Late that morning, nearly lunchtime, Chaiwa’s voice shivered louder than usual through the cottonwoods. The corrugated metal of Mara’s workshop contrasted sharply against the postcard-blue New Mexico sky. Barn doors wide open, she had an unobstructed view of the creek, watercress lining its slippery bed, evergreens and piñon foresting in the distance, the red-orange ocotillo and Mexican poppy, the muted jade and mauve rabbitbrush. The wildlife nearest the horses and grazing cattle were small and benign. In the distance, beyond the rolling sage hills, coyotes and mountain lions skulked after sunset, though they rarely bothered anything inside the fences.
Wearing her usual attire of sunflower-yellow coveralls that Trudy said made her happy and an indigo bandanna covering her faded-amber curls now streaked silver, Mara perched on the swivel stool at her metalwork bench, which had lately monopolized much of the studio. She hammered the delicate cactus wrens she was constructing from scrap copper to alight the spines of the barbed cane-cholla sculpture she’d been constructing in cast iron for weeks. Above each tap of her hammer, creek sounds and the warbling of sandhill cranes echoed through the chamber of her workshop, one of the reasons she’d chosen this location on the ranch. Working metal beside the water, she seemed to meld with the landscape.
A few minutes later, the distinct sound of children’s laughter called her from her copper bird on the anvil block. The three boys who lived down the dirt road on the neighboring ranch were splashing in the creek again. They never paid attention to the no-trespassing sign, but she didn’t mind them swimming. She just didn’t want the responsibility if they drowned themselves.
After a lifetime of solitary traveling, Mara Rothstein had returned to the childhood home she’d lived in for only two years as a girl. But it had etched itself like graphite into her memory while she lived abroad in Europe and vagabonded through the United States. Nowhere had felt like home after the trauma of Los Alamos. Home was a cave dwelling inside her, dark and dank. But New Mexico had called her back six years before, and her trailer had become a permanent fixture on Trudy’s ranch in an artist’s town nestled in the hills below the Gila Mountains in the southwestern fold of the state’s broomstick skirt. She’d chosen this life. Without kids. Without anyone. And it suited her just fine, living without obligations to anyone but herself. Until Trudy. Trudy had stay-cabled her to this place.
The copper wren Mara had sculpted from something elemental and shapeless, a coalescence of nature and machinery, was finished. Time to affix him to his new home, spiny cactus upon which he could sing.
She imagined life into all her artwork. That was the beauty. That was the joy.
Once she’d donned her welding goggles and torch, sparks began to fly in a brilliant conflagration of orange chasing white-hot blue, her favorite part in the process. Trudy often nagged Mara about safety. Their relationship was above tactfulness, and Trudy was not one for beating around the bush. “Aren’t you getting too old for that torch? I swear, one of these days you’ll burn your arm clean off.” Still, Mara delighted in vexing her. In response, she’d quoted Edna St. Vincent Millay: “My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night. But, ah my foes, and, oh my friends, it gives a lovely light.” But now, fusing her little copper bird atop the spiraled metal cactus rung, Mara went fuzzy. An uncanny falling sensation overtook her. She released her hand from the torch’s trigger, but the sparks did not cease. Outside the barn doors, crackling the once-blue sky, there appeared a horrifying blaze.
She’d seen it before, when her parents had helped create the world’s first atomic bomb. Seventy-five years fell away and she was five years old again, watching the sky catch fire from a safe distance atop Sandia Mountain. Watching the world fall away.
Something deep within her, deep as Chaiwa’s songs, told her this was not the bomb but what had happened after the mushroom cloud had faded …
A pain behind her temples grabbed her; she let the torch drop to the floor. Transfixed by the bloodred that streaked the sky, she stood immobile, as if still holding her mother’s hand and crying. She didn’t have a hand to hold now. Except Trudy’s.
Mara needed to check on her.
Outside, birdsong had dissolved. The creek lay silent. The little boys’ laughter had vanished. She scanned the water. Where had the neighbors run off to?
Wrapping her arms around her shoulders, she tramped across the dirt road, her vigorous gait belying her age. She called out, “Trudy? Trudy, you up there, hun? Did you see that? Trudy?” Though she knew she was still too far away to be heard, she shouted, recalling something she’d buried from childhood.
