unwavering. Why flee a blanket for the loneliness of the desert? Or, even worse, the noisy progress of the cities beyond.
Nobody ever left Pesa, except Iris. And Iris’ mother. An itch in their blood, they said. A barefoot curse.
Her father began driving slowly along all of the dirt roads in a 100 mile radius, searching for his sleeping rattlesnake of a daughter. Sometimes he would stop in the middle of the road, leaving his truck to idle, and he’d wander slowly through the cacti, searching for footprints like an archeologist looking for old bones. A sign of her was all he needed. Then he could let her go to the wind. He knew about freedom and how much she needed it. It fed her spirit in giant gulps. Without it, she would wither, shrivel, never find her words again. He called every police department in the state of New Mexico. Have you seen my daughter? She has violet eyes and spine-tracing hair. She’s special, you see. Her name is Iris.
------------------------------------------------
She stumbled up the steps of the old farmhouse one September evening after the clouds had rolled in. The sunset bathed the sky in pink, transforming the overcast horizon into little bursts of cotton candy. An end-of-summer sadness hung in the air as the crickets began to hum, transforming the last drop of daylight into dusk. My Grandpa Joe opened the door, answering a quiet knock. She had a full pack on her back, decorated with the ornaments of survival—brightly colored water bottles, a compass, duct tape, and the small knife she had taken when she left home five years previous. Her long hair fluttered in the night breeze underneath her patterned bandana, revealing the full severity of concern across her small features. Her handmade wraparound dress cascaded in a mishmash of fabrics and colors over her freshly painted purple toes, neatly tucked into a pair of worn, brown sandals. It stretched taut across her belly, which ballooned forward ever-so-slightly with the story of why she’d come home. She was three months pregnant. Two small tears traced the outline of her nose.
She was hitchhiking across the country with her little knife in her right pocket when it happened. She wanted to make it to South America eventually, hop the Darian Gap and keep on going all the way to Tierra del Fuego, have a real adventure in a place where people thought in a different shaped box than the one in Pesa. Even the U.S.’s box was too square for her now, too predictable. She knew the angle of its corners like the back of her hand. Instead, she wanted to live inside a shape that she couldn’t yet make out, a sort of amoeba with an outline that followed a completely different set of geometric rules. Or maybe even a shape with no borders at all. A life without borders seemed like the desert at night to her, vast and swollen. She ached for the desert and its inky sky; it felt like an old lover, buried underneath time but still an influential building block of her present-day self.
But every time she began her journey southward, a driver would pull over, offering the promise of a new American city she hadn’t yet visited: a new chance to search for her mother, who’d surely gone in search of a life of busy cosmopolitanism. She was the type of woman who wanted to go somewhere, who wanted progress. Wifedom, motherhood, sleepy, quiet unchanging days—none of it made sense to her. Why live the life everyone else lived? She wanted to do something, find something, live something.
Iris visited every French pastry shop, small cinema, and rare book store in the cities she landed, searching for her mother’s handprint, her face. These were the things she knew from the one letter she had received with no return address. Every morning her mother bought a chocolate croissant from the French pastry shop underneath her apartment. She couldn’t resist the temptation that wafted in her window at 5 am each day. On Saturday afternoons, she habitually watched a foreign film at the small movie theater around the corner, often Spanish or French but sometimes Italian or Japanese. She made her money working at a rare book shop. She so loved the smell of old books, she wrote. The smell of time and wisdom and words. Iris still had a few drops of her mother’s perfume tucked inside her backpack. Her sense of smell pinpricked when she entered these spaces, searching for the smell of lilies. Lily. Her mother’s name was Lily, beautiful like the flower.
