Prologue: The Girl Before the Sky Changed

I have to tell you about a girl before I can tell you about a country.

Every book about a place is also a book about a person you were on the day you left the last place, and the person I was on the day I left Arizona was a boy in love with a girl named Camille Whitfield who everybody in Sierra Vista called Clouds. She had been called Clouds since she was maybe six or seven years old, because her grandmother, Miss Ida, who raised her most weekends in a small house off Fry Boulevard with a screened-in porch and a hummingbird feeder that never stayed full, had started calling her "my little cloud" when she was still in a stroller. Miss Ida said the child would stare at the sky for the whole length of a bottle without blinking, and that a baby who watched the sky like that was not going to be an ordinary child, and Miss Ida was right about that in ways nobody in Sierra Vista would fully understand for another twenty years. By the time Camille got to Buena Middle School the whole family was calling her Clouds, and by the time she got to Buena High School it was the only name most people knew. Even the teachers used it. Even the coaches used it. The name on her report card said Camille Whitfield, and the name on her varsity jacket said Clouds, and the two names were the same person, and both of them were the girl I met in the fall of nineteen eighty eight, freshman year, third period American History with Mr. Braithwaite, who assigned seats alphabetically and put a Lyons next to a Whitfield the second Tuesday of school and did not know he was setting a match to the next two years of my life.

Sierra Vista in nineteen eighty eight was a small Army town at the foot of the Huachuca Mountains, about seventy five miles southeast of Tucson, and Fort Huachuca was the reason the town existed and the reason my family was there. Pops had been reassigned from Fort Bragg to Huachuca the summer before my ninth grade year, and we had rolled into Sierra Vista in a rented moving truck in July when the desert heat did that thing the desert heat does where it becomes a physical object you have to move through instead of air you breathe. Clouds's father was also Army. Master Sergeant Curtis Whitfield, Signal Corps, twenty two years in, one Bronze Star from the first Gulf War coming up. Her mother, Yolanda, worked days as a charge nurse at the small hospital in town and loved that girl the way certain mothers love a daughter who came late, which is to say completely and without any of the tiredness you sometimes see in women who had their children young. Yolanda and Master Sergeant Whitfield ran their household on post, and Miss Ida kept the house in town, and Clouds moved between the two houses all through middle school and high school the way military kids move between houses, which is to say she carried her whole life in a duffel bag and did not think of either address as more permanent than the other. I did not know any of that in October. I learned it in November, sitting on Miss Ida's porch the first time she invited me over for Sunday dinner, when Miss Ida looked at me across the table and said, "You know that girl got a mother who would walk through fire for her, and a grandmother who would walk through worse. You gonna handle her accordingly. Are we clear." I said, "Yes ma'am." Miss Ida nodded once and passed me the greens. That was the whole conversation. It took forty seconds. I have replayed it more times than I have replayed almost any other conversation from that year, because a grandmother telling a fifteen year old boy the ground rules of loving her grandchild in forty seconds is a masterclass I did not know I was receiving at the time, and I have used the same forty seconds, in slightly different words, on more than one young man who came into my daughter's life a lifetime later.

The nickname for me came from her, and I am going to tell you what it was because if I do not tell you what it was you are going to imagine something worse. She called me Ronnie. Nobody else in my life called me Ronnie. My mother called me Ron. My father called me Ronald or Boy. My friends called me Lyons or Ron or, later in Italy, Ron with a specific inflection Marcus Bell would put on it that meant the whole sentence "Alright, Ron, let us go be Americans in a place that is not America." Clouds called me Ronnie. She started calling me Ronnie the night of the first slow dance at the ninth grade winter formal, in the gym at Buena High School, with Boyz II Men's End of the Road playing at a volume the chaperones were monitoring, and she leaned back mid-song and looked at me and said, "You do not look like a Ron tonight. You look like a Ronnie." I said, "What is the difference." She said, "A Ron is somebody people call in a meeting. A Ronnie is somebody you can dance with." I said, "Alright." She was the only person in my life who ever called me that, and after Arizona nobody else did, and nobody else will. Ronnie was a name that belonged to a boy who lived in one house in one town for one specific stretch of two years, and that boy walked out of the house in August of nineteen ninety, and Ronnie did not come with him.