Something that made her fear Trudy would not reply.
THREE
SLEEPING SISTERS
Calliope lingered in Phoenix’s Crayola-colored bedroom, clutching his Thomas the Tank engines. Play with me, Mama, Phoenix had begged. Let’s play. She dropped the trains as if they’d stung her, then moved to his dresser and pulled out a pair of pajamas, which she folded and unfolded, searching the creases for some remnant, some clue. She wanted to pull his body out of hers again, to cesarean him back from wherever he’d gone. She wanted to lie on his bed, cover her chest and swollen belly with his knitted blanket, and wait. For his return. For God to fracture the sky again and bring him back. For an end to this nightmare. Her thoughts had gone fuzzy. Should she be getting on the road? What would Andres have been doing, if he were here?
Eunjoo Yeom was curled like a hedgehog on Phoenix’s child-size sofa, steadying the flashlight and watching her. The girl didn’t ask to play, didn’t say anything even as Calliope had wandered from room to room in the suffocating heat of the dark house before settling in Phoenix’s, unable to snap herself out of her languor. She stared into the girl’s sad face, translucent in the gleam of flashlight, and sighed, at last, “Come on, we should pack.”
In her bedroom, she changed out of her damp capris into a dry pair. Still Eunjoo quietly observed. Calliope could feel the girl’s gaze boring into her as she grabbed toothbrushes, pairs of socks, clothes, books from nightstands, hair products, toys, and other trifles, cramming everything into duffel bags and backpacks, then tossing each hulking bundle down the stairs. She couldn’t think straight. She hadn’t eaten in hours, though she had no idea what time it was, and the gray murk emanating from the sky didn’t help. It could have been midnight—it could have been five in the morning. The surrealism of their situation sent her head reeling. How long until sunrise? She didn’t know if the sun still existed, though she knew its disappearance would have meant hers as well. Like the disappearance of all people besides her and Eunjoo in Albuquerque? In New Mexico? Farther than that? How many people were gone? She tried imagining an answer but couldn’t think beyond the immediate. Hunger. The little girl whose hand she held. Calliope had tried the landline, thinking perhaps only her cellphone service was down. No dial tone. She’d tried the television despite electricity outage. It was dead. Same with her laptop. Even the battery was dead. She’d searched the closet for a radio, but couldn’t find one. The car radio played static. In the street she’d screamed for anyone, Eunjoo looking on silently. She’d honked the car horn for a full minute. No one. Nothing. Nothing except her husband’s words scuttling through her memory like wire scratches. If anything happens, take Phoenix and go to your aunt’s.
The climate debate had soured. Superstorms had come like those that had launched millennia of prehistoric ice sheets, no matter what pseudoscientists and politicians had promoted about cyclical warming and cooling. The scientists had been silenced. Calliope’s mother had chimed in: It was fulfillment of prophecy. It was too late to discuss how or why, Andres had said, and Calliope had, for once, agreed. It was time to prepare for the worst: the walls erected, the massacres already enacted, and more planned. The crisis would come to their front door as it had already come to so many others—fires swallowing forests, shootings punctuating every border, Gulf hurricanes demolishing her childh
ood home stretching inland as far as the Texas desert, floods destroying every coast, squashing shorelines, sweeping children from their mother’s arms, officials invalidating US passports then, in riot gear, kicking in windows, burning down homes, first taking parents and grandparents while children attended school, then quickly, so quickly, murdering whole families in the too-bright light of day.
As a paramedic, Andres couldn’t abandon his post. He’d said if something ever happened, she should take their son to Tía’s hacienda in Silver City, three hundred miles south.
She’d reminded him they weren’t activists or agitators. They were safe.
He’d held her shoulders and said she had to consider the possibility of being without him.
She couldn’t do it. She’d squared her shoulders, shaken her head. There had to be another way. She’d be too frenzied, make a mistake, endanger Phoenix.
I have faith in you, he’d said.
Maybe she’d believed him then, but now that he was gone, she didn’t know what she believed. She held Phoenix’s baby blanket to her face.
