Tears on her cheeks, snot at her nose, Eunjoo lifted her hand, which was bleeding.
Calliope instinctively pressed the bottom of her tunic to the girl’s hand, to staunch the blood. “It bit you?” The girl nodded, wiping her nose. “Amy, get me some napkins.” No answer. She looked around. “Amy?”
“Drive.”
“What?”
“They’re back.” Amy threw her body into the passenger seat, slammed the door.
Calliope flung Eunjoo’s door shut and moved as quickly as she could to the driver’s seat. The coyotes formed a semicircle around the back of the car, growling, their reddish hair on end. Calliope pulled the gear into reverse, stepped on the gas, and drove.
SEVEN
PROJECT Y
Mara had to be hallucinating. People didn’t just disappear. She’d put all of that out of her mind. Since Trinity and that mushroom cloud in the sky. Since the aftermath at San Ildefonso. And Chaiwa. As she drove into Silver City to find Trudy—the usual rolling green surrounding Trudy’s ranch replaced with muted grays—Mara couldn’t stop thinking of her first trip there. Seventy-five years earlier, on the train from Princeton, Mara had watched prairie give way to sage-speckled hills. The dunes grained with yellowing shrubs reminded her of the barnacle-covered sea rocks on Dover Beach. Her father had just taken a job with the Manhattan Project, and they were heading toward an undisclosed location in the mountains of northern New Mexico.
Mara, five years old, had breathed against the pane, tracing shapes in the foggy glass with her bare fingers. She refused to wear her white kid gloves or to let her mother style her red hair. She was born with a wild streak, her mother was fond of telling dinner guests and anyone who’d listen. She was like Esau, the twin whose birthright was stolen because of his foolhardiness.
Rose tried making Mara more ladylike, befitting their family’s position. At every opportunity Mara batted away her mother’s efforts. She was young. “Leave her be,” her father would chasten her mother in his soft but rasping German voice. “She’s just a little girl. Not a lady yet.” He would kiss Mara atop her head. Even then, Mara could see that he expected decorum only from his wife. His daughter he let run as wild as the aboriginal people Rose expressed fear they would encounter in the strange new land to which they were destined.
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.
A black limousine pulled up. A limousine, in the wilderness. Mara clinched her hands, grinning. “Is that for us, Mother?”
The man who appeared from the driver’s side stood in stark contrast to the cowboy who had stumbled from the saloon. In a gray tailored suit and hat, he resembled more closely the kind of men Mara saw in the city, his russet hair cropped close to his head. He moved with purpose, strutting around the limousine toward Mara and her mother on the platform. He said he would be taking them up to the Hill.
“What’s the Hill?” Mara asked offhandedly, not looking up from her sketchbook, where she was now furiously drawing the driver.
He flicked his cigarette to the ground, ignoring her.
No one spoke as the car pitched steadily higher, bumping over rocks and sinking into depressions in the dusty road. Terracotta-colored ranch houses mottled the rawhide landscape, along with black-and-white grazing cattle. Finally, a sign: Santa Fe. Her mother had read aloud from the WPA book: a long-established artist’s colony where the elite and wealthy afflicted with respiratory illness had been going for treatment for a decade. The clear mountain air and artistic diversion offered at the sanitariums surrounding Santa Fe were highly touted, according to the book.
The GI cleared his throat, explained, “We need to stop briefly in Santa Fe to obtain your badges before we can proceed up to the Hill. No one is allowed entry without a security badge.”
“Is the Hill much farther?” her father asked, his tone surprised.
“Another thirty-five miles or so,” the driver answered.
Sprawling beyond the clusters of flat, rectangular adobe houses lining the unpaved streets, a kind of Bohemian culture emerged as they entered the Plaza. Among red strings of wrinkled chilies, elderly Native Americans with sunbaked faces hawked their pottery, turquoise jewelry, and other handcrafted wares on blanketed sidewalks in the storefronts of curio shops and cafés. Women wore velvet skirts and peasant blouses, clinking silver belts slung low around their waists, and crescent pendants. Mara found them beautiful. The men ambled through the streets, smoking cigarettes and stubbing them out on the dirt. They wore jeans, button-down flannels, and cowboy hats like the rancher outside the bar in Lamy. The car stopped in front of a hollyhock-entwined patio, adobe bricks showing through the plaster, a wrought-iron gateway, halfway concealing a small sign with red lettering:
US ENG-
RS
When they entered the building, a woman at a desk typed security passes on plain paper, and doled them out before they were whisked back into the limo and driven another two hours, first through a sparse village called Española and then up a cliff and onto a winding stretch of road, all the while plodding through dirt, the car bumping and jostling. Mara giggled. It felt like a roller coaster, the view breathtaking. Colossal red-cleft rocks jutting across the plateau from the switchbacks gave way to bright evergreen mountainous desert. They passed a Native American vil
lage the driver called San Ildefonso. On the side of the road, near a low, flat adobe home, a mangy dog lying in a patch of weeds watched them without moving or barking. Mara wanted to stop and look around, wanted to pet the dog. But the driver kept on.
