by Wind, Ruth
Had there ever been a man as stupid as he’d been with Jessie? That single, lonely beer in the fridge summed it up. He’d traded the greatest love of his life for booze.
As a boy, he’d lived on a reservation near the border of New Mexico and Arizona. There had been no drinking there, not ever. But sometimes his family would go into Farmington for supplies, and Luke’s father would sadly point to Indians standing in clusters at the doors of certain bars, fighting, sleeping on the blacktop roads out of town for warmth. “See?” Luke’s father said, over and over. “Don’t let yourself be an Indian like that.”
Luke was ten when the family moved to Colorado Springs, and the image of those drunks faded. By the time Luke joined the army at eighteen, he drank beer along with the rest of the young, homesick soldiers. He dismissed his father’s warnings as the overly rigid advice of a traditional—quaint but not altogether useful in the world beyond the reservation.
But even just the beer had sometimes given him hangovers that scared him. He would awaken with a swollen head and a clutching fear in his chest, feeling as if he couldn’t breathe, as if he were on dangerous ground. He’d go on the wagon for a while, but the problem never seemed that serious. With practice, he learned his limits and stayed within them. Only beer. Only a few.
In his kitchen, on this cold winter night, Luke shook his head over the illusions he’d built so carefully, the lies he’d told himself. He poured a cup of coffee, stirred in a generous measure of sugar and reached for the milk in the fridge. His gaze caught on the bottle of beer once more, but his hunger for it was dissipating quickly.
In the living room the stereo paused as a new record fell into place, then Jackson Browne was singing about the lengths a man would go to forget a woman.
Jessie. Not a woman he’d been able to wash from his mind, though God knew he’d tried. He had buried himself in the arms of other women, in work, in projects. Another man would have used liquor. Luke didn’t have the luxury. His father, it seemed, had been right—at least about Luke. This was one Indian who couldn’t drink, not if he wanted to have a life.
He rubbed a restless palm over his chest, trying to ease the ache there. Jessie. Her name echoed through his mind, over and over, like a lost voice borne through a canyon by the wind. It seemed impossible that she’d just dropped into his life out of nowhere today, with no warning whatsoever.
He hadn’t forgotten her. Even after so much time had passed, a song or a certain kind of sunset brought his memories of her rushing back. He’d hear someone laugh, or turn a corner in the grocery store and see some woman with long hair, and he’d be instantly back in the past.
They’d met twelve years before, when Luke worked for her father in California, building an addition to the lawyer’s house by the sea. One morning he looked up toward the house and there she was, standing in the window of her bedroom, a soft white gown floating around her, her long, wavy hair lifting in the sea breeze. At lunch, she brought iced tea to the crew.
He told himself to be careful in the beginning. She was young, only a little past twenty, and somehow fragile—he didn’t want to hurt her. At the time, he’d been in no mood for settling down with one woman, and for several weeks, he kept her at arm’s length.
But somehow, he found himself seeking her out. They walked along the beach for hours in the evenings, talking and talking and talking. He learned her tragic story, shared his own losses, fell in love with her. And still he didn’t kiss her, didn’t even hold her hand.
Tired of waiting for him, she simply came to him one night in his tent on the beach. And Luke, for all his reasoning and caution, had not been able to resist the vulnerable way she offered herself. His will collapsed under the force of her innocent seduction, collapsed to the greater lure of his hunger for her.
As long as he lived, he would never forget the power of that joining. It had shattered him, and when the pieces came back together, he wasn’t the same man he had been before. Even now, he could see it—her long hair tangled by his fingers, her skin translucent and white in the moonlight. The sound of the sea underscored their passion, a passion so violent and moving and deep he still never thought of it without feeling her against his chest, smelling her skin and tasting her mouth.
From that night onward, they had been inseparable. When Luke grew restless in California, Jessie wandered with him, and for three years, they had lived an almost idyllic life—traveling and working and loving.
