A Window to the World, Scene 1

 

The desert both fascinated and frightened Kitty.

Every time her family came to Nevada, Kitty’s ten-year-old brother Jack would say in an affected voice, “The desert is teeming with life.”  It was a joking reference to Mr. Henry, Kitty’s science teacher.  In addition to running a fire lab every year that gave the principal sweats in more ways than one, Mr. Henry liked to quote nature programs.  Most of the quotes weren’t worth more than a groan and an eye roll, but this one…this one made sense to Kitty.  She liked how she could look for miles and see nothing but the occasional cactus when, all around her the desert was—well, teeming with life.  Just life she couldn’t necessarily see.  Underneath the rocks, underneath the needles on the cactus, even in the sand beneath her very feet.  “Life finds a way,” Jack would conclude in a fake creepy whisper, this time quoting Jurassic Park.  And here in the scorching Nevada heat was the proof.

Life did find a way.

Kitty shielded her eyes against the sun and gazed out at the road.  No car was coming.  No car was ever coming, it seemed, except their own when Kitty, Jack, and their mother drove in from the airport for their annual visit to Aunt Jessica (why that visit always had to take place during the hottest month of the year Kitty could never quite figure out).  Aunt Jessica was only two years older than their mother, but after twenty years of baking in the desert sun her skin now resembled the cracked leather of Jack’s old cowboy boots.  She also wore too much perfume and teased her ginger hair too high.  But she was fun, and she was kind—both qualities Kitty knew not to take for granted.

Aunt Jessica’s pre-breakfast cigarette had driven Kitty out of the double-wide trailer in which Aunt Jessica lived, past the outer limits of the small trailer community.  For a little while, at least, Kitty could explore the desert before the sun drove her back to the trailer again.  She could have gone with Jack and a couple of the neighborhood kids to the trailer park’s community pool but the kids were Jack’s age.  At nearly sixteen years old Kitty found she no longer possessed the same tolerance for horseplay and fart jokes she had in years past.

So here she was, outside at 8:32 a.m., on their second to last day at Aunt Jessica’s.

Up until now the trip had gone pretty much like all the ones before it.  Mom and Aunt Jessica sat in the trailer, watching soap operas and crowding near the little air conditioner, while Kitty and Jack amused themselves--in Kitty’s case with her acoustic guitar, or latest knitting project.  It wasn’t very exciting but it wasn’t bad, either.  Aunt Jessica made the best BLT ever, and she told funny stories about her waitressing days in Los Angeles, before she married the first of her three husbands and somehow wound up living in a trailer in the Nevada desert.  After the third divorce Aunt Jessica swore she would never get married again, but Kitty had noticed one of the neighbors—a quiet, balding man in his fifties—hanging around, offering to tune up Aunt Jessica’s air conditioning unit.   Kitty had asked her mother about it, but she hadn’t noticed him.  Her mother didn’t notice a whole lot sometimes.

Kitty squatted down to examine a delicate flower seemingly out of place in the harsh desert environment.  It looked terribly exotic compared to the flowers the neighbors grew in the suburb of Milwaukee, where Kitty lived with her mother and Jack.  They never planted flowers of their own, because her mother’s job at the school district didn’t pay enough for non-essential items like marigolds or geraniums.  Her mother had never finished college, and after she was left with two children to support all on her own…well, there wasn’t much of an opportunity to take classes then, either.  That meant no flowers, no paint, no pretty decorations.  Their slowly deteriorating house occasionally embarrassed Kitty, now that she old enough to notice it.  There just wasn’t anything she could do about it. 

As for Kitty's mother, she spent most of her free time watching old movies on television.  As long as Kitty got decent grades at school, her mother seemed content to let her live her life exactly how she pleased.  Or at least how she’d lived it so far, anyway.  Ever since the accident, Kitty hadn’t done much.  Her friends from grade school had long since drifted away.  Sure, she knew a few kids well enough to have lunch with at school, and occasionally she was even invited to a party.  But the shadow permanently cast over her five years ago made true friendship difficult.  The longer she stayed removed from her classmates, the harder it became to cross the ever-widening gulf that separated them.