Six years and she could still marvel at the way the light came down straight and white and hard, with an edge to it that she could taste in the back of her throat. Good solid Los Angeles smog, pressed down hard by the sun: air you could cut pieces off and eat. She’d thought she’d never be able to breathe it, gone around with a stitch in her side and a catch in her lungs, till one day she woke up and realized she hadn’t felt like that in weeks. She’d whooped, which woke up Frank; then she’d had to explain: “I’m an Angeleno now! I can breathe the smog.”
Frank hadn’t understood. He’d just eyed her warily and grunted and gone to take over the bathroom the way he did every morning.
She should have seen the end then, but it had taken another couple of years and numerous further signs – then he was gone and she was a statistic. Divorced wife, mother of two.
She came back to the here-and-now just past White Oak, just as everything on the south side of the street turned green. The long rolling stretch of parkland took her back all over again to the Midwest – to the place she’d taught herself to stop calling home. There, she’d taken green for granted. Here, in Southern California, green was a miracle and a gift. Eight months a year, any landscape that wasn’t irrigated stretched bare and bleak and brown. Rain seldom fell. Rivers were few and far between. This was desert – rather to the astonishment of most transplants, who’d expected sun and surf and palm trees, but never realized how dry the land was beyond the beaches.