Bone Deep

by O'Brien, Kim;

  Even so, I don’t feel like hanging out with Mrs. Shum or anyone, but then I see Jalen, hovering in the doorway, probably waiting for Mrs. Shum to leave so we can talk, so he can ask how I’m doing, be my friend. It makes me tired, thinking about the energy it’ll take to act like our kiss never happened. I’ve been avoiding him, but it’s been exhausting.

  I turn back to Mrs. Shum. “Actually, that sounds like a great idea.”

  Mrs. Shum smiles brightly. “Excellent,” she says.

  Jalen watches us pass. I sense his disapproval, which makes me happy. On the way to Mrs. Shum’s car, she dismisses a couple of reporters hovering at the gate with an impressively scathing look. I resolve to practice this expression later in the mirror.

  “So tell me about the sneakers,” she says, pulling an oversized pair of dark glasses out of her purse. “How did you find them?”

  I don’t want to talk about it, but it seems rude to ignore her question. “I just looked up and they were there.”

  “In a crevice in a rock,” Mrs. Shum finishes. “But how did you know to search the crevice?”

  “I didn’t.”

  We walk through the shimmering hot parking lot to her black Expedition. She unlocks it with a chirp from the key fob and opens the door for me. “What do you think those sneakers mean?”

  I don’t reply and take my time with the seatbelt while she walks around to the other side of the car. Why is she asking me all these questions? I thought the point was to get away from here for a while.

  Mrs. Shum gets in the car. When she looks at my face, her expression softens. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to make it harder for you. I just know how much Emily meant to you, how hard this is. Sometimes, it’s better to talk. I want to help. So does Dr. Shum. We’re on your father’s side.”

  I feel myself relax a little. “I think the sneakers mean that whatever happened to Emily happened in the park.”

  Mrs. Shum turns on the air-conditioning. As it blasts out hot air, we sit in silence, and then she says, “I agree. We get so many transients coming through the park. It’s impossible to make it completely safe.”

  Although I want to believe it was a total stranger, there’s a ritual aspect to the corn and writing that I can’t ignore. “You think a transient would put corn inside her Nike and leave that note?”

  Mrs. Shum shifts the car into reverse. “It must be,” she says firmly. “There’s a lot of local tribe people who hate that the National Park Service owns this land. They hate that we disturb the ruins, even if it’s our work that preserves them.” She accelerates out of the parking lot. “I wouldn’t put it past someone to make Emily disappear as a way of stopping work in the ruins.” Her hands tighten on the wheel. “Just wait, Paige, soon there will be rumors going around that the ruins are cursed and that Emily’s disappearance is just like that Native American tribe that vanished six hundred years ago.”

  She turns on her blinker and glances over her shoulder at the long, empty highway. “If you ask me, I think that whole scene was staged. Someone wanted those sneakers to be found.”

  Mrs. Shum’s theory sounds farfetched, but at least it’s an alternative to believing my father is involved. I lean back in the seat and point the air-conditioning at my face. “I think so, too,” I say.

  She glances sideways at me, her face unreadable. We fall into a more general discussion about a Native American art show in town that I might like to see.

  The Shums live in a modern stucco-and-glass house in a development called Painted Canyon. The house is larger than my father’s, but smaller than Jeremy Brown’s. It’s filled with a variety of Southwestern art and Native American pottery and weaving. In the family room, we pause in front of an oversized oil painting of a buck with fierce brown eyes and an impressive rack of antlers. The neck is arched, proud, and his face has a regal expression. When I praise her about it, she dismisses the compliment with a wave of her hand.

  “An anniversary gift for Dr. Shum,” she says.

  For lunch she serves me iced tea and a spinach quiche that is the first homemade meal I’ve had since I arrived in Arizona. When I compliment it, her eyes go soft.

  “My mother always told me that a woman needed to have one good dish for company. Mine’s quiche.”

  “My mom makes great pasta.” And just like that, I miss her so much it hurts. I haven’t talked to her in almost a week. I don’t know what to say to her. Just thinking about it makes me sad and confused and angry.

