Chance called again, “Mister, identify yourself. What business you have here?”
“I’m just looking for anybody,” the man called. “Y’all a sight for sore eyes, lemme tell you.”
“You got a weapon?” Chance asked.
“No, sir, I do not.”
“Keep your hands up, I’ll come to you.”
Chance trekked through the snow toward the stranger.
How had the man gotten to her tía’s in a snowstorm? Was he a neighbor from down the road? The nearest house was two or three miles away. Why hadn’t he come sooner?
Mara muttered under her breath, “How’ll we know we can trust him?”
Calliope was too upset to answer, though Mara’s inhospitable tone meant he wasn’t a neighbor.
A few minutes passed, Chance talking to the man in the snow. After Chance had searched him, the stranger finally lowered his arms and they trudged back toward the house.
Calliope didn’t wait for them to reach the porch but went inside feeling heavy, and slumped in front of the fireplace, an iron-bellied soldier, a smoldering machine man. She would have pointed that out to Phoenix, who would have laughed his contagious little laugh.
The pile of firewood was running low. For no reason that made sense, she walked toward the back door, toward the unfenced backyard where Tía kept her ax beside the chopping block, passing Eunjoo playing at the dining table with salt and pepper shakers shaped as animal figurines, but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything to the girl.
Outside, she brushed off the snow from the gloves beside the ax and slid them on her hands. She gripped the handle, positioned a thick chunk of wood on the flared stump, raised her hands above her head, fully cognizant that she should not exert herself, should not hold something so heavy above her head, should not swing, and brought the ax swiftly down. She did this several more times before Chance called from the back door, “Should you be doing that?”
Calliope ignored him, and the pain in her pelvis, and kept chopping.
“Mujer, I don’t know much about pregnant ladies except what I went through with my lady and our daughter, but I don’t think you’re supposed to be chopping wood if you can help it. Here, let me.”
She paused, rested the ax on the wood, caught her breath. “Who is that guy? Where’d he come from?”
“Vegas.”
“His name is Vegas or he came from Vegas?”
Chance laughed. “You should come inside and meet him.”
“Why?”
“He’s got an interesting story.”
“I’m tired of stories.”
“I know.” He sighed, reached for Calliope’s hands, peeled off the gloves, put them on his own hands. He took the ax, and she stepped aside. “But that’s why you need to keep listening.”
“Who are you, Chance?”
“A guide, remember? Bisabuela said so.”
She laughed uncomfortably. “About that, did you, I mean, when we were in the hangar …” What would she ask? Whether he had drugged her, given her a hallucinogen?
“I’m just an Indian science nerd, mujer. Nothing special. But I made you a promise and I’m trying my damnedest to keep it. That means no swinging an ax or running toward gunfire. I’m no doctor, and I know nothing about childbirth. Don’t go getting yourself into labor here, understand?”
He smiled, but her skin turned gooseflesh.
Labor. She hadn’t even allowed for the thought of giving birth without Andres. A paramedic who’d grown up in a small town in northern New Mexico, he’d helped deliver plenty of babies. He’d been with Calliope for Phoenix’s birth.
It had never occurred to her she’d have to find someone else to help her give birth.
In Spanish they said dar a luz—give light. She felt dark and cold.
* * * *
The stranger who’d called himself a friend had made himself comfortable in front of the fire. He’d taken off his hunting cap, revealing a thick mop of tightly coiled curls, and was eating chocolate chip cookies from a box Mara had given him from Tía’s pantry. His voice was raspy though convivial with a Southern drawl. Calliope wondered how she ever could have mistaken him for Andres. She shouldn’t have needed to see his rich, brown skin, the color of clay deep in the earth, two or three shades darker than her husband’s, to know it wasn’t him. He was taller and more broadly-built than Andres as well.
His name was Buick Janes and he was on his way home to New Orleans but had gotten lost.
“In the snow?” Calliope had asked.
“Nah, ma’am. Even before that.”
