“Do we really want to house someone careless enough to get caught in the first place?” Chato asks. A question that holds its own answer.
I hold my hands up to stop him. “I wasn’t asking for your permission. She’s staying here, no matter what. I was just telling you so you keep an eye out for anything coming from Harper. He was decent enough, but I don’t really trust him.”
Chema makes a face when he hears what I’m saying, but he doesn’t argue. That part always falls to Chato who, though he still calls me boss, doesn’t retain a shred of the subservience of an employee.
“So you’re not going to listen to us anymore?” he says now. “Is that what you’re telling us?”
“No. I’m telling you this ink falls outside of your rules.”
“Why?”
For some reason his continued questioning ticks me off. “Because the property’s still in my name and I said so?”
But I don’t think there’s a human alive who can intimidate Chato. Or pull rank on him.
“Swear to God, Boss, if you’re going to turn cabrón and not answer our questions, I’m going to beat the crap out of you.”
Given a few more minutes he probably would have, because even though I don’t stand a chance against him in a fight, I’m not in the habit of backing down either.
“Because I can make instaskin,” Meche’s voice floats down from above. She must be standing just outside the bedroom door where she can see us but we can’t see her.
Chato doesn’t seem mollified, but before he can say anything, she adds. “And he knows me from before. And there’s a reason I’m here.”
When she first starts down the steps, I think she’s changed so much they won’t recognize her from my paintings. But each step she takes fleshes her out more so that by the time she’s standing next to us she’s exactly as I remember her. The tiny bees dance in perfect, lazy figure eights around her head.
My compas turn to look at me.
“Why didn’t you just say so?” Chema says under his breath.
I shrug.
“I guess we’ll be off,” he says. Loud. So she can hear it.
“No,” I say. “Stay for dinner.”
The guys look at me as if I’ve lost my mind.
I introduce them to each other officially then and turn back to making food. The mushroom slices go into the pan sizzling with butter, and as soon as they develop their roasty caramel I throw the venison steaks in with them.
“This place … it’s got some special qualities, doesn’t it?” I hear Meche ask them.
They don’t answer.
“Like, it’s big-hearted enough to accommodate all your magicks,” she continues.
I turn from my pan a moment. Chato and Chema look pained, as if she’s broached the unbroachable. And, really, she has. We don’t talk about what we do here – or how – even to each other.
“Which one of you makes the property lines impossible to cross?” she asks, ordinary, as if she were asking who cut the firewood neatly stacked in the woodbox by the stove.
She smiles a little when Chema glances at me, then catches himself and looks down at his beer.
“I tried to get on this property for weeks,” she says then. “I kept ending up somewhere else and having to fight to find my way back.”
“I set it up so one of the three of us has to bring you onto the land the first time,” I say, turning back to the sizzling pan. “Like vouching for you. After that, there’s no problem.”
I take the pan off the burner and set it aside while I get plates.
“What else?” she asks.
“We’ve got WiFi and great cell phone reception where we shouldn’t,” I say. “As if we’re in some connectivity bubble. But at the same time, we don’t show up on any GPS. I’ve never asked but I think that’s Chato’s doing.”
“Boss,” he says, a bit like a warning.
I hear Meche’s delighted laugh as I divvy up the cooked purslane and dress it with a drizzle of malt vinegar.
“Y vos?” she says to Chema. I can’t figure how she knows he’s Central American and fond of the superinformal form of address.
He doesn’t answer.
“Water,” I say after a moment. “We shouldn’t be able to drink safely from the creek with all the run-off from adjacent pastures, but we can. There’s probably a lot more they’re both doing, but that’s the stuff I know for sure.”
There’s complete silence as I finish each plate with a scoop of quinoa cooked long enough for the grain to explode and turn fluffy. When I turn around Chato and Chema are glaring at me, Meche looks thoughtful.
“What?” I say as I set the plates in front of them. “She’s got magic, too, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Not everyone sees the bees, Del,” she says.
Chato grunts, takes a swig of beer, eyes her suspiciously. “I see ‘em,” he says finally.
Her eyes lock on his. It’s weird, like they’re taking the measure of each other.
She reaches over and tugs on the thin chain he wears around his neck. The medallion that’s usually hidden under his shirt rests in her hand and his seamed, tough face seals right up.
“La Morenita speaks for you,” she says. Then she lets the medallion swing back to its place, and pulls out a similar one from under her t-shirt. “La Caridad,” she says.
He looks away, but something’s changed and I see the tension leave his shoulders.
Chema doesn’t wait for her to reach. He yanks a small, square pendant from under his plaid shirt and opens it as he places it in Meche’s palm.
“My wife,” he says. “She died before I crossed.”
She nods as she looks at the photo in its plain locket, then smiles when she hands it back.
“Don’t look at me,” I say when she turns my way. “I don’t wear jewelry.”
“And nobody speaks for you.” She sounds fond, and just a little bit sad when she says it.
“I hardly speak for me.” I grin at her, and after a moment she matches it.
