* * *
—
SOME DAYS, I think I should not have meddled with my mother’s things. No bundle of sage could protect me. I am ghost-sick, possessed by every wrong thing she was unable to bring into balance in her life.
* * *
—
SOME DAYS, I believe I should have buried her suitcase in Dale’s garden—lost these histories forever in Florida’s black earth.
Most days, I do not believe I know how to care for my mother’s ghost.
* September 25, 1995. “I know deep in my heart one day the girls will be back in my life.”
[Little Sheep]
MY COUSIN-SISTER CALLED me a few weeks after I moved to Tucson. Sobbing, at four-thirty in the morning. She found out her boyfriend was cheating. She started the fight. “I will come get you,” I told her. “I will bring you home with me.”
* * *
—
THE NAVAJO FAIR was in town. People claimed spots all along the parade route in Window Rock and planted their tents and chairs along the side of the main road. We skipped the powwow and the ceremonials held that night; instead, we stayed home, bundled under blankets in her room, and competed for the highest Spider Solitaire score. We fell asleep watching A Bug’s Life, our heads facing in opposite directions.
The next morning, I woke before my cousin-sister and slipped out the door with a pair of military binoculars my cousin-brother brought back from his service in Iraq. My aunt’s dog, Toro, followed me down the twisting dirt road and into the flowering sagebrush hills. He followed his nose off the path, under bushes, over piles of gravel and rock. He missed a pair of cottontails, who bolted out from under my feet as I crossed the same ground minutes later. They reached the safety of a hidden burrow before he even turned around.
The trees that morning were full of birds: thrashers and songbirds and, overhead, a single croaking raven. I called Toro’s name, and he circled back to heel, bumping his nose into my empty hand. I patted his rib cage, scratched under his collar, talked cheerfully to him and the birds and the morning as we walked back to my aunt’s house.
When my cousin-sister woke, we packed her bags into my truck and left for Tucson. As we drove down I-40, my cousin-sister pointed out our family’s allotment, a small piece of land intended for too many of Pauline Tom’s heirs. She pointed out the cemetery where our grandmother was buried. The cemetery was barely distinguishable to me from the rest of the landscape, and when I followed her gaze, I saw only the stark white faces of the headstones and the silver glint of a ribbon in the wind.
“When you leave a graveyard, you have to do a blessing,” she said. “Or the spirit could follow you home.”
I thought of the smudge sticks, the bundles of dried sage, that I had found in my mother’s things. I burned them for days after returning from the hospital. I burned them after I went through her letters and her photographs. I burned sage, even though I didn’t consider myself superstitious, even though I knew no bundle of sage could protect me from the things I might discover.
My cousin-sister stared out the window for a few quiet moments, then looked at me. “What’s the difference between a spirit and a ghost?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“Neither do I,” she said, “but I don’t believe in ghosts.”
* * *
—
MY COUSIN-SISTER STAYED with me a week. I caught the flu from my freshman students, and I told her to keep her distance, but she said she wouldn’t get sick. We spent our days curled up on the couch streaming Shameless. She rested her head on my shoulder, on my hip.
A court date was scheduled, back on the reservation. She told me she needed to attend it, or a warrant would be issued for her arrest. I agreed to drive her home on the twenty-first, after my morning classes ended, and I realized I would be with my family, on the reservation, on the second anniversary of my mother’s death—not by plan but by circumstance.
The heavy rains of Tropical Depression Sixteen-E followed us for most of the drive, but as soon as we crossed onto the reservation, the rain stopped. By the time we arrived, my aunt had already fallen asleep, but she leapt out of bed as soon as she heard us walk through the door. She scurried into the kitchen and served us heaping plates of creamed chicken over rice, with green beans and corn on the side.
My cousin-sister’s thumbs moved rapidly across the keys on her phone. She carried her empty plate to the sink, then disappeared into her room.
I followed my aunt to the couch; over the sound of the TV, I could hear my cousin-sister quietly giggling on the phone.
I wanted to believe she wasn’t talking to her boyfriend, but when I walked into her room to get ready for sleep, she mumbled something into the receiver and quickly ended the call.
“Who was that?” I asked.
She smiled at me, a smile somewhere between innocent and mischievous. “Who do you think?”
“Your boyfriend,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said guiltily, but trying not to laugh. She spun an elaborate story—that she was talking to one of her friends, who hadn’t heard what had happened, but that my cousin-sister’s boyfriend had asked the friend to ask her for his mother’s set of keys—that reminded me of a story Eileen might devise. My cousin-sister told me she was embarrassed about the fight, and she didn’t want to tell anyone what happened, and so she called her boyfriend to settle things instead.
I picked up a pillow and turned to walk back into the living room, to sleep on the couch.
“No, wait!” she said. “You sleep in here. You’re sick.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
“You sleep here,” she insisted.
She tucked me in, under a pile of blankets. I watched her grab a pair of socks out of the dresser before she closed the door behind her. I pretended not to know where she was going, or what she planned to do.
