Crossing Over – Claire Brennan

June 2, 2026

Out in Mission Viejo they drive doorless jeeps and check their boots for scorpions each morning. When they find one they shake it out and crush it to death with the same boot it was hiding in. I’m glad I’m not a scorpion and I’m glad I do not live in Mission Viejo.

The desert makes me feel like I’m the problem. When I’m stumbling around the daylight and God grants the mercy of a breeze (it might not be God after all – it might just be the wind drifting ripples from a swimming pool a few blocks away into the air, but then again, how could there be such a thing as a swimming pool in the desert if not for God?) I make a promise to myself that this is it. This is the break I’ve been waiting for and I am going to take advantage of the air not suffocating me and I am going to make it all happen.

I am going to go to the Federal Express store and pick up more boxes and more shipping tape.
I am going to finish packing up my grandmother’s home.
I am going to put everything she needs in the back of a U-Haul truck and move her into the nursing home on the 1st of the month and I’m not going to miss the 1st of the month the way I did this month or last month or the month before that.
I am going to put the rest of the boxes in a storage unit and mail the key to my uncle, and he and my mom can list her house and deal with all of the boxes in the storage unit later.
I am going to pack up all of Lorraine’s shit and vacuum the floors once all the shit is off them, and then I’ll stop taking checks from my mother for a job poorly done and I’ll leave Mission Viejo for good and I’ll move someplace real again and get a real job again and start paying off my credit cards again.

But the breeze always peters out and my plan of action withers in the hot desert sun and my thoughts dissipate from packing tape and boxes and truck rentals and they get replaced with what in the world am I going to have for lunch today? If you are going to live in the desert, you have to have a plan every time you step out of your front door. Otherwise, you’ll never get anywhere before you come home.

The sun’s reflection off the white pavement burns my corneas and makes me homesick for being snowblind in the winter and for my nose hairs turning to icicles and for my skin stinging from the wind and for my teeth feeling hollow and dead and looking yellower than ever next to a perfect white blizzard. I am homesick for the other type of suffering as I watch my shadow merge and disappear into the shade of a blue-and-white striped awning. I can feel my pupils contracting and expanding as I swing open the window-paned door with cracking white paint and go inside the restaurant.

The blast of window box fans stream over me and I try not to think about the fact that ten minutes from now, the box fans won’t be enough anymore and I’ll have to roll my thighs from side to side to keep them from sticking to the vinyl of the barstool. The clock on the wall says 1:03. I don’t have enough time to go to the Federal Express store before I have to pick up Lorraine, but I do have time to eat lunch.

The only lights on are the Christmas lights hung across the slanted ceiling beams and the colored plastic bulbs poking out of the fake palm trees scattered throughout the dining floor. I can’t tell what geographic location they’re trying to emulate – the walls are white and paneled and have pictures of snowy lighthouses framed all down the halls, but then there are the fake palm trees scattered throughout – half New England, half Florida Keys. I guess the locale they’re going for is anywhere you could trick yourself into thinking the seafood you’re about to eat is fresh. In any case, that illusion will be shattered in about ninety minutes in whatever bathroom you’re nearest to, so I suppose it’s up to you where you’d like to pretend you are until then.

The bartender sees me and sets a coaster down. She fills a glass with Coke from her spout and sets it on the coaster in front of me and asks me if I’m playing today. The bartender was the first person to tell me that Mission Viejo isn’t actually the desert – it’s just hot. I tell her I’ll play for a few rounds but I can’t stay the whole time because it’s Wednesday and I have to have Lorraine home by 2:00 so that she can check on Maggie. The bartender sucks her cheeks in and nods. She hands me the trivia remote and I put in an order for a half a dozen oysters and clam chowder.

When I first got here in May I thought I’d be out of here in July. But now it’s the end of August and the leaves are starting to turn, which I didn’t even know they did out here. And I don’t know if the leaves will fall from the branches once they’ve turned (the way they do in places with real seasons), but if I buckle down and pack Lorraine’s house up the way I’m supposed to, my ignorance of what happens to the trees in Mission Viejo in autumn will be my reward.

