But as we returned over the years, I gravitated to the open excavation pits where visitors could see the piles of bones, stained a dark brown by the asphalt that destroyed and preserved them. I watched the tar extruding bubbles around the grisly clots of long mammoth femurs, camel ribs, and dire wolf skulls. As my nose tingled with the acrid smell, I imagined the peaceful transformation of bone into fossil. After thousands of years, the pain of that scene with the baby mammoth would evaporate along with some of the petroleum. All that remained would be bone, and the analysis of bone. I emptied the school library of its tiny collection of books about Earth science. Lizzy and I became best friends at the edge of the playground, trying to identify pebbles that had come unstuck from the ragged fringes of asphalt.
It’s how my father and I became friends, too. He was happier when I was a kid, back when he was still trying to get his college degree in night school. When he discovered I was excited about rocks, he bought me thick, heavily illustrated adult books on paleontology, chemistry, and geology. I pored over the charts showing the ages of the Earth, unraveling the eons in my mind, watching the continents form and shatter and bleed lava.
I wished I could talk to that father again, instead of the person he’d become. It was a hot, windy day in April, and for the first time in years, he and I stood at the La Brea Tar Pits. I’d just finished the new student tour at UCLA, and my father decided we should take a break here before heading home. Now we faced the square bulk of the Page Museum together, its carved stone facade crawling with Pleistocene life.
We strolled through the unchanging dioramas in the museum, pausing at the kids’ activity station. You could test your strength by yanking weights out of buckets of tar. Helpful signage explained that we were reenacting the struggles of ancient megafauna, trying to extract themselves from asphalt upwellings under the pond. Nobody else was playing with the display, and it felt like we had the whole museum to ourselves.
My father seemed happy. There was no boring job to weigh him down here, and no rug to obsess about. He turned to me, a smile still luminescent in his eyes. “Do you know why my father went to jail?”
I froze. It was something we never talked about. Was this a test? One of those questions where an honest answer ended with me screaming under the deluge of his wrath? I gripped the plastic handle sticking out of the tar, mashing my rings into my hands, pressing nerve into bone.
Of course I had wondered about Grandpa’s time in jail. He died when I was little, but was never far from my father’s mind as the reason for all his unhappiness. Looking into the black muck of the display, I tried not to move any muscles in my face. Maybe he would forget that he’d asked and we could go back to making fun of the dusty woolly mammoth display.
“He was smart, but he was lazy.” Except for the pronoun, it was the exact thing my father always said about me. “He always got tired of whatever he was doing when it got hard. He went from job to job, you know? First he was selling birdcages, then musical instruments. And somehow he always had money to start a new business. Then one day the police showed up at our house. I was nine. It turned out he’d been burning his shops down for the insurance.” My father paused, the lines in his face erased by a taut bitterness. I could see the little boy he’d been, innocent and outraged. “He was an arsonist, and it was… you know the term ‘Jewish lightning’?”
I didn’t.
“It’s a myth, that Jews burn their shops down for the insurance money and blame a lightning strike. Like the myth that we have horns, or we killed Jesus. But there he was, an actual kike firebug.” My father spat the words. “The judge thought he was going to save all the good Christians of Los Angeles from us. Nobody was hurt, but the cops charged my father with aggravated arson, which is normally only for situations where people were killed or injured. But my dad used a timer device to set the fire, and that technically made it ‘aggravated.’ So his sentence went from three years to ten. I didn’t see him again until after I married your mom.”
I was shocked. I barely remembered my grandparents. They were two old people with thick accents who died before I was old enough to hold a conversation with them. “But how did you get the auto shop?”
“One of his business partners covered for us, pretended he’d bought the whole thing from my father. He let your grandmother and me work there so your uncles could eat. And then he cut me in for half when I turned eighteen.”
“I didn’t know that.” I met his eyes awkwardly.
“That’s why we have to push you not to be lazy, Beth. I worry you want to get things the easy way. You spend so much time with your friends that it interferes with your studies.”
It was his usual accusation, and it never failed to paralyze me with frustrated rage. But this time, in this context, it meant something different. He was trying to warn me somehow, or maybe warn his dad retroactively through me. Don’t light things on fire. Don’t leave.
“Let’s look at something else.” I pointed ahead of us, where a team of researchers cleaned fossils behind a floor-to-ceiling glass window.
“What are they doing with those piles of dirt?” My father seemed glad to focus on something else too. “Shouldn’t they be looking at bones?”
“Actually that’s not dirt—they’re sorting microfossils.” Excited to explain it to him, I gushed everything I knew. “A bunch of tiny stuff got trapped in the tar along with the mammoths. There are teeth, insects, plants, and shells, and those can all tell us a lot about the Ice Age ecosystem.” I was warming to the topic when a woman next to us interrupted.
“Not that many people know about microfossils. Are you studying paleontology?”
“I’m going to study geoscience at UCLA next year.”
“That’s where I did my undergrad! I’m doing a Ph.D. in paleo now.” The woman pulled her hair back into a scrunchie as she talked, and I realized she was only a few years older than me.
“Are you studying microfossils?” The world had dropped away, and all I cared about was learning more.
“Do you know what paleobotany is? I’m studying pollen and seeds from the Pleistocene.” She glanced around conspiratorially. “Do you want to take a peek behind the glass? I can take you in.”
I barely restrained myself from jumping up and down. “Yes! That would be awesome.”
She turned to my father. “Are you her dad?”
“No. I’m… a friend.” His eyes had gone opaque, and he backed away. He hated talking to strangers, and always came up with bizarrely obvious lies to prevent them from knowing anything about him.
She looked confused, but continued cheerily. “I’m Quan. Do you like fossils too? Want a backstage tour?”
My father backed up more, his face blank. Quan was freaking him out. He sometimes got like this in unexpected social situations, and I couldn’t predict what he would do. It might be really bad.
“You know, we should probably get going. Thanks for the offer, though.” I hoped Quan wouldn’t be offended by our abrupt withdrawal. We left her standing next to the lab door I’d been hoping to enter, to see what remained of the Ice Age.
Somehow we wound up outside, next to the mammoth scene of anguish that had joined us in the past.