Isabel's Daughter

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

But neither of them is listening to me.

  “Oh, Avery…” Dale’s thin black eyebrows knit together in faux concern. “We can’t have you working when you don’t feel good.”

  The threat of unemployment has cleared my head like a whiff of ammonia. “I’m fine. Just give me a minute, okay?”

  “Take all the time you need, of course,” he purrs. “If you feel up to it, come on back to the kitchen. If not, I’ll get Horacio to take you home. We can manage.” He flashes his teeth again. “Well. No rest for the wicked.” He picks up the two intact trays of rellenos and vanishes, leaving the door standing open.

  DeGraf hands me the water, frowning after him.

  I drink about half of it and hand the glass back. “I’d better get going while I still have a job.” I start to get up, but his hand on my shoulder stops me.

  “Are you going to be all right? You don’t have to do this. I’ll talk to Dale and I’m quite sure—”

  “No!” It comes out too loud. “I mean, you don’t need to talk to him. I’m fine. Just…kind of startled.”

  I slide off the chair onto my knees and start gathering up the chiles. There’s nothing wrong with most of them, except cosmetically. For a few seconds I debate whether it would be unforgivably tacky to ask for something to take them home in. I hate to see food wasted.

  Paul DeGraf says, “That’s understandable. It’s not every day you come across a Tom Hemmings portrait of your mother.”

  I look up. “How do you know she’s my mother?”

  “Leave those.” Something in his voice makes me comply. He takes my arm and pulls me to my feet gently but definitely. “It’s fairly obvious,” he says.

  “Can you tell me—” I turn for a last look at the portrait. “Who is she?”

  He clears his throat. “Her name was Isabel Colinas.”

  “Was?” My head swivels around and I try to hold my expression in neutral, but his face says it all too clearly.

  “God, what am I thinking? I’m sorry. I should have—She…passed away. Some years ago.”

  “Oh.” I nod. And I keep nodding, like one of those dolls on a car dashboard. “Well…finding her was a lot to ask. I guess finding her alive was a bit much.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. “Look, this has to be difficult for you. I can have someone take you home—”

  “I never knew her.” I blot my forehead with the now warm washcloth. “I don’t harbor a lot of daughterly feelings.”

  He reaches into his shirt pocket, holds out a card. “I’d be happy to talk to you about her,” he says. “Call me when you’re ready.”

  “Thank you.” I stick the card in my pocket without looking at it and head for the door. When I pull it shut behind me, Paul DeGraf is kneeling on the floor picking up chiles rellenos.

  Rita wanders out barefoot in the blue terrycloth robe that makes her look like a little kid. Mascara is smudged under her eyes; her hair is a blond haystack. Coffee vapors float up from the clear glass mug that she stole from the Ore House.

  She squints at her watch. “Ave, what the hell are you doing? It’s not even light out.”

  I laugh at her. “Nobody said you had to get up.”

  “I got up to pee and couldn’t go back to sleep.”

  She drops onto the couch, an overstuffed, high-backed lump in a yellow green color that makes me think of motion sickness. But it was cheap, and Rita’s managed to camouflage it with an Indian patterned blanket that she found at a garage sale. She’s actually done a pretty fair job of camouflaging the whole apartment—an ugly white box of a place—with nothing more than a few quarts of paint, some fabric remnants, and a lot of upwardly mobile ideas from Martha Stewart. Considering what rents are in Santa Fe and what we might have got stuck in, it’s not so bad.

  The term “funky” could have been coined to describe our neighborhood on the unfashionable west side of town. The streets are lined with the curving forms and earthy shades of adobe houses, shoehorned in elbow to asshole. Some with crumbling corners, peeling trim, a mattress propped against the wall on the portal, the odd pickup truck on blocks in the yard. Some painstakingly restored to mint condition and landscaped with desert plants by preservationist yuppies who couldn’t afford to buy on the east side. Others simply maintained at the status quo—walls painted, gardens tidy—by people just trying to keep their heads above water.