Tía’s hacienda. Were Andres, Phoenix, and her mom already on their way down? Had they mistaken Calliope as disappeared? Never mind their cars in the driveway. They could’ve hitched a ride with neighbors. They could’ve walked. She couldn’t allow reason to kick in, couldn’t handle the possibilities.
She stuffed the blanket along with pajamas into a bag, stoppering her tears with packing. In her own bag, her mother’s rosary and a bottle of holy water. She’d allowed her mother to sprinkle the stuff on Phoenix’s head whenever he was ill and to pray over him. Calliope’s throat tightened. Was she praying over him now? Bisabuela had taught her the prayers of her people. Before Calliope had broken Bisabuela’s heart.
Calliope crouched to face the girl she’d just met, who beneath the filtered gleam of the flashlight appeared as a tiny, pearlescent waif disappearing into a gloss of blue-black braids. “Let’s find you something to take, chica.”
Eunjoo didn’t ask where they were going, only peeled herself from the couch as a shellfish dislocating from the seawall, bracing the flashlight in one hand and sliding her free hand into Calliope’s. The soft skin of the little girl’s palm reminded her of Phoenix, which both comforted and disturbed her. She resisted the urge to pull away.
Together the pair descended the stairs, a tug of war within Calliope, at once grateful for the child’s presence and resentful she’d been spared while Phoenix had gone missing. She felt almost repelled by the quiet girl. It occurred to Calliope that she knew nothing about her.
“How old are you?”
Eunjoo unclutched Calliope’s hand and held out her fingers. Six. Same as Phoenix.
Calliope stooped down to hoist the bags over her shoulder. Eunjoo reached for a bag, and Calliope grabbed Phoenix’s Lightning McQueen backpack. Phoenix’s rock collection lay on the tiled foyer floor. He must have been working on it before he left. She should take it to him. But it was so heavy. Instead, she grabbed one smooth turquoise stone and stuck it in her duffel bag. At the front door, she sensed a terrible heaviness. In the air, a strange metallic smell, and the sky, ashen as wind-blown forest fires. The lava rock xeriscape shadowed into animal shapes that seemed to bleed, reminding Calliope that the indigenous people of this land had buried their dead’s bones dipped in ocher. At one ancient time, when the Sleeping Sisters were still wild beasts, the ancient lava had flowed all the way to her house, to her neighborhood and beyond. The lava had encased the desert floor for eons, had chiseled the earth, but the volcanoes had been silent for years.
She and Eunjoo shoved the bags into the trunk and turned toward Eunjoo’s house. Eunjoo gripped Calliope tighter. Did she too sense danger? The relentless kicking in Calliope’s belly reminded her of bones rattling. Two babies, fighting each other in the carved gypsum of her womb like cave flowers, dangling undone.
“I’m scared to go in,” Eunjoo squeaked, her voice a small bird’s. “They were fighting.”
“Who was fighting, chica?”
“My mommy and daddy.”
Calliope’s pulse sped. “Did something happen when they were fighting?” What if there’d been a domestic dispute gone violent?
“I was playing with my dolls. There was an earthquake. I went downstairs, and they were gone.”
Calliope couldn’t leave the girl outside. She hesitated a moment, then reached out and set the girl above her protruding stomach. She seemed so light, almost feathery. A bird. How different from Calliope’s own solid, heavy son, grown too large to hold.
Eunjoo wrapped her legs around Calliope, then lay her head down on the woman’s shoulder as if relieved of a tremendous weight, a child’s inclination to sink into a mother, even though they’d never met before. Calliope thought of the time she lost her son at the chile festival in Old Town. He’d gone looking for a carnival ride and lost sight of his mama for a split second. A split second on repeat. Calliope had that same sinking feeling now, unable to see or feel or hear anything except where are you, where are you? A seesaw-sick swishing, falling-and-falling kind of feeling. Only now, it wouldn’t go away. Numbness did not take over. She was half-numb half-sick, and it lingered.