So when Henry pulled over in his small red Toyota and invited her to Memphis with a smile that showed a neat row of shiny teeth, she couldn’t help but say yes. She’d been picked up by every type of good person. She tended towards roads that led somewhere but lackadaisically. No interstates, just mountain roads, scenic ocean routes, old historic highways. The kind of road you take when you have time stretched across your dash board with no definitive end. So the drivers who answered her universal sign language of the thumb tended to be the kind of horizontal wanderers rather than the vertical destination seekers. The process kind of people, often never even reaching whatever product their small journeys hurtled them towards and achieving something fresh, delicate, and complex in their protest against check marks, destinations, and accomplishment. They also tended towards openness, didn’t resent her uncanny power to get people to spill themselves like a large glass of milk. Unlike the people of Pesa, who seemed to surrender themselves to her ears as if by force, her highway companions welcomed her slow unraveling of their carefully knitted selves. She began collecting their stories like rare gem stones in a worn leather notebook with ink smears across the pages.
Henry seemed like a particularly beautiful candidate for her story gathering. He was heading to Memphis to record an album, one he’d been working on for three years. He’d spent three months agonizing over each song, picking them apart painstakingly to ensure that every note, pluck, and mesh of sounds bordered perfection, but of course, never completely reaching it. His mother was Russian, his father Mexican, and he was perfectly American with his slight Southern slowness, that marbles-in-your-mouth way of speaking that is particularly endearing when accompanied by humble intelligence.
He was on a Ph.D. track at Emory University, studying archeology. He was going to be a real Indiana Jones someday, he half-joked. Then his lightness sunk away, his brow furrowed, and he said softly, “I study time’s breadcrumbs. Sometimes they lead you to a story unlike anything you could ever imagine.”
Smart. Handsome. Perceptive. And Young. How could you, Henry?
He pulled over at a truck stop and parked among the dinosaur skeletons of semis. How odd she thought. We are so small in comparison. Why are we hiding in this graveyard? It was growing dark, and the last bits of the sun’s blood rays peeked through the heads of the trees.
He said he would be back shortly and did she want anything? He left the radio to whisper an 80’s pop song that my mother hummed along to absentmindedly. She was thinking of the desert again. Inky dark, like the blots on her pages. She began to scribble what looked like the start of a desert poem, writing with her notebook turned horizontally in her lap, forming a grid with her words and the pre-drawn lines meant to hold her letters tightly, neatly. Writing this way was some unconscious form of rebellion. She didn’t want her desert words confined to lines.
He came back with a bag of potato chips and a cup of coffee. She smiled at him and he smiled back. Slight, sweet, maybe a bud of mutual admiration. It all seemed so innocent.
He put his arm around her shoulder, pulled her briskly toward him, kissed her square on the mouth. It seemed sudden, but she gave into it after the initial shock dissipated. She liked him. Mutual admiration. What a sweet little kiss.
But he didn’t stop. He put his hand on her thigh, on her breast, on her buttons—fumbling, tearing, wanting. She said no. She said no louder. She reached for her small knife, thought of her father because it was his, thought of the desert. He grabbed it before she could pull it from its sheath. He pushed her to the back of the car. She screamed. No one heard. She screamed louder. The dinosaurs did not stir.
But, Henry, she thought. I liked you. This isn’t the way the story was supposed to go.
But then, maybe it didn’t go that way. Henry, the archeologist—respectful, kind, intelligent—drove my mother to Memphis as promised. Asked her to sing her soft harmonies on his album. Took her to dinner at a tiny Russian restaurant, recommended by his mother. Made love to her later under the blanket of a few shots of vodka that had softened their inhibitions. Good, wholesome, right. The way that these things go. Not the unexpected rupture of a backseat rape. He was young and handsome. Why would he? They didn’t believe her in court. So she used the last of her money, saved from a few months of waitressing, to catch a bus to Albuquerque then Taos then Pesa.
------------------------------------------
The small clinic in town couldn’t help her. We believe in life, they said. What about my life? she retorted. They handed her shiny pamphlets filled with options. Adoption may fit your needs well, said the nurse with a pained smile. Or, you could keep the baby. You’re twenty, yes? Old enough, I suppose. You seem capable. I had my first when I was seventeen. It was tough, but worth it. God gave me my little angel. She saved my life.
Saved from what? thought my mother. The burden of a life where you must pave your own road to run down?
I was raped.
