“No,” Teresa said truthfully.
“You can be honest with me,” the detective said. “I know everything. I heard him talking to you on the phone. He sounded just like he was your lover.”
Alone in Dan and Catherine’s living room, Teresa wished she could erase every word the detective had heard; she thought of his apartment on Dolores Street—the window where the canary’s cage had been, the room full of Dina’s possessions, so carefully packed.
“You don’t really know anything,” Teresa said, wishing that she could lie to him and passionately cry that none of what he imagined was true.
“I can guess,” Bergen said. “I can guess well enough to be pretty damn certain. For Christ’s sake, Teresa, I’m not judging you—I’m not even talking about what people will think, what’s legal or illegal—I don’t care about any of that. It’s the fact that it’s Silver, that you keep on thinking that he’s something he’s not. Teresa, you don’t know him.”
“Maybe I don’t now,” Teresa said. “But I used to,” she whispered.
In the detective’s apartment in San Francisco there was a photograph of Dina and all three of her children taken years before by King Connors with a borrowed camera. It had been taken on a day when the sky was so bright that Teresa blinked as King clicked down on the shutter, a day when Teresa was not more than eight years old and anything seemed possible: men on white horses could ride blindfolded across the desert, drawn by the heartbeat of the woman they loved; sand had a voice of its own, and could sing; no one ever changed, or got old, or disappeared without any warning.
“You used to,” Bergen agreed.
Outside Catherine and Dan’s house, Atlas rested in a brown cardboard box lined with flannel; through the living-room window Teresa could see him stretch out in the sun—slowly his bones were turning warm once more, a ten-year-old boy carefully removed the burrs from around his neck.
“He used to have darker eyes than anybody else,” Teresa told Bergen. “He used to wear white shirts that were ironed perfectly, and he never wore the same shirt more than once—it was always clean. I knew him better than anyone; I could tell if he walked up behind me just by the sound of his footsteps.”
“An Aria,” Bergen said, and he knew that sixty miles away Teresa was nodding her head yes.
There were times when Teresa would stretch out on the grass next to Atlas and the old dog Reggie; she would lie down somewhere just beyond the sunflowers and stare up into Silver’s bedroom window. She could hear King trying to start his old pickup in the driveway, and the screen door slam as Reuben left the house to walk down to the Safeway. Sometimes she would wait for hours, out there in the backyard while Silver continued to sleep. Sometimes Dina would come out and sit next to her, and then both of them would stare up into Silver’s window, as silent as two lovesick girls.
“I’m worried about you,” Bergen said now. “I shouldn’t be—we’re not really related. But I still worry about you.”
In only a few hours it would be dinnertime in the house where Teresa had spent the night. Catherine would give her son a ceramic bowl full of carrots to cut up in slices, the table would be set with earthenware plates. If Teresa decided to let Atlas stay here he would sleep only a few feet away from the table, his nose buried in flannel, not moving until Catherine scraped the left-over into his plate.
“I’m glad that you came to our house that day,” Teresa told Bergen.
“Are you sure you’re not sorry it wasn’t King who came back instead?” Bergen asked her.
“Only sometimes,” Teresa admitted. “Most of the time I’m glad it was you. Do you want to know a secret?” she asked suddenly. In a little while she would clean off her muddy hiking boots with a damp cloth and walk over to Dan’s station wagon so that he could give her a ride back to Villa Lobo. The air would be salty, and below the ridgetop the ocean would look as clear as glass, pelicans would be perched on the huge black rocks, Atlas would be dozing a few feet away from the field of artichokes. “It was cinnamon,” Teresa whispered, wanting to give honesty to Bergen, the way someone else might have given him a gift of fragile pottery. “That’s what my mother put in her coffee.”
“That can’t be,” Bergen said.
“That’s all it was,” Teresa said. “I know you always thought it was something more.” She wondered if perhaps she had given the detective the wrong gift. “Are you sorry I told you?”
