Tessa watched a fat bumblebee, heavy with nectar, launch himself lazily from the wide trumpet of a squash blossom. Pumpkins ripened near the wall, and she could make out peppers, garlic, onions, and what might be potatoes. “So is this all organic, too?”
“It is,” he said proudly.
The sound of the bus trundling up the hill, away from the church, barely disturbed the depth of silence. “Why St. Nicholas? Isn’t he Santa Claus?”
“He’s the patron saint of thieves—los ladrones.”
“Ah! Of course.” She grinned. “Is the pilgrimage to St. Nicholas, too?”
“No, it’s a shrine to the Blessed Mother.”
She nodded. “Do you get a lot of tourists here?”
“A few. The pilgrims—did you see them leaving?—come once or twice a month. It’s usually a church group or something like that. Once,” he said with a grin, “we had a Red Hat Society make the trek.”
Tessa chuckled.
“Mostly, it’s just a bus that stops on its way to see something else. The church is not that important or particularly unusual.” He stabbed at a weed with his toe. “The tourists come for the town.”
“How long has the foodie thing been going on?”
“Oh, that.” He waved a hand.
“You don’t like it?”
He smiled gently. “It’s very indulgent, isn’t it? Greed and gluttony mixed together with a big helping of lust.”
Startled by the acuity of his observation, Tessa laughed. “True. But it’s also beauty and nurturance and creation, right?”
“Absolutely. All things in balance.” His smile broadened. He couldn’t be thirty, and yet an old soul gazed at her through dark brown eyes. Stepping forward, he offered his hand. “I’m Father Timothy,” he said.
“Tessa Harlow.” His grip was strong and solid. “How far is it to the top of the mountain?”
“Four miles and a bit, and nearly twenty-five hundred feet in altitude.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Wow. Steep!”
“Well,” he said gently, “a pilgrimage is meant to be trying.”
“I see.”
“If you’d like a less challenging walk, the lake is only a mile and a half.”
She wanted to protest, to present her credentials, like a badge of fitness—she had led adventure tours all over the world! She had sometimes hiked more than twenty miles a day in rugged terrain!—but it would all be a smoke screen. Four miles—eight by the time she returned—would be far more than she could do on her still-healing foot. Even a mile and a half might be pushing it, but she was going to give it a try. “Thanks.”
“The views are magnificent.”
A woman with the cropped hair and round shape of a lifelong nun appeared at the door of the rectory. “Father? There’s a call for you.”
“Excuse me.” He bowed. “Good to meet you.”
Before Natalie’s dad had to work on Saturday morning, rescuing somebody who wasn’t supposed to be climbing the rocks anyway, they were all supposed to go on a picnic. Instead, they got stuck at Grandma’s, and now they were going on a picnic today and it was hot, hot, hot.
Natalie sat in the shade beneath the tree in the plaza, holding her sister Hannah’s hand, waiting for her dad to come out of the drugstore with sunscreen. They had to walk to the lake, naturally, because nobody could ever just drive anywhere around here. Already her skin was prickly down her back. Her grandma said she should wear a hat, but Natalie just did not see how that would make a person cooler.
She would rather stay right here in the shade all day and read a book. Climb up into the tree, maybe, and then come down later and go into Le Fleur de Mer and look at salts from the Dead Sea, which she imagined was probably a desert, all glittery in the sunshine like diamonds even though it was big crystals of gray salt. The lady in there didn’t like Natalie to come in by herself; she said it was nothing that would interest a child, but she didn’t know Natalie. Or that she had her own salt cellar and was just waiting to find the right salt to put in it.
She swung her feet, banging her heels against the wall, and slapped a fly away from her neck. He was drinking the sweat, she thought. Disgusting.