  There are also a few commercial enterprises—a grocery and carniceria, a video rental place with a window full of lurid posters for Spanish language action movies, a small tailor shop, a coin laundry, and us. Our apartment’s upstairs and Alma’s Casa Blanca, a two-chair beauty salon, is downstairs. Behind the building there’s a narrow strip of gravel with space for five cars and a big old álamo, or cottonwood, to shade our rickety balcony.

  It has its advantages. I mean, if you have to live over a business, at least a beauty shop is relatively quiet—not like a bar. They open late and close early because Linda and Alma, the beauticians, both have families to take care of. And they give us half-price haircuts because we pay the rent on time.

  “How was the party?” I sip at my coffee.

  A smile lights her face. “It was fun. I wish you could have come. I met this cute guy named Rick…something. It’ll come to me as soon as I wake up. He’s a reporter for the New Mexican.”

  I shake my head. “Forget it. Reporters drink too much and don’t make nearly enough money.”

  When she wrinkles her nose, she looks like one of those little fluffy white dogs that rich ladies carry around under their arms. She blows on the coffee to cool it. “Soler. That’s his name. Rick Soler. Well, actually it’s Enrique.” Without waiting for me to comment, she asks, “How was your night?”

  “Interesting.”

  She looks at me over the rim of her cup. “What’s ‘interesting’ mean?”

  “I saw a painting of my mother.”

  She swallows what’s in her mouth, then sputters, “Shit! You made me scorch my tonsils.” She sets the cup on the table and leans forward, now fully awake. “Tell me what happened, pronto!”

  I have to be selective about what I tell Rita. She tends to get fixated on certain details and she can drive me nuts wanting to know more. So I try to explain what happened in very general terms.

  “Oh, my God, Avery. This is incredible. How the hell can you be so calm? How could you come home and go to sleep? Why didn’t you wake me up? Who is this guy? Are you going to talk to him again?”

  “He gave me his card—”

  She rips it out my hand and studies it briefly.

  “Paul DeGraf? Jesus God, Avery. Do you know who he is? He owns Pinnacle Gallery and Buena Vista. He’s got money out the wazoo.” She looks up at me. “So what did he say about your mother?”

  “Nothing, really. Except that her name was Isabel Colinas.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Just about. We didn’t have time to talk. I was working, and Dale was worked into a major frenzy.”

  “Well, you’re going to call him today, aren’t you? This morning?”

  “I need to think—”

  “You’ve had twenty-five years to think. Now you can know.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  She folds her arms, daring me. “It’s not that hard, either. You’ve got the questions, he’s got the answers. What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know. I just want to think about it.”

  Call me when you’re ready,” he said.

  Until now, it’s never occurred to me that I might not be ready. But suddenly I’m procrastinating. Maybe just because it’s the end of the quest. Once I know who she was, The Truth becomes simply more information.

  Or maybe I’m afraid of what I’ll find out. But how could it be any worse than what I already know? That my mother didn’t want me. That she dumped me in the basement of an institution and never looked back, never tried to find me, never knew—or presumably cared—whether I lived or died.

  While I, by
contrast, have spent the better part of my twenty-five years wondering about her.

  People who live their lives surrounded by family never give it a second thought. They know their eyes are blue because their mother’s were, that they’re pigeon-toed just like Aunt Sue, their musical talent came from their father, and their tendency to hold up gas stations when the moon is full is from Great Uncle Carl, the train robber.

  Obviously I had a mother and father. But I have no idea who they were. Where they were. If they loved or hated each other. Or whether they’d even recognize each other if they passed on the street.

  Monday morning I go back to Eyes Right and order another brown contact.

  Days pass, then weeks. Somehow it gets to be May. I can always think of an excuse not to call DeGraf. I haven’t had a chance to sort things out. I don’t have time to meet him, and I don’t want to talk about this over the phone. It’s too early—he won’t be there; too late—he’ll be gone. Midday, he’ll be busy. And so on.