The nurse looked at her with a mixture of sympathy and discomfort. Maybe even pity. She hesitated for a moment, choosing her words with care.
Well, honey, all babies are God’s children, even this one. Some things happen for a reason. Maybe this baby’s purpose was to bring you back here, back where you belong.
I was raped because of a man and his greediness. I want nothing to do with this God of yours.
She slammed the door behind her, ripping the pamphlets into tiny pieces in the parking lot and setting them on fire, one by one by one.
The next morning, she asked her father to drive her to Albuquerque. He said yes. They took the Ford. They drove to the end of the dirt road to nowhere, Lily’s road to freedom. It led them somewhere. It led them to Albuquerque.
News of my mother’s return, of her pregnancy and its termination (their euphemistic term for that sinful act) soaked into the sponge of Pesa’s ear, fed its hunger for news, excitement, misfortune. She hadn’t changed much really, her words still careful and few, her footsteps soft, her features small and elven, maybe even more beautiful in their maturity. Except her voice, it had changed. The breathiness that had once dimmed its volume to a whisper had disappeared. Her vocal chords had exercised, bulked up with courage and knowledge. With them she shattered her ghostliness, her mysticism, and the pedestal she stood on. Her fall from grace. Doors shut in her face when she called on old friends and acquaintances. She wanted to add their stories to her notebook, use her time back home to collect more gem stones, maybe string them together into a bracelet. But gone were the days when they surrendered their nakedness. Not to her, the runaway, the murderer. She was painted red, tainted, tarred and feathered. She couldn’t even get a job at the local diner.
My father was a ranch hand. He helped my Grandpa Joe with the cattle and the hay, one of only a few employees that he could afford. My grandfather was having a harder time turning a profit than he used to. The days of small scale farming seemed numbered in a way that made no sense to him. Maybe he was just tired, an older 57 than he should have been. Deep wrinkles braided his face with the story of worry.
Somehow my mother couldn’t bring herself to leave Pesa after it shunned her. Maybe, in a very human way, she longed for its acceptance, missed her place as the beautiful little ghost. Maybe after what had happened, she no longer found herself rooting for innate human goodness; it scared her, made her want to hide. The kindness of so many strangers had been corrupted by the cruelty of one.
She started helping her father with the farm, asking questions about the ins and outs of cattle ranching, thirsty for some sort of new knowledge in a place that was too worn and predictable. That’s how she met Bobby, my father. They used to catch each other’s curious stares; the caught turning away from the catcher, embarrassed, hurried—an awkward game of cat and mouse. They had known each other in school, of course; it was the type of town where outsiders were so rare that a stranger would turn heads, stir the gossip pot. Near nothing, on the way to nowhere. That was Pesa.
But he was a few years older, and they’d never talked much, never known each other as more than faces and names. He was handsome, kind, simple, strong. He looked nothing like Henry.
They were married within six months, and she got pregnant six months later. She named me Zinnia, adding to the line of delicate flower names ironically pinned to women who were anything but floral. We tore our petals off, like we tore off our shoes. At least mine was tagged with a more appropriate drop of spunk.
She had left home before I learned to walk. My own dad never talked about it much to me, but I caught puzzle pieces of the story from the various voices of my childhood, a little line of men whose wives had kicked their shoes to the curb and ran. My grandfather and my father were both good, hard-working men; yet, they’d somehow managed to lose their wives to this uncanny disease of flight. They called it a disease, anyway, sometimes a plague. Neither ever remarried either, both too exhausted with heartache. They had loved with their bones and the marrow inside them. That sort of depth is not easily shaken.
