Nowhere Near Home: Surviving the Broken Promises of the High Desert

TWO FACTS ABOUT LAKE LOS ANGELES: one, there's no lake, and two, it's nowhere near Los Angeles.

To find the place, look real hard while driving 70 in a 55 on a two-lane highway leading away from the city. There's a little green population sign that never seems to change, the informal Welcome to Lake Los Angeles. Don't blink, or the sign disappears and so does the town.

Six-year-old Kiara lay in bed and cringed as her mom downstairs yelled, "Go to hell!" at her dad. Kiara waited for him to yell back. This time, he didn't. Her mom screamed, "I'm leaving!" and slammed the front door shut, which shook the upstairs windows.

Her little brother Tommy crept into her bed, or at least tried to. The king-size waterbed rocked back and forth while he pawed at her. She reached over, grabbed his little hands, and lifted him up. She squeezed him like a teddy bear and drew the covers over their heads. They lay still, cheek to cheek, until the bed stopped swaying. He whimpered, so she sang him lullabies.

After that, the screaming ended. So did the marriage. Words got thrown around: divorce and sell the damn house.

Dad never returned. Every night at dinner, while Kiara choked down her fish sticks and mushy peas, the phone rang. Her mom didn't answer. Eventually, the phone stopped ringing.

The first night in their new house was a sign of things to come: the movers got lost somewhere between the coast and Lake Los Angeles, the electricity company hadn't flipped on the power, and the mercury plunged below freezing. Wind whistled and rattled the windows. The three of them—Kiara, Tommy, and her mom—shivered, fending off hypothermia together under a single blanket on their brown shag carpet. The desert had laid out the welcome mat.

Kiara lay there with teeth chattering and stared into the darkness. She imagined her old life, her two-story home in a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and sidewalks. A life before Dad left them, for what her mom called the whore down the street.

This was their "fresh start"—a new wood and stucco Craftsman single-story on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Her mom called it "affordable housing". Kiara called it hell.

Newly built didn't mean well-built.

She rubbed the goosebumps on her arms and snuggled closer to Tommy. His hair, scented with baby shampoo, tickled her nose.

"Mom," Kiara whispered. "Are you awake?"

"Go to sleep."

It wasn't as if Kiara could flip off a switch in her brain. "I'm trying. I was thinking, maybe me and Tommy could visit the lake—"

"—there isn't a lake."

"Isn't it called—"

"I said, go to sleep."

Kiara squeezed her eyes shut. "Where's Skittles?"

"Your dad took the damn dog."

All the muscles in Kiara's body tightened. "When do we see Dad?"

"Hopefully, never." Her mom growled. "Damn it, Kiara. Go. To. Sleep."

Kiara bristled at the tone of her mom's voice—the same tone she took during cussing competitions with her dad which often ended with her mom hurling any portable object across the room, always barely missing her dad's head. Regardless of her mom's poor aim, every shot struck Kiara in the heart. It hurt. All their yelling and insults hurt.

The way her mom spoke now reeked with that same anger and disgust.

Kiara balled up her fists and dug her fingernails into her palms. Maybe her mom was lying. Maybe Dad and Skittles would come back. Kiara would find the lake by herself.

Most of Lake LA was mapped on a grid with straight lines. People lived on dirt or roughly paved roads like 160th Street East or Avenue Q-1. Because everything looked the same, residents figured out where they were headed based on things like the collapsed Joshua tree, the reflector nailed to the wooden electric pole, or the rocks piled up by that sign.

At night, it was desert dark. Unlike city dwellers who relied on the manufactured glow of lighting to ease their fear of the unknown, folks of this community insisted on darkness.

Stars are brighter that way.

Didn't matter the reason. Kiara missed seeing where she was walking at night without tripping over her own damn feet.

A month after moving in, Kiara stood on the dirt corner of two of these letter-number streets, 158th Street East and Avenue Q-8, on the southern tip of town. Back at her old house, her friends lived two blocks away. Here, she had none. Her mom said that if she tried to make friends, she would. Be nice and others will like you. So far, the advice had proven to be useless.

Kiara hovered near a bunch of kids waiting for the school bus. Wind swept around her bare legs, coating them in a layer of dirt.

The sun beat down. She took off her pink sweatshirt and tied it around her waist. After dealing with below-freezing temperatures the month before, her mom said to dress in warm clothes even though it had been a solid week of hundred-degree-plus heat with dry, gusty winds.

With her backpack pressed against her sweaty back, Kiara approached a couple of girls. She lingered nearby in a slice of shade afforded by a massive Joshua tree, which wasn't a tree in the traditional sense—more of a cactus with spiky pom-poms at the end of each gnarled branch.

Kiara waved to the girls.

They rolled their eyes and whispered to each other.

Kiara cringed. She kicked at the ground, flinging loose rocks in all directions. Her sweatshirt dropped.

A boy twice her size ran over, grabbed it, and smacked her with it.

"Give it back," Kiara said. She stomped her foot.

"Give it back," the boy taunted.

Kiara considered her options. Was it worth fighting for? The sweatshirt was too big and too pink, like most gifts from her grandma.

Nearby, a dust devil gathered up the loose top layer of sediment and swirled it around into an impressive funnel that lifted scraps of paper and tumbleweeds. It turned and twisted. The kids, used to the spectacle, laughed and pointed.

Kiara squinted through her fingers trying to protect her eyes. The wind pulled strands of hair out of her ponytail and whipped them in her face.

It was over as quick as it started. Weeds tumbled back to the earth, papers flew away, and her hair settled down. She spat out the grit in her teeth. Though her chapped lips were sealed tight, dirt found a way in.

In the chaos, the boy dropped her sweatshirt. She shook off the dirt and stuffed the sweatshirt in her backpack.

Her old home, the big house at the end of the cul-de-sac, had grass, not dirt, where she used to play fetch with Skittles; they had a rock waterfall that streamed down into their hot tub then into the pool; her huge upstairs bedroom, with the king-size waterbed, had curtains that billowed in the cool breeze—all gone and replaced by a dusty, barren landscape.

The bus would arrive soon. Even though her bare thighs would stick to the vinyl seats for the sixty-minute ride to school, Kiara couldn't wait to be out of the sun.

A couple of boys threw a baseball back and forth across the road a few houses down from the bus stop. She used to play ball with her dad; he was patient every time she missed a catch or botched a throw.

The girls under the Joshua tree glanced her way and giggled.

Behind her rang out a loud shriek. Over by the boys, her little brother, Tommy, not yet three, sat in the middle of the street, screaming.

Oh my God. Kiara marched over there. What was he doing out of the house? He should be getting ready to go to the babysitter's so Mom could get to work on time. Kiara had half a mind to scold him for being where he shouldn't have been.

She bent down beside him. That's when she saw it—blood trailed Tommy's scalp, his brown hair soaked with it.