Finding Casey

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  She nodded. Fifteen texts this morning alone.

  Why weren’t you at my gig?

  I thought you were going to help me proof my essay?

  Where were you last night?

  “At some point you’re going to have to respond,” Chico said. He was dressed in a red-and-black buffalo-check wool shirt over a crisp white T-shirt, and one of those Elmer Fudd caps with ear flaps, and thank goodness, because they were so near the door that every time someone opened it to go in or out, it felt like a blast from the Arctic.

  “I’m deciding what to say,” Juniper said.

  “I bet I can help you with that.”

  She handed him the phone. “Go for it.”

  Chico turned it sideways and started typing. Juniper thought, Look at us, we’re not even thirty years old, but we’re all heading toward trigger-joint surgery. I should become an orthopedic surgeon. Too bad I hate blood. After a minute, he handed it back to her without having pressed SEND.

  She read what he’d written and smiled. Then, looking up at him, making and without breaking eye contact, she pressed SEND. She turned the phone off and put it in her purse.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” he said.

  “Why not? You pretty much said everything I was trying to say.”

  “Do you want to go have lunch?” he asked. “My treat.”

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  “What about a refill on your coffee?”

  She held up her hands, which were trembling. “I’m already flying on the caffeine express,” she said. “Tell me what Louella said.”

  “Remember her saying one of her grandmothers worked for a white lady on Colibri Road?”

  “Did she find any photos?”

  He shook his head no. “Isn’t it enough to discover that you guys are connected in another way besides Casey?”

  Juniper sipped her latte. “I guess I’m addicted to sherds and bones, stuff I can hold in my hands. Was that it?”

  “She said the lady she worked for took care of injured hummingbirds. Her garden was full of them.”

  “We get a lot in the summertime,” Juniper said.

  “I thought we might go to the Palace of the Governors’s archives,” Chico said.

  “Why would we do that?”

  “Because if there are any photos or stories, that would be where to start looking for them.”

  “Right now?”

  “Why not?”

  “Is this a date, or an anthropology thing?”

  “Would that make a difference?”

  She set her coffee down. “Let’s go before you change your mind.”

  “Don’t forget your scarf.”

  They stepped over the guitar player and his dog sitting outside Starbucks, and walked down San Francisco Street, passing holiday shoppers, women wearing Indian-blanket coats in patterns as old as time, couples headed for lunch at La Fonda. Even on the coldest day of the year Indians sat in the eaves of the Palace of the Governors, jewelry laid out to sell. One vendor had a cache of antique postcards, and they stopped to look at them. “That’s Acequia Madre,” Chico said. “Colibri Road is less than a block away. This photo probably dates to 1900, 1910.”

  “If only there was a postcard of our street back then,” Juniper said. “Wouldn’t that make the perfect Christmas present for my mom and dad?” She held up another card. “Look at that poor burro. He’s got to be carrying an entire bale of hay.”

  “Or you could think of it this way, he’s packed his own lunch.”

  She laughed and bought all ten postcards, thinking someday Aspen might like to see what old-time Santa Fe looked like. They walked down the sidewalk to the side entrance of the museum gift shop.

  “They have the most popular photos for sale in the gift shop,” Chico said. “You can order anything from the digital archives.”

  The computer in the gift shop provided instant access. While they browsed, the clerk chatted on the phone with some book vendor.

  “No Colibri Road anywhere,” Juniper said, after trying all kinds of search options and coming up with the same result: Your search has produced 0 records.

  “Why does it have to be that exact road?” Chico said.

  “Duh. Because we live there?”

  “Think about it,” Chico said. “That’s like saying only the turquoise mined in the state is worth making into jewelry. It all comes from the same earth. Try Acequia Madre, Canyon Road, and the Plaza.”