Luke picked up the sandpaper and eased a corner under the lip of the bureau, sighing. Their last year together wasn’t as easy to think about.
He wished sometimes he could point to that single moment when his control over his drinking had unraveled, but he couldn’t. His father died, and Luke and Jessie traveled to Colorado Springs to be close to Marcia, who needed her older brother. The death was sudden, unexpected, searing, and left Luke feeling unbalanced. His drinking, always present but never dangerous, took a day-by-day turn for the worse.
No drama. No searing pain. Nothing he could pinpoint. He simply learned he could blunt the lost places inside himself with booze. He knew he was losing Jessie. In the cold light of morning, he sometimes hated himself, but it didn’t help. He couldn’t stop.
She left a year later. Packed her bags and disappeared. It was the first bracket on the worst period of his life. Shortly afterward, his ten-year-old dog had to be put to sleep. Marcia finished high school and went off to college. Luke lost a job, and then another one. Through it all, he drank. And drank some more.
One morning, he awakened in a public park at dawn, unable to remember how he got there. He sat up slowly and saw an old man staring at him as he rubbed grass marks from his cheek. A crippling shame seized him, and Luke realized he’d become one of those men his father had pointed out to him in warning so many times. Instead of going home, he walked straight to detox and checked himself in.
The phone rang, abruptly shattering his reverie. Luke stared at it for a moment, then grabbed it on the second ring.
“You better back off.” The voice was young, Indian, unfamiliar.
“What are you talking about?”
“The weavers’ project.”
“Who is this?”
“A concerned party. We ain’t gonna give up those profits.”
The line went dead. Luke replaced the handset with a frown.
He dialed his sister’s Denver number. “Marcia,” he said when she answered, “have you heard anything from the res today?”
“Luke, do you know what time it is?”
He glanced at the clock. “Sorry. It’s important.”
“I was going to call you in the morning.” She yawned. “Somebody shot a bunch of sheep again.”
Luke swore.
“Yeah. Only a few were killed, but it’s pretty ugly anyway. Why?”
“I just got a weird phone call.”
“There was bound to be some harassment. We knew that when we started. Daniel thinks maybe after you talk to the people tomorrow, we’ll back off for a month or so.’
“Good.” He paused, considering the plan that had just bloomed in his mind. It wasn’t fair to Jessie, but then, she hadn’t been fair to him. For seven years she’d raised their daughter, kept her hidden away from him. “Marcia, can you get down here tomorrow night? There’s someone I want you to meet.”
“Who is it?”
He smiled to himself, thinking of Giselle’s dimples and the thick aura of mischief she carried around. Even Marcia would instantly see the resemblance between them. “It’s a surprise.”
“Hmm.” In his imagination, he could see her eyes lifting in curiosity and anticipation. “Okay. I don’t have repertoire classes tomorrow, so I can be down by suppertime. How’s that?”
“Perfect.”
“Can I stay for the weekend?”
Luke hung up. For a long moment he stood by the phone, staring at it as if it could foretell the future.
Once, he had known the answer to everything. Onc
e, he had moved with smooth, clean confidence in every situation, sure he knew what was best. Life had shown him how foolish that assumption could be.
He poured himself a second cup of coffee and finally identified the hollow feeling in his chest. He was scared. Scared cold. For years his life had been as predictable and dry as the Southwestern plains where he’d spent his first ten years. He wasn’t quite sure how the rains of this day’s events would change him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
Damn her! He slammed his hand against the counter, feeling anger and pain and sorrow and something so big and buried so deep he couldn’t put a name to it.
Leaves rattled against the window. If it had been Jessie alone who had walked into his life today, Luke knew what he would have done. He would not have spoken except in business. He would have avoided looking at her, shut her out until the business was done.
But Giselle changed everything. For his child, the only child he had, he would risk blowing open his defenses. For Giselle, he would risk it all.
