Taft, California took her back to her brother’s telescope.
It was mid-morning. Her brother was napping in the field after an all-night outing staring up at the stars. When the pickup truck ran over him, his ribcage was crushed and his heart was punctured.
The driver never saw a thing, hadn’t seen him cradled in the dip in the tall grass. The BLM agent behind the wheel had been on the job for just a few weeks.
He was out on the Carrizo Plain National Monument taking pictures for a future Environmental Impact report. It wasn’t until he got back to the office that he found out what he’d done. He resigned on the spot.
Her family kept their son’s mangled telescope.
The lens was shattered and the optical tube was bent. So was the finder scope and the eyepiece was missing.
Her father kept the telescope until his own death. Then she had it boxed up with the rest of her possessions neatly stacked in a storage unit in Tarzana.
Her father filed a wrongful death suit against the BLM. A judge dismissed the case and ruled that the victim had been trespassing on the BLM land. Trespassing invalidated any claims of negligence.
That’s when their family began to fall apart.
At first, the three of them had been lashed together by tragedy. Sooner than they could have imagined, the bonds of grief came undone. An ugly clutch of resentments boiled up. Her mother’s bitterness intensified. Her father’s curiosity vanished.
The family shattered like a porcelain plate dropped onto Saltillo tile. Sharp little shards of what had been a good family soared off to where they would never be found.
It was impossible to catalog all the ways she withdrew. But from the day of her brother’s death, there was no mistaking the turn she had taken.
It was her silence more than her sullenness people took note of. There was no brooding, no crabbiness. If she mourned, which she did endlessly, her bereavement went unheard and unseen.
All she wanted was to become invisible. She more or less succeeded.
