For weeks, my granddaughter Globe has asked her thousands of piblings and the roadrunners and the mule deer and the jays in the hills to wait until the seventh day of the seventh week, when the first light of starrise touches the glass above our heads, to sigh warmly into the sky. The way we might breathe fog onto glass.
On that morning, I wake her early to prepare the patio with our breakfast, raincoats and rainboots, one pair of binoculars for each. When the moment comes, we join the chorus, me holding onto Globe’s wrist like I might a balloon overeager to rise. Over our own breath, we can hear the collective ahh of her piblings, and when the land is quiet again, Globe pins the binoculars to her eyes, scanning from point to point along the horizon, the sky all lavender or mauve, in search of a newly-seeded cloud stained pink. Our collective moisture and heat condensating in the sky, the first cycle of a dynamic and unpredictable climate in this new home: the end of her quest. She searches every reach of the sky, but nothing has changed. She throws her binoculars into a prickly pear where it is peppered—armored—with violent and beautiful spines, and then her piblings emerge from their houses, lowering their heads when they see her, as if they have all done her wrong.
They apologize to one another for the lack of weather, but she always says it a little louder.
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Today I’ll grandparent by bedhead. When Globe wakes, I’ll decide how to seed the day with novelty by the way her bangs fall across her forehead. This is all I have: to leave her with little uncertain gifts she’ll someday mourn for having lost. Love even more because she never could puzzle them out.
When Globe opens the door to my bedroom, the house’s air shifts as though I need a reminder she is the center of my weather.
She yawns. Her hair falls capriciously to the left.
I wish I knew what that meant.
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After a year of bureaucratic hand-wringing Globe gets permission to empty one of the vast cisterns of stored water to flood our makeshift desert. On the day it happens, all her piblings come to line the excavator-carved path the water is designed to snake through the boughs of ocotillo and the cotton candylike flowers from the desert willows that are barely older than Globe. Someone makes a speech. A camera pans to record the completion of my granddaughter’s task. She turns the handle that evacuates the cistern, spraying forth a cumulus of spray, sending all the visitors scrambling for cover. From the platform, with my hands around her, afraid she’ll find cause to jump in, we watch the water wind its way into the new desert, for hours, long after everyone has departed and the sky turns the color of saguaro fruit. Both the big and small moons pass overhead once, twice, three times, each time guided by one of the three brothers who bear the blue lanterns, each time showing us just how nothing has changed.
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Because the black-suited phainopeplas mobbed south this morning instead of east or north or west, Globe and I play a board game her mother and I used to play on our long journey here. We work together to build a garden resilient enough to survive the light from a star that keeps getting hotter. She loves the uncertainty of picking cards and rolling the dice, all worn in their corners—she doesn’t know they once belonged to her mother. The ones we used to hold in our ends when we had nothing but each other.
It’s all to tell her about the total eclipse. “It won’t last very long, maybe a minute, but I won’t ever be able to see it again.”
“What’s so special about an eclipse?”
“Totality,” I say, as though that explains itself. Her eyes linger on mine. “It means the big moon will cover up the entire star, creating a massive shadow that tracks across the desert. It’s so rare I’ll never see it again, and you might not either, so we’ll do our best to be in just the right spot to catch it. The real jackrabbits might poke their heads out, thinking it’s nighttime.”
She turns her eyes to the game, makes a move, plants some peas, draws a card, keeps on cultivating.
“Maybe it’s so rare neither of us will see it again,” she says, and I know what she’s trying to say, but I’m her grandfather, not her mother; I have no claim to the hope our lives will intersect more than a few years. That was someone else’s job.
Later, when she laughs off our loss like it’s a warning against our entire lives and I’m packing up the game, she whispers: totality.
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On the trip here through empty space, my daughter rest her cheek on my shoulder and her palms on her daughter’s unborn head. The craft kept spinning, the galaxy’s brightest stars casting light and shadow across her face. Light and shadow. When I asked her why she kept her pregnancy from me, she said I would’ve called the whole thing off, kept her lassoed to the burning world we ended up leaving behind. She would’ve been right.
Then there we were, sailing through the uncertainty of emptiness.
Light and shadow as we spun.
Light and shadow.
Constant eclipses.
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Because the coffee maker beeps before it finishes brewing, I let Globe skip school so she can watch the scheduled and manufactured snowstorm accumulate in our backyard. I tell her about back home, how weather was always uncertain. Every day we would wake up and stumble into golden hours and cirrus circuses and record rainshowers and first happy gasps of a monsoon in July. We struggled with the difference between partly and mostly cloudy and could never understand what 40-percent chance of precipitation truly meant. When we got caught out in an unexpected downpour, we’d feel either furious or freed.