  “You’ll be seeing her soon.” Mrs. Shum touches my hand. “Just a few more weeks and you’ll be on your way back to New Jersey, won’t you?”

  I take a swallow of cold sweet tea. “Yes.”

  “And you’re a senior, right?”

  “Technically a junior.” She doesn’t need to know about the classes I failed on purpose.

  “Even better,” she says, “you’ll have more time to figure out what you want to do when you go to college.” She wipes her mouth with a paper napkin and then sets it down on her empty plate. “Do you have any idea yet?”

  I shake my head.

  She nods sympathetically. “It’s hard for you girls today. So many choices now. And yet, if I were to give you some advice…” She pauses. “Can I give you some advice, Paige?” She waits for my nod. “Look at who you were before you became the person you are now.”

  It sounds like a riddle and I don’t say anything.

  She taps her polished fingertips on the wooden tabletop. “What did you love doing most when you were a child?” she asks, studying me closely. “Those things tell you about yourself. They’re your passion. What were you happiest doing, Paige, when you were five?”

  “I don’t even remember being five,” I tell her.

  But that’s a lie. I loved sitting in the sun and carefully digging Birthday Barbie out of the ground. How happy I was burying her and finding her, burying her and finding her. Me, an archeologist? No way. But there was a time when it was what I wanted most in the world. It all changed when we moved to New Jersey and I saw what Dad’s profession did to our family. Only now, I realize that I had things wrong.

  I put my fork down. “I’ll think about it.”

  “You do that.” Mrs. Shum looks at my empty plate. “Pie? Or are you ready to see the studio?”

  “The studio.”

  Mrs. Shum’s studio is a wood and glass building behind the pool. She unlocks a thick door and switches on a light. We step into an oversized room with tall ceilings, open wooden beams, and an entire back wall covered in glass. At first, it looks like everything has been put in storage. The work tables, the easels—everything has been covered with sheets. The studio smells of paint and raw, wet clay.

  Mrs. Shum begins turning over a series of canvases leaning against the wall. They’re all of the cliffs that house the ruins, but from different angles. There’s a close-up of the T-shaped entrance on the second level and one blackened, almost undecipherable painting of what I finally realize is one of the windows.

  I compliment her, but she gives me what is becoming a familiar dismissive wave. “I really prefer working in clay,” she says.

  As if to prove this, she leads me past a potter’s wheel with chips of dry, gray clay clinging to it to a table centered in front of the wall of windows. There’s something under a sheet, and when Mrs. Shum removes this and a plastic sheet beneath, I see a sculpture of a man and a woman kissing. Their dark clay faces tilt against each other. The man has his hand supporting the woman’s neck. The woman has her eyes closed, but the ecstasy is clear in both their faces.

  As we circle the table, I realize there’s a tiny bit of space between their mouths. Mrs. Shum has captured the moment before a kiss happens. I think of Jalen, that moment when his lips touched mine and how overwhelming it was, how that first brush of his lips took my breath away. The sculpture could be me and him, and then I realize that’s the point. Anyone who’s ever been in love can see himself or herself.

  “It’s incredible,�
� I tell her.

  “It isn’t finished yet. Sometimes you have to live with a piece of art for a while before you figure out what it is.”

  “I think it’s perfect.”

  She laughs. “Have you sculpted before, Paige?”

  “In middle school. I made a pencil holder.”

  “That’s not sculpting,” she says, replacing the plastic cover and sheet on the sculpture of the lovers. “The grade of clay they use is terrible. What do you say? Want to give it another try?”

  “I’ll probably be terrible.”

  “No one is terrible,” she chides. Walking over to the counter near the sink, she opens a cabinet drawer. With a metal tool, she scoops out a portion of clay and sets it on a table. “You’ll want to wet your hands,” she says, “but don’t put too much water on the clay. It’s already pretty moist.”

  I slide my hands over the cool, smooth roundness, unsure exactly what I want to make.