“Cinnamon,” Bergen said, and beneath his tongue the word was like a spice, and he felt his disappointment melting. “No,” he told Teresa. “It’s always much better to know the truth.”
In the three days that Teresa had been gone, Joey started to leave the trailer early in the morning, and he took a fishing pole with him, but if anyone had asked him what fish he expected to catch, he couldn’t have answered. He didn’t give a damn about catching fish, and often he left the fishing pole behind once he reached the river, forgotten in the tall grass. Long before dawn Joey would crouch by the riverbank, and he stared down, just as if he were looking for the signs of trout, but in fact he was searching for very different signs of life.
Unlike Silver, Joey didn’t believe that Teresa would return to the trailer camp, yet he had managed to find her. When he sat by the river he truly expected Teresa to rise from the depths, a string of orchids woven through her fingers and her toes. Joey began to recognize the calls of certain birds, though he didn’t know their names any more than he knew what sort of fish swam toward the sea. He no longer checked the local papers for the names of those who had drowned in the storm, he no longer telephoned the sheriff’s office for the latest reports. He forgot all the arguments he and Teresa had had, he forgot his suspicions that Teresa had promised to marry him simply because she didn’t know what else to do. He felt closer to her than ever before, and much more in love than ever. He believed that if he sat at the riverbank long enough she would appear, she would float toward him, her skin would be perfect, pale and cool. And when she rose up from the bottom of the river he would be right there, ready to hold her in his arms.
Silver had spent three nights sleeping on the bare floor of a deserted trailer; his back ached, and because Joey was gone so much of the time Silver no longer feared that when Teresa came back she would run into Joey first. He decided to drive to Santa Rosa, check into the Lamplighter, and get a good night’s sleep. But once he had decided to get out of the trailer camp, Silver found that he couldn’t leave. The wheels of the Camaro were stuck in the mud. Silver started the engine and floored the gas, but the car only drove deeper and deeper into the mud.
He went to Joey’s unlocked trailer then, having decided that anything he found inside he would consider his. He shaved with Joey’s razor and a new razor blade, he drank a quart of orange juice, ate some crackers he found stored in a cabinet, then took a nap in the unmade bed. When he woke up his back no longer ached, and he searched through all the drawers in the trailer, just to see what he would find, but nothing interested him until he opened the closet and found some of Teresa’s clothes. He packed all of them in a brown paper bag, he took them out to the Camaro and threw the bag into the back seat. And then, because there was no one to help him and no one to hire, he went around to the toolshed behind Joey’s trailer and got a shovel and he slowly began to dig the Camaro out of the mud.
He took off the one white shirt he had with him, but he still couldn’t avoid getting mud all over his jeans and his polished leather boots. And that was the way he was when Teresa first saw him—out in the center of the trailer camp, straining to lift up huge shovelfuls of heavy earth. Dan had dropped her off a quarter of a mile down the River Road, and because Silver didn’t hear a car pull up, Teresa had the chance to watch him from where she stood by the metal gate. He had dug out the rear tires and was working on the front; his hair was darker than a crow’s feathers, his arms were knotted with muscles, he could have been anyone, any man laboring beneath the sun of a rare March day when the sky was as clear as a diamond.
Silver had gotten a rhythm to his work; the mud flew away from his car as if it had sprouted wings. When he happened to look up for a moment and saw a woman standing at the gate his rhythm was instantly thrown off; he dropped the shovel and stared. He had expected her to come back late in the evening, after he had taken a shower and ironed his shirt with the iron he had found beneath the sink in Joey’s trailer. He had imagined that she would wear a white dress, the sapphire he had once given her would be fastened around her throat; and now, when she walked across the yard to him in the blinding sunlight of the last days of winter, dressed in faded jeans and a borrowed sweater that was a size too large, Silver shaded his eyes and for a moment he didn’t feel half as sure of the future as he had felt only seconds before. But he recovered quickly and by the time she walked over to him he was leaning against the Camaro, grinning.
“Have you commandeered Joey’s trailer?” Teresa asked him.
