Earth Colors

by Sarah Andrews

  I liked the new library. It is the only library I have ever known that has a coffee shop on the main floor, lounges featuring chessboards, fireplaces, and stunning city views on every level, a newsstand inside its five-story glass atrium, and a garden on its roof. So I said yes, paid for my jolt of java, and followed her down the sidewalk and up the elevators to the roof of the new building. We settled on a bench that had a nice view and I started into the ritual of small talk, which was about all I was good for at that moment. “What brings you out on a workday?”

  Tanya was just placing the cookie between her lips for rapturous nibble. Efficient in her sensuousness, she waited until she had chewed and swallowed before answering me. “I took the morning off to run some errands. And then I decided to play hooky from doing the errands.”

  “Well, it’s nice to see you. Been ages.”

  “Hey, you too. Where’s your papoose?”

  “Faye’s up in Wyoming for a few days,” I said, my tone of voice more glum than I had intended.

  Tanya’s eyebrows jumped ever so slightly. Nothing got past Tanya, not even the FBI spooks that worked with her. “Had a spat, have you?” She put down her cookie and attended to some crumbs she had dropped on her blouse.

  One thing I had to hand to Tanya, she could make the third degree sound like light, impersonal chitchat. Almost. I clenched my teeth, vowing that I would not say another word about Faye or her reasons for being away. I buried my attention in taking a long draw on my coffee while I collected myself.

  Tanya took a demure sip of her latte and studied me frankly. “Strange marriage you two have.”

  “What?” I snapped.

  She made a dismissive gesture and plucked another crumb from her shirt. I gripped my coffee with both hands. First Ray and now Tanya. Hey, it’s open season on Em. Let’s just line them up, and everyone take their best shot. I said, “Sure, just laser-search my psyche, make a couple of wild leading remarks, and move on. Nice to see you, too, Tanya.”

  Tanya pulled back her head and made an elaborate job of blinking at me. “My, my, but didn’t you wake up feeling a bit defensive this morning.”

  “Yes, I did. The baby is with Faye. I miss the baby. You got a problem with that?”

  “What’s Faye doing in Wyoming?”

  My self-control vanished. “What’s Faye doing? Oh, just screwing around with some swell who puts Narcissus to shame for rank self-involvement. Which leaves me here in Salt Lake feeling like a prize chump for taking off a year from my life to help her with her adjustment to motherhood, as it seems she’s done with me now, thank-you-very-much-goodbye. And just to add sunshine to my day, Ray Raymond looks me up to do a twelve-step dump job so he can feel just great while I feel like a retard. Just what the hell do you mean, ‘marriage?’”

  Tanya put down both cup and cookie and raised her hands in mock surrender. “Hey—mortgage, baby, arguments you don’t talk about; some people call that a commitment.”

  “Very funny,” I said irritably. “I’m just waiting for Jack to come back. And I’m finishing my master’s.”

  “‘Finishing’,” she said, almost making it a question. “So sorry to intrude. So, what are your plans, really?”

  I wanted to snarl, You sound just like Faye! but the reality was that I did not have a plan. I was winging it, waiting to see what happened with Jack. I said, “I am willing to help Faye as long as she needs me.”

  Tanya patted me on the arm. “Are you still feeling responsible for Tom’s death?”

  “Oh, great. First Ray with the Twelve Steps, and now you’re a full-on shrink. Fine. Call it ‘survivor’s syndrome’ if you want, but I keep thinking that I could have prevented what happened to him.”

  Tanya shook her head. “He was in the wrong place at the wrong instant, Em. The life of an agent hangs on split-second timing. Tom could have gotten it a hundred times before you ever met him.”

  “So, I should have seen that he was slowing down. I pushed him.”

  “No one pushed Tom Latimer. He was the one that did the pushing. We all miss him, Em.”

  I was babbling now. “Jack can’t even talk about it. I can’t talk to him about it. We were both there with him, together. Whom better to talk to?”

  Tanya let silence sit for a moment, then said, “You think that might have had something to do with Jack going active?”