Chapter Three
The next morning, Jessie awakened late. Giselle had already washed and dressed, boiled water for Jessie’s tea and now sat impatiently by the heavily curtained window.
“What time is it?” Jessie asked.
“Seven-fifty-seven,” Giselle replied, swinging her legs. “I tried to be quiet.”
“You didn’t wake me.” Jessie pulled the pillow over her face with a groan. “I just wish they’d invent a later morning.”
“I’ll make your tea while you’re in the shower.”
“How did I end up with such a cheery morning person?”
Giselle raised her eyebrows coyly. “Maybe my dad is a morning person like me.”
It was the sort of thing she said often, but this time it was a plea for information. Jessie propped herself on her elbows and pushed her hair out of her face. With a scowl, she said, “He is. A crack-of-dawn morning person.”
“I think he seems really nice, Mom.”
By unspoken agreement, neither of them had mentioned Luke’s name after leaving the restaurant, but Jessie hadn’t been foolish enough to believe the subject would remain closed. She considered brushing it away now, at least until she woke up a little.
Instead, she found herself saying, “I’m glad you like him.”
There wasn’t a cup of tea in the world that would make any of this easier. Giselle had grown up with the portrait of Luke that hung on Jessie’s studio wall, but there had not yet been occasion to tell her much more than they had differences that led to their separation before Giselle’s birth.
“But you need to understand that I don’t have to like him just because you do.”
Giselle said nothing for a minute. The physical appearance of her eyes had come from Jessie, but the stillness behind them was Luke through and through. “Do you think he loves me, Mom?”
“Yes.” Jessie plucked at the bed sheet, unable and unwilling to confess that she had left Luke, giving him no chance to decide how he felt about his child. “He will love you even more when he gets to know you like I do.”
“Are you going to let me visit with him?”
Jessie swung her feet off the bed and sighed. “It’s not that easy.”
Giselle pressed her lips together, seemingly acquiescent. Jessie gathered clean clothes and headed for the bathroom. As she reached the door, her daughter spoke. “It would be really nice to have more people in my family.”
“I didn’t know you minded that it was just you and me.”
“I don’t mind.” She dipped her head and a fall of hair flowed forward.
Leaning against the threshold—one foot on carpet, the other on tile—Jessie waited. This was something else that belonged to Luke, Giselle’s way of considering her words, weighing them out before she spoke them into reality. Jessie had always found it odd that a child could inherit mannerisms and gestures from a parent she had never seen, but she had. Giselle walked like Luke, too, and carried herself with his unconscious air of pride and calm strength.
The child lifted her head. “When we go to powwow, I always wish there was a grandma that was really mine, or cousins, or uncles. There’s always so many people in every family except ours.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I don’t know.” Giselle swung her feet, and the silver-threaded double strings on her high-topped tennis shoes swept the ground, back and forth.
Jessie bit her lip, the tiniest bit wounded that she hadn’t been enough for her daughter. Intellectually, she knew that was a ridiculous response—children always want a broad network of family. Alone with her father, Jessie had longed deeply for the wild Irish Catholic cousins they had left behind in Ohio when her mother died.
“You don’t have any grandparents, sweetie. Luke’s parents are dead, too.” It was one of the things that had drawn them together so long ago; both carried the wound of losing a mother at a vulnerable age. When Jessie was twelve, her mother had finally succumbed to her alcoholism. Luke lost his at sixteen to complications of tuberculosis. At least, she thought now, Luke’s mother had gone of more or less natural causes.
“But I have an aunt now,” Giselle said. “And a father.”
“Yes, you do.” She shivered in the cold room. “We’ll talk about it, honey. I promise.”
“Okay.”
This time Jessie hurried into the bathroom, closing the door firmly behind her to forestall any more discussion. Under the hot spray of the shower, she wondered how life had grown so complicated in less than twenty-four hours. Pursing her lips in a frown, she cast her eyes heavenward in mock severity. Some people sang in the shower. Jessie had long chats with the heavens.