“Your boyfriend seems to have flown the coop,” Silver said. “Lucky for you I’m here.”
He noticed the change in Teresa and he reached over and took a handful of her hair in his fist.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I like it this way.” Teresa shrugged.
Silver shook his head with mock solemnity. “Whenever you’re away from me you make these sorts of mistakes.” He dropped his hand to her cheek and stroked her skin. “You’d better make certain that you’re with me all the time.”
Teresa moved his hand away.
“You’re not going to be shy with me, are you?” Silver teased.
Teresa stared at the white scar on Silver’s face. A long time ago, when a summer lasted forever and the sky was the color of hyacinths, Teresa could have traced Silver’s face in the sand blindfolded—she knew him that well. She knew that his breathing came through the bedroom wall, past the plaster and the wallpaper, straight into her heart. She knew that the veins in his arms turned to indigo when he reached up to close a window in the living room, that he always whistled under his breath when he ran down the stain to the front door. Now, nothing but the brand-new scar seemed familiar; it was the unmistakable mark of sorrow surfacing through his skin.
Teresa turned away and then walked to the trailer, stepping carefully around the pools of mud.
“Wait a minute,” Silver called after her. And when she didn’t slow down, he ran after her. She was already inside the trailer, staring at the open closet, when Silver caught up with her. There were empty hangers all in a row.
“I took the opportunity to pack your clothes,” Silver told her.
Teresa took a pad and a pen and wrote Joey a brief note of apology, in which she promised to repay all the money she owed him, including the seventy dollars he had spent for the wedding dress and the fifty dollars she was about to take from the jam jar of savings he kept beneath the bed.
“So that’s where he keeps it.” Silver smiled when Teresa knelt down and took out Joey’s savings.
“Where did you put my clothes?” Teresa asked now.
“In the back of the Camaro,” Silver told her. “All ready to go.”
Teresa walked out, toward the car, and before he followed her Silver pocketed the rest of Joey’s savings, and then he tore Teresa’s note in quarters and dropped the scraps of paper in the kitchen wastebasket. Out in the yard, Teresa was taking the bag of clothes out of the Camaro.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Silver told her. “You can go through those clothes later, after we’re on our way.”
Teresa’s throat was dry, drier than it would have been had the temperature been over a hundred degrees. “I’m not going,” she said.
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Silver smiled. “This is me. Silver. I know what you’re going to do.” He lowered his voice. “I know exactly what you want.”
“It’s what I used to want,” Teresa admitted.
“What the hell are you saying?” Silver said. “Are you telling me you haven’t been waiting for me all this time?”
Teresa couldn’t help but wonder if Gregory had left that scar on Silver’s face; if he had wanted to cut through the skin so that he could once more face that boy who had first sent him to Vacaville Prison.
“Let me tell you about where we’re going,” Silver told her now. “It’s so warm there you can go swimming every day, even in the winter. They’ve got parrots down there—I’ll bet you didn’t know that. And I’ll bet you didn’t know that the moon’s twice as big in Mexico, it’s so bright no one needs electric lights.”
In that sort of moonlight it would probably be impossible to see anything but that white scar, every other feature would be unrecognizable. If it had been that boy from so many years ago who now stood across from her in the trailer camp, Teresa would have run to him, she would have followed him to Mexico in the middle of the night. But it wasn’t that boy who now promised her a place where there were wild parrots streaked with red, a place where no one knew their names.
“We’re meant to be together,” Silver told her. “It’s as simple as that.”
“I can’t go with you,” Teresa said finally. “You’re not the one I love.”
Silver’s face grew hot. “Of course you do.” He went to her and held her around the waist. “I know you do.”
He held her as if for the last time; he breathed in the scent of roses on her skin. “Please,” he said. “I know you love me.”