Calliope straightened and braced herself to enter the silent house. Steady breaths rose and fell against her shoulder. Eunjoo’s body had gone limp with sleep, her small hands still clutching Calliope’s tunic. Calliope knew the feeling; postpanic, the body tended to shut down. She opened the door. No disarray in the living room, no visible chaos. No signs of struggle or carnage. Two white candles in two red sconces had burned down to the bases at the bottom of each wick. How long ago had the candles been lit? How long did it take a candle to burn to the bottom? How much time could have elapsed if the candles were still burning?
She blew them out.
Her temples throbbed, a dull ache. She was thirsty. She thought of her amniotic fluid. Dehydration could cause premature labor, she’d been warned. She would search for bottled water, but first she’d gather Eunjoo’s clothes. Upstairs, she found Eunjoo’s bedroom, decorated with paper cranes that soared from strings tied to the ceiling. She placed Eunjoo on her bed and opened drawers, pulling out ruffled skirts and brightly patterned tank tops, stuffing them into a backpack. She was kidnapping her. What if this was a mistake? A misunderstanding? What would she tell the girl’s parents if they came home and found Calliope, a stranger holding their daughter?
The room grew hotter. A deep rumbling shook the earth. Eunjoo awoke making a guttural sound and covering her ears, and above them, the cranes dipped from their strings, nose-diving in sharp angles. Calliope grabbed Eunjoo’s hand and darted out of the room onto the balcony. Across the scrubbed hills, from one Sister’s sandstone habit, a cloud of ash and cinder skewered the sky. A screaming Sister howled back to life. Time swelled and contracted. Calliope coughed in dry wracking spurts, covering her mouth with the inside of her tunic. The air had been sucked away, replaced by a breath-stealing heat. They’d be turned to stone.
Eunjoo’s coal-dark eyes fluttered. “What is that?” The girl’s screech startled Calliope out of her stupor. A voice inside her commanded: Run!
She couldn’t focus. Her stomach dropped as with labor pains. She needed to grasp something. She clenched Eunjoo tighter and cantered down the steps, ignoring the careening in her gut. She had to get the girl out. The divergent sensory perceptions flickered like camera flashes as Calliope ran: the water in her gut, the fire from the earth, the flapping birds and Sleeping Sisters, her aching muscles and bursting eardrums. The heat scalded. Glass shattered from shelves. Outside, the heat worsened. It was bladed glass sticking through her clothes. It pierced her skin, releasing bullets into her body. Jawed, thick black smoke. She had no breath. Eunjoo’s mouth opened wide in a scream. She was silent.
In the distance, cones crackled and split like hornet nests. Calliope threw Eunjoo into the car and sped
out of the driveway onto the main road up Paseo del Norte away from Boca Negra, where all the Sisters now spurted awake. She couldn’t look in the rearview mirror. She gripped the steering wheel and pressed her foot hard on the gas pedal, ignoring stop signals, snaking through the broken-down cars on the road at full speed, jerking the wheel with no thought but away, away. The river. She had to get to the river.
The Río Grande in sight, she pressed the gas and lurched across the bridge.
Finally, on the other side, she stopped and allowed herself to look back. Lot’s wife.
“Are you okay, chica?”
Eunjoo held a single turquoise crane, blue against the black smoke chuffing and whirring behind them. A blinking eye in a storm. The girl nodded.
Calliope quickly scanned the girl for signs of burns, then checked her own skin. It was hot to the touch, feverish, but not burned.
They’d made it out unscathed. She had no idea how. They shouldn’t have been safe.
Through the charcoaled haze, the bright blaze of her neighborhood. The flames had gorged everything. Phoenix’s swing set. Their home. Swathed in ash. A Pompeii destroyed and pumice-buried. The Sisters’ skirts had spurred everything beyond the black mouth of the canyon.
Calliope opened the driver’s door. Vomited on the bridge.
Under sheets of sediment, someday other archaeologists might find bits of animal bone, pottery shards, plants. What of the letters she’d written to her husband, photos of Phoenix on his first day of school, her mother’s Bible, her bisabuela’s rebozo, paper cranes? What details of everyday life might be preserved? New Mexico honey in jars? Plaster casts of victims in situ? Her home was a burial site. With no one to bury. Where was her family?
Trinity Sight Page 2