  “Close your eyes,” Mrs. Shum instructs, standing behind me. “See with your fingers. The clay will tell you what it wants to be.”

  She’s watching me, so even though it feels kind of silly, I do exactly what she asks. I close my eyes and run my hands over the roundness of the ball and let my fingers explore the shape. I let tiny indents become eye sockets beneath the slightly rounded plane of a brow. I draw a line down what becomes the scalp and draw long, silky hair with my finger. I have never explored Jalen’s face with my hands, and yet slowly, my fingers shape the shape of his lips, the slight flare of his nostril.

  At some point I am aware of Mrs. Shum leaving me to lose myself in the memory of Jalen kissing me, how clichéd it seemed to think he was the other half of myself, and yet that’s how it felt.

  I don’t know how long I work. Only that my fingers smooth and pinch and shape. I step back, narrow my gaze. Try again to capture the perfection of his face. It isn’t him at all. The expression is too blank. I don’t know how to capture the life in his eyes.

  Mrs. Shum comes up behind me so silently I jump. “Excellent,” she says. “I thought you would have a good eye, but this is even better than I expected.”

  I cringe at the lopsided nose and the clumsy, thick lips. “It’s horrible.”

  Mrs. Shum’s eyes stay on my sculpture. “It’s Jalen, isn’t it?”

  I nod, a little shyly, surprised but kind of proud. “You could tell?”

  “Absolutely. Would you like to see what I made?” she asks, and we walk over to her table.

  The second I see her sculpture, my breath catches in my chest. For a moment a physical pain seems to explode in my stomach, and I feel dizzy, lightheaded.

  The girl Mrs. Shum has sculpted is beautiful. I study her smooth clay brow, her oval eyes, and her perfectly shaped full lips. The girl’s hair falls straight past her shoulders and is exquisitely detailed with fine lines.

  I look up at Mrs. Shum, trying to breathe and holding back the sharp points of unshed tears. Why would she do this? Did she want to hurt me? I would never have thought her so cruel. Doesn’t she think I miss her enough?

  “Why did you sculpt Emily?” I finally manage. My voice is choked, raw.

  Mrs. Shum blinks at me in surprise, and then her face seems to collapse in sudden understanding. “Oh, no, honey,” she says, “That’s not Emily—that’s you. You were sculpting Jalen, so I sculpted you, Paige. You think I haven’t noticed how the two of you look at each other?” She gives a small laugh even as I blush. “Fight for him, Paige. The only thing that really matters in life is love.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jalen

  This is what I know about love.

  My grandfather owned a small tire and auto parts shop on the Navajo Nation. It had been going under for as long as my father could remember. One afternoon, Grandfather asked my father and uncle to take an order of tires to a garage in Phoenix. They had car trouble along the way, and so they arrived just a little after closing. The owner of the garage saw them, locked the door, and flipped a closed sign in the window. When my father called to him through the glass, the owner told them to come back the next morning. My father explained they had driven five hours and it would take them only fifteen minutes to unload the tires. He did not mention that they could not afford either the lost time or the cost of the gasoline, although that probably was understood by everyone.

  What happened next is less clear. There was more arguing through the glass, a sour comment about reading the clock versus following the sun, and then my uncle slammed his fist through the window and turned the closed sign to open.

  My father, with the stacks of tires still strapped in the bed of the pickup, drove my uncle to the nearest emergency room. There, a nurse with soft, brown eyes and hair like black silk helped pick the glass from Uncle Billy’s hand. By the time my uncle’s hand was ready to be stitched, my father had the nurse’s telephone number and a promise to have dinner. They were married three weeks later.

  He said it happened like that for his father and his father before him. The men in our family fall immediately, irrevocably in love, or not at all.

  I was not raised on the reservation. Through my mother, my father found work in construction, and they bought a small house in the suburbs. When my grandparents still lived, we used to visit them on the Nation. They lived in a one-room hogan and there was no running water, but it smelled of fresh, warm kneeldown bread. Before dawn, my father and grandfather would wake me, and we would walk to the top of the hill and watch the sun rise.

