Finding Casey

by Jo-Ann Mapson

“I already ate today,” I said, remembering the doughnuts. Also, it wasn’t even three thirty, which meant I had to wait until the cafeteria closed at four.

  “You need to keep your strength up so you don’t end up in the bed next to Aspen,” Susie said.

  That was another saying, because there wasn’t any bed next to Aspen’s. If there had been, I would have lain down in it and watched her forever. I always remembered to smile at Susie. “Thank you, Susie,” I said.

  “You’re welcome. Don’t you look nice today?” she said, as she gathered up her supplies and left. “That shirt is a good color for you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. When she left the room I looked at myself in the mirror in the bathroom I wasn’t allowed to use. Blue plaid, soft cotton, size small, brand of Levi’s. Yes, the shirt was pretty.

  Not me.

  ___________

  All day my thoughts were hiking up and down so many ideas. Is, as, said, sad, die. I couldn’t shut them off. If I started to fall asleep, I’d startle myself awake from some strange kind of dream place, where dolphins leapt and people with no faces were laughing. When I tried to put the pictures together in my mind, I got angry that I couldn’t. Anger scared me so bad, because what good ever came of anger? None. Only rage and age and nag inside that word. I remembered those times Abel got so mad at me costing money or me crying because I was lonely. Early on when we were in the California forest, I wasn’t as good at shutting up as I am now. It took me a while to learn how to stop thinking, to go into a quiet place in my mind and stay there until things were safe again. But in the hospital, there was no one to be quiet for and my mind kind of went wherever it wanted.

  Years ago, I’d hear Abel yelling at Seth about the Outside World, or how he’d gotten ripped off by someone he sold drugs to. He’d stomp around our camp, throw things, break things, make this roaring sound that meant he was so mad that he had to take it out on something or someone and eventually that someone was me. He’d slap me until I was curled up into a ball with my hands over my face, and then he’d pull me to my feet and throw me against the shack wall or onto the shack floor. Hands around my neck, squeezing. Knees on my legs, opening. Afterwards, when he was calm, almost sleepy, I’d whisper, “May I go home now?”

  He’d laugh the same way Seth does now. He’d say, “I’m going to explain this to you one more time, so you had better listen. By staying with me you keep me from hurting other girls. That’s your purpose on Earth. God chose you for me. God put you in my path. God wants you to stay.”

  I’d cry and sleep. Cry and sleep. Pretty soon I just stopped asking. When I stopped asking, I thought he would be nicer to me. But that didn’t happen until I was pregnant, and even then I knew if he wasn’t hurting me, he was Outside of camp, finding another girl to hurt until I wasn’t pregnant anymore.

  Every day that Seth didn’t come to the hospital I felt better in one way and worse in another. What if Aspen died? Where would I go after they took her body away? What purpose did I have if I wasn’t a mother? Should I ask Seth if he would give me another baby? No, that wouldn’t help, because the baby would be someone else, not Aspen. I told her new parts of the Princess of Leaves story because I had so much time to think and I hated thinking. The day she was born, when I had to push her out and cut the cord myself, that was when the story began. That was the day I knew that the reason people told stories was because stories made things standable, or whatever the right word was; Mrs. Clemmons would know. The princess was lost and hurting, but eventually, if I told the whole story, she would find her way back.

  “Wake up, Aspen,” I whispered to my little girl. “Without you, there isn’t any reason for the princess to try.”

  The doctors knew a lot, and I tried to believe they could make her better, but what if they didn’t know everything? They said Aspen couldn’t hear a word I said, she was in a coma. Maybe she would hear me deep in her sleeping and when she woke up, she’d tell me, so I went on with the story. Not too long after, I noticed Mrs. Clemmons standing in the doorway, listening. We didn’t look at each other, but I knew she was there.

