Go forward, up the long sloping hill of heat-baked, late afternoon sidewalk, besides two car lanes split by lush traffic islands—toward the dizzying summit. Then stagger over into another world beyond.

For this Santa Valeria neighborhood holds Southern California homes of casual wealth and quiet opulence. Not the garish, built-up mansions near the Mission, nor the sprawling, mostly dark estates embedded high in the foothills that semicircle the downtown grid.

She knows these houses belong to the every day rich, who drive their own cars, buy groceries, and live their own life—to the extent that they possess one.

“Gabriela? Oh my god, that’s so lovely.” Young married women, her employers have told her this. Jealous, saddled with names like Alexis or Skyler or Jen. One even said, “I wish it was my name, but friends would call me Gabby. And that would totally ruin it.”

Gabriela trudges ever upward, used to the incline, and shaded under palm tree fronds, by oaks and pines, within the mysterious shadows thrown by church towers and the odd tall structure. A cooling sea breeze wafts gently against her back from the coastline two miles south. This is the rise where ocean gusts finally die out, unable to sustain into an asphalt valley cradled by mountains.

“You are walking?” Maria shouts, tucked into a bus stop bench for the long haul.

Gabriela nods to her friend and neighbor. “How long are you waiting?”

“Half-hour.” Maria squints hopefully toward the long flat stretch of Lower Grand Street for a glimpse of silvery rumbling movement. Gabriela waves before continuing north.

Most days she takes public transit, but sometimes the bus just doesn’t come. No explanation; no apology. As a child, Gabriela walked three miles with her mother to their village of Mazunte in Oaxaca, then back after a day’s work. So a two-mile trek homeward now doesn’t even prod her subconscious as a complaint. She recognizes various people en route, familiar strangers, though her position renders her invisible to them. Seen then forgotten.

A forty-ish man sways on a  porch swing, strumming a guitar and singing tunelessly. With enough money, one can do this. Display ragged musical skills and a strangled voice, and actually achieve personal joy performing as passersby suffer.

Gabriela works this neighborhood and beyond, cleaning houses, running errands—when Cousin Juana loans her car out—and helping aging residents in their gradual slide toward infirmity. At fifty, she has done similar jobs since childhood, assisting her mother.

Yolanda was a warrior, groaning and growling through her day while supporting the weight of the world. Her strength was amazing. Their family of cousins and grandkids and lifelong friends celebrated Abuela’s eightieth birthday last spring in Cesar Chavez Park. Yolanda danced, drank beer, and arm-wrestled a nephew into a plea for surrender. Two days later she died. Doctor Bergen told Gabriela her heart just stopped, like the electrical system in a car. Yolanda was up-and-running at full force, then click—switched off forever.

A serpentine hiss of sprinklers ahead, their run-off draining down sloped driveways, the only water stain evident amid succulents and conifers rooted in dry dirt. Sidewalk pavement looks warped and pitted, riven and rucked by weather, from earthquakes that barely punctured Gabriela’s early morning dreams. By moisture and the aching void of moisture. Chattering automated spigots spray wide arcs, rainbows in their mist. A startled cat dashes past before sprawling on a stone boundary wall.

Beneath a Japanese maple tree, she feels a last spatter of sunlight through leaves.

Gabriela sees the middle-aged woman up on a lawn fronting a small cottage. It sits ten feet above the roadway atop a mount of earth. Because most everyone living in this neighborhood is white, Gabriela initially assumed she worked for the household. Wrong. Believes her name is Lavonne. She patrols the patch of grass that displays tables and outdoor furniture as if waiting for her family or guests to arrive. Over several months, Gabriela has never spotted anyone else. Ever. Just Lavonne shifting positions, sitting, reclining, standing, and always talking loudly. No visible cell phone, but perhaps she wears an earpiece. Very hard to tell anymore in America who speaks on phones and who communicates directly to the sky.

The hill is a series of rises. When Gabriela crests one, she is rewarded with a level stretch to catch her breath. Darkness envelops the ground now and even shadows the homes: bungalows and single-story ranch houses, Swiss-looking chalets and New England white clapboard cottages, cream stucco buildings coated in Spanish tile and dark redwood cube-like structures, and places that resemble Far East temples with dripping zen fountains. Only the sky still holds a feathery blue and hints of a dusky light waiting beyond the summit.            

Some suspect Gabriela is uneducated. Incorrect. Having no high school or college education, she may be unschooled, but has taken courses online for years, studying plants and animals, history, and architecture. She wishes to name every bird and tree, each car and house she encounters.  

A tangle of vines hangs off a bamboo wall, while sidewalks hold embedded gardens. Lush manzanita sprouts everywhere, light green clusters of yawning agave, a riot of primary-colored roses and sunflowers. Behind the scrim of a high privet hedge comes the splash and frolic of a teenage pool party; unseen worlds all converging at property lines. On the final slog upward, Gabriela encounters oak trees whose massive trunks resemble gray elephant legs. The scent of flowers never fails to return her to childhood, the honeysuckle of her youth, when everything arrived brand new. For a moment she is displaced in time.

Gabriela reaches the hilltop by Casa Espana Apartments feeling dazed. Emerging from residential calm, she returns to the world she lives in. A golden light has pooled in the valley before her, where the heat of the day still lingers, everything glowing and encircled by green, stone-stubbled mountains. Two lanes of a drowsy Grand Street expand to four lanes of honking, screeching, vocal traffic. Other pedestrians now share the sidewalks, slouched or hunched from the residual warmth, their clothes loose and casual. A certain resignation is evident.

A man near sixty inhabits a bench across the wide avenue and shouts, “Muy hermosa. Maravillosa!”