Before they left the Indian village, Mara noticed a woman making a pot on her front porch. Mara smiled at the woman, who looked up, didn’t smile back. Mara didn’t know then she was seeing Chaiwa for the first time. The woman who would change her life.
They made a hairpin turn onto a one-lane suspension bridge crossing over a wide river.
“This is the Rio Grande, I assume,” her father asked the driver.
“They call it Otowi,” the driver said. “Place where the river makes a noise.”
Watching the water as they drove slowly across the bridge, Mara felt drawn to its immensity. Did it have a secret to relay? She listened, hearing only the rumbling sound of the engine.
“Here we are,” the driver said, nodding ahead. “Site Y. Your new home.”
Across the river, the limo slowed outside a sprawling chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Squat, gray barracks and hutments lined the dirt roads. Dust clouded around their car, pluming at the windows as they pitched slowly toward the gate. Army vehicles everywhere. Mara sketched furiously, creating a kind of shadowed, ink-blot version of the new world she was seeing—a shantytown, rickety trailers, overflowing garbage cans, laundry on the wire. She glanced at her mother, who’d gone pale. Mara sketched her face, a look of pure horror.
Now, as she pulled into the outskirts of Silver City, Mara imagined her face bore the same expression her mother’s had years ago. Cars crashed. Fires. Trudy couldn’t have been shopping at the Walmart. The Walmart was burning to the ground. Trudy had to be with her son. In the mental ward of the hospital where he lived.
* * * *
But inside was much worse. Beds empty. Thick white sheets, threadbare blankets, bars on the windows. Nursing station, papers strewn, notebooks open, computers dead. Med carts untended in the hallways. Chairs gathered in a semicircle around a blank TV screen. Blankets and pillows piled on the floor in heaps. Flies buzzing on trays stacked atop a food cart.
What grisly scene had she walked into? Where were the patients, the doctors and nurses? Her head hurt; the room spun. At the end of the hall, a Native American woman in scrubs. Was Mara seeing things?
She was five again. The whole Hill was buzzing with excitement. They’d dropped the bomb. People celebrated. She didn’t understand then, but she’d replayed it in her mind many times over the next seventy-five years. A custodian from the San Ildefonso wearing beige coveralls grinned at a scientist in a pinstripe tie. “We did it, didn’t we?”
“Yes, we did.”
They’d held a country line dance at the San Ildefonso sweat lodge, brought glass bottles of Coca-Cola and the Native people had made fry bread.
Chaiwa had told Mara lizard meant close to the earth. Close to the dirt. The sand. We all come from the sand, she’d said. Formed from the rocks. Chaiwa wanted to teach her to be that low, that connected, again. It’s not something you should be able to teach, she’d said. Like she was teaching her words in Tewa. But I sense a lizard spirit in you. The tail of the lizard meant breaking into a new reality, letting go of the old and making a miracle of the new—growing it right there, yourself.
Mara thought of this as she approached the lone woman in the hospital hall. The woman’s voice reminded her of Chaiwa’s, though Mara hadn’t heard it in seventy-five years. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Where is everyone?”
The woman in scrubs sighed, her long black hair in a braid down her side. She was tall, solidly built. “Gone.”
“Where did they go? My friend’s son, Julian Jimenez was a patient here. My friend would have come for him. After that flash. Did you see it?”
The woman nodded.
“You work here, right? You knew him?”
“You shouldn’t be here,” she repeated in a low voice, her insistence startling Mara.
“Please help me. I need to find my friend.” Her boots scuffled against the linoleum. She walked closer to the woman. A nurse? A doctor? She couldn’t tell. “Can you help me?”
EIGHT
BAD MOON RISING
Eunjoo was still crying although Calliope had assured her she was not badly hurt. She’d stopped driving long enough to examine the girl’s hand, torn at the fleshy pad of skin connecting thumb to index finger. Calliope thought it wise to stitch it with Andres’s suture kit. Phoenix had once sliced his thumb on his bicycle spoke while trying to fix a broken chain all by himself. Like Daddy, he’d said. They’d taken him to the ER when it wouldn’t stop bleeding, and the paramedic at the triage said he would have done the same, would’ve taken his kid. You don’t fool around with hands. Calliope had grimaced then, watching the ER nurses do their job. Now, each time she pressed the needle through Eunjoo’s skin, she held her breath. The girl was so brave, hardly cried. Just like Phoenix. “It’ll be fine, chica. No te preocupes, my bisabuela would say. It means don’t worry, but everything sounds better in Spanish.”