So I was raised by two good men who taught me to drive a tractor and braid my hair on the same day. They let me play with Barbie’s and toy trucks, taught me how to shoot a shot gun and bake a pie. So egalitarian it was almost radical, but it wasn’t like they were trying. They just wanted to fill the holes left by my mother and grandmother, add the feminine in with the masculine. Both were valid and important. Both were necessary. I used to ride my bike to the Rio Grande and swim in a section of flat water, listening for my mother’s voice to echo off the canyon wall above me. My grandfather had told me that she loved to swim there, so I searched for her memory in the water, hoping it might overtake me, make me like her. Iris, I would whisper to my toes and the minnows that floated around them. What did I do? I didn’t inherit their beauty or their grace. My eyes are small and squinty, my hands and shoulders too large to be girlish or delicate. I have my mother’s hair though and her violet eyes. I think it makes my father sad sometimes. But what can you do other than be who you are, even if it reminds them of someone who runs.
But, you see, I don’t run like they did; I dance instead, painting pictures with my toes in the sand and walking slowly along the dirt roads, always home in time for supper. I can’t quite see what there is to run from; I mean, moving like that from one mark to another, it makes you want to move forever, search for something you may never find. I like to move about the space I live in, circling it, exploring it, feeling it. I think Grandpa and Papa can see it. I think it makes them sigh with relief.
But the search, I do understand that. How can I not be curious about the women that are responsible for my existence? What if we have the same laugh? What if they bite their lips when they concentrate just like I do, sometimes chewing too hard and causing a small dash of blood to smear across my bottom lip? What if meeting them gives the textures of my character more meaning, more explanation?
But I never had to go searching. The phone rang late one night; Grandpa Joe answered. I could hear his muffled tears all the way in the attic. Lily, he whispered in the dark. Lily, lily, lily. chanting her name as if he were casting a quiet spell to wish her back into existence. I shuffled down the carpeted stairs and slipped into the living room, where he sat at a desk, looking like a ghost of himself. A single candle burned in front of him. I flipped on the light switch and the ceiling fan began to whir. The bright yellow and blue walls of the living room seemed too bright for this moment. They offended me. I wanted them to fade in respect.
What, Grandpa?
I knew what.
His silvery hair had fallen across his face. He stared at the candle with fascination and intention. Tears slid down his cheeks, dripping off his nose and down his chin. He didn’t wipe at them. He didn’t make a sound. The candle was Lily-scented.
-----------------------------------------
She had been living in a mental institution in Oregon. She’d been there for five years, since the day she tried to jump off a bridge into the Willamette. The diagnosis was schizophrenia. It was an odd thought, my grandmother crazy, cuckoo, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. Inflicted with a sort of bug that burrowed into her brain, made her see the world in a way that made existence different and miserable. A way that I hoped I would never understand.
My Grandpa’s heart was shattered. It was one thing that she had left him, wanted a life with vibrancy and new ness. It was another that she had been living in pain and isolation, and he hadn’t been there to help. I could see how heavy his eyes were with guilt; their normal blue had faded to grey. The hospital had said she killed herself. She’d stopped responding to therapy, didn’t want to take her medication. She had been lost in another world. She fell in a hole and didn’t have the strength to claw back out.
My Grandpa didn’t ask very many questions. He didn’t talk much at all after that. His wife was crazy; he had not known. He knew now; she was dead. Plain, simple, the cut-and-dry facts. No need to make this more complicated.
They sent her back to Pesa, back to the place she ran from. She was wearing a pearl necklace.
Her eyes were closed, and she was still beautiful.
My mother came back too. She had a dream about her mother: she’d been rowing down a river on a makeshift raft, and my grandmother floated by in a canoe. She had no oars, her face serene and vacant. She didn’t speak. Her eyes were closed. My mother knew when she awoke that something had happened.
She searched for her obituary online, found it in the Pesa Gazette. She had no choice, she said, bought a one way ticket from Anchorage to Albuquerque. It had been very cold and snowing when she left. She told me that the snot in her nose kept freezing as she walked from her car to the airport terminal; her tears stuck to her eyelashes. She didn’t call to say she was coming, just knocked on the farmhouse door with her adorned backpack. This time she wasn’t pregnant, and her long black hair was painted with a few stray gray hairs. My father let out a sigh of relief when he opened the storm door to let her in, stopping her with a long embrace. I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to write a paper about my mother.
She bit her lip when I looked up.