The last night on Reservoir Hill in August of nineteen ninety, which Chapter 1 is going to walk you through in detail, we said goodbye the way two seventeen year olds say goodbye when one of them is getting on a plane to Italy the next morning and the other one is staying in a town neither of them chose. We said the wrong things. We said some right things badly. We said one true thing to each other on that hill, and then Clouds got out of the Buick and walked down the dirt road toward the water tank alone, and she did not turn around, and I sat on the hood of the Electra by myself until the sky was completely dark, and the next morning at oh five hundred I was in a shuttle van heading to Tucson International, and by the time the sun came up over Arizona for the last time I would see it come up over Arizona for another five years, I was already thirty three thousand feet above New Mexico, watching a country I had lived in for one year of my life get smaller in a window. I wrote her one letter from Italy in September. She wrote me back in October. I wrote her a second letter in November. She did not write back. I wrote a third in January. She did not write back. I stopped writing in March. She never sent another letter. That was, in the small honest way people mean when they say it, the end.

That is not the story of Under the Purple Umbrella. That is the frame around it. The story of Under the Purple Umbrella is the two years in Italy that started the morning after that last night on the hill, and it is a story I could not have written honestly without telling you first that I did not arrive in Italy empty. I arrived in Italy with a girl already in my chest. I carried Clouds through every scene of the two years that follow. I carried her onto the plane. I carried her into Frankfurt at oh six hundred. I carried her into the apartment on Villaggio and out onto the balcony at oh five thirty on that first Tuesday morning. I carried her into Mr. Braithwaite's American History classroom's Italian equivalent, which was Mrs. Cavalieri's Italian I classroom, and I carried her into the bus shelter at the bottom of the Villaggio hill, and I carried her past Sergeant Coleman's morning watch of her own daughter, and I carried her into the moment I first saw Jalisa Coleman standing on the second floor landing of Building Twenty Two in her burgundy raincoat with a purple umbrella hanging off her wrist. Every scene you are about to read has a second scene behind it that you cannot quite see, and the second scene is Clouds, in Arizona, doing whatever she was doing in that hour, in a life I was no longer a part of.

Clouds is the room I started in. Everything after is what I built with what she taught me.

Miss Ida died in two thousand and one. I did not go to the funeral. I was twenty six years old and I told myself I could not get away from work, which was true in the small way work is always true and false in the large way work is always false. Clouds sent me a note about the funeral through a mutual friend from Buena, on a folded piece of notebook paper delivered by hand, and the note said, "Grandma asked about you at Christmas. I told her you were fine. She said, good." That was the entire note. I read it in my kitchen in Louisville and I sat down on the floor with my back against the refrigerator and I cried for the first time about anything Sierra Vista in the whole eleven years I had been gone from it. I cried for Miss Ida and I cried for the porch light and I cried for the greens I had been passed at fifteen and I cried for the forty second masterclass I had not deserved and I cried for the boy who had not gone to the funeral because he did not know yet that a life is made of the funerals you show up to and the ones you do not. I have gone to every funeral I could get to since then. I have told my children why. I am telling you now.

The last thing Clouds said to me on that hill, the one sentence out of a whole two years of sentences I never got rid of, was this. "You don't want nobody. You want the idea of somebody. And ain't nobody real ever gonna live up to what's in your head." She said it soft. She said it kind. She said it like a diagnosis a doctor gives you when the two of you already know the results and she is just saying the words out loud so you cannot pretend anymore. I told her she was right. I meant it. And then I got on a plane and I spent the next two years in a country that was not mine, measuring every person I met, quietly and without their permission, against a picture in my head. Every scene of this book has a second track running under it, and the second track is Clouds's voice, calm, in the dark, asking the same question every time I met a new person, which is, is this one in my head, or is this one real. That question was Clouds's gift to me. I did not answer it in Italy. I did not answer it in college. I did not answer it fully until I was married, with children, and had spent enough years watching my wife be an actual person in an actual house to understand what Clouds had been trying to tell me on that hood. I owe Clouds the answer. The whole rest of my life is the answer. And this book, all two years of it, is the country I was walking around in with the question still ringing.

Now, Chapter 1. The last Arizona sky.