by Ruth Wind
"A tea for heartache? Really?"
"And one for love, and one to ward off the evil eye." He chuckled, clicking his boots on the tile. "I decided not to sell those. Love potions could be dangerous."
"Love tea is a great idea, Eli!"
"No. She told me she would not make those for people if she could not see into their hearts to see their real trouble. She would only make the tonics."
A pair of sunburned tourists in shorts and fishing hats posed in front of the well to have their picture taken, and Sarah watched them idly. "I was so excited the first time I saw your teas, Eli." She smiled at him. "They were in a grocer's in Manhattan. A sort of arty little place, with all natural foods and that kind of thing." She remembered standing in the narrow little aisles, hearing the rain outside. "There it was – Summer Tonic, by Santiago Teas."
"Did you know it was our tea?"
"Not that minute, but once I picked up the box and saw they were made in Taos, I did."
He leaned on the wall. "Wow, I really never imagined seeing them in New York."
His pleasure was so deep it made Sarah laugh. "Did you think you ship them out around the country so people can put them in storage, or what?"
"No." He inclined his head, grinning at her. "It's just amazing, that's all. To think something we make here is sitting on a shelf in somebody's house in a city I might not ever see."
"I guess it is amazing when you put it like that. I started seeing them all over after that. They're very popular in some places."
"That's good."
"Will you ever go public with the stock?"
His dark eyes glittered. "You making an offer?"
"I am."
"We'll see." He lifted his chin toward Teresa. "She's back for more. What did you shoot, hija?"
"Oh … all kinds of things," she said.
Sarah wondered what mischief she'd find on the film when she developed it. There was no mistaking that expression. She would find out soon enough, she supposed. "Let's get a few shots of you here, shall we?"
"Then we can have our picnic," Eli said.
"Good plan."
* * *
Chapter 8
«^»
After they left the Hacienda, Eli drove without thinking to a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande gorge and the tiny silver ribbon of river below. A gnarled stand of cotton-woods cast dappled shade over the ground. He was out of the truck and reaching for the picnic basket before he realized his mistake.
Sarah stepped out of the truck, smoothing her skirt, and stood right where she was, staring at the landscape. After a moment she looked at Eli with an oddly stricken expression. "Why here?"
He ducked her gaze. "I come here often," he said. "I forgot—"
"You forgot, Eli?"
It wounded her, and with regret Eli reached for her, feeling her arm slip from his fingers as she stepped away.
"It doesn't matter," she said. Stiffly she moved through long grass that had found life in the shade of the trees. Her camera swung from her hand.
He left the basket and ran after her, catching her shoulder to halt her retreat. "Sarah, that isn't what I meant. I had to try to forget. I kept coming here, so I would have other memories, besides…" Besides the two of them, entwined in a wild rush of passion. There was no need to say it aloud. "You have not had that luxury, to put other things in place of what … where…" He stopped. "I'm sorry. I did not mean to hurt you."
She stared off to the ragged break in the land, sudden and deep, that was the gorge. "I know," she said, and for one tiny breath of time, put her hand over his and raised her eyes. "I know."
They were so close. Her chin was uptilted, her hand trusting over his – it would have been the right thing to bend just a little, and kiss her. He hesitated a moment too long, however, and she moved away. Returning to the truck, he got the basket and Teresa fetched the blanket for them to sit on.
Eli had brought sandwiches – turkey and chicken – a bowl of black olives, oranges and pears, and a large chunk of sharp cheddar cheese. There were bottles of exotic juice to wash it down with, guava pear, raspberry-strawberry, others.
"You should have brought lemon tea," Sarah said, teasing him. "Santiago sun tea."
"Teresa is off sugar," he explained. "She picked out the juices."
"Off sugar, huh?" Sarah frowned. "You aren't dieting, are you?"
"No. I just think sugar is bad for your skin." She held up a bottle of juice. "This will make you healthier. That's what my mom says."
"She's right."
The girl could never be still for long. She ate a sandwich and a little cheese, then, taking an apple, asked if she could borrow the camera again. She wandered toward the gorge, stopping now and then to shoot a picture.
"With that camera in her hand, she reminds me of you," Eli said, his eyes on his niece. "Always with that camera, shooting the sky and the ground and everything." He looked at her, smiling gently. "Everything."
She gazed at him oddly, a faraway expression in her eyes.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
She shook her head with a smile, lowering her eyes. "I don't know. Ghosts, I guess."
Ghosts. The ghosts of the pair of them. They had come here often, and made love. He wondered if it was that she remembered, the feeling of their joined flesh, the fury of their youthful passion, the glory of their discovery of one another. His body responded all too willingly, and to distract himself, he picked up an orange. He tore into the thick skin, releasing the fresh, sharp smell. "Did you talk to your parents this morning?"
"No. They weren't home." She gave him a rueful twist of her lips. "Thanks ever so much for reminding me. I had forgotten."
He chuckled. "My apologies." He separated a section of orange and held it out to her. "Do you remember the Spanish?"
"Naranja. One of my favorite words." She took the section from him. "I love the way it feels in my mouth."
