Our house is in an oasis of Dark Sky on a low ridge west of Black Mountain.  Here, without fences, our neighbors’ gardens slip into the canyons that follow our street downhill to its dead end in a stand of sycamores, their thirsty roots clutching the clay and rock scrabble in the arroyo.  There are no sidewalks or curbs and few lights, just asphalt and gravel for cars and feet, and even those are seldom seen.

            Deer run in the twilight.  Coyotes jog alone and gather in packs.  Roadrunners zoom between Toyon bushes, covered this time of year with berries as red as Santa’s hat.  Hawks ride the salty wind from the west, crying and circling for hours.  This is not a place for lovers of the hustle-bustle.  It is quiet, still.

            Sometimes I want a city and noise and movement, shoulders to bump, and I leave for one or another, to find people and interesting discussions and laughter like a run of notes on a piano, a coltish child, a Dark and Stormy, hard-to-find parking places.

            But sometimes, like tonight, even this casita isn’t isolated enough, or at least I’m not, from pain I can’t share, walls I can’t breach, people who are more cruel than I already thought I knew, a depth of loss I am only beginning to understand, a sense of powerlessness I’ve never known.  I need the blanket of the night.

            It’s cold, around 35 degrees, so I pull on a pair of tights and tuck my pants into sheepskin boots, wiggling my blue-glitter-painted toes in the oily wool.  Shirt, jacket, the softest thick scarf around my neck.  No hat.  I hate hats.  I turn up my collar and slip out a side door while Mr. Forte sleeps, tired and unaware, and stride silently, hands deep in pockets, up the street.

            A mile or so away I turn onto a dirt path that curls through a eucalyptus grove, up a small hill, and spills into a clearing at the top with a gentle bench that faces west, a tiny ground light near one leg.  In the daylight you can see south to Mexico’s Islas Coronado, a rocky archipelago that disrupts the blue arc of the Pacific horizon.  Tonight, with only the edge of a moon, the ocean is an inky pit, unseeable, but above it fiery stars burn in a cloudless sky.

            I lie down on the bench and look up, find the Big and Little Dippers, my astronomical beginning and end, unless you count Venus (reliable) and Mars (sometimes).  Seeing those three diamonds in that perfect row makes me cry, so I do that for a while, tears running to my temples, watching the sparklers waver and ripple through the saline filter.  I sniff.  Something else sniffs – or sneezes?  I look.

            She’s standing at the edge of the clearing, a female coyote, looking frankly at me, as they do.  She is neither threatening nor afraid.  I don’t move, just turn my head in her direction.  We look at each other, blink.

            “Hey,” I say softly.

             She doesn’t move a muscle.

             “I’ve wanted to meet you.  I hear you outside my window almost every night.”

             Her coat is that perfect match for camouflage against the sage:  dirty blond with a peppering of dark hairs, less scruffy than many.  She’s wiry but not scrawny.  There are lots of rats and rabbits around, coyote grub.

             I roll onto my side, tuck my hand under my ear, fingers in my wet hair.

             “Do you have a family?” I ask, “Have you been finding food for them tonight?  Some nice mice?”

             She doesn’t answer.

             “There are gophers at our house, in the back.”

             She looks over her shoulder quickly and back at me, then abruptly sits and lowers her belly to the ground, resting on her forelegs, Sphinxlike.

             “You’re a pretty cool Chiquita, aren’t you?”  I smile at her.  She blinks, not buying the flattery.

             “Do you have a brother?  I bet you do,” I whisper.  “I bet you grew up together, playing and chasing each other around in the canyon.  I have one, my little brother.  We used to do that, too, a long, long time ago in a different canyon not too far from here.  I’m pretty old.  People live a long time, many more years than coyotes, you know.”

             Her eyes never leave mine.

             “My brother is very sick.  He has cancer and it’s a bad kind, so they’re giving him medicine, but it’s like poison and it makes him feel really terrible.  They can’t even tell if it’s working.  Everyone is just hoping that it is.  And even though he’s kind of old – like if you were 25, you might think that 56 is old – he’s not old enough to die.  You know?  But that’s it, really, right there.  He might die.”

             I cover my eyes with my other fingers and cry for a little while, feeling the cold grab my hands and the wind pick up and blow harder.  I open my eyes.  She hasn’t moved.

             “I’ve known people whose brother or sister died or even a husband or a child, one of those people you'd name if you were counting on your first hand the people you love most, and I always said how sorry I was, but I found out you just can’t know how awful someone feels about one of those people dying until it’s you. 

    "There’s nothing I can do, nothing at all.  I’m just watching it happen.  I think about how selfish it is to be thinking about how sad I am that my life would have this huge hole in it where my brother used to be if he dies when he’s the one who is sick and might die."

    I breathe for a minute, just in and out in the silence, rubbing my thumbnail. 

            “And I can’t help him.  I can’t offer to cut off my hand or give up ten or twenty years of my life or even my whole life to make him well.  I can’t offer to find someone who isn’t a nice brother – and we all know there are some of those out there, a person who could disappear ..." my fingers open like a flower " ... like smoke and after a really short time even the people who said they would miss him wouldn’t miss him at all – to swap and be the brother who dies so he could live.  My brother is a really good brother, an amazing and wonderful guy.  He’s funny and really smart and kind and generous and writes music and plays the pedal steel and keyboards and any kind of guitar and has a million people who love him so, so much.  It’s not fair.

            “Maybe you had a brother who died.  Or who’s gone and you don’t know where.  Maybe it just happens and you go on, even if a part of you will always be the saddest you’ve ever been.  Maybe it will never make sense because a lot of things just don’t.

            “I hate to say this because everybody says that I should think positive thoughts, like somehow if I don’t, bad things will happen to him, but I think he’s going to die.  I hope I’m wrong.  I’ve never wanted to be wrong before, but I really, really want to be wrong this time.  Because thinking I might be right is just horrible,” I say to her yellow eyes.

            We look at each other for a long time while the wind howls and shakes the gum trees, whipping branches like shirts on a clothesline, blowing ridges in her tawny fur, until all I have is salt tracks on my face, until it suddenly stops and everything is still and black and quiet.  I look up.  The stars are brilliant in the huge sky, heartbreakingly bright.

            A small sound, a scuff.  She is up and walking north along the verge, still looking at me.  Then she turns and heads west, loping downhill into the darkness, then moving a little faster, out of the circle of light.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

             When I’m halfway down our street, I can see the silver ruffles of the Dusty Miller at the foot of our stairs and the agaves the color of pewter, shining like they had sponged up light from Miz Moon two weeks ago when she was so fat and full, showing me the way home, where Mr. Forte is sleeping, where life is lived, fair or not, warm or cold, today and tomorrow and the next day until one day, when it isn’t.

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