Sisters of Heart and Snow

by Margaret Dilloway

  “Shush.” I shove at her playfully. She laughs, zips up her briefcase.

  “I’ll call you soon. And Rachel—try not to worry.” Laura opens the front door.

  “Hey.” Quincy exchanges pleasantries with Laura and introduces her to Ryan.

  “What’s up?” She never comes down here midweek. Too much going on.

  “I’ve been cold at night lately. So I thought I’d get that quilt Obachan made.” Quincy smiles at me brightly.

  “It’s pretty big for your dorm bed.” I look at my daughter, her shining hair in the morning light.

  “I still want it. Is that a crime?” Quincy threads her hand through Ryan’s. He looks terribly tired, his face drawn and thin.

  I peer into his face. “You okay, Ryan?”

  He nods. “Working a lot.”

  “You should be sleeping if you have the day off.”

  “I’m spending the day with Quincy,” he says, and Quincy squeezes his hand.

  “Don’t worry. My classes are under control.”

  Whatever. She’s ditching. I bite my tongue against the lecture about skipping the class we’ve paid for and just motion to her. “It’s in my closet, I think.”

  We head upstairs into the master bedroom, and I slide open the mirrored door. I know exactly where it is—on the highest shelf. I point. “All the way up there in the space bag, behind the other blankets.” Ryan reaches up and moves everything easily. He’s helpful to have around, I have to admit. Strong—and tall. He gets down the heavy space bag and hands it to me. I put it on the bed and unzip it. This one is Chase’s, blue and white. Quincy’s is yellow and blue. “There should be another one up there.”

  Ryan puts his hand on the shelf and feels around. “I can’t find the other one. It must be way in there.” He gets the small wooden-backed chair from the corner of the room and steps up; peering into the depths of the closet, he finds another bag, slides it out, and holds it up. “Is this it?”

  I take it. It’s full of black material. My old wetsuits. I’d forgotten they were up there. I pull at the fabric and wonder if either one will fit anymore. I should get out there into the ocean, use these again. Maybe take Quincy with me. “Nope. See any more bags?”

  He shakes his head and takes out a ring box. “This is up in here—is it supposed to be?”

  I open the box. I know what’s inside. A nugget of gold about the size of a gumball falls into my palm. I turn it over, feel its cold weight in my hand. Sighing, I close my fingers around it and hand it to Quincy. “Gold.”

  This gold represents my best memory of my father. Why I still hold a bit of hope that one day we can have at least a neutral relationship.

  Once a year, during winter break, he’d take us out to the Anza-Borrego desert for a weekend. It was cold in the desert in winter, a fact most people didn’t realize, especially at night. But I loved the hotel where we stayed. We stayed in a casita with its own small kidney-shaped pool, heated with solar panels. I stayed in the water nearly all day, emerging only to run into the warm room.

  On days Dad didn’t play golf, he got me up early for what he called “Desert pirate gold adventures.” It was something his father used to do with him, and one of the few times Dad seemed truly enthusiastic and open. “There are still veins of gold out here,” he told me, his eyes glinting with something like youth. “Still undiscovered.” Mom stayed behind with Drew, who was too young to go out into the desert. It made me feel proud and important.

  Usually, I followed Dad to dry riverbeds where he poked around with a pickaxe, whistling happily. Occasionally he came across a small nugget that looked like lead and held it up to the watercolor blue sky. “Wooooo!” He’d crow. I loved it. I loved how engaged he was, how I could pretend I, too, would find a huge vein of gold and make him proud.

  Scraps of kindness can keep you hoping that the person will change long after you should’ve given up. I was like a stray dog whose owner would feed it steak or backhand it according to his mood, following my dad around, always hoping it’d be the steak.

  One gray morning when I was eight, Dad drove me out farther, way past any civilization, to where the desert turned back to trees, the pebbles of the unpaved road knocking on the underside of our Mercedes’s non-offroad undercarriage. We pulled over amid spiky barrel cacti, fat paddles of prickly pear, and dried-out brown waist-high shrubs. A long-haired white man waited next to an ancient rusted-out military jeep. “What are we doing, Daddy?”