I say, “They got better at predictions over time, but to do it perfectly, they would need to understand the entire closed, fluid system of the planet. That’s just too much—the origin of every raindrop, where every breeze got its start, the shape of every snow—”
“Are all things certain?”
I laugh.
Hides her face beneath the blankets. “Tell me I’m wrong if I’m wrong, but don’t laugh.”
“Sometimes things are so sad they seem—”
“Maybe they couldn’t understand the whole planet, but what about one person? We have to be simpler than that.”
“If that were true, I could’ve prepared,” I say.
Globe cyclones her arms around herself.
I leave her with a story of how, when her mother was just a child, we would stand in the backyard and wait, patient and without judgment, to see what awning of pink would delight us by warming the west. No two were ever the same.
Outside, a palm tree curtsies its fronds and spills its slurried headstone of snow.
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Globe digs a hole in the earth until she uncovers the shell of the great desert tortoise on whose back we all ride. She translates her request into a sequence of knocks in Morse, a chain of dits and dahs she’s been practicing for weeks. Her knuckles on the floor, the walls, her dinner plates as she waits. I follow along for the first hundred words, then get distracted by a mule deer gnawing on the freshest arm of a cholla, spines and all, and never find my way back into the cadence of her request, which takes her all day to recite. One pibling comes to watch, then another, then a third. One of them holds an umbrella over her, a dark and joyous cloud, the kindest gesture they know to impart. The land shakes, like the desert tortoise is waking from an epochlong slumber, and the phainopeplas all scurry into their air, their black suits glowing in the small moon’s light, but then everything goes still except the quiet weeping of the piblings who listened to my granddaughter’s story all the way to its end. The birds land on their perches. Everyone goes home.
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I wait in the kitchen for the crack of Globe’s door and the shift in the air, but it never comes, and when I check her bedroom, it’s empty. I run around the residences in my bare feet shouting her name until her piblings stop me and lead me, handing me off from one to the next, to the victory garden, where I’ve always left two plots—mine and my daughter’s—fallow. Globe is tilling her mother’s plot, the one labeled with the name we’ve never spoken to one another, pulling and discarding the weeds grown from my neglect. I watch from the fence that keeps mule deer out as she casts wildflower seeds—brittlebush and globemallow and lupine and gravel ghost and fairy duster—over the dampened soil.
When she sees me watching, she asks, “Will you water them?”
“We will,” I say.
She stirs at her seeds with the bow rake while wearing the slightest of smiles, like this is the solution to the closed, static cycle we live in now. Planting as a gift to the unpredictable tomorrows. The air we all breathe. An antecedent to weather—the destination I’m meant to carry her into. The only problem is that living things are not closed systems like this new desert or the planet we left behind. We are flowing fluids and heartbeat tides that unreliably absorb the starlight. We commit our bodies to terrible consequences, like leaving home and dragging our families along with us. Our brains, a Coriolis of improbable inertias, keep fledging despite impassable fronts. We are temperamental. We give to temperature.
Globe and I hold the watering hose together. She’s not quite strong enough to work it herself. Not yet.
Totality, she whispers. Totality.
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Globe asks the phainopeplas to create an updraft. To grasp the warm air beneath their wings and carry it up to where the sky ends in glass, deposit it there, collect a wingful of cool air and deposit it low among the cacti and curious mule deer. The phainopeplas cyclone for three hours, and my granddaughter asks for seven more. At thirteen, they ask when they’ll be able to stop, but she promises nineteen and no more. Piblings start bringing handfuls of desert mistletoe plucked from their mesquites, bugs they’ve found in their gardens and stored in glass jars just in case, because anything just might have a purpose. After twenty-three hours, a wind picks up at our backs, and after thirty-three, they all collapse on the ground and refuse to move any longer. I look over at Globe, who has her hands clasped tight and a smile on her face, two shapes she holds all the way home, even after I tuck her in and say goodnight, a determination that leads even me to believe that come morning her palms will be trellised in the softest of hominy snow.
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On the walk home from school we stop to see pallbearers carrying a body toward the Gila monsters to be recycled into the soil. Bones into fertilizer. Blood into roots of the maize we share.
“Do you think Mom made it back to the Gila monsters?” Globe asks.
“It’s the same result either—yes, I think so.”
“I don’t like it. The idea of being used up like that. It’s like the person never happened at all.”