After she visited the salt store, she would go into the drugstore for a cherry phosphate, made with cherry syrup and lime juice and plain soda water right out of the fountain. The man took a maraschino cherry and a triangle of lime, stuck them on a tiny plastic sword, and propped it on the top of the ice. It came in a shapely glass in a silver holder, with a fat paper straw, not plastic. She would sit at the counter on one of the turquoise chairs that swung back and forth and look at magazines, maybe the one with Rachael Ray on it, because she always seemed really really nice, or one of the ones that had beautiful pictures of cakes on the front. It didn’t matter. When she opened those magazines, it seemed like a whole world whispered out at her, inviting her inside their glossy pages to share a secret.
If she closed her eyes, she could imagine the counter inside the drugstore, the fan swirling air over her head, the pages of her magazine riffling a little. She would take tiny, tiny sips of the phosphate to make it last an hour, and only then would she eat the cherry.
“Don’t nod off on me, sleepyhead,” her dad said, all cheery, like she wanted to walk to some stupid lake and eat stupid mushy bananas and stupid lunchmeat sandwiches.
“I’m not,” she said crossly. “Do we have to go on a picnic? Can’t we just have a picnic here?”
“No!” Jade roared. “I want to swim!” She had a red-and-white polka-dot bathing suit under her shorts, and her hair was braided tightly in one long white horsetail down her back.
“Me, too! Swim!” said Hannah, who still talked like a baby, even though she was three. Grandma said it was because everybody talked for her.
Daddy sat down next to Natalie. “You don’t want to go swimming? It’ll feel pretty good up there. And I got you a surprise for lunch.”
“What surprise?” she asked without excitement. “A candy bar?”
“Nope. Something good. Something only you would think to ask for.”
A kindling of hope sparked in her chest. “Really?”
Sometimes, not often, he actually got it right. She wasn’t holding her breath or anything, but she stood up and put her backpack on. “Okay.” Pedro scrambled to his feet and she took his leash. “Let’s go.”
Breakfast #59
Baked French Toast with Fruit: Our special-recipe French toast, made with fresh raisin bread, honey collected from local bees, and spices, served with fresh strawberries or peaches, and bananas, fresh whipped cream, and organic butter. Served with organic or soy sausage, coffee, tea, or milk.
BAKED FRENCH TOAST
8 thick slices raisin bread*
6 eggs
¾ cup milk
¼ tsp baking powder
1 T vanilla
FOR FRUIT LAYER
10 oz. frozen or 2 cups fresh strawberries, sliced
4 bananas, thickly sliced
⅓ cup honey
1 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp allspice
Pinch of cardamom
Cinnamon sugar
Place bread slices close together in a flat pan with high sides. Combine all other ingredients and pour the mixture over bread, cover, and refrigerate overnight.
In the morning:
Layer strawberries and bananas in a glass casserole dish. Pour honey over them, then sprinkle with spices. Carefully place slices of egg-soaked bread on top. If any egg mixture remains in the pan, simply pour over the top. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.
Bake at 450 degrees for 20-25 minutes.
* See recipe for fresh Raisin Bread.
SIX
After the priest went inside, Tessa wandered around the garden at the church, making notes. The harsh early-afternoon sun didn’t lend itself to photos, but she’d come back another time. She had planned to also explore the interior of the church, but when she peek
ed in, a handful of people were gathered in a circle, praying, and she didn’t want to intrude.
Exiting the garden, she wandered around the outside of the walls, half expecting to remember something. Although there was something intimately familiar about the hot sun and the smell of the earth, the church itself gave her nothing. Her mother had been a hippie, after all. Why would she have come into town to go to Mass?
In the distance, she spied a man with long dark hair, walking fiercely toward the back of the church. Reminded of the man—“the Coyote Man”—who had radiated such fury at the cantina, she followed him, curious. The smell of his cigarette fouled the air as she came around the corner.
Behind the church, nestled beneath the shade of elm trees that had shed a shower of twigs over the buffalo grass, was a small graveyard. The man was gone, maybe up the path to the pilgrim site or on a path down toward the river.
She shrugged him off and shot a quick series of the shaded churchyard—very old, judging by the tilt of the headstones. Its picturesque light would appeal to her boss. It would look beautiful in the brochure.
