The Goldfinch

My dad, in one long step, lunged forward and grabbed it before I could get to it. “About time,” he said jauntily, tossing it onto the baggage cart. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”

Out we rolled through the automatic doors and into a wall of breathtaking heat. Miles of parked cars stretched around us in all directions, hooded and still. Rigidly I stared straight ahead—chrome knives glinting, horizon shimmering like wavy glass—as if looking back, or hesitating, might invite some uniformed party to step in front of us. Yet no one collared me or shouted at us to stop. No one even looked at us.

I was so disoriented in the glare that when my dad stopped in front of a new silver Lexus and said: “Okay, this is us,” I tripped and nearly fell on the curb.

“This is yours?” I said, looking between them.

“What?” said Xandra coquettishly, clumping around to the passenger side in her high shoes as my dad beeped the lock open. “You don’t like it?”

A Lexus? Every day, I was struck by all sorts of matters large and small that I urgently needed to tell my mother and as I stood dumbly watching my dad hoist the bags in the trunk my first thought was: wow, wait until she hears about this. No wonder he hadn’t sent money home.

My dad threw aside his half-smoked Viceroy with a flourish. “Okay,” he said, “hop in.” The desert air had magnetized him. Back in New York, he had looked a bit worn-out and seedy but out in the rippling heat his white sportcoat and his cult-leader sunglasses made sense.

The car—which started with the push of a button—was so quiet that at first I didn’t realize we were moving. Away we glided, into depthlessness and space. Accustomed as I was to jolting around in the backs of taxis, the smoothness and chill of the ride was sealed off, eerie: brown sand, vicious glare, trance and silence, blown trash whipping at the chain-link fence. I still felt numbed and weightless from the pill, and the crazy façades and superstructures of the Strip, the violent shimmer where the dunes met sky, made me feel as if we had touched down on another planet.

Xandra and my dad had been talking quietly in the front seat. Now she turned to me—snapping gum, robust and su

“It’s wild,” I said—watching a pyramid sail past my window, the Eiffel Tower, too overwhelmed to take it in.

“You think it’s wild now?” said my dad, tapping his fingernail on the steering wheel in a ma

“See there—check it out,” said Xandra, reaching over to point out the window on my dad’s side. “There’s the volcano. It really works.”

“Actually, I think they’re renovating it. But in theory, yeah. Hot lava. On the hour, every hour.”

“Exit to the left in point two miles,” said a woman’s computerized voice.

Carnival colors, giant clown heads and XXX signs: the strangeness exhilarated me, and also frightened me a little. In New York, everything reminded me of my mother—every taxi, every street corner, every cloud that passed over the sun—but out in this hot mineral emptiness, it was as if she had never existed; I could not even imagine her spirit looking down on me. All trace of her seemed burned away in the thin desert air.

As we drove, the improbable skyline dwindled into a wilderness of parking lots and outlet malls, loop after faceless loop of shopping plazas, Circuit City, Toys “R” Us, supermarkets and drugstores, Open Twenty-Four Hours, no saying where it ended or began. The sky was wide and trackless, like the sky over the sea. As I fought to stay awake—blinking against the glare—I was ruminating in a dazed way over the expensive-smelling leather interior of the car and thinking of a story I’d often heard my mother tell: of how, when she and my dad were dating, he’d turned up in a Porsche he’d borrowed from a friend to impress her. Only after they were married had she learned that the car wasn’t really his. She’d seemed to think this was fu

“Um, you’ve had this car how long?” I said, speaking up over their conversation in front.

“Oh—gosh—little over a year now, isn’t that right, Xan?”

A year? I was still chewing this over—this figure meant my dad had acquired the car (and Xandra) before he’d disappeared—when I looked up and saw that the strip malls had given way to an endless-seeming grid of small stucco homes. Despite the air of boxed, bleached sameness—row on row, like stones in a cemetery—some of the houses were painted in festive pastels (mint green, rancho pink, milky desert blue) and there was something excitingly foreign about the sharp shadows, the spiked desert plants. Having grown up in the city, where there was never enough space, I was if anything pleasantly surprised. It would be something new to live in a house with a yard, even if the yard was only brown rocks and cactus.

“Is this still Las Vegas?” As a game, I was trying to pick out what made the houses different from each other: an arched doorway here, a swimming pool or a palm tree there.

“You’re seeing a whole different part now,” my dad said—exhaling sharply, stubbing out his third Viceroy. “This is what tourists never see.”

Though we’d been driving a while, there were no landmarks, and it was impossible to say where we were going or in which direction. The skyline was monotonous and unchanging and I was fearful that we might drive through the pastel houses altogether and out into the alkali waste beyond, into some sun-beaten trailer park from the movies. But instead—to my surprise—the houses began to grow larger: with second stories, with cactus gardens, with fences and pools and multi-car garages.

“Okay, this is us,” said my dad, turning into a road that had an imposing granite sign with copper letters: The Ranches at Canyon Shadows.

“You live here?” I said, impressed. “Is there a canyon?”

“No, that’s just the name of it,” said Xandra.

“See, they have a bunch of different developments out here,” said my dad, pinching the bridge of his nose. I could tell by his tone—his scratchy old needing-a-drink voice—that he was tired and not in a very good mood.

“Ranch communities is what they call them,” said Xandra.

“Right. Whatever. Oh, shut the fuck up,” snapped my dad, reaching over to turn the volume down as the lady on the navigation system piped up with instructions again.

“They all have different themes, sort of,” said Xandra, who was dabbing on lip gloss with the pad of her little finger. “There’s Pueblo Breeze, Ghost Ridge, Dancing Deer Villas. Spirit Flag is the golf community? And Encantada is the fanciest, lots of investment properties—Hey, turn here, sweet pea,” she said, clutching his arm.

My dad kept driving straight and did not answer.

“Shit!” Xandra turned in her seat to look at the road receding behind us. “Why do you always have to go the long way?”

“Don’t start with the shortcuts. You’re as bad as the Lexus lady.”

“Yeah, but it’s faster. By fifteen minutes. Now we’re going to have to drive all the way around Dancing Deer.”

My dad blew out an exasperated breath. “Look—”

“What’s so hard about cutting over to Gitana Trails and making two lefts and a right? Because that’s all it is. If you get off on Desatoya—”

“Look. You want to drive the car? Or you want to let me drive the fucking car?”

I knew better than to challenge my dad when he took that tone, and apparently Xandra did too. She flounced around in her seat and—in a deliberate ma