  Work is getting more frenetic every day as summer season revs up, rushing headlong toward the climax of Fiestas de Santa Fe in early September. There are cocktail parties and dinners and gallery openings, picnics and barbecues. Opera season starts in July with preperformance tailgate parties and postperformance dessert buffets. During the day I take bookings and do site surveys and client hand-holding. Juana and I have the coveted full-time slots, so we help with bids and kitchen prep, too. Most nights I work as a server. My schedule rarely coincides with Rita’s, so I don’t have to offer any explanations for the fog that seems to surround me.

  When I do have some free time, I’m usually so tired that it’s all I can do to feed myself before I stumble off to bed. The frenzy of activity keeps the shadow of my mother at bay for a while, but then late one Saturday night when I’m tossing hollow-eyed in my bed, too exhausted even for sleep, the past comes looking for me.

  two

  I read where some famous doctor said that babies are like little blank slates, waiting to be written on, waiting to be made into whoever they will be.

  This, as any baby knows, is a load of horseshit. Babies are born with the seeds of who they’ll be already inside them. When you plant a sunflower seed, you get a sunflower. If it gets too much water or not enough light or the soil’s too heavy, it might grow scrawny or droopy. The leaves might shrivel and drop. It might die. But it’s not going to come up a columbine.

  Babies can see and hear and smell and feel. They know all kinds of stuff they’re not supposed to know. But they can’t tell anyone. And by the time they learn how to talk, they’ve forgotten what they knew.

  So it was no big surprise to me the first time I heard the story of how I was found. After all, I was there.

  Alamitos, Colorado—in English, the name means “little cottonwood trees.” It’s a small farm town in the San Luis Valley, down by the New Mexico border. High and dry, flat and windy, ringed by mountains—Sangre de Cristos to the east and south, San Juan, La Garita, and Conejos-Brazos to the north and west. White frosted in winter, dirt brown in spring, green in summer. The cottonwoods that it’s named for turn gold in autumn, and the air is thick with the damp earth smell of potatoes, piled at the edges of fields, stacked in bins and boxes, truckloads and railroad cars full.

  Besides potatoes, the valley’s other big claim to fame is the Great Sand Dunes—fifty square miles of sand, dropped when the prevailing westerly winds run into the Sangre de Cristos. I lived in Alamitos for the first thirteen years of my life and only saw the dunes once. I knew without being told that they were a freak of nature, didn’t belong there—a pale and shifting ocean, high in the Rockies.

  San Juan Avenue runs straight through the middle of town. There’s the square brick post office and the El Azteca movie theater with its pink and green neon sign, a couple of banks, Corie’s Café on one side, Tina’s Cantina across the street. There’s a hardware store and Raymond’s Corner Market, where we used to go in the afternoons to drink lemon slushees and watch the older kids from the public high school smoke and make out. By the time I left Alamitos, Raymond’s was closed, and everybody was hanging out at the new supermarket north of town on the Del Norte Highway.

  Crossing San Juan Avenue at perfect right angles are ten streets—San Luis, Cerrillos, Hatcher, Selden, Laguna, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth. It’s like they ran out of ideas for street names. Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Streets, that’s where the poorest people lived, behind crumbling adobe walls, or in wood frame houses with peeling paint and tarpaper roofs. Rusting cars bloomed among the weeds, and skinny mongrel dogs laid on porches.

  Up at the other end of town, the streets were wide. There were sidewalks and tall, arching cottonwood trees and big old houses. On Selden Street was the biggest house of all, a red brick building called the Randall Carson Foundling Home.

  That’s where I made my official debut in the basement one frigid January night, wearing a soiled diaper and an undershirt embroidered with flowers; I was wrapped in a bath towel from the Stardust Motor Inn.

  The story goes that the janitor, a nearsighted Arapaho named Charlie Elvin, was in a hurry to lock up and go home to his nice warm trailer where his wife and his dinner waited. Without his glasses, he thought the bundle he bumped with his work boot might be some stray dog that had crawled into the relative warmth of the furnace room to die.

  Charlie might have been half blind, but his ears were sharp. He heard a jerky, gasping sound. The bundle was breathing. Crouching down, he found himself looking into a pair of small, dark eyes. Eyes, he later told his wife, that were somehow not right, although at the time, he couldn’t say why.