  In a sepia-toned photo entitled “Acequia Madre near Manhattan Street,” they studied a mill built of adobe bricks and stone. In another photo, dated 1910, a little girl with a bowl haircut stood in the road next to a dog that reminded Juniper of Curly, Casey’s dog. That photo lifted Juniper’s heart and at the same time broke it, because while it was a cliché that pictures could be worth a thousand words, it meant nothing if you didn’t speak the same language. They tried to puzzle out a surviving page of a newspaper handwritten in a spidery, thin script.

  “The handwriting is gorgeous,” Juniper said, “but I can’t read a word of it.”

  “There’s actually a computer program that deciphers cursive,” Chico said.

  “You’re such a geek.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  Juniper smiled. Chico leaned in so close to her that she could smell the soap he’d used to wash his face. They scrolled though photos of a fire at the men’s club just off the Plaza, the smoke clouds reminding her of Casey’s pot, the object that had taken Juniper from pride to anger to an unthinkable reunion. There was an article on a flood that had been traced back to the 1600s, decipherable by the absence of trash in a layer of strata, and there were so many portraits of white men with mustaches that a stranger might think there were no other ethnicities in early Santa Fe. “Rich men, outlaws, and criminals,” Juniper said. “Where are the ordinary people?”

  “They’re the ones behind the camera,” Chico said.

  Juniper looked through every photo in the store, finally settling on the Acequia Madre photo of the girl and the dog. “If only this dog was a hummingbird,” she said. “Then it would be a great Christmas present.”

  Chico opened the door for her. “This date isn’t over yet. Follow me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the Frank Howell gallery. We’re going to find you a hummingbird.”

  A few minutes later they stood in front of a print of Frank Howell’s painting Reunion. A woman was front and center, the subject of the painting. Her eyes were closed, her arms lifted, palms facing upward. She wore some kind of deer-hide garment, and her long hair was streaked with silver, like a grandmother’s. Surrounding her were twenty hummingbirds in flight. “Oh, my gosh, Chico,” Juniper said. “How did you ever find this?”

  “School,” Chico said. “In Howell’s biography, he said, ‘The painting is a wonderful kind of inner mirror, and reflects the inner you, not your external appearance.’ “

  “I’m impressed. How do you know so much about art?”

  He shrugged. “A long time ago, I wanted to be a painter. I was never much good at it, but occasionally I dabble.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Juniper said. “Can I see your paintings?”

  “Let me think about it,” he said, and Juniper felt the distance between them return to TA and student.

  She looked at the price tag. “Too bad this print costs more than my car,” she said.

  “This isn’t the only painting he did with hummingbirds,” Chico said. “Excuse me, where are your posters?” he asked the clerk. The man pointed toward a bin near the window. Chico began paging through them.

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you,” Juniper said.

  Chico didn’t look up. “Is this about your grade again?”

  “It’s not about school. There’s something I want to tell you, but I’m nervous.”

  He pulled three posters out and leaned them against the wall. “None of these is over forty bucks. My
personal favorite is White Hummingbird, but Two Sisters might be the most appropriate choice.”

  “You’re such a damn stork,” she said.

  “A stork? What did I do now?”

  “Maybe you should be asking yourself what you didn’t do. Did you even hear what I said?”

  He looked at his watch. “I should get going before it gets dark,” he said. “One of my headlights is out.”

  “Yeah, no kidding.”

  He looked back at her. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Haven’t you ever had a girlfriend?”

  “Not since grade school. Harriet Wilkinson. I gave her my St. Christopher medal and she threw it in the dirt. I’ve kind of given girls a wide berth since then.”

  “That’s a good reason to retreat from the female gender.”

  “It made sense to me.”

  She reached out her hand and took his. “What a load of bullshit. You’ve liked me since the day I brought those pottery sherds into Dr. Carey’s office.”

  “I won’t deny it.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “For a brilliant student of anthropology, you are a very slow girl,” he said, and smiled at her. In fact, he couldn’t seem to stop smiling. He squeezed her hand, got brave enough that he put his arm around her, and kissed her forehead. In the background, they heard the clerk clear his throat and they broke apart. Juniper could feel the ghost of his lips against her cold face.

