“Sweetheart,” Mara said, “I don’t think it is a metaphor. I didn’t want to believe this had anything to do with what I saw when I was a child up at Los Alamos, but I can’t deny it now. Not with what I’ve seen, what Chance tells me you’ve all been through.”
“What happened when you were a child, then? What do you think is happening?” Calliope hadn’t intended the boiling pitch in her voice, but she was angry. It wasn’t fair to think of Mara as a stranger. Yet Calliope felt alone amongst strangers.
“They accused Chaiwa of witchcraft. Mother went crazy. Dad was discharged for her unhinged behavior, her erratic ramblings in public and failure to keep the place a secret. I chalked it up to being young and easily influenced. We moved to England, and Mother died shortly after. It ruined our lives.”
“What did?” Calliope pressed.
Mara’s face went ashen, her eyes distant, as if she couldn’t believe she was going to say whatever it was … “People were disappearing.”
Calliope sighed, exasperated. “Mara, I’m sorry about what happened to your family, but don’t people often disappear in the military, during war, et cetera? Government is corrupt. Only now it’s more bald-faced, but the populace is so gullible and forgetful, so wrapped up in cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias.” She sighed again, adjusted her position beneath the heat of Eunjoo’s sleeping body. “It’s always been corrupt though.”
“Not kidnapped or murdered, I don’t mean that.”
Chance reached out, touched Mara’s arm. “What do you mean?”
“In front of our eyes. There one minute, gone the next. Vanished.”
Calliope’s stomach knotted. She wanted to say again, People don’t just disappear, but the words felt as useless as a parrot’s mocking singsong atop a shoulder. She thought of Bisabuela in the hangar. What was Mara saying, that her family had vanished ? She’d never see them again? It was ludicrous. It was insane. She sat upright, peeled Eunjoo from her lap, and waddled off the couch, her legs pins and needles from sleeping under the girl on the couch all night.
In the bathroom, she turned on the faucet out of habit and startled when she realized water was streaming. For a brief moment, she took the water as sign that things had returned to normal in the outside world—but then she remembered Tía’s land had its own water reserve, its own underground tunnels and pumps, that didn’t rely on the town, one reason of the many she and Andres had chosen this place as refuge in the crisis they foresaw. But they never foresaw this.
She splashed cold water on her face several times, stared at her reflection, pink from yesterday’s trek through the snow and the sunrise-pink light filtering through the undraped window. Her honey-colored eyes glowed in the new light, and she felt angry at her own hopeful visage. Her belly aching, she cupped water in her hands and drank it down in gulps; she was dehydrated, and couldn’t risk inducing early labor, disaster atop ruin. She stared out the window at the rising sun. Today was a Monday. Today she should have gotten dressed and gone to her weekly ob-gyn appointment. She should have been listening to her babies’ heartbeats. Twins were usually born early, at thirty-six weeks. She’d almost reached thirty-two. The doctor had wanted her to schedule a C-section, but healing after Phoenix’s had been agonizing. She’d been bedbound, her stomach and uterus on fire for weeks. She wanted a vaginal birth. Today the doctor would have made sure that was still possible. The twins hadn’t kicked all morning. She pressed against her rigid belly, whispered, You both safe in there? She had to keep them inside her if not the full month they still needed, at least until she had found—
In her dream, Phoenix was stoning her. The anger she felt, she’d seen that on his face. Was he scared, wherever he was? Were Andres and her mother with him?
Vanished. What did that even mean? Vanished where?
She turned off the faucet, slumped onto the bathroom tile, head in her hands. What proof was a batty old woman’s story? Mara was an artist, what she described was a child’s PTSD fever dream. Whatever she’d gone through during the war, she’d explained away or transformed through fantasy—that’s what children do, what imagination is for. It was not for grown-up mothers who needed to find their child. Calliope couldn’t give in to fantasy now. It hadn’t worked for Bisabuela when she’d prayed for healing. The Ancients hadn’t come to her when she’d refused Western medicine and died as a result. Why should they have come now? Myth was just that. Hell, Bisabuela and the Suuke were probably a result of Calliope’s exhaustion, dehydration, and terror. She’d seen a woman almost raped in front of her, had almost killed the rapist. What she’d seen in the hangar—that was PTSD not reality.