The conversation gets easier as we eat and drink together. Chato and Chema really do finish off all my beers, and by the time they leave it is as if Meche has filled the vacant spaces we didn’t even know were between us.
“Will you drink some coffee if I brew another pot?” I say to Meche as she leaves the table and curls her long frame into the Morris chair by the cold woodstove. I hadn’t planned it, but now that I’m alone with Meche I’m struck by something a lot like hunger – a craving that calls for mixing a color I can see but can’t name, and laying it down so it catches on the tooth of paper just so.
“Sure,” she says. “I’ll always do coffee.”
I tape a sheet of Arches on the backing board as the pot percolates, then start mixing powdered pigments together, guessing at the proportions I’ll need to arrive at the color I’ve envisioned. Meche doesn’t move from where she is, but I can tell she’s watching my prep. I break to serve the coffee, then wander back to the easel.
“You don’t mind, do you?” I ask belatedly as the first, long stroke of color cuts the white paper nearly in half.
I can hear her laugh. It takes three more strokes before I realize there might be more to her answer. I stop, poke my head out from behind the easel to look at her.
“I’d more or less be insulted if you didn’t,” she says.
“So you are a muse.”
She shakes her head. The bees fly off for a moment, then return to their usual lemiscate patterns around her. “No. Just Meche.”
Completely contrary to my intention, the color of dawn I mix on the palette lays on the paper as a thin wash, not a solid. I’m not sure what I’m painting, but I decide I like the variegated window of rich yellow I’ve laid on the page and I lose track of time while I consider what to do next. Not a face. And not a realistically rendered landscape either.
“You remember coming to my peña?” she asks after a while.
“Of course.”
I shake a couple of grains of red pigment into the shade I’ve been working, then blindly pick another brush out of the jar. My arm starts to move over the paper without my attention. “There are some things you don’t forget.”
“Like claiming you had no magic?” she says. “So, tell me, how does it work?”
I don’t answer right away. “I ask the land to do for me. It’s a conversation for all that I don’t always get a straight answer. And it’s not my magic, it’s the land’s. I can’t do anything like it anywhere else.”
“You’ve tried?”
“Well, no. But some things you just know.”
“And the painting?”
I laugh. “If I had magic for that I’d sell a lot more work than I do.”
“But you’re pretty particular about your paints.”
I look over the messy collection of pots and tubes on the stand with my palette. I wonder that she’s noticed.
“I hate acrylics,” I say after a moment. “They don’t lay on paper or canvas the same way.”
“They don’t have the same memory,” she says.
When I come out from behind the easel to meet her eyes, she adds, “Their pigments aren’t ground from components that once knew earth.”
Then, “Earth magic, Del. Not particular to this place, much as you love it.”
I can feel my jaw lock and set. “Were you asking me about my magic, or telling me?”
She laughs, a little rueful. “Sorry.”
I duck back behind the shield of my easel, but don’t start painting again. Everything I’ve asked the land to do since I returned to it runs across my mind as if it were a movie screen. Shale heaving above the creek to form a dry crossing; impassible outcroppings flattening themselves to paths; the stretching and contracting that ultimately exhausts uninvited guests until they turn away from the boundaries of the place.
“You’ve made it impossible for the rest of the world to touch this land, only abut it, ” Meche says quietly. “Your ‘conversation’ with it has turned it into an in-between place. A spot of safety and kinship. But unfortunately, only for a lucky few.”
I look down at the dry pigments I’ve been using. Suddenly the desire to mix until I stumble upon the color I envisioned is gone. I twist open a tube of prepared paint and squeeze a long snake of color across the palette. It is a deep red with no trace of yellow or orange. I go first for a thinly bristled brush, but then choose a broad fan instead.
“You think I could do more but choose not to,” I say, still fiddling, not laying the color over what’s gone before.
“Well, what about you?” I say, as I slam the new color on the paper in angry, careless strokes. “As I recall, almost everything about you is morally ambiguous.”
“That’s what you remember?” she asks quietly. Then, “I’m tied to an element with different gifts and obligations. Mine is the catalyst in a formulation.”
As she talks, an uneasy feeling creeps from my gut to my chest.
“I think maybe you scare the shit out of me,” I say.
After a while I feel her come to stand behind me.
“Funny how you can still see the yellow and orange through the red,” she says when she looks at what I’ve painted.”You wouldn’t think it’d be possible.”
“It shouldn’t be,” I say. “It should be opaque. The paint must be old.”
“Or behaving badly,” I add, a bit like an apology.
“Why bother to paint the other in the first place if you want the red to obscure it?”
I shrug.
“Tell me.”
“Sometimes the memory of something is enough.”
“Ouch,” she says, then gives me a small smile before she heads upstairs.
But I don’t believe what I’ve told her.
I clench the brush, the easel, the stand with tubes and jars of pigment. Anything to keep me from following her exactly as her bees do, blindly chasing infinites.
I don’t remember finishing the painting.