  I froze. This was the thing I had not wanted to consider. Had Jack run away when his feelings overwhelmed him? Did he run to war when I’d have preferred he’d come to me with his pain?

  Tanya changed the subject. “So, back to this Ray Raymond. Is that the Ray Raymond with the nice buns who’s a cop on the Salt Lake force?”

  “That would be the one.”

  “What do you mean, ‘twelve-step dump job’? He take your inventory or something?”

  “Inventory?”

  “That’s when someone who’s sworn off the sauce figures he’s so smart he gets to go around telling everyone else what’s wrong with them.”

  “No, that would be what you’re doing. No, Ray was much cuter than that. He gave me the old ‘Here I am apologizing for my folly in having known you’ job. ‘Things were sweet. Things were, in fact, so great that I’m getting a life. I was a turkey, now I’m an eagle—see ya.’”

  Tanya rolled her eyes. “I agree that twelve-step amends can be more for the forgiven than for the forgiver, but aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? I mean … it’s quite a view from up here, isn’t it?” She gestured out toward the rocky wall of the Wasatch range, which today arched its spine above Salt Lake City with particular pride. The view from the roof of the library was nothing short of stunning: The Wasatch front reached south to hold hands with the Oquirrhs, and the curving sweep of the library’s daring architecture completed the geometry like a circle of young maidens embracing the coming of spring.

  As always, Tanya’s reasonableness had its effect, and I began to calm down. It was true that Ray’s apology had been more for his sake than for mine; nothing had changed, everything was still on his terms, still lacking in the mutuality I craved. Seeing Frank up in Cody had bothered me, too. He was as kind and gentle and caring as Jack was romantic and funny and … well, thrilling. I wanted a man who was all that and more like Ray, possessed of a healthy dash of self-interest. And wanting all that made me emotionally dizzy.

  Tanya cleared her throat. “So what do you hear from Jack?”

  I tried to bury my face in the task of taking another sip of my brew, but managed to choke on it.

  “That bad?” she inquired.

  “He’s doing fine,” I rasped.

  “But you’re not,” she said affably. “You look like somebody swiped your birthday cake.”

  “Tanya, let’s change the subject, okay?”

  “Okay. How’s the thesis going?”

  “Nowhere. Faye’s got a hot idea for me, but—”

  Tanya put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Tell me about it.”

  I began to crumple under her sympathy. “Maybe it’s not the stupidest idea anyone ever had, but I’d need a lot of help with it, because the thing is … Well, hell, the problem is that there really is no place to go to get a degree in forensic geology. The curriculum does not exist. I’ve been taking courses that other forensic geologists have taken, but when it comes to doing a thesis, it’s darned hard to come up with something. My advisor is supposed to help me with this, but she’s not a forensic geologist. In fact, there aren’t any theses to use as guides, even.”

  “But people do the work. We have three forensic geologists on staff back at the labs in Quantico.”

  I fought the urge to lean against her for strength. “Can I take you into my confidence on something? I mean, pick your brains a bit?”

  Tanya arched her own spine and offered the bronze skin of her face skyward to the kiss of the sun. “Pick ho; I’m not sure what you’ll find in there, but if there’s anything, it’s all yours. I surely wouldn’t want t
o get stuck paying the storage fee.”

  “Well, the fact is that the reason Faye’s in Wyoming … Well, she has a client … And well, I’ve been asked to do a little private investigation work. I don’t like the sound of the job, but Faye’s involved in it, so I have to convince her that it’s best to turn it down.”

  “What don’t you like about it?”

  “It would require a lot of analytical work, for starts.”

  Tanya cocked her head to one side. “Analytical work? You mean hard evidence? You’re right; that’s not you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tom always told me you fly seat-of-the-pants.”

  “Ye-es,” I drawled, “Tom always loved me for my intuition, not for my hard science, but that’s because—”

  “I thought he said it was your hard head he liked.”

  “Tanya, you are so far out of line today, I—”

  “So what is it you need from me?”