  Days after the monster had knocked out the good soldier and taken the princess, the monster did a terrible thing. He took out his weapon and stole the princess’s voice so she couldn’t call for help. He didn’t care about her singing voice, not one bit, and the cut he made stole her voice. Then he took her to his horse and put her across the horse’s back as if she was a saddle blanket. He made her drink another bitter cup of tea, which she knew now was a sleeping potion, and when the princess woke up, she was in a forest of the tallest trees she’d ever seen. The trees were a beautiful red color, and so tall she couldn’t see the tops of them. Instead of leaves they had needles and lace, a whole new kind of pretty to look at, but so different from trees with leaves she didn’t like them at first. This was the monster’s lair. One day the princess woke to see that the monster was no longer alone. He had a twin brother. They were building a castle to keep her in. “Where are the turrets and windows?” the princess asked in what was left of her voice, which was low and raspy, like when the wind pushes a tree branch against a window, skree, skree, a terrible, scraping sound. Inside scraping is crap and pain and raping, so that makes sense.

  “Keep your mouth shut,” the monster who had taken her said, but the princess couldn’t have said anything more if she tried. The cut on her neck was long and ragged, not deep enough to kill her, but deep enough to take away her songs forever. She had to hold her skin together, because when she tried to speak, it started bleeding again. Already she understood her singing was in his knife. She knew she had to get it back, but how? Two monsters against one princess is not an easy fight. She told herself, a princess without a voice isn’t the worst thing. You must concentrate on staying in the world, so you can find your way back to the king and queen, to let them know you’re all right and that you love them. But the princess knew if she were to ever get to that day, there were going to be many tasks she had to complete, none of them easy. That day, if it was coming, was a long, long way off. So she shut her eyes and she tried to sleep, and when the monsters came and woke her, she pretended she was sitting by the fire in her castle room. The first monster liked to tie her up and do terrible things to her, things she didn’t even know could be done to a person. After a couple of days of that, the monster’s brother went away, and when he came back, he had a potion that he used to glue her skin back together. He wrapped the cut with white fabric spun from a thousand silkworms, and he told her not to speak, and she obeyed, not in her heart, not really, but in her deeds. That’s because sometimes you have to pledge yourself to a bad king in order to save the good one.

  “Laurel,” Mrs. Clemmons said. “The doctors tell me that Aspen’s spiked a fever. They want to switch her antibiotic. Is that all right with you?”

  I looked at her and said, “There was nothing the king and queen wouldn’t give for their daughter to be safely returned to them. They would live like paupers to have their daughter safe at home where she belonged. Their hearts would be broken.”

  Mrs. Clemmons nodded.

  “The question Aspen always asks at this point is, ‘But a heart can’t break, can it, Mommy?’ “

  “What do you tell her?” Mrs. Clemmons asked.

  “I tell her the truth. Everyone has a broken heart at one time or another. You know why? Because without the cracks, how else can love find its way in? I’m sorry, but it’s better to know the truth. When a heart breaks, it does hurt. Not the way a bone does when it needs a cast. Mostly it aches. When something aches all the time, it can grow so sore that it feels as if the parts that make everything work have come apart. That’s what happens. That’s what my heart will do if Aspen leaves me. She has to get well. I don’t care what medicine the doctors give her. Just make her wake up.”

  “I’ll tell them,” Mrs. Clemmons said.

  As he hobbled his way toward the castle, the guard went over what he might say when he returned without
the princess. He knew he had to make up a story or be hanged. As he limped back to the castle, these are a few of the stories he concocted:

  The princess demanded to go into the forest to collect acorns from the tallest tree with branches stretching out over the cliff-side. I held her by the shoulders to keep her safe. I kept my weapon nearby, but the princess spied the river flowing down the ravine, and once she saw the silvery water, she demanded to climb down to it and gather the leaves floating on the surface. I told her just as you instructed me to do, “One day we’ll go, but today is not that day,” but she leaped into the water and the current carried her away. Look at me, my clothing wet, my face scratched, I have a broken leg and my ankle cannot support me. Though I cannot swim, I waded into the water and searched, but found no sight of her. I accept whatever punishment you deem appropriate.

  Or perhaps this story: Sire, I regret to tell you that a man I’ve not seen before stole your daughter. He took my weapon, my chain mail, and beat me until I was down. Then he took the princess. But do not fear, for it was a case of love at first sight. Once the stranger heard her singing, he became a man possessed. He swept her up onto the back of the blackest horse I’ve ever seen. He spurred his horse and away they galloped, his silver horseshoes sparking, in the direction of the darkest forest. I’m certain he was a prince.