“Thanks a lot,” she said dryly. “I’ve gone two whole months without smoking and now you drop Luke Bernali in my lap?”
No lightning split the sky to strike her dead, but a distinctly uncomfortable prod from her conscience was nearly as effective. “I’m only kidding,” she muttered, picking up a bar of scented soap. As she worked it into a lather over her face and shoulders, she sighed. “I’m sure you’ve got your reasons.”
A more religious or superstitious woman might have sworn that she heard a distinct, powerful chuckle. Jessie figured it was gurgling in the drain.
* * *
A good cup of scalding hot tea couldn’t stop the curious questions of a seven-year-old, Jessie thought as she inhaled the steam of her second cup, but it could certainly make other things appear in a much kinder light. Giselle had asked that they wear the same hairstyles today, and after French-braiding both sets of long hair, Jessie was energized.
“It’s a beautiful day,” she said, yanking the pull on the drapes. A thick scarf of mist draped the mountains. “I’ve always loved this city.”
“It’s pretty,” Giselle agreed. “Before we go home, do you think we could go to the mountains?”
“I wouldn’t think of leaving without taking you up there.” Impulsively, she hugged her daughter. “I’m so glad you got to come with me.”
“Me, too.” Giselle returned the embrace fiercely. “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too.” Straightening, she glanced at her naked wrist and realized she still didn’t have a watch. After three days without smoking, she’d taken it off. Time passed much more slowly when she glanced at her wrist every two minutes. “I think we’re supposed to meet Luke pretty soon. Did you have enough to eat to tide you over, or should I stop to get you a junky fast-food breakfast?”
“I can wait.”
“Let’s hit the road then, kiddo.” She draped a wide, fringed shawl over her sweater in lieu of a coat and opened the door.
On the way down the stairs, Giselle asked, “You used to live here, right?”
“For almost a year.” A terrible year, except for the fact that Giselle had been conceived. It was the year Jessie had lost everything but her mind—and even that had been a close call. The thought took a little of the sheen from her mood. Resolutel
y, she took Giselle’s hand. “Your dad was raised here.”
“I thought he lived on the res when he was little.”
“He did, when he was small. I think they moved here when he was nine or ten. His mother had tuberculosis, and they moved here for the climate.” She glanced at Giselle. “You can ask him. I’m sure he’d be happy to tell you…
It was the right thing to say. Giselle looked at Jessie with a brilliant, beaming smile. They rounded the corner toward the car, holding hands in friendly accord.
So the sight of the car was a doubly sickening shock. Jessie froze in her tracks, instinctively pulling Giselle back.
“Oh, yuck!” Giselle cried.
The small blue economy model was nearly unrecognizable, so smeared was it with a substance that gruesomely resembled blood. It covered all the windows, the hood and trunk and doors. Scrawled over the windshield were the words, Go Home.
Nothing could have induced Jessie to drive the car until it had been inspected engine to trunk.
They needed to meet Luke at the gallery in a half hour. Mentally, she raced through the choices available. She could call a cab, the police or Luke, who had given her his number the day before.
It wasn’t a tough decision. She needed help. “Let’s go call Luke.”
* * *
They waited in the hotel coffee shop. By the time Luke drove up in his well-preserved but very old pickup truck, snow had begun to fall lightly.
Jessie spotted the truck first and gathered her shawl. She dropped several dollars on the table for the coffee and Giselle’s muffin, then glanced out the window again to see Luke slam the door behind him.
She was braced for his appearance this time, but it didn’t help much. For a long, long moment, she was utterly riveted to his powerfully male beauty against the mountains and snow. Wind whipped the tails of his long black duster around his calves and caught at the hair on his collar, tossing black strands over his angular face. Firmly, he brushed the offending locks away and pressed a worn black cowboy hat down upon his head.