Now that she’d gotten some sleep, in a warm and familiar place, she could sort out fact from fiction, could piece the puzzle together with critical intellect and not wishful thinking. Chance had been a bad influence, with his stories just like Bisabuela’s. If she were inclined to believe in such things, she’d wonder if he was some kind of shaman or witch—if he’d slipped her something and brought on the delusions through a hallucinogen. When had she drunk that bowl of earth-tasting clay water “Bisabuela” had “given” her? She thought back to the strange encounter. The apparition in the rebozo had offered it to her right before she saw the “Suuke.” Or maybe she’d never seen anything at all. Maybe she’d described a hallucination and the others had taken her word for it. Eunjoo was an impressionable child, susceptible to wild beliefs at adult suggestion. What about Amy? Had she seen the Suuke? Calliope couldn’t remember now. Memory was blurring. She’d been so confused and scared in the hangar.
And yet, what motive could Chance have possibly had for drugging her? It didn’t make sense. He’d protected her several times. He’d had ample opportunity to harm her and Eunjoo—if he’d wanted to.
She sighed, rubbing her hands vigorously across her temples and cheeks. Forget the supernatural. What were the facts? She’d been a terrible mother. She sighed again, leaning her head against the cabinet. She was allowing emotion to cloud her judgment, and she couldn’t keep wallowing in guilt. Where had that ever gotten her with her Catholic upbringing, her own guilt-ridden mother always criticizing her for not believing hard enough, not being good enough. There was no room for her mother or her bisabuela. She’d tried things their way and ended up on a monster hunt, searching for a mystical path that didn’t exist. She hadn’t found her family. This wasn’t about faith or guilt, which felt interchangeable to Calliope.
No, this was about bridging what she knew about the abandonment of the past with what she knew of the sinkhole she’d found herself in. That’s what she lived for—connecting the pieces of prehistory to the present. The Ancient Ancestors left Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde because of drought; severe hunger and thirst drove them from their elaborate structures, their society and way of life. Yet signs of an ancient horror lay buried beneath the rocks. Excavation uncovered a darker story, one Calliope was hesitant to believe and never would have shared with Bisabuela. Over a thousand bones and bone fragments, shoulder blades, skulls, vertebrae, ribs, arm bones, hand and foot bones, and teeth. Nearly all were broken and scattered in heaps in air shafts, irreverently. Like game bones after butchering.
Bisabuela had taught her that the Ancients had abandoned Chaco after supernatural intervention. The knowledge they’d gleaned, their ability to shape the natural forces of their environment, their closeness to the earth—they’d used their power in ways that caused things to change. What changed? Calliope had asked. Changes never meant to occur, Bisabuela had told her, and Calliope remembered because at that moment the clouds were swelling above the mesa and thunder grumbled, giving credence to Bisabuela’s tale. She said these changes had set the migrations going again. Calliope thought of Room 33 in the great building at Chaco Canyon. The grave goods left there. Calliope had seen for herself in her fieldwork research that it was used for dark rituals. Room 33 had scared her, though she couldn’t say for certain why. Wh
en the Ancient Ancestors abandoned their great architectural achievement at Chaco, the buildings and doorways were sealed, pottery broken, a ceremonial going away. Clans divided. Kivas burnt. The Ancestors had been so in tune with natural forces they could control those forces and abuse them. Everything is meant to fall back to Mother Earth, mija. Some things in our migration history, we don’t understand, but we don’t need to understand. We no longer need to repeat that portion of the story. We’ve found our place, and that story no longer bears on our daily lives.
Daily lives. That made sense to Calliope. Not the supernatural but the practical. The Ancients had starved, reduced to their basest instincts for survival.