  ___________

  Mrs. Clemmons brought me another dinner. Pizza, salad in a Styrofoam container (ruining the earth, not biodegradable), and two bottles of orange juice that tasted too sweet so I didn’t drink them.

  “Would it be all right if I ate my dinner with you?” she asked before she took out her containers (look for the number 1 on the bottom, that means recyclable) or even sat down.

  I could have said a lot of things, such as “Be my guest” or “It’s a free country” or “Your guess is as good as mine,” but I said, “All right.” I liked her sitting there beside me, eating.

  I can’t be mean to someone who brings me food when I’m hungry. That’s what Seth did a lot of the time. He didn’t make me have the kind of sex Abel did, all pushing and shoving and slapping if I cried, or cuts and hands tied or hands around the neck, squeezing. Seth used to comfort me after Abel was mean. He brought me water and he carried away the bucket I had to use because there was no bathroom. But it turned out he still wanted the same thing Abel did, only in a way where I didn’t cry or fight. All I had to do was lie there, he said. Afterwards, when it was finally over, he would say, “There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “Laurel, are you crying because you’re worried about Aspen’s fever?” Mrs. Clemmons asked me. “The doctors are on top of this. The new drugs will help.”

  If I looked at her I would make the sound, I just knew it. “That’s part of why,” I said. “Sometimes the story is sad and it makes it hard to tell.”

  “Isn’t that true of most things in life?” she said. “If you leave out the sad parts, then the happy parts aren’t quite as happy, are they?”

  “I guess not.”

  “You know, sometimes I think a person just has to have a good cry. And sometimes they just need to vent. Do you know what I mean by that?”

  “Like a volcano has to steam or else it blows everything up?”

  “Exactly. You’re so insightful, Laurel. If you would ever like to vent, I’ll be happy to listen and keep whatever you say between us. Otherwise, I won’t press. Your life is your own, Laurel. You get to make the choices.”

  I looked at her then. Was she making fun of me? The room was dim because all along it had been getting dark, and I couldn’t see Mrs. Clemmons’s face, just the outline of it, with her short hair and her big body and the pearls shining at her neck where I had a red scar. By the light of Aspen’s machines and monitors, Mrs. Clemmons reminded me of this picture Frances had shown to me a long time ago, in one of her books about Gods and Goddesses. She said it was the oldest stone carving of a woman ever, as old as woolly mammoths and dinosaurs, which I didn’t believe entirely. I couldn’t remember the name. The Venus of Willingness?

  Something like that.

  Chapter 13

  The subject of Juniper’s eight A.M. class was the last-minute details for the trip to the Pueblos, the capstone of their quarter’s study of pottery. Dr. Carey was in Washington, D.C., for a conference, so they were stuck with his TA, Chico de la Rosas Villarreal. Chico was extra hard on Juniper because he didn’t think she belonged in a 600-level class. He’d said so right to her face. “You should be in high school, not taking up a space that should go to a grad student.” He was such a freak. She was paying her own way. So what if she was younger than everyone else? She passed all the prereqs. She got A grades.

  A year or so back, she’d met Chico for the first time. She went to Dr. Carey’s office hours, eager to show him some blue-and-white pottery sherds. One of Daddy Joe’s cousins was redoing the shower stall in the master bedroom. He had to dig down several feet to put in new plumbing. When his shovel uncovered something white, he stopped and called Daddy Joe to take a look. Juniper followed. She picked carefully through the soil and found nine white pottery sherds with a blue pattern on them. No way they were Indian—they looked like porcelain. Chico looked annoyed when she walked into the office. “Dr. Carey’s not here,” he said. “What do you want?” Then he looked back down at his pile of work papers.

  She’d almost turned and gone, certain that Chico not only wouldn’t be interested, but also that he wouldn’t know the first thing about dating pottery. But he’d made her so mad. “Look,” she said. “I found these in Santa Fe one block from Acequia Madre. It’s probably nothing, but I was hoping Dr. Carey could take a quick look at these, maybe give me a direction so I could date them.”