He told her his story. He’d been on vacation in Las Vegas, triple cherries at the slot machines, enough to take his girlfriend out for steak and lobster, when the casino lights began flashing. As if in a dream—he couldn’t find the city, couldn’t find the lights.
“In the casino?”
“Or any casino. It was all desert as far as I could see.”
He figured he was drunk—or someone had slipped him something. Maybe his girlfriend, though he couldn’t see her stooping that low. But those were the facts. He’d won a jackpot, then he’d gone blurry and everything was gone. Someone must’ve drugged him and dragged him into the desert. He’d slept it off, then found a car with the keys still in the ignition.
Calliope listened through a vague aura of grief, the kind of numbing that comes when you’ve already processed the most horrifying information: your father has died, for instance. And now you’re learning he’d had another family a few miles across the border, and you had half siblings in your city’s sister, Ciudad Juarez. It’s what you’d already figured, and though it might’ve ripped you apart when you were younger, more naive, or if he were still alive to defend himself, by the time police reports have been made and you’re helping your mother choose wood for a coffin, cheap pine for an undeserving man, no other shock can really settle in.
Calliope had heard Amy’s version of this story, and Chance’s. She knew hers and Eunjoo’s. And while she hadn’t heard her friend say the words, her pío pío pío in the dirt before the bullet to her head haunted Calliope.
All she could do was listen as Buick Janes ate chocolate chip cookies on her tía’s couch and explained how he’d misplaced an entire city. Then as he passed the Arizona-Nevada border on the road he always took to and from Vegas, something chilled his blood on the bridge over the Colorado River. “The Hoover Dam wasn’t dammed.”
“It broke?”
“I didn’t see no concrete at all, you hear what I’m saying? Like it had never been dammed.”
“Oh, we’re damned alright,” Mara said from the kitchen doorway.
“You know about Petrified Forest? You know what it is?” Buick asked Calliope.
She nodded. An archaeologist’s dream, a fossilized forest. On Navajo and Apache counties in northeastern Arizona, log fragments scattered over badlands. She’d heard it disappointed tourists expecting the trees standing in thick rocky groves instead of lying flat in sections. But Calliope loved the felled trees that had lived in the Late Triassic, 225 million years ago. The sediments containing the fossil logs comprised the colorful Chinle Formation for which the Painted Desert was named. Ever since she was a child, Calliope had loved running her hands across the smooth, cold, stony surface of petrified wood.
Buick raised his eyebrows, sat forward conspiratorially, and said, “Well, it’s not Petrified Forest anymore. Now, it’s just forest.”
Calliope felt a familiar paste in her mouth, the stirrings of nausea. “What?”
“I’ve passed through a hundred times. But now the cut-down petrified ruins are full-grown again and lush. Brand new. It’s jacked up is what it is.” He pulled a handful of cookies from the box, shoved them all in his mouth.
She didn’t tell Buick and Mara about the forest that had sprung up on their way
to Tía’s from the City of Rocks. She didn’t want to hear Mara’s theories. She didn’t want to hear anything.
But Buick’s story wasn’t finished.
“All the gas stations and ghost towns along the 40? They aren’t ghost towns anymore. They’re just ghosts. And Albuquerque? Disappeared. It’s like I was lost, but there were the Sandias, just the rest of the land was covered in black lava rock.”
The Sleeping Sisters had buried the city. Nausea hardened in her belly.
If her family had been hiding, she had to believe they’d gotten away, as she had …
She couldn’t ignore the pain radiating from her pelvic floor down her thighs. She keeled over, pressing hands to knees, breathing in short spurts, instinctively.
“Ma’am? You gonna have your baby now?” Buick’s pleasant Southern accent rang in her ears, the absurdity of the situation hitting her. Was she really going to give birth in front of this man she’d just met? That was surely more than he’d bargained for when he’d stumbled across her tía’s hacienda. “Should I get the father?” He nodded toward the back door.
The cramping seized her tighter. She glared. He meant Chance. He thought they were together. If she weren’t splitting apart, gripped with fear, she might’ve laughed.