With deep shade from the cottonwoods above them, they smiled gently at each other across time, and in the space between breaths, a door that had been closed tight suddenly swung open. Eli found himself staring not only into her eyes but beyond, seeing the whole of her soul, and the past. He felt it, too, as acutely as if he'd been locked in a stuffy room and someone had flung open a window to allow a breeze to waft through.
And in that moment, falling into her eyes, into her soul, Eli reached out and touched her face. It was a hesitant touch, only the tips of his fingers against her cheekbone, then her jaw. A wisp of hair blew against his wrist. He wanted to speak, to somehow express the sense of wonder that filled him, but there were no words to capture it, so he only gazed at her, and at last took his hand away.
But she didn't shy from him this time. Her open gaze stayed on his face. "I loved taking pictures of you," she said softly. "Your face has changed some, but your eyes are exactly the same."
He was aware of his heart thudding harder in his chest, and of the blood moving through him, rushing and hot. But he found he could speak quietly, without revealing himself too much. "Your eyes have changed more than anything else about you."
"Have they?" It seemed to startle her.
"There was always laughter in your eyes then. A secret. Now…" He paused, trying to think of what he meant. "Now there is wariness."
She lifted one shoulder in a jerk that showed it mattered to her. "I was very young then. Life teaches you to be careful."
"Life is not always as hard on people as it has been on you."
A flash of pain crossed her face, and she closed her eyes. "That's not true. There is always something that takes that youthful wonder away." She looked at him. "Something."
"No, Sarah. That isn't true. What if your father had welcomed me? What if we had simply been able to marry and have our child? If that had happened, there would not be so much sorrow in your eyes now."
"Is this what you wanted to talk about?" she whispered. "That's too much. I don't … I'm not sure I can talk about all of that, Eli.
"
"One part of it, then." Impulsively he reached for her hand, taking it into his own and looking at the slim length of her fingers lying against his palm. "It was cruel to make you give her away, Sarah."
She bowed her head, and her hair fell forward in a curtain to hide her face. "It was me who did it."
He shook his head, but she couldn't see him, so he reached out with one hand and pushed her hair from her face, cupping his palm around her jaw. There was a surprising fragility to the bones. "You were betrayed. By all of us."
The gray eyes turned cold. "Which does not excuse my own betrayal." With an abrupt move, she pulled free of him and stood, brushing at her skirt. She strode toward Teresa, and Eli could not help watching her, his heart thudding with regret.
As he drank in the way the sunlight glazed her arm, kissed the crown of her pale hair and illuminated the shapes of breast and hip and legs, he knew he was doomed. He wanted her. Maybe he loved her still.
But until now, he had not seen how deep her pain went behind those rigid walls that kept him out. Kept the world out. And he feared if he tried to breach them in order to free her, the resulting emotions might destroy her.
* * *
Eli dropped Sarah – firmly hidden behind her walls of careful politeness – at her cottage, and took Teresa home, mentally bracing himself for the confrontations he knew were brewing. The entire family had probably seen the newspaper photo by now.
His sister's car was in the driveway, and, coward that he was, he didn't stop the engine. Teresa looked at him curiously. "Aren't you coming in?"
"Not today," he said.
"Is there something going on? You've been kinda weird all day."
"I'm sure you'll hear about it soon enough." The front door swung open, and Eli swore as his sister came out of the house, as small and fierce as a crow. "Probably three seconds."
Cynthia came directly to his window and crossed her arms. "Elias, how could you?"
"How could I what?" he snapped. "Dance with an old girlfriend in a public restaurant?"
"Not just any old girlfriend, and you know it. I've been fielding calls from your brothers all day. They're ready to get a posse together and string you up by your boots, and here I am, aiding and abetting you by letting you take Teresa up there to get her pictures done." She narrowed her eyes. "If that's even what's happening."
He waited until she wore her tape down, and said mildly, "It isn't my fault some photographer thought that would be a grabber."
"Mom, you aren't going to make me stop now, are you?"
"I don't know yet." She glared at her brother again. "You could have been more careful."
"Mom," Teresa said, "you can't—"
"Go inside, Teresa. This is none of your business."
"It is, too, my business. It is if this stupid old war ends up making me give up my portfolio."
Eli touched her hand and lifted his chin toward the house. "Let me talk to your mom alone."
With a last, worried glance at her mother, she obeyed, and Eli waited until she was out of sight. "Don't punish her when you're angry with me."
She took a deep breath and put her hands on the side of the truck, imploring. "Eli, don't you remember how awful it was? All that fighting over it, and the punishments and the craziness? This family doesn't need to go through that again. We've barely healed all the wounds from the first round."
The brutality of his anger, sudden and hot, was blinding. "It has nothing to do with the family! Only me. My life."
"And your life has no bearing on ours? That might work somewhere else, but it doesn't work here. Family is life, Elias, and you know it."
He clenched his jaw and looked away from her. "I've worked hard for this family."
"Oh, Eli, I know." She reached through the window and put her hand on his arm. "But you can't do this. Not for us, but for you."