Across the yard, on a park bench next to a chuckling little fountain, was a dark-haired woman and a white cat. Both were skinny, cat and woman, and the angles of the woman’s cheekbones were echoed in the sharpness of the cat’s triangular face. There was grace in their movements, something feline in the angle of the woman’s head, something female and hungrily human in the cat’s acceptance of the long strokes down her back. Around the woman’s wrists were tattoos, and her collarbones stuck out in sharp relief. Tessa took out her camera and focused her lens on the pair.
A press of sorrow sliced through her, and Tessa jerked involuntarily. She lowered the camera, pressed a hand to her heart. Maybe there were ghosts around here.
Maybe she didn’t want to bother these two. Or be here right now. She slipped away, around the tree, leaving them alone. She put the camera away in her pack, retied her left tennis shoe, and took out a bottle of water and an open weave hat she adored. Putting it on made her feel more in control, as if she was a tour leader who knew her stuff after all.
From the other direction came a ragged black-and-white dog. She glanced at him, then glanced back, suddenly recognizing him. It was her friend from the restaurant the other night.
“Hey, you,” she said, kneeling. She held out a hand, palm up. He glanced over his shoulder with a worried expression, then came over to her, head down apprehensively, and sniffed her fingers. Tessa murmured to him, running her hands over his head, down his spine. Each bone was as big as a knuckle. She searched in her pack for food and gave him half of a protein bar. It took him a long time to chew it, but he didn’t give up.
“I have to go now, honey,” she said, and tossed a roll into the forest for him. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do, feed him. But how could she not? He dashed after the roll, white socks flashing. Turning her back, Tessa headed toward the lake. When she looked back after a minute, the dog was gone.
The trail headed up the mountain beneath stands of mixed pine, ponderosa with their long needles and spicy bark, paler spruce, and ordinary red pine. As she walked, Tessa made mental notes about the trail itself—well traveled and tamped down, with exposed rocks and roots in places. It would be a mess after a rain, the earth a deep clay red that would stain everything it touched, but in the worst spots the park service had laid railroad ties. The flora was standard Rocky Mountains at eight thousand feet—mixed in with the pines were yucca and prickly pear, scrub oak and wild raspberries. Another thousand feet of altitude and there would be aspens, but the trail toward the lake split off before it climbed that high.
The air smelled of sunbaked pine needles and freshness. She was alone, in her body, walking. Finally. Her foot was sore, and she made a conscious effort not to limp, but it wasn’t bad. Unused muscle came to life in her thighs and shoulders and glutes, and light sweat broke down her neck and over her chest. The altitude made her breathe a little harder than normal, and the climb got her blood pumping. Suddenly she felt little explosions of endorphins that flooded her with a happiness so fierce she almost wanted to weep.
This was her world. God, she was missing it!
Although Tessa and her father had always spent a fair amount of time outside, sometimes camping, they’d never done any hiking. Sam preferred the water. And while Tessa had reluctantly learned to swim finally—at a pool, inside, at the YMCA—she had never found any love for the ocean or rivers or lakes. She wasn’t phobic; she just didn’t enjoy swimming that much.
So she’d tended to think of herself as a person without athletic inclinations. She loved reading. She loved movies and television and friends and music and dogs.
In college, she’d fallen for a guy who was an avid hiker and camper, and to spend more time with him, she tagged along, to Lake Tahoe and on trails overlooking the ocean and into the mountains. To her amazement, she found joy in the soft buzz in her legs and hips at the end of a long day of walking, the genial company on the trails, with the boots and packs and the reward of drinking beers with like-minded souls afterward.
Mostly she loved the feeling of being alive under the sky, touching the earth, being wholly herself. Sweating. Walking. Thinking. Admiring. On the trail, she didn’t bring her troubles. There was only room for wind and sky and sun and rain and humming under her breath.