But there it is in the morning, still taped to its backing board and ready to be ripped free. It is like nothing I’ve painted before. The oblong of carmine is underlaid with a visible array of yellow and orange: from lemon to ochre to the rosy, hopeful salmon hues of dawn. Scrawled across the window of paint are evenly spaced lines of words. My handwriting, sloppy but legible.
I lean forward. Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm, it starts. Then: for stern as death is love, relentless as the nether world is devotion; its flames are a blazing fire. Deep waters cannot quench love, nor floods sweep it away.
The painting feels like a breakthrough.
* * *
I don’t count the days.
It might be weeks, or months, or maybe, if I really want to punish myself when I think about it, closer to a year.
As soon as I get back from work every day, I take her with me on my rambles to acquaint her with the farthest reaches of the acreage and everyone making a home on it. Chato and Chema join us every evening for dinner. After, Meche and I talk and mix up batches of skin in infinitely subtle shades until it gets so late we’re goofy with exhaustion and coffee. All of our nights end the same way as the first: with me clinging to my strange new paintings so I won’t cave to fire and follow her upstairs.
I go searching for her one Saturday morning that I’ve overslept and she’s not in the cabin when I wake up. I walk the expanse of the property, stopping finally at the road that cuts between my land and Harper’s.
Some of his sorry-looking cows are in the pasture, but I see the old farmer inside the barn, leaning up against a milking stanchion. Meche’s talking to him, brightly gold in the dark of the barn. I call out, and after a few attempts, I catch their attention. They come out of the barn door together, heading toward me as I start across the road to meet them.
Harper is laughing, I remember that and the way he leans in – as if Meche is a lifelong friend – even as I feel my body lift with the impact. I can hear the car stop, the squeal of rubber on asphalt, the babble of four or five voices speaking at once.
Everything seems so normal, except I’m on my back on the road staring up at a perfect Prussian blue sky like the one that greeted me as a kid when I’d passed through the trial of the cave. Meche’s face, and behind that Harper’s and three other alarmed faces I don’t know, swim into view. I wonder at the fact they’re so large they block out the sky and manage to turn it black in an instant.
I open my eyes in a dim hospital room, strapped to more monitors than I can count when I turn my head to look. I feel more than see someone get up from the chair in the corner and come to stand by my bed.
“Del?” Cassie’s face is creased with lines I haven’t seen before.
“I’m here. More or less.”
“Shut up, you idiot.” I feel her slap me lightly on the arm. “If you knew how worried I’ve been you wouldn’t say anything like that.”
“I must have been out quite a while for you to have gotten here from Hastings already.”
Her laugh is short, a trace hysterical.
“I’ve been in Smithville for a week. Mom, too. And Finn came up yesterday.”
“Jesus.” I try to sit up, but though the rest of me moves, my legs stay put.
Maybe she sees the panic in my eyes. Her hand comes to rest on my cheek, her thumb stroking the skin beneath it with a tenderness I have to work to remember from her.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m going to get you away from this godawful Podunk hospital and take you where someone can actually do something about that.”
She stays with me through the nurses’ garbled explanations, through the night and into the next morning when the neurologist makes his rounds and tries to explain the weird and woolly ways of the brain. Like how even though my legs are intact, I can’t move them and most likely never will again.
I don’t say much, just listen, and watch the array of expressions that chase across the faces of family gathered
around my bed. Cassie’s family, not mine. My family’s missing in action, and no matter how much I hope to hear their footsteps in the hall leading to my door, they don’t show.
I fade in and out of sleep and the next time I rouse Finn is the one in the room, slumped in the visitor chair in the corner.
“Hey,” he says when he notices me awake. “Want me to call Cassie? She’s somewhere out there making calls and filing paperwork so you can be transferred down to the medical center in Hastings.”
“No,” I say. “I have something to ask you.”
“Okay, but she and Mom are the ones that have been dealing with the doctors.”
“Not about that. I’m reeling with too much information and not enough understanding about all of it anyway. I was just wondering about the people who were with me when I was hit.”
Finn shifts in his seat, then leans forward. “Your neighbor’s been in a couple of times to check on your progress. And Meche, too. But listen, if you think Cassie’s going to let her see you, you’re nuts.”
“Why not?”
He just gives me a look.
“When are they moving me?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I want to see Meche before I go. And Chato and Chema, too.”
“Who?”
“Nevermind. Just find a way to get Meche the message, okay?”
He shakes his head, but I know it doesn’t mean no even as he leaves.
He comes back after a long absence. “Meche says she knows some instaskinned ink who works graveyard. He’ll sneak them in sometime tonight. I don’t know when exactly, but keep the lights out and pretend to sleep because I don’t think the nurses bother to check on you if they think you’re resting comfortably.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s on you. If Cassie ever hears about it….” He starts to leave again, then stops without turning around.
“Whatever’s between you and Meche, you still love my sister, don’t you? That’s why you haven’t signed the divorce papers, right?”
I’m not sure how he knows about the divorce papers, and I don’t ask. I don’t answer either. I’ve never been easy with words and to come up with something even remotely close to the truth I’d have to give name to some pretty complicated feelings.
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