"I'm not doing anything," he said, and both of them knew be lied.
She slammed her hand on the door. "Damn it, Eli, at least be honest with me."
Mute, he met her eyes. "I have to go, Cynthia." He put the truck in gear. "Thank you for your understanding."
As he drove out to the ranch, the argument lay like a rock in his gut, and he wondered if it might be easier to duck everyone, go spend the night in a hotel somewhere. But there was work that had to be done – he had calls and orders to make, and reviews on the quarterly earnings, and he had worked too hard for too long to slack off now.
The ranch was long and narrow, shaped like Italy, only it ran uphill. His mother's renovated house sat just inside the gate that marked the property line. Beyond it were the fields of herbs, dissected neatly by a road that led to the production plant. In the distance sat his grandmother's two-hundred-year-old house, the base covered with a blur of red blossoms.
Eli drove to the plant, waving to the field supervisor as he passed, and parked in his spot among the other cars and trucks in the parking lot. As he got out, he smelled freshly mown peppermint, and beneath that, the faintly cloying odor of ragweed, blowing in from the east.
His brother Miguel was busy with a machine as Eli came in, but Eli would have had to be blind to miss the daggers Miguel shot in his direction. He ignored them and went to his office without incident, taking mail from the basket where his secretary had left it. She left early on Thursdays, to volunteer in her child's third-grade class, and Eli found her notes, along with an agenda for the afternoon and next day, on his blotter. A lot of phone calls, he saw.
He closed the door, hoping it might be a deterrent. For a little while it worked. But first Miguel, and then on his heels his mother, showed up to express almost exactly the same sentiments his sister had. With his brother, he was dismissive.
His mother deserved more. "Sit down," he said, when she showed up.
A small woman with a trim figure and black hair only now showing streaks of silver, she said in Spanish, "I don't want to sit down." She always spoke Spanish, even though she was utterly fluent in English. She simply felt Spanish the superior language. Her children, and more often her grandchildren, spoke back to her in English, but it never dented her resolve. "I want you to tell me what you're doing with that girl."
Eli wanted to placate her, and spoke back in her favored language. "Mama, it wasn't what it looked like in the paper. I saw her at La Paloma and danced with her, that's all."
"How can you want to dance with her after all the sorrow she caused you?"
Her aim was true and deep. He simply had no answer, not one that would make sense. For the truth was, Sarah had been a source of misery and sorrow in his life. But she'd also been the source of his greatest joy, a fact his mother would not understand. "I don't know," he said quietly.
Her shoulders sagged. "Ah, Elias, she'll tear you up. I can't stand to watch it happen again." She pressed a fist against her chest. "Not a day goes by that I don't think of that baby."
He pressed his mouth together, thinking of the vast sorrow he'd glimpsed in Sarah's eyes this afternoon. "It's the same for Sarah. How much worse for the mother than the grandmother, eh?"
"If you start with her again, Elias, you'll be dead to me. I mean it."
"Don't you dare threaten me," Eli said in a low, hard voice. His anger rose, and as if buoyed on it, he stood up. "I am no boy to be ordered around at your whim, Mama. I am a man, and will choose my own life."
"You are a selfish man," she said. "Don't care about anybody but you. We tried to warn you back then, but you wouldn't listen, would you? And here you are again, after everything I said came true, going to do it all again."
"Stop it," he said through gritted teeth. "This has to end, or it will just keep happening over and over and over. You have to forgive her. I have to forgive her. There has to be peace, or this curse will ruin anything we ever try to build."
She lifted her chin and glared at him. "I'm so glad your father is dead, so he doesn't have to see this." Haughtily, she turned on her tiny heel and left him.
Eli
let go of a breath and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. At least that part was over with.
* * *
Sarah found a message from her mother taped to her door when she got home. "Gone to the mountains," it said. "A day or two and this will blow over."
In spite of herself, Sarah grinned. It was one of her mother's classic moves – find a way to get around the problem first, then, and only then, deal with it. But in this instance it was probably exactly the right call. Her father loved to fish, and they had a cabin on a small lake not far away. A day or two of fishing would blunt his fury, and maybe even let it all blow over.
At the very least, it delayed the argument, gave Sarah some time to think of how she would respond if her father came unglued. She'd worked hard to smooth their relationship, and hated to think of all that hard work coming undone over a silly photograph.
But it had become more than just a photograph, hadn't it?
A thunderstorm was moving in over the southwestern mountains, and the air temperature dropped along with it. Sarah changed into a pair of jeans and a shirt, and washed some greens for her supper, trying to distance herself from that thought.
But it haunted her. Her dream hung in her mind, casting a sensual haze over her whenever she thought of it. And today, when he touched her, when they talked, she had seen they were not aloof from each other. The embers of their old relationship were starting to crackle.
She took her plate to the couch by the south windows so she could watch the storm come in as she ate. It was beautiful and dramatic, moving in fast with dark gray clouds and flashes of lightning, and at last the rain itself, pouring hard from a slate-dark sky that covered all hints of day. Sarah curled up in the chair and watched it falll, a glass of wine keeping her company.