Whatever I’m doing on Wednesdays, I have to be finished and in the parking lot of the community center by 1:50, so that I can pick up Lorraine and get her home by 2:00 so that she can check on Maggie. Lorraine can only check on Maggie on Wednesdays, and only if she’s home by 2:00.

I sip my fountain Coke even though I’m trying to only drink the bottled kind from the Mexican corner store on Lorraine’s block, because those are made with real cane sugar and not high fructose corn syrup like the kind that comes in the can or from a fountain. But even with the high fructose corn syrup coursing through my veins corrupting all of my cells, I’m still doing less damage to myself than all of the other people sitting at the bar, with their brains irradiated from television screens and their grips shaking on sweaty tequila glasses and their black holes where their eyes should be and their God knows what where their hearts should be.

The television screen says one minute and four seconds until the next round starts. The clock is counting down. I take the remote the bartender gave me – the keys are sticky with some kind of residue. I crack my initials into the keypad and hit enter and watch them appear on the screen next to everyone else’s. I look around and try to match the people at the bar with the initials on the screen. If I were a PJ, what would I be drinking? The trivia isn’t run by anyone at the bar – it’s some third party that makes the questions. The trivia runs on a loop on the TV screen. Ten questions and then a break to let more join and then ten more questions and then a break and then ten more. The questions haven’t repeated themselves as long as I’ve been in Mission Viejo, but maybe they will if I stay too long. Maybe I’ll run out of new questions and Mission Viejo will be another place I’ve tapped dry. Sometimes when it’s 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and I can’t sleep, I lay in bed and think of the trivia flashing in the empty bar. The blue screen illuminating the dark floors and the deserted stools. The same deep blue as Jeopardy, but with much easier questions. Jeopardy for decrepit, desert alcoholics. The screen flashes red: “Are you ready?”, and counts down from 10 in big, bold numbers. I am ready. I straighten out my spine and blink into focus because I want God to look down and to know that I’m ready. I don’t want him to have doubts.

Question number one asks for the capital of Missouri. Jefferson City, I know right away. I wish it wasn’t multiple choice when I know the answer. When I know I’m right, I wish we played the hard way. No choices, no hints.

About a month after I got here I thought it would be good for Lorraine to not check on Maggie so much. So I went to trivia and played all the rounds and I figured she would play an extra hand of bridge at the community center and that when she realized it was past 2:00, she would see that the world was still turning and that if she was doing something that she enjoyed she didn’t have to drop it all to check on Maggie. At first I thought it worked. She was smiling waiting in the parking lot for me and she was smiling as I reached over to unlock the passenger door and she was smiling as she climbed into her seat. I’d never seen anyone cry as hard as Lorraine did when she saw the clock on the dashboard said 2:28. She cried the whole way home and she cried as she crawled into her La-Z-Boy chair in front of the TV and she cried as she flung the footrest up and she cried as she tossed the afghan she had knitted herself over her head and she cried all through the afternoon and all through the night and all through the next morning. She grabbed one of the house phones from the charging docks next to her chair and threw it at my head and she called me a spoiled idiot who couldn’t even do the one thing she asked me to do. But mostly she just cried. She cried all through the week until the next Wednesday at 2:00pm when she dialed the phone and got through. And then it was just like before – like I’d never failed her.

The next question is asking for the 25th president – William McKinley. I hit B) on my trivia remote right away to get the full amount of points. Answer D fades away. Then Answer A fades away. I hear a chorus of alcoholics mumble “Goddammit” as they fall for the red herring of C) Theodore Roosevelt. My clam chowder and oysters are placed on the bar top in front of me as the screen flashes the leaderboard. My initials are number #1. CB. I think of the same initials written out on school supplies, on summer camp lunchbags, on chalkboard rankings in classrooms. All of the times those initials meant me and all of the times I was a prospect for something or had something worth marking as mine. And how all of those prospects and markings have culminated here, in this bar in Mission Viejo with a negative account balance and thirty minutes before I have to go get Lorraine. I squeeze lemon all over my oyster plate and slurp down my first shell. I am number one. I take a sip of my clam chowder and it burns the roof of my mouth. I slurp another oyster and wash it down with my Coke and the trio of flavors gives me déjà vu of sitting at this desert bar playing trivia with the same burnt tongue and the same corn syrup filled throat and the same sick feeling of pride at my initials on the screen. Déjà vu always makes me feel the way a dog must when you bunch up the fur on their neck and pull upwards –giving them the sensation of when they were puppies and their mother used to pick them up by the scruff of their neck to carry them. It’s a memory they can’t quite understand, but they succumb to it anyway and drop all their weight down, going limp and helpless even in ripe old age. I wonder who used to carry me by the scruff of my neck and pour oysters and Coke down my burnt throat and I wonder where they went and if they’re ever going to come back for me, or if I’m going to be limp and helpless and stuck in this desert forever.