  He picked up the baby, and just as quickly set it down. It smelled like his chicken coop on a summer afternoon. He ran to the door. Then back to check the baby.

  “I’ll be right back,” he blurted, sprinting for the night duty station.

  Annette Colby, the nurse on duty that evening, was a plump, sensible young woman with short brown hair. When Charlie burst into her tiny office, babbling about a child in the basement, her first thought was that one of the children had fallen down the steep stairs. She lunged for her black bag.

  “I’ve told the board a thousand times to put a gate in front of those stairs—”

  “No ma’am.” Charlie shifted his weight impatiently. “It’s a baby. Poor little thing looks half froze.”

  She narrowed her pale blue eyes at him. Charlie’d been known to take a nip, but he’d been going to AA for nearly five years now. “That’s not possible,” she said calmly. “How would a baby get in the furnace room?”

  “Damned if—’scuse me. I don’t know, lady, but it’s there. I’m tellin’ you. Come on with me.”

  Her own panting filled her ears as she followed Charlie down the stairs and through the long, dim hall that smelled of floor wax, taking two steps to his one. Through the high windows she could see huge, silent snowflakes drifting between naked tree branches. The wind had stopped momentarily.

  “I don’t hear anything,” she said as he pushed the door aside for her. “Is it…?”

  “Was when I left.”

  “Did you bother to—” The baby interrupted her with an impatient wail. “Dear Heavenly Father.” She bent and picked up the shivering bundle, tucked it inside her jacket, towel and all, wrinkling her nose at the stench. “Charlie. Run upstairs and call Dr. Tatum. Hurry now.”

  As she climbed the stairs, lost in her conversation with God, she felt a tug at her blouse. She looked down.

  Locked in a tiny, filthy fist was the necklace Annette’s mother had given her—a gleaming butterfly—made by a silversmith named James Avery. Annette took it as a sign from God, and she named me James Avery. When in the course of the doctor’s examination, they discovered I was a girl, Annette simply inserted a comma.

  Name: James, Avery.

  The thirteen years at Carson are blurred now, like photographs taken by someone in a hurry to get somewhere else. It’s mostly the
smells that come rushing back, dragging the images behind them—pine disinfectant is the chilly tile bathroom with its row of white sinks. Chalk dust is the stifling paneled room where we had Bible study. Moth-balls—the closet where scratchy wool blankets summered, the heavy glass doorknob and giant key.

  And then there’s the kitchen. Steam from dried flint corn simmering in water and baking soda. The dusty smell of dried chiles that came from Esperanza Verdugo—a round person with a long gray braid, snapping dark eyes, smooth brown arms, and a gold front tooth. The cook at Carson. Not a housemother or a teacher or a nurse. No degree in psychology or social work or early childhood education. No counseling credentials. If the truth be told, she couldn’t read or write, and her English sometimes sent me into fits of laughter.

  But of all the Carson staff, it was Esperanza who always seemed to be wading through a river of kids. We’d hang on her arms, grab at her skirts, cling to her legs. She was the one who tied shoelaces, wiped runny noses, smuggled bizcochitos into the library. She was the one we called Tia or Nana, Abuelita or Gramma. The one we screamed for when we woke from bad dreams.

  There was a chair with one leg shorter than the rest. I used to stand on the seat, rock precariously back and forth, watching her make posole on the big black stove.

  When I was eight, she let me shell peas and beans. When I was ten, she taught me to pat out masa dough by hand into perfect tortillas. She said it was one of those things that’s best learned young, before you start thinking about it too much. She brought her own comal—a big flat round griddle of unglazed pottery—not like the newer ones of cast iron or stainless steel. It had been her mother’s, she said, and her grandmother’s before that. She greased it with a little rag dipped in Crisco. She kept a bowl of cold water at her side, and she dipped her hand in the water, pressing and turning the tortillas so they didn’t stick. When they were browned on one side, she pressed the side of her wet palm on the edge of the tortilla and flipped it over.