Andres would have known how to survive. He would have gone where he was needed. Unless he needed help. Only the well could tend the sick. What if there’d been an altercation? A clash? She’d never known Andres to be a fighter, but in times of crisis people surprise us.
Where else could he have taken Phoenix and her mother? Once, when Calliope had explored a back road out of Albuquerque on her way to Chaco Canyon, she’d seen a sign that had caught her interest. Splitting the road into a fork, the sign had pointed two ways: one direction, shooting range. The other, winter shelter.
Ever led by curiosity, she’d followed the latter and come to a dead-end dirt road harboring a large, squat, metal building, encircled by a tall chain-link fenced topped with barbed wire, padlocked and bearing a sign made of red streamer-paper tied through the chains into a heart that read Welcome. The winter shelter had turned out to be a closed-down prison turned into a place to shelter homeless people each winter, bussed in from Albuquerque at sundown from the doorsteps of designated churches and train stations around the city. It was equipped with food rations, water, cots, generators. Why hadn’t she remembered this before? She’d been so set on Tía’s hacienda, it had never occurred to her they might have gone elsewhere.
She stretched her legs across the bathroom tile, wiggled them to get the blood flowing. She was still wearing the camper’s hiking boots and thick socks. Her feet ached. At home, before all this, she’d complained of aching pregnancy feet almost daily to Andres, and he’d rubbed aloe vera on them. She unpeeled the boots and socks, pulled one swollen fish of a foot up to her thigh, and began rubbing it, tears stinging her eyes.
She’d come all this way for nothing.
Would journeying back north be another wild goose chase?—resting completely on the off chance that Andres had remembered her once telling him about the winter shelter in her rush of excitement at finding it. What proof did she have he would have gone? She’d described it to him, yes, but they’d never planned to meet there. She had to return to the beginning. What had set this off? What change? Bisabuela said it was a change that set the Ancestors migrating. Calliope’s own research had corroborated Bisabuela’s story. She rubbed her other foot, closing her eyes to think. What made the day she’d crashed her car different than any other? What made her group different than any other? What did they have in common? Why had they stayed behind while the others had disappeared?
If there was an explanation, it eluded her.
Morning light filtered through the window, warming her face. She opened her eyes toward the light—and was startled by a dark splotch against the windowpane, a sudden clang, a thud and blackness spreading, followed by a sticky red dripping.
She screamed.
Chance barged into the bathroom. “Mujer?”
She was on her feet, her hands over her mouth, staring at a smashed crow.
Chance’s eyebrows furrowed, and he breathed out an exclamation in Zuni she didn’t understand. “Did it fly into the window? Or …?”
Her stomached cinched. “Or what?”
“Stay here.”
He flustered out the door as she resocked and booted, then scurried after him.
Eunjoo sat at the dining room table eating a granola bar while Mara stood in the kitchen, her rifle on the counter. She asked what was going on, but Calliope only rushed past.
At the front door, Chance saw Calliope following and chuckled, shaking his head like Ay, mujer—there was no commanding Calliope. The icy air nipped at her face and hands as she stepped outside. The sky wore a purplish-blue haze, although clear of clouds, the early morning sun shining bright. It was the clearest she’d seen the sky since before her crash on the Río Grande bridge. Easily three inches of snow enshrouded the yard in incandescent white, but the sun was already melting the ice on the porch rafters, drops of water trickling off the roof, down the beams, wetting the floorboards. Careful not to slip, Calliope caught up to Chance, her camper’s sweatshirt brushing against his flannel. She stayed a step behind but close enough to smell his unshowered mustiness mixed with wood smoke from the fireplace.
He spoke softly in Zuni. “Ulohnan uteya k’ohanna pottiye.”
“What’s that mean?”
“The world is filled with white flowers.” He kept one hand on his rifle, still slung over his shoulder.
The bird’s neck was broken in half, its body at a right angle to its head. Chance drew nearer to the scene than Calliope could tolerate; she turned away, leaned against the porch rail, searching for the dead crow’s flock. She wrapped her arms around her chest. What would make a bird fly into a closed window? Especially a frosted pane?
“Chance?”