“I think it’s beautiful,” I say. “It’s the last quest we fulfill, when we’re freed from worrying about the rest.”
Globe takes my hand. I tell her how back home, the world she’s never known, people buried themselves in boxes. Hardwood, metal, concrete. Keep the land from touching them for as long as possible, like they might still cough up another breath. I’d always wanted to be cremated. Burned into a handful of ash. Globe asks why.
“I liked the idea of someone letting me go into the wind. Who knows, maybe I would’ve become a cloud.”
Globe goes quiet. Once the procession passes, she sprints home, leaving me far, far behind. A rock, having flown so far, having mostly burned up in the atmosphere, plinks on the glass far above our heads and tumbles its way toward the ground beyond our reach, a red-hot and irretrievable wonder.
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Because there’s been six short brownouts today instead of the usual long two, and because the monsoon is predicted for this afternoon, manmade by control systems and a lattice of sprinklers above our heads, I grandparent by surprise. I pick up Globe from school with a mechanical jackrabbit. We skitter onto the roads faster than I’d like, and Globe asks me to be careful, but the jackrabbit wants to sprint and I don’t have the heart to demand it go slow. It veers to avoid a thatch of cholla, or carriage teetering on the edge of collapsing, just before righting and finding traction and bearing down on the road’s dead end, where the still-unclaimed desert begins.
Globe unbuckles herself and falls backward into the sand. I’m not there in time to catch her.
“That was scary,” she says, wiring her knees and palms. Corrects the record: “I’m scared.”
The smell of creosote that precedes a downpour is our signal to crawl beneath the jackrabbit’s belly. Just above us, its metal heart still sails. LED arrays flash false lightning and speakers rumble with thunder, the bare suggestion of danger. Globe still holds my hand. The jackrabbit turns its metal nose toward the sky in what looks like reverence. When the rain slows and then stops, we step out before the emerald desert and weeping foothills. We’re not strong like the birds and butterflies who circle this closed and stunning spiral. We haven’t learned to leave our bedhead unruffled and center around joy.
Maybe I never will.
Globe leans all her weight into me, my wobbling body reverberating into hers.
She says, “Mom would’ve loved to see this.”
“Me too,” I say, the only coda I know that covers all.
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I help pack Globe’s bag for the trip to see totality. Her dolls, her stuffed animals, the clothes we’ll need for the journey ahead. She keeps talking about the moon’s path between us and the sun, pulling up maps on her phone, learning where the moon’s shadow will dance across this new desert. While she’s not looking, I drop in all her mother’s dice. Inside her bag, they rattle around, deciding on which future to flash that only she will see.
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In the wildflower bed, I see one, two, three tiny plants, so young they haven’t yet shed their seed leaves and lifted their chins to the sky.
My task, upon entering this place: Give her novelty and get out of her way. Someday it’ll all come into effect.
I ask one of her piblings if she’ll watch the wildflowers for us while we’re gone, however long that might take, to which they graciously agree.
For now, I’ll do the watering.
I’ll water them too much.
Years ago, upon ending our long journey through the emptiness to reach this land, upon toeing solid ground again, upon being greeted by those who had come here before us with welcoming arms, upon feasting and drinking and swallowing more new names than we could possibly remember, upon watching our first starset, upon watching the stars come out the same but a little stranger, upon saying our goodnights and turning toward the just-built homes we got to call our own, my daughter told me she felt different.
She had completed her impossible quest, which was to pilot us all here. By the next day she’d given birth, left the hospital, and disappeared among the cruel boughs of cholla of this new and cruel and undefined desert.
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I wake to the sound of someone scratching at the door to the carriage fixed to the back of the mechanical jackrabbit that Globe and I rode into the desert on top of. She’s gone, and when I look in the bag I packed for her mother’s dice, it’s clear she took them on her way out.
“It’s me,” the someone says. One of Globe’s many piblings. “Are you okay?”
“Where’s Globe?”
“You’ll want to see what she’s done,” they say. “It’s almost time.”
The pibling takes my hand as we walk toward the arroyo-side cliff that looks down on the path of totality, passing hundreds of tents that hadn’t been there when we arrived the evening before. We get there just in time to see one of the three brothers cross the desert with their blue lantern to lead the larger of the two moons across the daytime sky.
The path of totality has become a comet’s tail of memories, with Globe as its coma. Colorful kaleidoscope of trinkets and bicycles and stuffed animals and pictures still in their frames and clothes that flurry in the false wind. Any object that reminds them of someone they’d lost or left behind. Even the jackrabbits and Gila monsters and roadrunners and javalina arrive with offerings of their own: bone, whittled sticks, sparkling minerals.