  “Like you say, there are geologists working in the FBI forensics lab. I’ve been meaning to contact them anyway to ask them … well, for help with the thesis. But it’s kind of tough, phoning someone I don’t really know and saying, ‘Hey, help me.’ But I’d also like to ask them about the work. Kind of do an informational interview. Find out where I might apply for work if I ever—when I get this master’s finished.”

  Tanya said, “Oh, I get it, you want to work in the lab in D.C. so you can be near Jack when he gets home. Why didn’t you just say so?”

  I closed my eyes and counted to ten. “Tanya, I swear, can you take just one little thing I say at face value?”

  “Just one.”

  “Good. Okay, so I need to talk with this woman who’s a forensic geologist in the FBI lab. Tom was just trying to put me in touch with her when he—” My voice caught in my throat.

  Tanya tucked the last bite of her cookie into her mouth and chewed it quickly. “Noreen Babcock. Sure, no problem. She’s a real smart lady, and almost as much of a loner as you are. You two would get along like a couple of stones in a rock garden. I’ll write down her number.”

  BY THE TIME I got back to Faye’s house, I was in such an unstable mood that I figured it was best to avoid all contact with other human beings for as long as possible. I decided to stick my head into something intellectual, in the hope that I might push my wolf pack of feelings into a cave and roll a rock in front of it.

  That something was my schoolwork. I was almost done with my coursework but it was true that to complete the degree I needed to write a thesis, and to write a thesis, I needed a research topic. Worse yet, research tended to cost money, and that was something I did not have. The tank was empty; I was getting by on fumes. I was getting free rent from Faye, and she was essentially feeding me, too. My mother was paying my tuition and sending the occasional check that covered books and bus fare and a little pocket change. Even this was a problem for me, not just because at age thirty-eight it hurt my pride to be hitting my mother for expenses, but also because she expected to be paid back.

  As I opened my books to study, my brain ground once again through the problem of identifying a thesis project. I hoped to do something that involved trace materials, which meant soils and other fine sediments, the kinds of things that cling to a crime scene in such microscopic quantities that most criminals don’t notice they’re leaving evidence behind.

  This term I was taking a full load of courses: Sedimentology, Soil Science, Meteorology, and Statistics. It was a real grind, but quite engrossing. Sedimentology was teaching me what kind of rock fragments wound up where, and why; Soil Science and Meteorology were teaching me how these sediments weathered into dirt, and why and where; and Statistics was teaching me how to put numbers and probabilities to the whole business. By the end of the semester, I’d have everything I needed to finish except the dreaded thesis. My advisor, Molly Chang, was beginning to roll her eyes every time she saw me coming.

  I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. Perhaps I could make a thesis out of the job Tert was offering. A painting is made of paint, which is made of pigments and a binder, and pigments are, after all, trace evidence. The key to documenting the forgery might be a matter of identifying the pigments, which were most likely ground-up bits of minerals. The trick would be to focus on the painting, and stay away from Tert Krehbeil and whatever’s going on with his family.

  Little cash-register sounds went off in my head. If Gray Eyes paid enough, I could quit borrowing from my mother, an act I enjoyed about as much as gargling turpentine. Why? Because Mother was the only one left on the ranch I had told Gray Eyes I owned. In fact, she owned the ranch, not me, but it belonged to me in the sense that I knew each bluff and swale, each blade of grass, and each beam in the barn. The ranch was woven into the very fabric of my soul. But until Mother left, I could not be there. She might be sober now, but sobriety had not healed our relationship.

  Money, money, money. The ranch was small, as semiarid ranchland went, just a few square miles of short-grass prairie, not enough to raise much beef. I knew that since my father’s death and the last drought, and with the rise in the cost of feed and labor and the continued sluggish prices in beef, my mother had been struggling financially, but she had been only too willing to loan me the money to get my degree. “With a master’s,” she had said, “you might get a real job.” I had bitten my tongue, figuring to repay her by taking over the ranch the instant she was ready to give up the charade and move to town. She didn’t belong there, not really. She had been born gagging on a silver spoon in Boston. But, forty years after thumbing her nose at her family by running away to Wyoming with the cowboy who had been my father, she still spoke with a Brahmin accent as she addressed her neighbors with a dry, stinging, ironic New England wit that sailed past them like so many cow chips in a high wind.