“Hmm?” He pulled a pair of work gloves from his back pocket. Had those always been there? She hadn’t noticed. Her cheeks burned when she realized what she was staring at. She looked away.
“What did you mean it could have flown or? What are you insinuating?”
He pinched the bird corpse with a gloved hand, studying it. “It was used as a projectile.”
“Thrown?”
“Right.”
“By whom?”
“Exactly.”
She squinted into the bright white yard.
“Who would throw a bird at a window? That’s ridiculous.”
“For a person, yes.”
She sighed. “About that … Chance … Suuke? Really? I don’t, I just can’t … buy it.”
He smiled, deeply, raised his eyebrows, still examining the corpse. “I didn’t realize my people’s beliefs were for sale.”
She stammered, “I didn’t …”
He cut her off. “You didn’t realize my Spirit Ancestors needed your approval to exist?”
Her cheeks flushed.
He smiled mischievously.
She sighed and tried again, “If you thought a malevolent creature was skulking around the house, why would you have come outside?”
“I promised to help you find your family. I can’t do that if you’re dead. So that means I promised to protect you, yes? I told you to stay inside anyway. Do you ever listen to anyone?”
She shrugged, about to retort, when in the distance, beside the icy lake, branches began crackling, twigs snapping, snow thudding to the ground.
Chance dropped the bird, quickly peeled off the gloves, disengaged the safety on his rifle, and put his finger on the trigger. “Mujer,” he whispered, “Por favor, escúchame ahora. Agáchate.”
His imploring in Spanish, his palpable fear, Calliope listened this time and ducked down. Her heart pounding, she peered through the snow-covered bushes blocking the slats between porch rails. She wished she still had Susana’s gun. Though that mentirosa Amy probably needed it more. For whatever reason, Calliope had Chance.
He aimed but didn’t flinch otherwise, just stood, waiting.
Calliope couldn’t see. She was tempted to ask, but stayed quiet and still as possible. A thought nagged at her. Had she remembered to close the front door? She should’ve locked it. Closed or not, she didn’t want Eunjoo running outside. Whatever was out there, Suuke, mountain lion, anything else—she didn’t want Eunjoo to find it. Calliope couldn’t help herself. Curiosity won, and she
elevated on her haunches high enough that her nose was touching the rail, her eyes peering above the top.
A loud upheaval from the branches, the empty hackberry and black walnut forest releasing a burden of snow to the ground followed closely by a black unfolding of crows into the sky. The screeching caws reverberated through the yard, the snow creating an echo chamber. Calliope covered her ears.
“Who’s there?” Chance called. “Identify yourself.”
Calliope couldn’t see anyone. She was distracted by Mara bursting out the front door, shooting her rifle into the air. Calliope sucked her teeth. What was the trigger-happy nut doing?
“Mara, wait,” Chance said. “I’ve got this.”
“Like hell you do,” she answered, firing again toward the commotion in the trees. “I’ll shoot that son-a-bitch that killed Loren.”
Hands emerged from behind a trunk. Human hands.
“Don’t shoot,” a man’s voice called from the distance. “I’m a friend.”
EIGHTEEN
NEWS FROM THE WEST
Was it Andres?
Calliope’s pulse quickened, stomach dropped. She had to know.
“Stop shooting,” she screamed, pulling herself up. “Stop shooting.”
She skidded on the icy porch as she cantered toward the stairs, but Chance grabbed her arm, steadied her, held her back.
“Wait, mujer. We don’t know …”
“It’s him,” she said, desperately. “Let me go.” She tugged her arm away, calling, “Andres? Where’s Phoenix? Is he with you?” She glared at Mara, the woman’s rifle still raised. “Don’t you dare fucking shoot.” She moved toward the stairs.
The man emerged from behind the tree, his arms upraised as if praising.
He wore thick snow gloves, a felt hunting cap, a jacket and jeans. His face contrasted against the snow, russet-brown and terrified. Calliope crumpled onto the icy steps.
It wasn’t him.
Trinity Sight Page 15