  “Looking for our fortune,” my father said. He gave the man some cash. I suppose it was the man’s land. There was no fence or building anywhere that I could see. Just outcroppings of tan house-sized boulders amid the scrubby landscape and pinkish-brown mountains in the distance. To the right a steep slope led to a gully. Here, near a faintly gurgling stream, an outcropping of bare multitrunked smoke trees grew in gray fingers toward the sky.

  The man led us down the slope to the muddy wash. I clung to Dad’s hand, my feet slipping in the loose dirt, moving through the clumps of dried-out sage bushes and the sumac with crimson-tinted winter leaves. The creek water moved slowly, so shallow I could see every stone beneath.

  “Go ahead, now,” the man said. “I’m entitled to half of what you find.”

  He and my dad started talking about mineral rights, how most people who owned land didn’t own the mineral rights as well. That meant if you found gold or oil in your yard, it belonged to the municipality. “It isn’t right,” Dad said, and the man clucked in agreement. “But this man here’s smart,” Dad said, turning to me. “He bought all this with the mineral rights attached.”

  I stared up at the other man, wide-eyed. “Have you found oil here?”

  “Not yet.” The man chuckled, and lit a stinky cigar. “Haven’t looked in every inch of dirt, though.”

  “When I was a boy, out with my father, I found a big chunk of gold in this very area,” Dad told me. Taking my hand, he led me forward. We waded into the stream, the water flowing around our rubber boots, Dad moving his metal detector in slow arcs. “My father took it from me and promised he’d make the house payment. The next thing I knew, he’d drunk and gambled it away.”

  “Gold makes men do evil things. You can’t even trust your own father with it.” The old man leaned toward me. Sour breath. “You hear that? If you find gold, hide it from your old man.”

  I wanted to get away from him. “Can I try?” I asked my father. To my surprise, he handed me the detector. I walked downstream as my father continued talking. The water was silty, the tossed cloudy sand covering smooth round rocks. I peered ahead. The gully where we stood was covered in smooth rocks three times the width of the water. Farther on, the boulders formed walls. It would be difficult to climb out of here. “Is this whole thing a riverbed?” I called back.

  The old man nodded. “Yep. We get lots of flash floods.”

  I glanced up at the sky nervously. “Is that why the rocks are so smooth? From the water?”

  “Exactly right.” Dad grinned. The wind whipped his gray hair around his head.

  I moved the metal detector back and forth across the sand. Nothing. I pursed my lips and kept walking forward, out of the water altogether, toward the big boulders. Overhead, rain clouds thickened, and I thought I heard distant thunder. I ignored it. My metal detector beeped.

  “I found something!” I shouted.

  The old man limped over and tossed me a spade. “Dig.”

  I strained to move a large purplish-gray rock partially buried in the hard earth. My father watched, his arms crossed, a faint smile on his face. The same expression he got when his football team was winning on television. Finally I managed to use the shovel as a lever and pry the rock up, pushing it with my foot.

  “Nothing there,” the old man said.

  A scorpion, so pale it was almost translucent, emerged. I screamed and jumped back. The old ma
n stomped it. I looked up at my father, who was staring at the sky. I worried he’d yell at me in the car for giving up. A jittery feeling took hold of my stomach. I held the detector over the spot and again it beeped. The soil was looser with the rock gone. I used the spade to feel around, digging about a foot farther down, until the metal edge of the shovel touched another rock. A small one, less than half the size of a meatball. With my other hand, I snatched it out.

  It was a round piece of gold.

  “Let me see that.” The old man grabbed my wrist with his leathery fingers. “Placer gold. Not bad.”

  “I found gold!” I shouted up to my father. “Gold!”

  “Good job, Rachel!” Dad shouted back.

  The old man licked his lips. “Don’t forget, I get half.”

  “It’s a small piece, Ralph,” Dad said. “I did pay you.”

  “Half,” Ralph said.

  I clutched the gold in my hand. How could they break this in half?

  “Let me see it,” Dad said. I handed it over. He pursed his lips. He looked at me, then took out his wallet and gave Ralph what seemed to my eyes like an enormous stack of bills. “That ought to take care of it.”