By the time the contraction released her, tears wet her face. Eunjoo stood patting Calliope’s hair, her little hand a cat’s paw. Mara held a damp washcloth to her forehead, though Calliope wasn’t sure what good the woman thought that was. A cloth to her head did nothing for the pain in her midsection. “He’s not the father,” she said, hoarsely, to a frozen-in-place Buick, cookies still in hand. “I don’t know where the father is.”
Buick nodded, his expression shifting from fearful to melancholy. “Ma’am, damn near the entire Southwest’s gone missing … but I think that’s the saddest missing-person case I’ve ever heard.”
NINETEEN
LABOR PAINS
The contractions persisted into the evening, aftershocks to the initial quake, none quite as strong as that first and sporadic enough to mean false labor. But that didn’t mitigate their effect. A message from Calliope’s body, burning with fever, or her babies, squirming: calm down or brace yourself.
Mara had been right to bring the cool cloth. False labor commingled with exhaustion and sudden September winter. In Calliope’s fevered state, she was barraged by crows, flailing themselves headfirst, breaking their necks against her body, turning her into a tree, rooted to the ground. She transformed into a crow, alighted from her own branches, wounded herself with black pinpricks, stabbed the ice-white sky. Fever. Dead crows. Suuke.
She sweated and cramped, sweated and cramped, for hours.
Chance had been holding her, she realized when she came through the haze. He’d been chanting in Zuni.
“Mujer, hesitant as I am to admit it, we’ve got to keep moving. I need to get you to the rez. My mother’s people. They’ll know what to do.”
“Thanks, Chance. I appreciate you sitting here with me and everything. But I can’t go to Zuni. I still haven’t found my boy, my family. They won’t know to look for me there.”
He squeezed her hand. “I’m not telling you to give up. I wouldn’t say that. Just hear me out. On the rez, many Zuni women have died in childbirth …” Calliope pulled away, leaned forward, groaning. Chance put a hand on her shoulder, said, “Wait, mujer. I asked you to listen. Please.”
She stared into the quartz of his eyes. Leaned back against the armrest.
“I’m not saying you’re going to die. It’s just that I don’t know how to help you with childbirth. I’m out of my scope. A Suuke comes or a psycho with a knife, I’ve got you covered. You need to find food? You want to talk about bubble universes? I’m your guy. But little people crawling out of you? Look, I haven’t told you what Zunis believe about giving birth ’cause you’re not Zuni … Bisabuela is of The People, but it’s not exactly the same.”
Calliope’s head ached, the sweat of her fever had soaked her clothes. She needed to use the bathroom and change. “What’s your point, Chance?”
“There are times we’re more vulnerable to attacks than others. When we emerged from Ánosin téhuli, the lowermost womb or cave-world, we went to other worlds first. None of them was right. So we came to this world. But some of the creatures from the other worlds followed our ascent. That first world of sooty depth was growth generation, place of first formation, black as a chimney at nighttime, and foul as the internals of the belly. The second underworld was water moss, also dark. The third was a mud world. When we finally reached the fourth world, the one we’re in now, there was light. We called it the wing world because the rays of the sun were like birds’ wings. But we weren’t the only beings to crawl through. Witches followed us, brought seeds with them. They bargained with our leaders, so we had to let them stay. They killed two of our children, and the rains came, and the seeds grew. After many years of wandering, when we finally found Halona Idiwan’a, Middle Place, the witches found it too. They’ve lived amongst us ever since, sometimes cursing us with illness, death. Whenever we’re closest to the Spirit world, like during childbirth, the witches are never far away. We must follow ritual then, as our Ancestors instructed. It’s the safest way.”
She stared into his face. He bore the most sincere expression she’d ever seen on a grown man. He reminded her of Phoenix in some ways. She thought of the story Andres had told her, about the old man who’d thought the witches were burning him. It was radiation, not witches. There was always a scientific explanation. “My friend, I’m thankful you’ve helped me as much as you have. But I’m a scientist, not a mythmaker. I’m fascinated by our ancestors’ stories. I love piecing together the puzzles they left us. But I don’t believe them. You’ve asked me to believe I’m in danger of attack first by bogeymen called Suuke and now witches?”