  Chico sighed, set his papers down, and held out his hand. She carefully transferred the sherds, making certain not to touch Chico and catch his cooties. He pushed his glasses up his forehead and stared at the pieces, his brow furrowing. Then he set them down carefully and began pulling books from Dr. Carey’s shelf. An hour went by, their heads together, flipping pages, consulting the computer, and in the end they had dated the pieces back to the year 1700 C.E. “They’re Asian import, obviously,” Chico said. “They probably belonged to a wealthy family. May I keep them for a few days? I’d love a chance to photograph and catalogue them, but I don’t have a camera with me.”

  Juniper said, “That’s okay. I have my camera with me,” and brought out her old 35mm Pentax.

  It should have been a bonding moment, but after that Chico seemed to avoid her in the lab. When he subbed for Dr. Carey and saw her name on the roll, he seemed to give her a much harder time than anyone else. The sherds had their own shelf in her desk in her room in Santa Fe and were among her most treasured possessions. She’d gotten an A last quarter, and she was currently getting an A. If there had been a higher grade than A, she would have gone after that, too. Maybe Dr. Carey had made an exception allowing her to take the upper-division course, but she deserved to be there, and that was what mattered in the end. Didn’t she always make sure she was in her seat fifteen minutes early? Didn’t she know the material frontwards and backwards? Whenever Chico asked a question, wasn’t hers the first hand up?

  “Where’s Anna?” Chico asked as he took roll and students began pairing up. Anna Decker was forty, a mother of two kids, back in school to finish her degree, and she was Juniper’s lab partner. They made a kind of odd couple, but Anna didn’t make a big deal of Juniper’s being the same age as Anna’s oldest daughter, and Juniper didn’t say anything about Anna being old enough to be her mother.

  “I have no idea,” Juniper said. Most likely Anna was sleeping in, or one of her kids was sick. It was freezing cold out and Juniper wished she were in her own bed at home in Santa Fe, with Cadillac keeping her feet warm and a fire in the kiva.

  After finishing roll, Chico said once he’d checked everyone’s reports they were free to head on out to the assigned Pueblos. Juniper opened her project folder for him
to check and waited. She took out her cell phone and checked her text messages. Nine from Topher. She sighed. Her going to the Pueblo for three days and two nights did not sit well with him. I’m playing a gig at the college pub, and everyone knows that a real girlfriend always shows up to support the band.

  She’d tried to explain to him. This field trip counts for half my grade. I knew it was coming up long before you got your gig.

  Apparently he was pouting because the text messages were stacked up and whiny: You better come home tonight! Drive back! She didn’t want to read any more texts for fear that he was breaking up with her. She shut her phone and set it on her desk.

  Juniper and Anna had been assigned the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo the first week of the quarter. Until 2005, when the tribe took back their original name, it had been called the San Juan. She remembered when Governor Richardson had announced the name change and ordered it to be put into use immediately, and Daddy Joe had said, Wow, that’s going to keep some sign maker busy. All Juniper could think was that anthro texts would have to update their editions, and then they’d cost even more than they already did, which was a fortune. She spent far too much time already trying to find used textbooks online so her parents wouldn’t go broke.

  Juniper was bummed that the pottery she and Anna would be studying was so plain. She wished she’d gotten the Hopi or San Ildefonso, but then so did everyone else in the class. Dr. Carey always said, If you do your research, there’s something astonishing to discover in the plainest pot. Juniper put on a brave face, figuring she’d never get anywhere without paying her dues.

  Instead of the usual conversations and kidding around, today there were only murmurs in the anthro lab. Everyone took this assignment seriously because it was the culmination of the entire quarter’s work, and prep for next quarter’s seminar. Chico made his way around the room like the stork he was, and Juniper studied him as clinically as an artifact. He had this dorky way of walking, and even skinny-leg jeans were baggy on him. Topher was rock-star thin, but Chico looked like he was starving. He wore hiking boots that made his feet look huge, but to be fair, they were Danner Mountain Lights, awesome boots, much superior to her Big Five clearance specials. And he always showed up in a herringbone-tweed sport jacket so unfortunately ill-fitting that she couldn’t believe anyone could look in the mirror and not see how ridiculous it looked. The sleeves were too short, but he did fold them back. It was a sort of umber color that reminded her of picking up after the dogs. All he needed was a safari hat and people would start calling him Dr. Livingston.