He looked surprised. “No. And I wish like hell she had. Now. Back then I was oblivious. Tell the people you love what you want, Wendell. Don’t give anyone the excuse of not knowing what it is you want. Ask for what you want and give as much as you can.”
“Tristan gives it without being asked. Why couldn’t Tag?”
“Let it go, little girl.” His voice was soft and tender. “You’ll never hurt as much from giving as you will from holding back. I promise you that. There’s so much more than what we think we know.”
His words made circles around the room. Like snowflakes in a mid-winter blizzard, like kite tails in a spring wind, like something glittery and potent in the summer sunshine. Like autumn leaves twirling and falling into a crystal clear stream, brilliant oranges, lush yellows, crimson. She saw them for what they were: wisdom and fancy and sky and magic, proof of flight, proof of freedom from earth’s gravity. Trust in the wind, trust in something she could not see.
Lying in bed it happened again. Tag’s energy seemed to be inside her own, and her entire body sizzled. His thoughts and hers tangled in a bizarre conversation.
Come back.
No.
I miss you.
You come here then.
You know I can’t.
Why not? Quit the military. Come have a normal life with me.
You call what you’re doing normal?
It went on and on. She rolled back and forth across the bed, trying to make it stop, but it didn’t.
I’m not leaving.
Let me rest.
The next moment everything calmed down. His energy enveloped hers, warm and soft. As though he was hugging her with his thoughts. Like nothing she’d ever felt before.
Okay, then. Sleep.
Aztec turned out to be an okay place to lay low. The ruins were mysterious and lovely, and the din of the past took over for a few hours as she and her father walked and stopped and walked again.
She hadn’t told him about the night before. When she woke up things were normal. Almost as if the cosmic conversation had never happened. But it had. She still felt the vestiges of that tingle of energy, the surreal calm of Tag’s energy hug.
The kiva at the ruins was large and intense. She wondered what would come if she merged her mind with her father again and recorded everything that passed through. He looked at her.
“That’s the downside of this. You can get so caught up in it everything around you starts to fade. The real stuff.”
They didn’t have time to go further with the conversation. Her father turned to the trail and she followed his gaze to see two men approaching. They were dressed in casual hiking attire, but still it was obvious. They weren’t hikers. They worked for the government.
He saw them coming before he turned his head.
First thing he thought was they were not CIA. Not U.S. Army. They were rogues. He figured they wanted the sketches, but he also knew they wanted to talk to Wendell. Like a slow motion slideshow, his thoughts flashed. Back them off, send her ahead. What she had, the sketches, would be enough for now.
They remained casual until they began to approach the kiva.
“When they get closer, I’m going to take my gun out. You go around them and head back toward the parking lot. Get in the car and lock it. Wait for me if you can.”
He slipped the keys to her and stood up.
When he pulled the gun they stopped. Wendell skirted them and walked, just as he’d told her to.
“We just want to talk to her.”
Scott shook his head. “No. You go back to whoever’s running this show and tell him this: Stay away from her. I mean it. Now take a seat and enjoy the ambiance.”
He left the men sitting. They weren’t going to do anything crazy, this wasn’t a TV movie. What worried him was Tag. He’d let Wendell leave with the sketches. He was the link. He’d hooked up with Wendell. That was their trump card. That was how they’d get to her.
This was the hardest part. As long as Tag was there they had a line to Wendell. It all depended on Tag’s true motives. If he loved her he wouldn’t use the line. If he didn’t – well, there were ways to deal with that. One way in particular.
What he had to do was get Wendell back to the woods of Virginia where the rhythm of the season was familiar. Where the endless circle of seasons marked time. He thought it would soothe the intensity she was feeling. Ground both of them.
“Think of this,” he told her when he got to the parking lot and climbed into the car.
“Winter back home, the first snowfall of the season. A full moon by evening, walking the path along the woods behind the house.”
For a moment he thought she was too old for this game. They’d played it many times when she was a child, him distracting her from what she didn’t need to think about, something she couldn’t control, something she had taken up to bend to her will. But she turned from the steering wheel to look at him. Her long hair and bright eyes, the curve of lips and flash of teeth that said she was wavering. Letting go of this thing with Tag, following Scott back through time to a winter night long ago.
“Our boots crunching footprints in the perfect whiteness,” she said. He waited for her to continue. “The moonlight in long fingers through the barren trees. The delicate filigreed shadows of branches across the blanket of white.”
“Deer prints and rabbit prints and you tracking what went where and when.”
He remembered these things as though they were a few hours ago. Wendell bare-headed because she wanted to hear the rustlings of deer and night creatures while they walked. Hoping she wouldn’t catch cold and him the wrath of Jess for taking her out so late.
The night air, Scott, and her without a hat, and no gloves either, I bet.
Jess was right, no gloves. Wendell hated anything between her fingers and the earth, her ears and the night sounds. She was like him that way. She wanted to soak it all in unfiltered.
“I miss home. I didn’t think I would but I do.”