  If you drive to the Navajo Nation, it is not uncommon to see people, mostly teenagers, hitchhiking their way out. Although the land sits on top of deposits of natural gas, uranium, and minerals, jobs are scarce. Unemployment runs high. There is little government funding. Basically, we’re on our own. Alcohol factors into most of the crimes, and the high school dropout rate is high.

  Despite these problems, or maybe because of them, I see myself going back there someday, living there. What I’ll do is still a question in my mind. My grandfather’s garage is long gone, of course, but it isn’t automobiles I dream of fixing. I think, mostly, what needs fixing is me.

  I don’t know much about love, but I do know about wanting. About wanting a girl who isn’t right for you, but not being able to help it. You try to ignore, rationalize, deny, but it’s there—like a thirst that burns your throat or a dream you don’t want to wake up from.

  You will fall in love, but you won’t help her and she’s going to die. My uncle was drunk when he said those words, but how can I dismiss them? How can I hope that he was confused about the whole falling-in-love thing and Emily Linton was the doomed girl in his vision? How do I tell Paige? What if I don’t? What if it’s already too late?

  TWENTY-NINE

  Paige

  Two days later, it’s early evening, still burning hot, and my father and I are on the back deck assembling a new grill when the doorbell rings. We bought the Weber on the way home from the park, and although my dad said he was tired of eating microwaved dinners, I know the grill is his way of showing me that he was listening when I talked about what good fathers do. He’s trying to be a better father. Just like me, keeping him company, is my way of showing him that I want to be a better daughter.

  At the sound of the doorbell, my father sets down the screwdriver and glances into the house. Neither of us is expecting company, and when his gaze returns to me I see the wariness in his eyes.

  “Remember, if I’m arrested, call the lawyer, the Shums, and then your mother.”

  After I nod, he squares his shoulders and then walks inside. I follow, bracing myself for the sight of Detective Rodriquez’s round face, but it isn’t the police standing on the front step. It’s Jalen.

  He looks freshly showered, his black hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail that still shows the lines of his comb. “Hello, Dr. Patterson,” he says when my father pulls the door open. “I need to talk to your daughter.”

  Your daughter. Still he won’t use my name. It mak
es me clench my jaw in frustration. He turns to me, and despite my anger, despite knowing that there’s never going to be anything between us, my face heats. It doesn’t seem fair that he can do this to me and I do nothing to him at all.

  I will my face to blankness. “Sorry, but now isn’t a good time.”

  My father ignores me and pulls the door open wider. “We’re about to try out the new grill. There’s plenty of food—why don’t you stay for dinner?”

  Jalen looks at me. I make my face as unwelcoming as possible, but he ignores me. “Thanks,” he says and steps inside, passing so closely my face nearly touches the worn cotton of his T-shirt. I smell the clean fragrance of his soap.

  “It’s charcoal—not propane,” my father explains, leading us through the hallway, then the kitchen, and back into the oven-like heat. “The salesperson at Home Depot thought I was crazy, but if I wanted simplicity I’d do takeout.”

  The grill is already almost completely together, a simple project for someone used to assembling decaying skeletons and shards of pottery. My father banters back and forth with Jalen as he finishes tightening the legs and then adds the charcoal briquettes to the basin. As soon he has a strong flame going, he excuses himself to work on the marinade, something I know needs no work as it comes out of a bottle.

  The moment he’s gone, Jalen says, “You’re avoiding me. Why?”

  I study the flames rising in a bouquet of colors from the grill. “I’m not avoiding you. I’m just busy.”

  He steps closer. “We need to talk about what happened.”

  I force myself not to back up, to hold his gaze. “What’s there to discuss? Nobody understands why someone put her sneakers there, and…”

  “I don’t mean about Emily.” He takes another step closer. My stomach knots because now he’s within an arm’s length of me. And his smell—that faint mix of soap, sweat and Arizona desert—moves through me. “I want to talk about us. About what happened.”