But I couldn’t sleep. I rotated slowly in bed so that my head pointed north, then east, then south, then west. It was something I did on sleepless nights, a way of tricking my body into falling asleep, but it didn’t work. My cough kept me awake.
I untangled my legs from the blankets, climbed out of bed, and walked into the dark living room. “Are you awake?” I asked, touching the pile of blankets on the couch, but the peak caved under my hand. I was surprised I hadn’t heard my cousin-sister leave.
I returned to bed and fell asleep.
* * *
—
I DREAMT OF a two-story sandstone motel, its three square walls opening onto the desert. A sun set between two mountains, and heavy drapes were drawn across all the windows. My mother and my aunt and all my sisters were running in and out of the rooms, slamming doors, shouting at one another from the landings. I understood that each door was a choice, each room a potential future, and that my mother’s and my aunt’s and my sisters’ doors were closed to me. Standing on the landing and looking into the sun, I noticed the figure of a solitary woman in the desert. She wore a loose blouse and a long skirt, cinched by an elaborate concho belt, and though I’d never met her, I knew she was Pauline Tom, our gnomon, casting a long, indecipherable shadow on our lives.
I woke to the sound of water lapping stone. I sat up in my cousin-sister’s bed and peeked through the blinds to watch the rain carve pools in the red clay. If I were better rested, I would have walked into the hills and looked for waterlogged birds, but I was tired, too tired.
I wandered into the living room, where my aunt sat on the couch on top of my cousin-sister’s blankets. “She left last night,” my aunt said, pushing a pad of paper toward me.
I picked it up and read: “Went to Gallup. Need to get pads and face wash. Should be back soon.”
My cousin-sister wrote a number on the bottom of the note, but when my aunt tried to call it, no one answered.
“
She prolly went to see that guy,” my aunt sighed.
My aunt asked me to follow her into the kitchen; she told me to sit and began boiling water on the stove. “I heard you coughing all night,” she said, dropping bundles of Navajo tea into the pot. She stirred and strained the drink, then set a full mug in front of me. “This will make you feel better.”
“Thank you,” I said, hugging my hands around the warm mug. I blew tight ripples over the surface of the golden-brown tea.
She set a plate of French toast in front of me, then told me she needed to run an errand for a friend, but asked me to come by the hair salon later—she wanted to give me a present before I left for Tucson.
I told her I would stop by.
I crawled back into bed after I finished my breakfast. I tried to read for class, but I couldn’t concentrate on the book. One of my professors, Ander Monson, had assigned us to keep track of the day, September 22—to record everything that happened in an essay—and so I jotted down a few notes. Then I walked to the front porch and stared at the muddy front yard, where my aunt and her neighbor had spent the previous day clearing out the summer weeds. Toro made a rabbit’s nest of them.
I crooned his name from the porch, and he lifted his head and fixed me with red and watery eyes, but did not move.
I walked a few steps into the yard and called his name again. He stood slowly on quivering legs.
Concerned, I walked over to him, and he leaned the entire weight of his body against my legs. “Toro,” I whispered, and I traced the black line between his eyes, smoothed my hands over his head and down his sides. I remembered the stories my cousin-sister had told me. All the times Toro had been hit, flipped over the hoods of cars. Gotten up, shaken it off. I wondered if he had been hit again. “It’s so hard, I know,” I said, rubbing his soft ears. “It’s so hard.” My aunt wouldn’t take him to the vet. He was a rez dog now.
Toro took a few steps away from me and lay down in his nest of weeds. He curled into a tight ball, with his back to me. There was nothing I could give him—nothing I felt I could do.
I walked back into the house and waited for my cousin by the screen door.
She told me she hadn’t seen her boyfriend when she finally returned home. She said she went to Shorty’s, across the street, and helped him set mouse traps in the middle of the night. He couldn’t do it himself, she told me. He kept catching his fingers. She would tell me if she saw her boyfriend.
I wanted to believe her.
* * *
—
ON THE DRIVE out of town, I stopped at my aunt’s work, a salon and flower shop that operated out of a trailer. She offered to cut my hair, which was too long and breaking at the ends. She washed it, massaging the shampoo into my scalp, then led me back to her chair and draped a pink cloth around my shoulders. I watched her reflection in the mirror, dividing and redividing my hair and constantly adjusting the black banana clip that held it on top of my head.
“This is where I was when I found out your mom died,” she said, suddenly. “I went in the back and cried and cried.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said nothing.
“I’m glad you could be here today,” she said, as if I had planned my visit intentionally.
She fought the tears in her eyes as she finished cutting my hair.
Before I left, my aunt gave me a glass vase full of plastic purple and yellow flowers—a memorial gift, to bring home with me. Tucked inside the arrangement was a card with a message written in my aunt’s handwriting, so similar to my mother’s perfect script: “Missing you. We Love You.” Missing, always.
* * *
—
ON THE DRIVE home, I looked for the cemetery my cousin-sister pointed out to me the previous week. I scanned the side of the highway—watching for the headstones, the silver ribbon. I imagined stopping and visiting my grandmother’s grave, even though I didn’t know the blessing. I wasn’t worried about spirits or ghosts. But I didn’t recognize the cemetery or my family’s land.