She was soft and exposed and vulnerable. If he could he would have transported her bodily backward in time, to the woods and the snow, back to a time when the only thing she wanted was him there with her looking for creatures and stars by the light of the full winter moon. And if he could do it, if they could travel back to that violet night and precious year, he would never leave her again. He would make a different choice. And she would grow up to pick a man like Tristan instead of one like Tag.
She drove south through the night to appease her father. “Just stay off the main roads,” he said right before he closed his eyes and fell asleep. So that’s what she was doing. He woke when she stopped for gas and checked the map.
“I’ll take it from here. Your turn for some shut-eye.”
When she woke it was daylight and they were pulling in to a parking lot.
“Where are we?”
“Animas, New Mexico.”
“But we left that part of the state.”
“That was northwest. This is southwest. Animas Mountains. Not far from the Mexican border.”
He must have wanted easy access out of the U.S. if he’d brought them so close to the border. But there was something else. Animas. She didn’t know why she hadn’t realized it before. The book Tag had given her in New Mexico, the Cormac McCarthy novel. In the first paragraph there was mention of the Animas Mountains.
Everything pulled together and stretched apart again. On one level they were running from Tag. And on another, the entire trip felt predestined, as though he had input the coordinates and she was following them. Which was crazy. She was losing it.
And if she told her father, instead of smiling and saying sky’s the limit what she’d hear instead was this: shut him out. Don’t let him in.
They camped for close to a week near the border of Mexico. She expected trouble, imagined it a number of different ways. Men walking up and taking her away. Tag showing up and forcing her to choose between him and her father. Various Hollywood
endings, with appropriate plot twists and action.
But it was quiet. Her father drove close enough to town to make one phone call and they returned to the campsite. He turned the car off and they sat while he explained.
“They did a lot of experimenting back when I was there. I got pretty far out, and I did some things that seemed impossible. I haven’t tried to do those things again. It could have been a fluke. But I got in deep. I went a little crazy. They put me back in the field.
They know what I can do. The unit Tag is working in didn’t authorize the stuff he did, tracking you, getting you on post at White Sands. I suspect he’s working for someone else, outside the U.S. They’re watching him now. He’ll back off.”
She wanted details, but he shook his head.
“You know plenty. We need to burn those sketches. I told them we had no interest in the sketches.”
“But what if they’re important.” She didn’t think he understood. “Someone is building missiles, advanced designs. Maybe the sketches could stop them.”
He sighed. “You have to make your own decision about this. If you want to work for the government and get involved in saving the world that way that’s your business. But it’s not all about that. Egos and personalities get involved, and what they think they know. Worse, it gets tied up in personal stuff that has nothing to do with the job but drives it anyway. You and Tag made some kind of connection. You don’t think they’ll expect you to use that against him if he’s working for two governments?”
She blinked back tears. She thought Tag had let her keep the sketches because he was giving her the choice. Now she realized he had been waiting to pass them on to someone else. Or have her do it. “There has to be a way to keep things separate. Balanced.”
Her father sighed. “You can pull that off up to a point, but you’re already long past that with Tag. The thing is, we’re all connected. Everything is connected. And you and I and Tag, we don’t have special abilities so much as we’ve opened to what’s possible. We’re not special. Everyone is special. Anyone who wants to can learn to do what we do. The thing is, the world’s not ready for this, en masse. Not ready to admit that most of what we do and think and believe is flat out wrong. There’s so much more than what we know.”
“But won’t studying it and using it help?”
“Not the way they’re doing it. Not in my opinion.”
“Well, maybe Tag will leave too.”
Her father shrugged. “Maybe he will. But that’s his decision to make. Meanwhile, you have to take care of yourself.”
Just before dark she walked out a little ways from the campsite and sat down. She relaxed her body and opened her mind, the same way she’d done on the mountain. She invited Tag to join her.
He was there quickly, almost before she asked him to be. It was an argument of energies, conducted in the ethers, and if she had doubted how powerful the energies were, she no longer did.
She felt his intensity, his absolute desire for both her and the job he did. His appeal was potent and strong, and pulled at her physically, from the inside out. When she said no, and he knew she meant it, his energy sucked back, away from her, and it was that moment that was the worst. The withdrawal of his self, it felt like, the absence of literal energy from hers. It was the worst thing she’d ever felt in her life.
She suspected she had experienced it when her mother died, but didn’t have access to the full memory. That had to be what had pulled her back to the scene in the hospital room.
Tag did not say goodbye to her nor did he say anything was over. He simply vanished from her consciousness. She tried over the next two days to get him to come back, even if it were to argue. He had withdrawn completely. She began to understand why her father had been so distant during her childhood. She felt removed from the world.
She had experienced bliss. And now she was alone.
Wendell took Scott out on the town in Austin, Texas. They had drinks at the Cedar Door and listened to music on Sixth Street. They swam in the springs and walked along the Guadalupe River. She dragged him to Tex Mex restaurants and bars that served margaritas with olives. A day trip to a place called Enchanted Rock. She enjoyed knowing more than he did about a place. After all the years of him driving, she took the wheel and spun him around town, down desolate hill country roads, to funky little shops where they bought things for Jess and shipped them to Virginia.
