I was too tired for language at first. Too far outside my own body. I had slept maybe three hours on the flight back from Tokyo, if the twitching, half-conscious collapse against an airplane window counted as sleep. My mouth tasted like stale coffee and airplane air. My blouse was wrinkled beneath my blazer. The rental car’s air-conditioning had fought the Arizona morning all the way from the airport and lost the second I opened the door.
The desert heat hit me like a palm to the chest.
And there was my house.
Sun-faded adobe walls. Terracotta pots lined beneath the front window. The mesquite tree in the yard throwing its thin, crooked shadow across the driveway. The brass sun my grandmother had bought from a roadside artist in Tubac and nailed beside the front door, saying it would keep “bad energy and bad men” away from the porch.
I had laughed when she said it.
Now I stood in my own driveway, suitcase handle digging into my palm, looking at a stranger who seemed genuinely concerned that I had arrived at his property without permission.