[Beauty]
IN TUCSON, I tried to fill my life with beauty. I bought a sunshine-yellow beach cruiser, and as I pedaled to school in the mornings, I paid attention to the hummingbirds buzzing around cactus blossoms, the verdins hopping in the mesquite, the Gila woodpeckers scaling saguaro and palm.
On the weekends, I drove into the desert, sometimes alone and sometimes with the new friends I made through the MFA program. We hiked up mountains and through canyon and wash. I filled my life with poetry and literature and attended readings at the university and around town.
I shared pieces of my book project in my nonfiction workshops, until I received a feedback letter from one of my cohort, who told me that I sounded angry; that I should learn how to forgive my father. He suggested I seek therapy. I cried for hours.
When my mother had visited me in Pennsylvania for my college graduation, she’d attended a reading hosted by the school’s undergraduate literary journal, which had published one of my essays about my father and his racism; the discoveries I had been making about my Diné heritage; and my mother’s inability, or unwillingness, to aid me on my quest. After the reading, she was uncharacteristically quiet.
I asked her what was wrong.
“Why would you write something like that?” she said: an accusation, not a question. She would not meet my eyes. I had never felt my mother’s anger directed at me before, and I lost all words. I did not write another essay, did not write at all, until after she died.
A few weeks after the workshop, I started seeing a psychiatrist through the school’s counseling center. They assigned me to an ancient white man, a wizened turtle, who could hardly stay awake. I told him I was anxious about my book and my degree. I told him I was struggling with my mother’s death. I told him about my father and my sisters and about my worries for them. As I talked, his eyelids fluttered, and his balding head nodded up and down. When I stopped talking, he startled awake and shuffled the papers on his desk. “You seem like you’re handling things remarkably well,” he said. I did not feel as if I was handling things remarkably well, but I thanked him. I kept talking even after his eyes closed again, though I knew it wouldn’t help.
[Nursing Home]
THE SUMMER AFTER my first year in Tucson, I joined two of my cohort for a field study in writing on Grand Manan, a Canadian island floating off the coast of New Brunswick, across the international boundary line from Maine. For two weeks, we were given the freedom to explore the island and write about the local community, a traditional fishing village facing radical changes as herring populations crashed in the Bay of Fundy. In our first few days on the island, we drove past fishing wharfs, traditional herring weirs, and shuttered smokehouses. We visited dark warehouses that housed lobster, hibernating in the icy cold. The lobster industry exploded as the herring populations collapsed, and we met high school–aged boys who made small fortunes on lobster boats.
My colleagues opted to take a whale-watching trip, but I signed up for a bird-watching tour instead. Our destination was a seabird breeding colony on Machias Seal Island, which was little more than a jut of rock in the middle of the sea. Only the first fifteen on board were allowed to disembark, to sit in narrow blinds and watch the seabirds up close, but the captain offered to take those remaining—me and two others—in a skiff around the island. The water was calm and flat. The captain let the skiff idle and started making a strange, rattling sound in his throat. A handful of puffins became curious, paddling closer in nervous circles with their carrot-orange feet.
On the return trip, I noticed I had missed a call from my father—more than one—though I figured he was probably drunk. I waited until I got back to the bed-and-breakfast to call him.
He told me my grandmother hadn’t slept in days—that she was hallucinating. She was surrounded by her young children, by people who weren’t there. “She lives in New Jer
sey now,” he said, laughing.
I tried to laugh with him, but I was worried. “Does anyone know what’s wrong?”
“The doctors don’t know anything,” he complained, though he suspected it was a reaction to her new medication.
He told me to enjoy my trip, though I found it almost impossible to relax.
The next day we visited Kent Island where there was a nesting colony of Leach’s storm petrels. The island’s researchers nicknamed their nesting grounds “the Shire” after the fairy-green moss that blanketed their underground burrows. We followed a student intern to the site and watched her pull a sleeping petrel out of its burrow and pop it headfirst into a cardboard toilet paper tube. She weighed it and took a sample of its blood, and she recited a few facts about their feeding and mating habits, though I had forgotten to bring anything beyond my phone with which to take notes.
My father called me again that night to tell me my grandmother had been admitted to a nursing home for observation, but they only had a bed for a man, not a woman, and she had been sent home again. He said he hadn’t slept in days, either, but his voice was filled with a kind of manic energy. He railed against the ineptitude of the doctors, the nursing home, and his sister, who was trying to wrest the control of my grandmother’s caretaking from him. “She doesn’t care about your grandma,” he insisted; he believed she was only in it for whatever little money my grandmother might have in the end.
The next morning, I hiked to a waterfall and spotted a thrush, almost perfectly camouflaged in the dense undergrowth. I leveled my binoculars on his round black eye, and for as long as I watched him, he didn’t move or make a sound.
My father called twice, but I didn’t answer. He left a message telling me he thought he’d figured out the road map to artificial intelligence and that my grandmother should be a whole lot better by Monday. And then he revised his statement to tell me she wasn’t faring much better at all.
Dog Flowers Page 19