I get lost in the task of eating my lunch and thinking about who is going to save me from Mission Viejo and when I look up again, I’ve missed three questions and am now in 6th place. I’m a loser, but at least I’ve shattered the déjà vu – an irony which is not lost on me, as my thigh sweat starts to stick me to the barstool, just like I knew it would. I hand my credit card to the bartender and she brings me the check to sign. I tip her 50%, because you may as well be generous when you’re up to your eyeballs in debt and have lost the meaning of a dollar.

Outside the restaurant, my shadow meets me where I left it under the blue and white striped awning and we walk down the street together, back to where I parked Lorraine’s big silver minivan. The handle shocks me as I open the door, and I stand on the street and crank the window open before climbing up into the driver’s seat and starting the car – blasting air conditioning into the stifling street before I’m ready to take the chance of rolling the window up and suffocating myself. I look around the van and feel a sense of pride at the vacuum streaks in the gray fabric and in the spotless floorboards. I cleaned out the van the first week I got here and through meticulous defense, have managed to fend off Lorraine’s perpetual attempt to sabotage this feat. The vacuum streaks and trashless floorboards are my tattered but hard-won flag waving in the wind. This van is my Iwo Jima. Lorraine’s house is the war, but it’s going a lot more like Vietnam than World War II.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror and see what used to be the laugh lines on my forehead that are now just lines. My crows feet are digging in, getting deeper, making themselves at home. I have Maggie’s dark eyebrows and Maggie’s dirty blonde curls and I realize that everything you can see in the small rectangular sliver of the rearview is Maggie’s. The pink jewels of the beaded crucifix hanging from the mirror reflect the sun into little spots all along the car’s interior. I wonder what else of Maggie is in me that I don’t know about yet. I crank the window back up and shift the van into drive. The jewels rattle together, swinging like a hypnotist’s pendulum beneath the mirror. I think about how nice it would feel to be able to be hypnotized as I drive the three miles up the same street to the community center.

I pull into the parking lot just as Lorraine is coming out of the double doors. Her maroon sweatpants are the same shade as her bejeweled sweater. Her sneakers are white and wide and orthopedic. Her hair is permed and dyed and I can just barely see the tip of her curls because her head is obscured by the massive box she is carrying, the contents of which the only thing I am sure of is that it is something she does not need. I think of the room I finished last night – the floors bare and clean, empty and pure. I think of the progress I’ve been making – the illicit trips to alleyway dumpsters in the middle of the night, the reappearance of swaths of carpet popping up across the house like the first patches of dead grass in early spring after a long, snowy winter. And here she is with more shit. She’s like the Taliban – letting you take over a small territory like a minivan or a sunroom – meanwhile she’s converting the living room and kitchen into havens for radical Islamic fundamentalism with her sewing machines and beaded jewelry kits and all the other shit she orders from QVC. I am Sisyphus – slogging away through decades of junk and grime, and when I finally get a glimpse at a floorboard or a tile, down rolls the boulder of the 78-year-old hoarder with more shit from the Home Shopping Network, pinning me down to Mission Viejo for another week or month or season.

I reach over to open the passenger door from the inside. The stretch in my arm reminds me of threading the needle in yoga class. I remember my head tilting forward onto my purple mat, my eyes staring at the tips of my fingers hovering precariously close to the person at the mat next to mine. Holding until the instructor says to let go. I feel far away from being the kind of person who goes to yoga class. I’m the dog being picked up by its neck scruff again. Lorraine climbs into the passenger seat with her loot and carelessly tosses the box into the backseat, not acknowledging when one of the box flaps slaps my sunglasses down from my head and onto my face.