  “I don’t know,” Ralph said doubtfully. “Gold’s worth more these days.”

  Dad handed him another bill. This one had Benjamin Franklin on it. My heart fluttered.

  “Well then.” Ralph tipped his hat to us. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get to the grocer’s.” With that, Ralph limped back toward his jeep, stomping over the scrub bushes. He revved the engine and took off, sending a cloud of dust up behind him.

  Dad ruffled my hair. “Let’s get back to work, then. Rachel, you’ve got a nose for this, just like your old man.”

  We spent the rest of the morning looking for gold, stopping only after a sudden noon downpour. “We’d better get out,” Dad said, loading me into the car. “There might be a flood.”

  I leaned over the seat as we drove away, the gold in my hand. I felt bad that he had paid Ralph so much money.

  “You want this gold, Daddy? You can have it.”

  “It’s yours, Rachel.” He grinned at me in the rearview mirror. “I’m not my old man.”

  Now, sitting together in my old bedroom, I tell Quincy and Ryan the story. Quincy’s eyes widen as she passes the gold to Ryan. “I never knew that. You never tell us anything about your family. Especially not about your dad.”

  This stings. A lot. I cough to hide my distress. “I tell you as much as you need to know. And how much do you tell me about you?” I ask. “You quit volleyball and didn’t mention it.”

  She crosses her arms and looks down. “Enough to keep you off my back, I suppose.”

  Ryan laughs, handing the gold back to Quincy. “My mother would have a heart attack if she knew about all the crap my brothers and I pulled when we were teenagers. She says she’s better off not knowing.”

  A pang hits my chest. How well do I know my children? How well do they know me? Perhaps Ryan’s mother is wise. My children don’t need to know the troubling nitty-gritty of my late teen years. It will only disturb them. All they know is that my father was very strict, and didn’t like my choices early on. Which is all true.

  Do I really need to know every bit of trouble or fun Quincy gets into? I’m her mother, not her confessor. But shouldn’t we be getting to know each other as friends now? Isn’t this the time? Especially since she’s getting married.

  Quincy gives me the nugget. “I didn’t know your dad took you mining. You should tell us more stuff. I like your stories.”

  My hands feel cold suddenly, though it’s warm.

  Maybe that father with the gold is still inside my current-day father, someplace. I look directly at Quincy. “Killian can’t make it to the wedding. He’ll be traveling.”

  “Oh.” Quincy’s gaze centers out the window.

  I regard my now adult daughter, feeling like I’ve been punched in the stomach. My children don’t know the whole story. They don’t even know that my mother was a mail-order bride. I didn’t want to color my kids’ perception of Mom. Or me.

  I smile at my oldest ruefully. “It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.”

  A silence settles over us, thick as one of my mother’s quilts. Ryan sits on the bed motionless, his eyes fluttering closed. Poor guy. A motorcycle roars past on the street below, shaking the single-paned window. After a minute or two, Quincy clears her throat. “We should be going.”

  I look at her and realize she’ll probably never sleep under my roof again by herself. Everything’s changed. “If you want to come over this weekend, we could take you guys out to dinner with Aunt Drew.”

  Quincy hesitates, nudges Ryan.

  “I was just resting my eyes.” He moves his shoulders noncommittally. “Don’t you have a paper due?” he asks, yawning. I hope Quincy drives them home.

  “Yeah,” Quincy echoes, her voice going strange. “A paper.”

  “In what subject?” I ask. “Is there something wrong?”

  “History. It’s just a big project, and I need to get started.” She smiles her sweetest at me, showing deep dimples on both sides of her mouth. “I’ll see you later, Mom. Come on, Ryan.”

  “Bye, Mrs. Perrotti.” Ryan lifts his hand to me, following Quincy out.

  She’s never sounded like that about a paper before. Quincy’s not a procrastinator—ever since third grade, she’s tackled projects as soon as they were assigned. I go to the window and watch them walk down the driveway. An uncomfortable ache settles in my gut, but I can’t tell whether it’s my too-sensitive Mommy instinct or because I wish she’d stay with me. Probably both.