  I drummed my fingers. The ranch might have been purchased with her money (or, more accurately, her father’s money), but my father had built every foot of fence and dug every inch of irrigation ditch. In my angrier moments, I blamed his overwork for his early demise, even as I longed to pick up where he had left off. But she had sent me away again and again.

  I took several long, deep breaths, trying once again to let go of a past in which the milk of being in a land I loved was always curdled by the vinegar of human failings. About now, Faye would be giving me a pep talk on the art of letting go, I told myself. If she were here. And if she were still talking to me. I cringed at how truly accurate Tanya’s observation had been: Faye and I now communicated with about the frequency and to approximately the depth that my parents had done, three and a half decades into the disappointment they’d called a marriage. I was playing Clyde Hansen’s stoic servant to Leila Bradstreet Hansen’s self-indulgence. I had re-created my family drama—and to what gain? None. If I didn’t get a grip on myself soon, I’d wind up as prematurely dead as my father or as eternally self-destructive as my mother.

  I stopped to calculate how old my mother was now. I reckoned sixty-three: She had borne me when she was just shy of twenty-five. She still had her looks, and was disgustingly strong, physically speaking. Her body had weathered decades of alcohol abuse, and now more than half a decade of hard physical labor. How long had it been since Daddy died? Six years? Or was it seven?

  In all the months I had studied the ceiling while thinking my thoughts, I had made a pretty thorough map of the patterns in the drywall texturing. To the right of center was the land of big blotches that formed a shape like a canoe, and to the left, the isthmus of the funny guy with only one leg. One-Leg reminded me of myself, forever hopping around, never quite whole.

  My eyes shifted to other figures I had traced in the plaster. A long, sinuous line could be Faye, skating toward the edge of reality, ready to date again, having been widowed now longer than she was married. The blob next to it could be good ol’ Em Hansen, now starring in the supporting role as the cuckolded roommate with gender confusion. And was that jagged bit to the other si
de of her Tert Krehbeil? What did Faye see in him? Why was she reverting to her snob-ridden past? Would regression help wall off the memory of Tom? Better a self-absorbed bit of fluff from Pennsylvania than a man who took one last risk and was killed? And was it my job to save her from this fate, or was I, in fact, part of the problem?

  Enough of this maundering self-pity, I decided. Time to go out for a walk. Restore the body, and the spirit will follow.

  Outside, the day was warming, and I had walked only a few blocks before I needed to open my jacket. Flowers were beginning to peek out of the gardens I passed, and all but the last dirty, icy chunks of snow piled up in the deepest north-side shadows had melted away. My mood lightened, and I even got to rolling my hips a little in a sort of celebration of spring.

  Which in turn immediately soured my mood again. Sensual motion in my pelvis reminded me of Jack, and where the hell was he?

  I tripped over a break in the sidewalk, and as I lurched to catch myself, my head snapped forward so fast that for a moment I could see through my own self-interest. I had no idea who Gray Eyes was as a person, not really; and although no one could replace Tom Latimer, he was dead, and life went on.

  Everybody’s life is going on but mine! whined my nasty little brain. Now desperate to escape myself, I leaned forward and began to jog, and then to run. I made three blocks before I got winded, at which juncture I turned right and right again and headed back toward the house. I was coming down the straightaway, slowing back to a shambling jog, when I was passed by a man who was really moving along, all fleet feet and sopping-wet sweat suit. He hoofed it three houses past Faye’s and then pulled up, jogged up the front walkway, put his hands on the bottom step of the porch, and began pumping off push-ups.

  Who’s this? I wondered.

  A Realtor’s sign saying FOR SALE had stood on the front lawn for several weeks, and was now surmounted by a smaller sign that read SOLD.

  I put my hands in my pockets and wandered over to make his acquaintance. “Hi,” I said. “You must be a new neighbor. I’m Em Hansen. Welcome to the neighborhood.”