“What is that?,” I ask.
Lorraine grabs for her seatbelt.
“Cat toys.”
“You don’t have a cat.”
The click of the belt buckle.
“I’m getting one.”

I nod and put the van back into drive. Lorraine peers over to check the time on the dashboard: 1:51. She leans back into her seat and tells me about the bridge she played today. We pull into the driveway at 1:56 and she is so focused on getting inside to check on Maggie that she forgets the box of cat toys in the backseat. I’ll take the box to an animal shelter tomorrow morning and the van will go back to being Allied territory. Lorraine is unlocking the front door of her house as I lock the door of her van. She leaves the door open and I stand at the edge of her lawn and watch her silhouette kick off her shoes and shuffle over to her La-Z-Boy. I get the mail from the box and am flipping through glossy advertisements when I get close enough to hear Tom Edmund’s voice on TV.

Tom Edmund is live in his studio audience standing next to a teary-eyed Hispanic woman. The woman does the prayer thing where you touch your head and your stomach and both shoulders. The woman says she wants to talk to her husband. Tom Edmund puts his hand on her shoulder and says he’ll see if he can reach him. The thing about Tom Edmund, Lorraine pointed her finger in my face and told me the first week I got here – is that he can reach anybody. That’s the thing about him and that’s why he’s the best.

Tom Edmund closes his eyes for a minute and then says he’s feeling a connection. He has someone here who is trying to reach him. She asks if it’s Carlos and he touches his hand to his sternum and moves his lips silently before saying yes – as a matter of fact, it is Carlos. Tom Edmund grabs the woman’s shaking hands and holds them in between his own. He relays to the woman that Carlos loves her and misses her. Then Tom Edmund says that Carlos is trying to give a message to someone else – someone who is not the woman standing in front of him, but maybe a child or a younger person.
“Our son?” The woman clutches her breast as she asks.
“Perhaps.” Tom Edmund cocks his head to the side. He closes his eyes and mutters again.
I’m getting an “H” – is there someone with an H close to you and Carlos?
The woman shakes her head no.
“A ha- or a he-… hi- maybe a “ho–”
“José? My son is José.”
“Yes – yes that’s it.” Tom Edmund loves bringing Hispanics on stage because the H sound in English doubles as a J sound in Spanish, and he can hedge his bets on the person standing in front of him having a loved one with a name that’s either an H or a soft J.
“Carlos says he needs José to know that he’s proud of him and that he loves him and
misses him very much.”
The woman nods.
“AND…” Tom Edmund bends his index finger as his eyes close. He continues. “He says to tell José that heaven has all the Dodgers games, and that he hasn’t missed one yet.”
The audience gasps and the woman weeps as Tom Edmund holds her gently by the elbows. She sobs into his chest and tells him that they loved to watch the Dodgers together. Tom Edmund says the connection is getting weaker and that he must bid farewell to the spirit of Carlos, and a production assistant comes out to walk the woman back to her seat. I wonder if it’s the same production assistant who internet searched Carlos’s name to find a picture of him in a Dodgers jersey, or if that’s someone else’s job. Tom Edmund stands alone on stage now.

“Ladies and gentleman, this concludes the in-person portion of our show. For the rest of the program, we will be taking call-ins. If you are looking to get in contact with a spirit who has crossed over – then please, dial the number on your screen to join the queue.” The 1-900 number pops up in big bold letters. In smaller letters underneath is the rate of the call per minute: $0.99 for the first minute and $6.99 for each minute after, rounded up and to be applied to the caller’s telephone bill. Lorraine doesn’t need to see the phone number. There are two phones next to her chair and one of them is only for calling into Crossing Over with Tom Edmund on Wednesday afternoons. The other phone is for dialing QVC or my mom or my uncle or anyone else she needs to call. This way she can just hit the “last” button and voilà – she is in the queue before other people have even picked up their phone.

