Isabel's Daughter

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  “World’s full of people, Avery. You got to learn to handle all kinds. Just don’t let anyone do you bad.”

  One day in the summer before my senior year I walked in alone, and I saw right away another reason to hurry up and get out of there. Will Cameron was squatting on the floor in front of a row of shelves, sifting through a bin full of bolts.

  He was the one who’d kept Kevin from pulverizing me that day in the street, and he was the only person at school besides Jimmie John who ever said hi when I saw him in the hall or in the cafeteria. We’d been in lots of classes together ever since I came to Florales. Sometimes I could feel him looking at me and when I looked up, he’d smile, and I’d look away. It got to be almost a game.

  He wasn’t handsome, but he had these blue-gray eyes like the sky when a storm’s just breaking up. Not that I spent a lot of time looking at his eyes. I just happened to notice them once, that’s all.

  He didn’t play sports or belong to any of the Mickey Mouse groups like 4-H or Chess Club that met in the afternoons after class. His family owned the Cameron Ranch, which was pretty famous for their cutting horses, so most days by three-fifteen, he was gone. Back to the ranch, mucking out stalls or whatever you have to do on a ranch.

  During long sleepy afternoons I’d stare out the study hall window and daydream about those horses. About watching him ride one, the way cowboys do, cutting out the cows that have to be branded from the rest of the herd. It seemed absolutely real, like if I went outside and looked on the ground, I’d see hoofprints and horse shit.

  I started past the aisle where he was, figuring he didn’t see me, but he said, “Hi, Avery,” and smiled without looking up.

  I said hi and kept walking. Past the screwdrivers and wrenches, past the different hammers and utility knives and saws, back to where the different sizes of twine and rope sat in neat stacks off by themselves. I measured the three yards of nylon cord that Cassie wanted and took it up to where Floyd sat perched on his stool.

  “That it?” he said.

  I practically threw the money at him, grabbed my sack, and headed for the door.

  “You want your receipt?”

  “No thanks.” I didn’t look back.

  When I heard footsteps coming behind me, my grip tightened on the brown paper bag.

  “You might need it. If you want to return anything.” The voice was Will’s. I never thought of him as Cam. Since we weren’t friends officially. I wondered what it would be like to have a nickname that wasn’t insulting, like Witch Girl. For one thing, it meant that people liked you.

  He was walking next to me, acting completely normal and relaxed, and all of a sudden, I was having trouble breathing. He took the bag from my hand, dropped the receipt in it, and handed it back to me.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” His boots made a hollow tapping sound on the section of sidewalk where a gaping hole was covered with planks. “School starts in a couple weeks.

  “Yeah.” The word cracked in my dry mouth.

  “Guess I’ll see you then.”

  “Okay.” I could only look at him sideways. He was looking down the street and I noticed his nose was a little bit crooked, like maybe it was broken once. Suddenly I was imagining this whole story about him getting in a fight with one of his brothers. He looked over at me and grinned, white teeth against his tan face, then he turned on his boot heel and walked back toward the hardware store.

  When I looked up, I saw Cassie in the doorway of Mami’s Café, talking to Anna Marion and pretending like she wasn’t watching.

  The snake bit me because I broke the rules Cassie’d taught me.

  Watch where you put your hands and feet. Don’t gather wood in the dark.

  But I was in a hurry and it was cold, and it was just the woodpile on our back porch. I even hesitated like you do when you’re about to do something you know is wrong, but you think this one time won’t hurt. So just about when I’d decided that this one time wouldn’t hurt, I heard the warning. It started with three slow crick, crick, cricks, like a Spanish dancer warming up, and accelerated into a nonstop warning rattle. Instead of freezing the way Cassie always said to do, I jerked my hand back, but the snake was lots quicker than me.

  At first I didn’t feel it and then I did. My inner arm about six inches above the wrist started to tingle and burn.