--------------------------------------
She and my father talked for an entire day, sitting on the back porch in rocking chairs and sipping on bad beer. I walked by every once in a while to steal a piece of their conversation, taking the puzzle pieces and setting them in my pocket to piece together on a rainy day. The pictures I had seen of her didn’t convey the slight glow that emanated from her skin and the sense of vulnerability and trust that overcame me when she looked me square in the eyes and asked about school, hobbies, friends. This strange woman who had left me so young suddenly seemed like a vital portion of my existence. She asked me my favorite color and what book I was reading. She wanted to know if I had a boyfriend, if I’d ever wandered the desert at night. I told her about my dancing, and her face came alive with laughter. I want to see, she said. I bet it’s beautiful.
I always thought I would be a little angry and betrayed. I’d even imagined making her feel guilty for the heartache of my father and my grandfather, for leaving me to grow into womanhood without a woman to talk to. But her genuine goodness overtook me and turned my disdain into wishfulness. Will she stay? I wanted her to, to brush my hair at night and talk to me about Argentina, Memphis, and Cuba. I wanted to run into the desert with her barefoot and dance under the stars and the moonlight, a sort of picture-perfect image of mother and daughterhood. Something like the movies paint.
But the movies aren’t real.
I don’t think so.
No, the movies aren’t real.
--------------------------------------
But then, maybe they are real. Reality. Who’s to say there’s only one?
Maybe, instead, I left the summer I turned 17, just before I was supposed to go to college at UNM. Maybe I told my father and my grandfather that I was going to find my mother and my grandmother and bring them back to their good, hard-working men. My father cried but said he understood and gave me a peanut butter sandwich and a bag of carrots just before I boarded the greyhound. I hopped buses all the way to New York City, which was large and loud and disruptive, bordering between unpleasant and magical. I got off the bus in China town and took the subway to the Empire State Building, waiting in line with tourists who were mostly wearing t-shirts with pictures of New York City on them. Most of them looked bored and impatient. My palms were sweating.
I surveilled the city from the top, trying to make out the faces of the ants that scattered the little tunnels between buildings. I breathed in deep gusts of wind, filling my lungs with wild air and courage. My palms stopped sweating.
I met my mother at a coffee shop in Brooklyn. She had sent me a letter with her phone number when I turned 16, the only letter she’d ever written me. It came inside a package with a sun dress and some lipstick. For your party, she wrote.
She’d asked me to visit her, try living in New York for the summer. She said she worked at a publishing company, that she was the editor-in-chief. I could intern, make a little money. We could go see a musical and eat gelato afterwards. We could watch foreign films and drink coffee and talk about my future. She smiled when I walked in the door. Her eyes were unmistakable. Iris, beautiful like the flower.
--------------------------------------
Maybe she told me that she had found her own mother living in India, run off to a sort of hippie existence. She taught yoga and spoke Hindi. My grandmother had sent a letter asking her to visit just after I was born. She couldn’t tell her father; it would break his heart. That’s why she’d gone.
Don’t you understand Zinny, love? I needed to see her. After that, I couldn’t go back, not to Pesa. There was no place for me there. I had to find a place where I fit. I needed room to breathe. Don’t you understand?
Yes, mother. She smelled like rain, in a good way. I wanted her to hug me, but she didn’t. I wanted her to say sorry, but she didn’t. It was okay, though, because she was here and she was beautiful and smiling and telling me that she was happy I was here. It was okay because I knew where she was and my grandmother was alive and she wasn’t going to leave me because I came to her, and I would go to school in New York instead of New Mexico and study dance at the Alvin Ailey School and learn to dance like you’re supposed to, not like you dance in the desert at night when no one is watching but maybe a being on another planet peering from a bright dot in the night sky. And in time she would hug me and say she was sorry and even go back to New Mexico the next summer to visit her husband and father and sit on the porch sipping bad beer and talking ten years into an entire day.
Or maybe Henry never raped her, so she never came home in the first place, so she never married my father, so I never existed, and she made it to Tierra del Fuego. Then what? Maybe.