When Calliope drove again, her heart still pounded from the exertion of the coyote attack, her muscles ached from the pit of her stomach to her thighs, and pain radiated from her navel to her bowels. She breathed deeply and pressed onward, focusing on the headlights filtering dust in the road. The rundown cars growing sparser, Calliope accelerated through the rubble.
“That was close,” Amy said when they were on the road out of Los Lunes. “I still don’t understand why they attacked.”
Calliope didn’t answer for fear of scaring Eunjoo even more, but it must have been rabies. What else could have caused the coyotes’ erratic behavior? She’d have to watch the girl for signs.
Desert coyotes didn’t often hunt in packs; they usually ate mice and other small rodents, and if they ever came into town, it was solo, to eat garbage. Were they staking claim on the abandoned town? How had they known it was abandoned?
“What now?” Amy asked. “We didn’t get gas. Should we try another station?”
If the coyotes had so quickly overrun the town, what else would lurk in the stretch of empty desert and farmland between here and Belen, the last town along this road before they reached Las Cruces, with no other towns save ghost in between? Calliope checked the tank. A little less than half. “We have enough to get to Cruces.”
“If nothing else attacks us,” Amy said, chuckling mischievously.
Calliope shot her a warning look, signaling her not to scare Eunjoo.
Amy sobered, said, “Hey, I’m only teasing. We’ll be fine. Lead the way, momma.”
Eunjoo said quietly, “I miss my mother.”
“I know, chica. We’ll get to my tía’s and find our families, no te preocupes.”
“They won’t be at your tía’s.” The girl’s voice was quiet but firm. Eerily firm.
Calliope checked the rearview mirror, surprised by the girl’s pessimism. There was such heaviness in the girl’s face, her eyes black and clear as night. Her expression crumpled like she’d received the wrong present on Christmas or spent a birthday alone and forgotten. “Don’t lose heart, chica.”
“I already know what happens, Phoenix’s mama. They aren’t there. None of them.”
The hairs on Calliope’s neck bristled at the way Eunjoo seemed so darkly sure. The little girl hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes since she’d appeared at Calliope’s house. She must have been exhausted. “Try to sleep. Things will seem better when you’ve rested.”
The girl closed her eyes, and Calliope focused again on the road, still unsettled by Eunjoo’s sudden Nostradamus direness.
When Eunjoo began to breathe steadily, Amy said, “Wow, she’s a little bummer, isn’t she?” She stretched upward like a cat and reached into the back of her tight jeans, pulling
out a pack of gum she’d pocketed in the convenience store. She opened three mint-green sticks and shoved them all into her mouth at once, smacking as she chewed. She offered Calliope a piece.
“No, thanks.”
Amy shrugged, put the gum back in her pocket then stared out the window, continuing her noisy chewing. “What do you think happened to her family? Do you think we’ll find them?”
“Yes.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Calliope sighed deeply. After a moment, she said, “Honestly? I’m not sure.” Amy shrugged, though her face assumed the quality of a crumpled paper bag. Calliope didn’t say what she felt in her gut: the fates of Eunjoo’s family and hers, maybe even Amy’s, were bound together. If they found one, they’d find the others. They had to. She sighed. “My mom’s a devoted Catholic, right? Deeply pious. She wears a rosary and prays with it every day along with other novenas where she lights these santos candles and incense and leaves gifts at the altar for Mother Mary, the whole enchilada. Since I was a little girl I’ve struggled to believe. But her faith, her unwavering faith … Something keeps telling me she’s safe. That my whole family is safe.”
Amy smacked her gum, stretched her arms above her head. “I hear you, momma. Nothing like a mother who believes there’s good out there. Sounds real refreshing to me.” She looked out the window awhile, then turned toward Calliope again. “Hey, tell me something though. Calliope isn’t a very Catholic-sounding name. If your mother’s so devout, why didn’t she name you Martha or something?”
Calliope laughed. This girl. “Well, my father named me, apparently. That’s pretty much all I know about him. My mom says he named me after a circus instrument, and then ran off with one.” Calliope smiled ruefully, recalling how she’d seen herself on an old circus advertisement in a museum when she was a child, which read, Big Top Calliope, the wonderful operonicon of the muses. She’d imagined her father riding off in a circus carriage, as if he’d gone black and white and disappeared into the past. The past was safer, Calliope had thought. No one could hurt you there. No one could leave you. They were already gone. Later, she’d learned she was also the Greek muse of epic poetry, and although she couldn’t write poetry to save her life, she’d felt better about being a strong woman rather than a mere instrument. “My middle name is Anne though, like St. Anne, mother of Mary. So my mom squeezed a little Catholic in there.”
Trinity Sight Page 6