  “So we’re buying the albino hummingbird and the Two Sisters,” he said to the clerk. “Can you put on a ribbon or gift wrap?”

  “Happy to,” the man said, and wrapped each print in butcher paper, applying a purple stick-on bow. “Thanks for shopping local, and happy holidays. After the first of the year we’ll be relocating to Canyon Road.”

  “Thanks,” Juniper said.

  Posters in hand, they walked out onto the sidewalk, into the street, at the corner of Washington and Palace of the Governors, chained off from through traffic. They stepped carefully around icy patches, passing shoppers toting bags and gifts. A snowflake or two whirred through the air. A hotel van pulled to the curb of the Inn of the Anasazi, unloading passengers, and that was when Chico finally got up the nerve to kiss her. Topher had been an accomplished kisser with all the right moves, easy for her to follow. Chico was learning as he went along, and Juniper knew that what she would remember about this moment was that. Chico being so tall she had to stand on her tiptoes, and still he had to duck his head to reach her. It occurred to her that the more they kissed, the better he was doing. When they broke apart, they looked at each other and neither said a word. They began walking toward his car as if it had been the plan all along. Juniper tried to memorize every detail so she could relive the moment later: the sidewalk cold under their feet, the store windows lit up and decorated for Christmas, how the snow appeared blue in the shadows. The wind chapped her face and she didn’t care how red her cheeks were, or that she wasn’t wearing makeup, or had coffee breath, or any of those things. Chico’s walk relaxed, in tune with her step for step, and she thought, I could spend the rest of my life with this guy. Out of all the people on the planet, how is it possible we found each other?

  A crowded house on Christmas Eve was nothing out of the ordinary to Glory. In California, there were always foster sons passing through, or Lorna and Juan’s Christmas party, and if it wasn’t that, she was preparing for an upcoming wedding, or taking care of a lame horse, or worrying how she was going to pay the mortgage. Since moving to New Mexico, there had been none of that, but this Christmas her house was filled up in a different way. Halle was in the kitchen making peppermint-candy cupcakes. Casey and Aspen sat by the Christmas tree, their first one ever. Whenever Aspen reached for a bulb, Casey gently took hold of her hand. “No, that’s where the ornaments live,” she explained, and by the time she finished the sentence, Aspen was already on to the next new adventure. Glory wondered what next Christmas would be like, when her own little girl was here. Poor Joseph, surrounded by women, except for the dogs.

  Curly was trying to win Eddie over, but Eddie remained unconvinced. No dog has ever worked so hard to fit in, she thought, while Eddie “tested” Curly by stealing all the dog toys and sitting on them. Curly wagged her tail, ever hopeful. Caddy lay by the fire, near enough for Casey to reach out and touch him. Glory wondered, did he remember the day Casey disappeared? Was it Casey’s DNA that informed him that this was Juniper’s sister? Did the sight of him remind her of the terrible night she was taken?

  Since their arrival a few days ago, Aspen had been exploring the house, opening closets and drawers and emptying them of their contents, whether it was pots and pans or winter coats or file cabinets. Juniper patiently allowed her to dress up in her clothes, then reminded her, “Now, those aren’t your things. You can play with them, but you’ll need to put them back. Here’s your dresser. Most of the drawers are empty, but after Christmas they’ll be filled to the brim with new things that are all yours.”

  Not one word had been uttered about Topher, but there was plenty of talk about Chico. Glory noticed how Juniper jumped every time her cell phone rang. She’d take the calls privately, and after she hung up she walked around the house humming, offering to vacuum or chop firewood. When she asked if Chico could come for Christmas, Joseph said, “Your mom has a full house,” and Glory interrupted to say, “What’s one more person? But he’ll have to sleep on the floor.” Juniper assured her he was the most flexible person ever, and he’d be fine with that, and thanked them so profusely that Glory and Joseph exchanged a knowing glance. The day after Casey was found, Joseph had formally declined the Candela job. He was busy organizing an animal-therapy program, recruiting volunteers to staff it, and arranging training.