As she did now, on the trail toward the lake above Los Ladrones. A breathy tune. She paused to listen: “Climb Every Mountain.” She laughed. The Sound of Music was in the regular rotation, but it was usually the title song.
“Corny, Tessa. Very corny.”
She made it to the lake in just under forty minutes, not a bad time for the distance and climb. It would be quite accessible for nearly anyone in her groups—even those who had not hiked a great deal before. The walk could take an hour up and an hour back down, and they could eat on the sandy shore of the small blue lake.
Nice.
She had expected that there would be more people, but on this side it was deserted. In the distance, on the other shore of the lake, were fishermen and picnickers, who must have driven up from the north end of the mountain. A trail ran around the water, maybe a couple of miles. Tumbles of boulders provided perches for sunning; the beach was flat and clean.
Beautiful. Tessa stood with her hands on her hips, sweating lightly, surveying the scene. Perfect! She could lead the group up the hill, around the lake, stop for a lunch, and walk back down. Most of their tours were more vigorous than that—with hikes of up to fifteen miles in a day, several days in a row—but there were always easy and/or optional days of mellower walks thrown in.
She sat down on a rock right at the waterline and took a long swallow of water from the bottle she carried. As the priest had promised, the views were stunning, postcard cutouts of mountains layering one against the next into the distance, with a long valley between. A river snaked through the valley floor, silvery in the bright afternoon. It must be the Ladrones River, she thought, orienting herself. And there, like a toy village, was the town of Los Ladrones.
Something about it—the colors or the angle, or the mountains, or maybe her dream from the night before—made her think, suddenly and with a piercing longing, of Tasmania. The island lay south of mainland Australia, an underpopulated landscape of mountains and water—equal parts Scotland and Australia and American West—that had captured her imagination completely.
Or, more truthfully, it had been Glenn who captured her. Tasmania was simply the landscape that had spawned him.
How could it sting so much, after two years? How could she, who had made an art form of footloose, easy connections, have allowed herself to fall so madly, passionately, blindly in love? It was embarrassing how much she had loved him, how snivelingly devastated she’d been when he fell in love with a fellow scientist and cleanly, matter-of-factly broke Tessa’s heart in two.
Humiliating how much she still sometimes missed him, or at least the life they had created tog
ether. Missed Tasmania and a sense of having roots in a place.
“Don’t start, Harlow,” she said aloud, and irritably stripped off her shoes and socks. The scar where they’d had to clean out the infected spider bite was still angry and dark, nearly two solid inches across, in the shape of Texas. She poked the flesh, feeling the tenderness deep within. Not healed yet. After the long walk, it was sore, and tonight she would probably have to soak it before she went to sleep. She thought about sticking it in the lake, but maybe it would be better to avoid that for a while longer.
Time. Things took time to heal.
Taking a towel out of her pack, she stripped off her shirt and lay back on the beach in her sports bra, letting the hot sun sear her eyelids and belly and knees. The buzz of exercise moved in her limbs, and her brain was happily tired, too.
She must have dozed off, because she came awake sometime later to the breath of an animal in her ear. She sat upright, startled. A dog barked a greeting.
Her friend from the first day, the Akita mix, white and fluffy with black-tipped ears.
Again.
“What are you doing here, buddy?” she asked, reaching up to bury her hands in the fur around his neck. “How do you keep finding me? Are you my soul mate?”
He grinned at her, bowing happily before giving a cheery little bark-growl, like Scooby-Doo, then looked back toward the trail. Behind him trooped the three little girls he’d been with yesterday, the older girl looking hot and sweaty and annoyed. Bringing up the rear was a man, obviously their father.
He carried a midsize dog over his shoulder, and he wore no shirt, only a pair of jeans and hiking boots. A blue T-shirt was tucked into his back pocket, swaying like a tail. As he reached the beach, he bent down and tenderly put the old dog on the ground so she could make her pigeon-toed way toward the shade, panting hard but happy.
The Secret of Everything Page 7