When Tom Edmund tells Lorraine she’s on the line I take some dishes off the coffee table and walk them to the kitchen sink. I watch the green numbers on the microwave clock change and think of all the dollars she’s being scammed out of. But then I think of the week she didn’t call. I think of how she started crying on Wednesday afternoon and how by Friday morning I felt so guilty that I drove 60 miles out to a Toys R Us in Loma Linda because it was the only place that sold Ouija boards. So I bought one and came back and set it up on the kitchen table and surrounded it with $1 vanilla tea lights I got from a Wal-Mart in the same strip mall as the Toys R Us. The candles smelled like rotten Pine-Sol, but it looked like a séance and I figured I’d move the planchette around the way you do when you’re a teenager at sleepovers (because ghosts only ever do it in the movies), and she’d feel better like she does after Tom Edmund lies to her. But when she walked into the kitchen and saw the board she screamed it was demonic and spilled the cheap candle wax all over the board. So I couldn’t even return it – I was just out the $27 for the board and the $13 for the candles and however much for the sales tax and however much else for the gas money.

I know what getting older does to your skin and your crows feet and your dreams but I don’t know what it does to your brain. I know Lorraine used to be very smart. I don’t know if she is now, but I know that she was. I know she was good at math and understood numbers and had a job with some big company as their first woman bookkeeper. I know that Lorraine would know the 25th president and the capital of Missouri and that there was a time where she’d know the answers to whatever the trivia questions were that I missed when I wasn’t paying attention. For most of her life, she knew everything I know and more, and it still didn’t save her. It didn’t save her from Crossing Over with Tom Edmund or from the La-Z-Boy or from the house filled with QVC boxes or from the casket with the dead daughter in it. Before she knew she’d have to bury her Catholic daughter in a Godless protestant cemetery because her daughter died in a Godless protestant way, Lorraine knew a lot. When enough time has passed, I go back into the living room. Crossing Over with Tom Edmund is at a commercial. Lorraine sits quietly with her afghan folded over her lap.

“How’s Maggie?,” I ask.
“She’s good. She’s been spending a lot of time with Denny lately.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“Yes. I’m happy they’ve worked things out.”

I open my mouth to ask a follow up question, but the theme music for the show starts playing and Lorraine turns her attention back to the TV set. Even after she’s checked on Maggie, Lorraine always finishes the episode because she likes to make sure that everyone else who calls in gets to hear from their beloved and find them dead and well in heaven. They always do. That’s the thing about Tom Edmund and that’s why he’s the best.

I pick up the shoes Lorraine kicked off when she came in and push the tongues into the soles before flipping them upside down on the floor so that scorpions can’t get in – the way Lorraine used to do for my mom and my uncle and Maggie when they were little. Even though he’s parted Lorraine from thousands of dollars over the years, I can’t hate the fake psychic who spends his afternoons stumbling through the alphabet under hot studio
lights with his eyes squinted open for hints of a reaction and with his hand held in a bent salute to his gelled hair. I can’t hate this makeup-wearing con artist entirely, because it’s thanks to him that Lorraine falls asleep and stays asleep knowing that God forgave Maggie, who lives in heaven now without a broken neck and with the color returned to her face. Lorraine sleeps knowing the rope isn’t still strangling her daughter’s vocal cords – it can’t be, because here she is telling Tom Edmund to tell Lorraine that she is okay and that Denny is looking after her even though her and Denny get on each other’s nerves sometimes (although I guess now is not one of those times), and that she will wait for Lorraine to get there and that they’ll be together again one day and that everything is and will be okay. And so Lorraine sleeps all through the night every night of the week, and best on Wednesdays.

As for me, I know I’ll never live in Mission Viejo for real, and I know that one day I’ll pay off all my credit cards and make something of myself. I know I won’t get stuck licking tequila salt off a sweaty glass in a desert afternoon day in and day out and taking pride in knowing the answers to trivia questions I’ve seen a dozen times before. And most of all I know that I won’t ever come home from a long, hard day of life not being what I wanted it to be and end it swinging purple-faced from the neck. I know this all not in the way I know that the state capital of Missouri is Jefferson City or that the 25th president is William McKinley, but in the same way Lorraine knows that the television psychic is telling the truth about Maggie. Which is to say – we don’t really know at all, but we hope so hard it feels like we do.