When she sees me, she sprints up the arroyo’s edge to meet me, takes my hand, says, “One more experiment,” she says, taking my hand. “Come on.”
“I won’t be able to keep up.”
She tries to push my immovable force forward.
“I’ll meet you down there as soon as I can,” I say.
She knows what I mean. “But this was your dream,” she says, but has never been so wrong.
I watch her return to the line of totality, where a hundred of her piblings are all trying to hold her had like she is royalty. She shakes one hand loose and pushes her bangs, which I’ve been meaning to take her to get cut, back to the left.
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When totality arrives, the shadow slicing through the glass and swallowing Globe and her piblings in serendipitous dark, they dance. Holler and cheer. Follow the umbra of totality as it tracks across the desert, stampede across all the memories they’d planted along the line. A column of dust reaches up to meet the shadow that falls from the moon and through the glass above us all. Sibling to cremation. Without the star to warm us, the air grows cool. The other stars, as the coyote once arranged and rearranged them, peek out their twinkling heads. The sky turns a haunted auburn.
The column of dust is not a column of dust but a girl’s arm reaching out, through the shadow, toward what her mother might’ve once been. Not a column of dust but an enkindling of what we once had.
Wind curves past me, toward a gray-bellied monsoon cloud that now hangs low in the distance. Lightning rainbows from its width and dits against the desert. Thunder rudders the glass above us. Jackrabbits go hurriedly back to their burrows, wary of the storms they’ve only heard in their longest-held fables. Phainopeplas take to strangely humid air, which must rest differently beneath their shadowlike wings. The land shakes, like the desert tortoise is waking from its long hibernation.
The cloud opens its mouth and whispers this land’s first true rain.
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“Wake up.”
If I were free, someone would’ve already come to wrap my body in canvas and take me to the Gila monsters who collect our bodies to infill the soil, but I know I’m still alive by the way I can keep my eyes closed. Still here. The tide of my heart still presses on. Now I’ll never know if I gave Globe novelty, if she’s becoming who she meant to, if I’ve done right, when I would’ve been allowed to enter the everlong path, the finished quest’s grace, where she left the both of us. We would’ve been allowed to watch on together, reclined inside the petals of whichever flowering crops would’ve replaced us.
“Grandpa. Come on,” Globe says.
Come on. It was what my daughter kept saying. Come on. Fly with me to another planet at the far, far end of the galaxy. Come on. I never could resist.
When I open my eyes, her arms are adorned in spines of cholla and prickly pear from her parade beneath totality, but she doesn’t mind, like they have become her armor.
“Do you feel any different?” she asks.
This part we know how to talk about.
“I feel free. You?”
“I’m scared,” she says, turning around to spread the tent’s door, revealing what weathers beyond. “But maybe it’s the same thing.”
We crawl out of the tent together. I ahh out pain. Globe holds my hand so tight. Clenches her teeth at how slow I move. I once thought at the end of my quest someone would arrive to show me the path toward my ending, my daughter, where we could listen together as Globe’s second and seventh and hundredth rain eclipses the sky and dampens the desert, but no one does. Not for her either, which means our quests must not be done. We are free, just in none of the ways we once dreamed of.
While we walk, Globe plucks the cactus spines from her skin all the long way as though she needs them no more.
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We once said the weather on the world we left behind was created by the heat of the sun. Unevenly distributed thickets of hot air that swirled by their own accord. We thought the same would happen here, in this place we’ve come to dome and populate with the desert, this new species of fast-growing saguaro cactus that stretches full height in years, not a century, dozens of jackrabbit generations, black-suited phainopeplas unfrozen and throttled alive once again. We believed it would happen again unprompted. We believed the seed of weather was beyond our understanding.
But listen: When Globe wakes in the morning and opens her bedroom door, there is no more shift in the air of this home. I listen for the wilting of the picture frames and the expectant quake of the window’s glass, but they stay still. I hold for the circuslike skip of my own heart, but despite my age, I’m steady as tide. It was never the center of my weather, but rather our loss. Our empty. And what is weather but wind chasing down a void?
When she wakes in the morning and steps out of her bedroom, she walks to the window where I mostly sit, ahhs a cloud onto the glass and captures it in the palm of her hand. We wait. I think of my daughter. She thinks of something she dares not speak. When she moves her hand, the cloud dissipates, leaving us in favor of another whose void is still deep. We hope the sudden and uncertain clouds catch them off-guard. We hope the rain finds them freed.
