It was 1943. They were traveling under assumed names, “Mr. Edward Lewis and family.” Mara and her mother got to keep their first names. Mara had heard her mother complain she didn’t want to move; she’d grown accustomed to their life in Princeton, those luncheons and teas. They were safe in New Jersey, in the prestigious American university; behind heavy oak desks, in ornate halls, under soaring campaniles and vaulted chapels, atop ivory towers, behind her husband’s name, his status as a scientist, his degrees, his important civilian work, they were safe.

“Will it be safe for Mara?” she’d asked.

“Of course,” Isaac had assured her, not looking up from his escritoire, where Mara was hiding. His dark hair combed to the side and disheveled from his fedora hat, his brown wool suit fitted to his angular frame, Mara thought him handsome. She wanted to be just like him.

“There’d better be indoor plumbing and no rattlesnakes,” her mother had said.

The conductor called out, “Lamy Station.” Mara couldn’t wait to get off the stuffy train and into the wild. They stepped off into nothingness. No semblance of city. The small station stood alone on the side of the railroad tracks, a whitewashed adobe brick building with the metal block letters “L-A-M-Y” spelled across the side. To either side of the station, tumbleweeds and desert hills spanning as far as she could see. Mara thought it was perfect. She loved the muted hills, the terracotta bricks that made up the platform, and the reddish slats of the sloping station rooftop.

“It’s like we’ve gone into Siberia,” her mother breathed. “Wasteland.”

Mara pulled out her sketchbook and hastily tried to capture the landscape with colored pencil, though her talent wouldn’t catch up with the images she saw in her mind for many years to come. When she was much older, after completing art school, she would go through those old sketchbooks and remake all her early attempts at sustaining on the page the magical place that had arrested her since childhood. Though she was almost six years old, Mara didn’t talk much. Her mother worried about her unusual proclivity toward introversion. Her mother didn’t realize she was speaking all the time but through her art.

As her father strode toward the caboose to fetch their baggage, Rose took Mara’s arm and shuffled her to the front of the station. Across the dirt road there squatted a derelict hotel, saloon in full swing. A lean man in denims, plaid flannel, a Stetson, and boots tumbled out of the bar, lit a cigarette, then climbed into a beat-up truck and scraped along the road into the hills, kicking up dust. Rose clasped Mara’s arm tighter. Further down the road a bell chimed from a small Catholic church in the adobe style with a wooden cross atop, the arched doors painted bright blue.