His face fell, and she knew she had hurt him. He’d trusted her with his sacred stories, and she’d insulted him.
“I’m a scientist too, mujer. I don’t understand why you’re so dead set that science and belief are incompatible. Our stories are supported by evolutionary theory. Just because it’s not written in a book doesn’t make it false.”
“I’m not saying that …”
“Look, believe whatever you want. I’m not asking you to believe. You’ve seen the Suuke. You’ve seen the landscape utterly changed. You’ve seen a forest burst from nowhere, overnight. You’ve seen volcanic ash disappear when your books tell you it should have lingered. Yet you don’t believe anything you’ve seen. Science is about more than what the Western world tells you is true. It’s about finding answers for what we see around us. Well, I’m saying let’s find answers. My people have seen this kind of change before, mujer. This kind of shifting between worlds is the basis for our stories. We’re an intelligent people, mujer. We’re not a spectacle for your fascination …”
“I didn’t mean—”
He cut her off. “You study the past. I study possibility. We emerged from the underworlds and theoretical physics says it’s possible …” He moved away from the armrest, smoothed his wavy hair from his face.
“Chance, I—”
“Whether you believe or not, you’re part of the story, mujer. You might as well start believing.” He walked away, out the back door.
Through the window, the evening shone a reddish glow around him. He picked up a small piece of wood, propped one leg on the chopping board, pulled a pocketknife from his boot, and began whittling. His words buzzed in her mind like those cicadas she’d heard at the hangar, when her bisabuela had encouraged her to trust him.
Fine. She had no better plan. She might as well trust Chance.
TWENTY
THE COYOTE WHO KILLED
“Have you seen Eunjoo?”
Mara and Buick were sitting at the table eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Calliope’s stomach gr
owled. How long had it been since she’d eaten? Her last meal had been yesterday’s snacks on the journey to Tía’s. She was starving. Eunjoo would be hungry too.
Calliope had showered, thankful for Tía’s water pump, and changed into clean clothes she’d found in the closet, a cable knit sweater and pair of black yoga pants—the only items Tía owned that would stretch over Calliope’s belly. The contractions had subsided before the shower; afterward, they’d ceased altogether. She’d towel-dried her hair since she couldn’t waste the generator on a blow dryer, and she entered the kitchen with a towel turban-wrapped around her head.
“I thought she was with you,” Mara said. “She said she was tired and going to take a nap with you.”
“I was in the shower … Eunjoo?” she called.
No answer.
Calliope opened the back door.
Chance was still in the yard whittling. “Peace offering?” He held up a figurine he’d carved.
“Have you seen Eunjoo?”
“She’s with you?”
A stab of guilt. Eunjoo was her responsibility, not theirs. The girl should’ve been with her.
“Eunjoo, answer me.” Calliope flung open the front door.
On the porch, Eunjoo’s footprints.
Panic rose in Calliope’s chest. Why would the girl have gone outside? She knew how dangerous it was. She’d seen the dead man’s body.
Calliope called out again, grabbed a jacket from the coatrack beside the door, threw her hair towel to the floor, and rushed out into the snow.
Chance must’ve heard her calling because he came jogging from the side of the house. “She’s out here? You saw her?”
Calliope nodded, pointing toward the small prints punctuating the snow. They followed the tracks toward the lake, which was covered with a crackling sheet of ice that couldn’t have been thick enough to sustain a body, not even a child’s. Through the ice, waterweed and coontail reeds wisped upward like downy child’s hair. They moved quicker, calling out for the girl, scanning the ice for cracks or holes, any sign that she had fallen through. Inwardly Calliope chanted Don’t-let-her-be-dead don’t-let-her-be-dead. On the ground, a bright red bloom like a poppy growing from the snow: Eunjoo’s blood-soaked thumb bandage. Calliope had been so consumed by her own grief, her own needs, she’d forgotten to check on the girl’s wound. Now whispering her chant aloud, she picked up the bandage, tucked it in Tía’s jacket pocket.
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