Protection

Mei's tenth birthday party went off without a hitch, Yoko busy in the kitchen for the day and me standing around awkwardly cleaning or proofreading a chapter or staring at my phone. The girls came in like a whirlwind and ate and laughed and shouted, and I, in a lapse in judgement, told this story of a time when we, my brother and father and I and some other men, drove out on a Friday night into the New Mexican desert, towards the Florida Mountains, on the edge of Mexico, and found a place to camp at the foot of one of them. The story was about how cold it gets at night, even in the desert, but when you were packed in together, you can be warm. We slept under the stars, I said, and one of the girls piped up to ask, what if it rained and the other one said, it's the desert.

I remember this story in the way you remember weird things floating inside of your library of memories. Things you are fairly sure actually happened, but who really knows. I'm sure it did and now, looking on the Internet, I can see the names of the mountains that I didn't know and road we must have taken. I can see, although I never thought of it, that our house faced west. But I don't remember who exactly had gone. It must have been the church and Dennis Powers, the scholar in our lives, the geologist that my dad respected even though Dr Powers knew the earth was not ten thousand years old, must have brought us there. This would have been around the time of Promise Keepers. It was all men, there were no women. We ate a lot of meat, I'm sure, and pancakes in the morning, the food all packed in thick plastic Igloo coolers. Again, I don't remember this exactly. I remember sleeping under the stars and feeling safe as you do as a child, surrounded by men to protect you. Something deep in our subconscious where all embodied metaphors come from. 

The girls listened to the story and then decided they wanted to sleep outside in the tent I'd pitched earlier, which hadn't been the plan. They started shuttling things out to the garden, and I was sent out back to the tent to dissuade them, although of course at this point I couldn't. They would wear coats, they said, it would be fine. When the night came though, I suddenly thought about the time we had been broken into, and the stabbing, but as they watched Britain's Got Talent on the flat screen TV, giggling and eating popcorn on the sofa and blankets on the floor, I fell asleep watching Goodfellas in my bed. The time came for them to camp out and they stomped through the house full of giddy energy, and I went out to tell them to be quiet and sleep. I said I would sleep on the sofa, but then Yoko took the blanket and did instead, like the mother bear, the tiger with the cubs, the light on in the living room. 

At 4, I woke for the day, my own giddy energy for marking and running and writing, and sent Yoko back to bed, waiting in the grey light, trying to meditate and thinking about care. That morning in the desert, we had packed up as it got warm and I took off my hoodie and was in shirt sleeves in the sun and we drove back east to El Paso. We must have, I don't remember it. I remember those mountains, always in the distance then, when the thunderstorms would come. In the night, I stir — my daughter in the other room is screaming in her sleep like I do sometimes. I think I might wake her, but I stay in bed, waiting, wondering if it will pass.