When he let her go, she picked up the bag of her clothes, and even then Silver couldn’t believe that they weren’t going to Mexico together, he couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a hotel room waiting for them, the sheets on the bed already turned down, or that Teresa now walked toward the gate of the trailer camp beneath a sky that was slowly turning a deep purple color. He was still certain that if he dug the Camaro out of the mud and came after her she wouldn’t have any choice but to ride next to him in the front seat. She would be so close to him that he would be able to feel the heat rise from her skin, all he would have to do would be to reach out his hand and she would be right there. Silver grabbed the shovel, he dug furiously, and before long he was covered with mud and he didn’t even notice that Teresa had begun to walk east on the River Road, without once looking back.
In time the secretary at the sheriff’s office finally took Teresa’s name off the missing-persons list, and then neatly retyped it at the bottom of a long column of those who were permanently missing and presumed drowned. In time Joey was able to reach into the shallow waters on the river and have fish swim right into the center of his palm, and Harper began to notice that the sapphire Teresa had given her no longer changed from blue to green, but now remained the pure jade color of a cricket’s wing. In time winter was nearly forgotten, and the temperature rose higher than ever before, and the flooding of the season that had passed left behind only occasional pools in the river, and a slow trickle of water that moved west, and nothing but a few hawk’s feathers that had dropped from the sky collected in the shallows.
But on that night when Teresa left Villa Lobo the asphalt shimmered like ice, the sky was black and starry and cold. She had already walked several miles when Silver’s Camaro passed her, taking the curve in the River Road so quickly that Teresa barely had time to move out of its path. And when the shimmer of metal and chrome had disappeared, Teresa knew that because Silver had never bothered with strangers he had not stopped; he simply didn’t recognize her on a dark road where lines of sandbags held back the tide. Teresa had seen his reflection in the Camaro’s rearview mirror before the headlights disappeared; and even if he returned, backtracking, still searching for her along the road, Teresa was certain that it was now too dark for him to find her, and much too late.
When the moon had risen, Teresa hitched a ride into town with a man who had been working overtime on the road crew. She slept for a few restless hours in the back of his pickup, parked on an unfamiliar street on the outskirts of Santa Rosa in the driveway of one of the new tract houses. Ea
rly the next morning, when the man from the road crew was still in bed, his arms around his wife, Teresa walked to Webster Street. At the counter of Max’s Café she ordered coffee, and she drank as leisurely as if she were at her own table. She used some of the money she had borrowed from Joey to buy breakfast, and then she walked across the street to the five-and-ten-cent store where Dina had always bought the scarves she insisted they wear when they worked out in the garden planting rows of tomatoes.
Teresa walked up and down the aisles of the dime store until at last she found a table piled high with shoes at the rear of the store. She looked through the high heels, the leather shoes with laces and straps, the sneakers and the running shoes, and finally, on a rack just behind the table of shoes, Teresa found a wall full of moccasins made of strong leather. She reached for a pair that had beads sewn into the pattern of a star, then leaned against the table and unlaced her hiking boots. When she slipped them on, she knew that the moccasins were exactly what she had been looking for, and she left the boots where they stood, in a quiet aisle at the rear of the store.
When Teresa walked up to pay the cashier, she couldn’t hear her own footsteps, and out on the street the cement felt cool through the leather soles. She walked down Webster Street, carrying her bag of clothes, and she was as quiet as a spy when she turned the corner at Divisadero Street. It was still the time of year when the fog from the river traveled through town each morning and every night, when a mist wrapped itself around every lamppost like a school of silvery fish. When Teresa got to the house she saw that it had been repainted, a pale yellow trimmed with dark green. Someone was living there now; a radio had been turned on in the kitchen where Dina’s blue and white dishes had once lined the cabinets, a light was on in the living room where King Connors had stretched his legs out to rest them on a leather ottoman. There was a Ford Mustang in the driveway, and in the backyard laundry was still hung out from the day before; fog circled around the sheets and the pillowcases, it ran along the clothesline as if a second rope had also been drawn across the yard, a twine made up of water and air and sleep, the sort of rope found only in recurring dreams.
White Horses Page 29