He saw Jess opening the set of Tex Mex spices and salsas and imagined her smile. Knew with certainty she would find a recipe. The hand-painted clock she would put by her bed, on the nightstand that she kept just so.
The charm bracelet was pure folly: a cowboy boot, a chili pepper, a guitar, a heart with an arrow, an armadillo. He didn’t even know if Jess wore bracelets, but he wanted to give her one anyway.
The last night Wendell pulled him to the back porch steps and handed him a beer.
“Wait, daddy, just sit very still and wait.”
Not hard to do, out beneath the night sky, creaky knees stretched out long, the sweet smell of his daughter wafting through the air. The lingering heat of the day tempered by cold beer. Something skittered in the yard. Wendell’s slender fingers squeezed his arm. Then, inside a circle of light made and aimed by Wendell, an armadillo waddled slowly. The light panned back and revealed four tiny armadillos moving with their mother.
“I knew I’d see them before I left.” Wendell’s whispered words broke a little and he touched her cheek.
“They cry, daddy. I read that if you catch them by the tail they shed tears.”
Her tears slid between his fingers and mixed with his own when he wiped his eyes. This was something. He wasn’t sure of the right word. A healing, maybe, or simple hope. Making space for something new.
They watched the little creatures retreat to the darkness of the brush. Wendell clicked the flashlight off and they sat. Not one thing weighed between them.
It was agreed that she would leave Austin first, in the Toyota. Her father would close up the little house and follow her back to Virginia in the rental.
There was something she had to do before they left. Her excavation site had to be put back the way it was. She had never dug deep enough to find the objects, isolated by seasons and years and weather and geology. She wished she had time to find them, return them to their original context, together.
The layers of earth she had uncovered went back almost as they had been. She sprinkled grass seed purchased from the local hardware on top and watered it, then covered it with a scattering of half-composted leaves. By spring it would look as if no one had ever touched it. No evidence of the excavation. The isolated objects remained undisturbed.
In Culpeper, Virginia she unloaded the car without speaking. Her old room looked comfortable and familiar. The sunlight passed through the windows the way it always had. So much had changed, but the play of light across her walls remained the same.
Half a day later her father arrived and unloaded the rental. He said she could stay as long as she liked. She called her landlord in Charlottesville and gave up her apartment there. She didn’t want to go back to the way things had been.
Down the hall she found her father in her mother’s old den. He sat on the floor with a cloth in one hand and one of Lynnie’s tiny objects in the other.
“I always do this when I come home after being away,” he explained. “There’s another cloth in that top drawer if you want to help.”
He had never shared this with her before. He’d always closed the door. As a girl, she’d had no idea what he did in there, alone, on his returns from trips. She had assumed it was private, something related to his job.
Together they wiped away the dust accumulated since the journey west. He told where he’d gotten some of the miniatures, which ones had been her mother’s favorites. That the one Wendell had loved most as a child was the little silver soldier.
She held it in her hand, cool metal that warmed as she squeezed it tightly in her palm.
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br /> Her father’s favorite was the piece of polished amethyst he’d gotten right there in Virginia, at a roadside gemstone mining stand. She knew that amethyst was a healing stone, and a symbol for mystical pursuits. She supposed that was perfect for him.
Her new favorite was a little statue of a woman sitting, body twisted as she reached for the sky, her head turned upward.
She was still and rooted to the earth. But one arm rose. She reveled. She transcended.
Aunt Jessie stood on her front porch, arms crossed tight while she tried not to cry. “Wendell, thank god you’re home.” Jess skipped down the steps to wrap her arms around Wendell, still smelling of lavender, still soft and warm and full of love.
Most of her life she had taken Aunt Jessie for granted. She missed her mother. She ached from the hole she left. What she had never really done was take the time to appreciate what she had. Aunt Jessie had devoted her life to Wendell. Who had never once said thank you.
“Aunt Jessie.” Wendell’s voice broke. It was not hard to say the words. “Thank you for being so good to me. Thank you for loving me so much.”
She cried in Wendell’s hair. “Let’s have tea and dark chocolate. I’ll get the boxes.”
Wendell followed her inside and watched while she started the tea. She held up the box of China Oolong and Wendell shook her head no. “Let’s do red zinger today.” They broke the chocolate into squares.
When Aunt Jessie headed to the hallway, she stopped her. “Wait, Aunt Jessie. Can you show me your box?”
She was surprised, then she smiled. Wiped at the corner of her eye. “I do have one,” she said, and grinned. “I did have a life, you know.”
They stretched across Jessie’s bed, photos strewn between. They didn’t do the tea and chocolate ceremony quite the same way as usual. They gulped the tea and gobbled the squares, giggled over baby pictures of Wendell in the kitchen sink with her hair pointed up with soap. Belted out hard laughter over old love notes Aunt Jessie had saved from high school.
The Meaning of Isolated Objects Page 22