  Ryan feels my eyes on him and turns, waves.

  • • •

  Drew arrives at the coffee shop five minutes early. The place Alan picks isn’t corporate-owned. It’s called Lestat’s (like the vampire, Drew remembers), and it’s near Balboa Park, in a neighborhood Drew’s not familiar with. When she was growing up, the area was rough and nobody she knew went down here unless they wanted to buy sex toys or illegal drugs, but now it’s gentrified and populated with hipsters carting around MacBooks.

  She finds it readily enough, though. It’s decorated with hanging crystal chandeliers and gold-painted chairs, comfortable couches, fabulous velvet thrones of carved wood. Glass cases of elaborate pastries glisten. Drew’s mouth waters. Is it too early for a slice of cheesecake?

  She doesn’t see Alan yet, so she orders her latte and a slice of cheesecake, and, in case Alan doesn’t like cheesecake, a Danish. The debit card goes through without a hitch, causing a pang to appear in Drew’s gut. Killian’s money is paying for those pastries.

  He wants her to talk to Rachel, but Drew won’t. First and last and in between, he can’t treat their mother like a milking cow past her prime and sent to slaughter. He just can’t. It’s not fair.

  Not that anybody ever thinking something’s not fair has changed it.

  The door jingles and Alan appears. Right on time. He’d told her the library opened late today, not until noon, so he has this whole morning free. “Drew! Good to see you.” He smiles at her and, though he’s British—aren’t they supposed to be terribly standoffish?—and she only just met him, he gives her a quick hug when she stands. The kind of hug any friend would use. But she also notices how his shoulders feel under his argyle sweater vest. Strong, but not jacked-up.

  “Find the place all right?” He sits down across from her. He looks a tiny bit tired around his eyes.

  “Definitely. No problem.” She smiles, feeling shy, points at the pastries. “I didn’t know what you like.”

  “Oooh. Cheesecake.” His cheeks dimple. “I’m sorry I didn’t arrive before you. I owe you a coffee.”

  “You were right on time.” Drew sips her latte. The barista has drawn a heart in the foam. Her ears color.
It’s like they’re in a musical. Either of them might burst into song. Like she’d done at the library. Except she didn’t bring an instrument, and her singing voice is only adequate.

  “My girls were dawdling this morning. Took Audrey fifteen minutes to find one shoe.” Alan shakes his head. “She put it in the pantry, of all places. Behind the flour bin.”

  Drew’s heart drops to the floor. “Little girls?”

  Alan nods. “Lauren and Audrey. Ages four and three.” He digs out his phone and lights up a picture. “Here.”

  Two little blond girls with cherubic faces beam out. They’re eating ice cream cones almost as big as their heads. Drew can’t help but smile. “They’re adorable.”

  “Yes.” He pockets the phone. “You know, Drew, that viola was amazing. Magical.”

  Drew takes in another deep breath. So. This coffee is just a coffee. To repay her for the bet. She takes the spoon and swirls the heart away. “Thanks.”

  “Some of the children have asked if you give lessons.” Alan laces his fingers together.

  “I’ve never thought about it.” And she hasn’t. She’s not usually in contact with kids, so it hadn’t occurred to her. It might be kind of fun. She wonders how quickly she can find students, if she’ll need insurance. She smiles to herself. Rachel would be proud of her for thinking so responsibly.

  He lets out a sigh. “Well. I need a coffee. Would you like anything else? Fruit tart? Flask of whiskey?”

  Drew shakes her head. “I’m good.”

  She watches Alan walk up to the register. His corduroy pants make that whisk-whisk noise. Drew’s always liked that sound. She had a pair when she was little. And they’re hugging him rather well. Is he married? She hates to say it, because Alan seems like a genuinely nice guy and she already enjoys his company, and maybe she’s a totally unevolved immature person, but she can’t be just friends with him if he’s taken. She won’t be able to stop thinking about touching his smooth shaved face, what it would be like to put her mouth on his. Asking for trouble. Her phone buzzes with a text.

  Jonah.

  Haven’t heard back from you. Decision?