  At the center of things, watching her family’s massive life changes, Glory lay waiting and wondering, watching Aspen in particular. There was something about the little girl that seemed odd, and Glory wondered if it had to do with the scarring on her heart. It left her with premature ventricular tachycardia; Glory could always tell when her heartbeat was out of rhythm, because the girl would cough. Not that it seemed to inhibit her activities, far from it. Here she was, one week out of a coma yet running around a strange house, eating everything that was offered to her, and chattering as if she had grown up around these people forever. Glory envied her the ability to move on, and was grateful that the task of mothering kept Casey busy. Nearing seven, Aspen still entertained imaginary friends—perfectly understandable, Ardith Clemmons said, given her seclusion. And oftentimes she sat by herself telling that story Casey had entertained her with over the years. One day the princess stopped sleeping and got up and walked away from the bad man and came to Santa Fe, New Mexico, because the Christmas tree needed her help and so she made cupcakes for it and remembered to feed the birds because it was winter and the flowers were all asleep …

  Every day, Juniper and Aspen filled up the bird feeder and put out fresh water. Aspen stood at the window naming the birds: wren, woodpecker, scrub jay, raven, sparrow, first by their common names, and then in Latin. Joseph had given her a bird book, and now she carried it everywhere she went. “That little girl is very smart,” he said, marveling at how quickly she learned. She seemed particularly enamored with the sparrows, of which there were several varieties she seemed determined to master. “Chipping sparrow, rufous sparrow,” she called out, and every time she spotted one, she ran to Glory and patted her belly. When she laid her little hand on Glory’s stomach, she would say, “Hello, Sparrow,” and then run off to look out the French doors, or to watch the feeder. She had no fear of Glory’s chickens, she was at ease with the dogs—Dodge especially seemed to realize she needed him to be calm—and while that made sense, it still seemed extraordinary for a dog who’d been out of control only a few weeks earlier. The first time the house ghost groaned, Aspen looked up at the ceiling and said, “Shh, Dolores, time to be quiet.”

  Had Juniper told her about the ghost? Gl
ory wondered. Had Joseph? The retablo had been moved to the fireplace mantel, above the Christmas stockings, beeswax candles, and garland of pine. Halle said she hadn’t told her, and how did a person explain a ghost to a child who was just learning about Santa, anyway? Yes, she was odd, but bless her heart, with everything she’d been through, wasn’t that the least of her problems? Glory no longer complained about the drywall dust, what with flour flying through the air and more of the sprinkles going into Aspen’s mouth than on the cookies, but what the dog didn’t lick up the broom would take care of, and Glory found herself missing housework, just a little, something to make her feel a part of the crowd versus lying idle at the center of things.

  Halle surprised Glory. She let the little girl play with her makeup, pester her from breakfast to dinnertime, played Candyland until even Glory never wanted to hear the word again. Ardith Clemmons had driven down from Española and come to their house to engage the family in therapy, so while they got used to each other, Casey would still be able to count on her to feel safe. Seth White Buffalo hadn’t been found—yet, Joseph said. But all those years she’d been captive, thinking her parents and sister were dead, and then finding out her mother had committed suicide had taken a toll. Casey had nightmares, so she slept with Juniper and Aspen. Some nights Glory woke up and could hear them talking.

  “Things will improve,” Ardith Clemmons said. “They already have.”

  Christmas Eve, everyone went on the Canyon Road walk except for Glory. She hadn’t felt well all day, so she went to bed early, a little cranky. If you could call this sleep, she said, when she woke up to pee what seemed like every ten minutes. At three A.M. the house was quiet as she made her way to the bathroom for what she hoped was the last trip until morning. But when she stood up, she felt a trickle between her legs, and knew at once it was her water breaking. She cleaned up, changed into dry clothes, and checked her overnight bag. She went to the great room to look at the Christmas tree until she had her first contraction, figuring she might as well let Joseph sleep, because who knew how long labor would last?