Gabriela curses and swats her hand. Victor was a repairman, a landscaper. Now he mostly drinks and flirts lazily with passing females. She is not interested. Divorced her husband Arturo ten years ago, lost her religion, or the Catholic Church shunned her. Doesn’t matter. Her daughter got married—how long ago?—and moved to Florida. Never returns voicemail messages.

Gabriela is proud of her strong legs. Only her upper torso has gained weight, much of it muscle. Not like her mother though, whose once nurturing breasts merged to become a single hard mass over time, another flank of her defensive armor. At seventy, Yolanda lifted withered naked men in their mid-eighties into bathtubs and sponged them down without judgment or interest, singing old Mexican folk songs Gabriela now wishes she could remember. Those rich men she worked for begged Yolanda to marry them, or suddenly cried out for their long-dead mothers.

Yolanda told her, “As you grow older, Gabriela, you will carry more and more ghosts with you. Don’t be scared.”

“Of what?”

“When they ask you to join them.”

Gabriela descends with the route into a ravine, crossing at a four-way stoplight. A party shuttle motors through the intersection and college girls gesture and laugh at her. No point in swearing at them. Twenty years will flash right by until many wake up in hollow marriages—husbands always working, traveling—their fancy homes stocked with every type of liquor, medicine cabinets crammed with Prozac, Xanax, and other drugs. Gabriela knows; she housecleans for rich forty-somethings who chatter on their phones all morning and then lie flopped on their beds, sobbing through the afternoons.

Ahead she sees a trio of youths in her path. They are camped, nestled in an abandoned couch and a ratty velvet armchair decaying out on the sidewalk. Two skinny men sport baseball caps and show sunken faces, with an attractive but disheveled young woman in torn clothes who clutches a skateboard. Gabriela recognizes her. Ashley, a local one encounters every day in the valley. They appear daubed and dazzled, flecked and frazzled. She hopes to pass without incident.

“I’ve seen you before,” says one guy, smiling green and grotesque. He turns. “She works for people downtown. Gets paid in cash.”

The other dude strokes a goatee and extends his long bony legs from chair to sofa so Gabriela can’t pass without climbing over.

“Hey,” the first says, “we need twenty bucks for food and beer.” He comes to attention from a dazed slump.

“No,” she says. “Leave me alone. This is my home too.”

“Really? Okay, thirty bucks.”

Gabriela opens her bag and grips the knife she hopes not to use. Only once, twenty years ago. Wounded a man who assaulted her in Pittsfield—upstate New York. She fled the city the next morning satisfied that whatever crimes the man committed in the future, rape would not be among them. “Please,” she tries.

“Let her go,” Ashley says, lying on the couch, relaxed near unconsciousness.

Goatee keeps his legs blocking, while Bad Teeth rises to reach out a hand. “You can afford it, amiga, then go home, cook dinner.”

Gabriela feels her rib cage tighten, difficulty breathing. She squeezes the knife handle so hard her fingers ache. Lifts it slowly. Bad Teeth notices; his eyes pop.

Ashley comes out of her trance and folds forward. “Fuckheads.” She hammers an elbow down onto Goatee’s knees until he retracts his legs. She jams her big skateboard into the other man’s chest. Hat flies off and he staggers backward, confused. “I told you to let her go,” Ashley says. “When you get old, this lady or her cousin will take care of you, pretend to love you when nobody else will.”

Goatee huddles into himself, defensive posture. “Who cares? I won’t live that long.”

Now standing, Ashley’s face conveys disgust. “Yeah, but I will. You’re not screwing up my future karma.” She nods to Gabriela, who scurries by them during the moment of calm.

“Well, shit, man,” says Bad Teeth, “you kinda hurt me, Ash.” He rubs at his scrawny chest.

Gabriela picks up her pace; only a half-mile left. She hears Ashley laughing, then the clatter and bounce of her skateboard’s massive wheels and bearings rolling downhill. Fading.

She walks past Verizon and CVS, Pacific Dental Center and We Buy Gold, beyond Tandoori Palace and a German restaurant that’s never open, SoCal Locksmiths and El Pollo Loco, Holiday Lounge, and Upper Grand Motel as the land slopes upward again. But the incline is gradual. A break shows through the surrounding mountains, a space between avenue tree branches where a last orange light glazes over Gabriela. She pauses at this highest point of the trek, her apartment complex two blocks away.

Right there, bathed in the gloaming, she can squint and just perceive the threads stretching out from her body in every direction, a fine latticework spun out for miles. Imagines it to be silk, but as firm as tensile steel. With weary satisfaction, she exhales the day just gone by.

Gabriela holds this world together. Like her dead mother, and sister in San Diego, and her daughter who doesn’t call anymore, and many thousands more—even millions. She doesn’t need to share that with anyone. They wouldn’t believe her or would know so deep inside but never admit it aloud. A private moment of power to sustain her through the next day, and the next.

Gabriela continues homeward in the new dark as the errant bus grumbles and wheezes by, her friend Maria glowing with saintly fluorescence inside. An unseeing holy statue facing out toward the limitless expanse of night.

– Max Talley

Author’s Note: Ever since a former President gave a speech about the people crossing our border (“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists”), I’ve wanted to write a counterpoint. That opinion piece never happened. Instead, this story grew out of daily walks during 2020, the pandemic year, usually at sunset in the nearby neighborhoods of my Southern California town. I studied everything: the trees, sidewalks, the homes, landscaping, and of course, the people I saw. “Ascending” combines a truthful log of my journeys and an imagining of the lives we encounter briefly and perhaps wonder about later on. There are dozens of stories to write about the secret heroes that walk among us every day. Gabriela’s is just one of them.