  “Shit!” I swore, backing slowly away from the woodpile. I stared at the two beads of blood, embarrassed at my stupidity. Then I ran inside. Cassie was stirring a pot of beans that simmered with a ham hock on the stove. She turned off the flame.

  “Damnation, child!” It was the first and only time I ever heard her swear.

  She ran into her bedroom and came back with a small white cardboard box. “I don’t s’pose you got a look at him?”

  I shook my head. At the kitchen sink, she let it bleed into the drain, then washed my arm with soap and water.

  “Do you have to cut me?” I remembered seeing that in a movie once. They cut an X over the puncture marks and this guy sucked out the venom.

  “Course not.” She held my arm up to the light, peering at the red place that was beginning to swell. “Sit.” She motioned to a chair at the kitchen table. “Let your arm hang down at your side.”

  My throat tightened with fear. Or was it poison? From the box, Cassie took a white tube with a suction cup on one end, placed it over the bite and pumped. Other than a slight sucking, I felt nothing but the throb of the wound.

  “Cassie, am I—will I die?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Lord, no, child. You’re far too ornery for that. The snake might, though.”

  She was trying to make me laugh, but I could tell by her jerky movements as she grabbed her black quilted jacket from its hook and the way she didn’t meet my eyes that she was worried.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to sit right in this chair.”

  “Should I lay down?” I asked.

  She shook her head vigorously. “Keep the bite lower than your heart. And don’t…” She was unwinding the stretchy bandage that she sometimes wore on her right wrist, then rewinding it around my arm a couple inches above the bite. “Don’t take this off. No walking around. I’m goin’ to get Amalia.” And she was out the door.

  If I’d thought hard enough about it, I would’ve been a lot more scared than I was. Here was Cassie, this old lady, running off in the dark to Amalia’s a couple miles away. She could fall and break her leg. She could have a heart attack or get hit by a car as she dashed along the road. She could lie in the desert all night and not be found. Even if somebody found her, they wouldn’t know about me sitting primly in my chair, arm resting carefully on the table, inflated with poison.

  Even if nothing happened and she got there okay, how long would it take? How long did I have? I felt almost like crying, but it seemed pointless, not to mention shameful. For the first time in my life, my fate was truly bound up with someone else’s. It was a strange and unpleasant sensation.

  Rattlesnake bites were common enough around Florales that I’d heard talk. I knew that most people didn’t die from them, but I also knew that being small, I had more to worry about than a normal-sized person getting the same amount of venom. I’d heard people say that it was bad to get all upset and scared, because the faster your heart was beating, the faster the poison would circulate.

  I looked cautiously over at the wound, now fiery red and puffy. My arm was starting to tingle. From poison or just from holding it still for so long. How long? How long had Cassie been gone?

  Finally I heard Amalia’s truck rattling down the arroyo. In the next minute she and Cassie burst in the door, followed by a man. He pushed past them and came close to me, lifting my arm, touching the area around the puncture with surprisingly gentle fingers. He peered into my face, pulled up my eyelids, and beamed a tiny flashlight in my eyes.

  I squinted at the light.

  “How ya doin’, A
very?” I could tell he wasn’t expecting an answer. He had bushy eyebrows and dark stained teeth, and his breath stank of tobacco. Without another word, he picked me up and carried me outside to a dirty white car. He put me in the front seat, Cassie and Amalia climbed in back, and we took off in a spray of gravel and dust.

  When we got out to the main highway, I asked him where we were going.

  “Darby,” he said. He never took his eyes off the road as his foot pressed down on the accelerator and the orange bar inched across the speedometer past 50, 55, 60.

  “How come?” I didn’t know exactly how far Darby was, but I thought it was a pretty good ways from Florales.

  “Because that’s the closest clinic with antivenin. How you feelin’?”

  “Like I might puke.”

  “Amalia, give her one of those blue things.” The blue thing turned out to be a cold pack. “Hold it on your forehead,” he said. My arm felt like a roasting hot dog being held by tongs over a flame. That’s where I would have liked to put the ice, but I did what he said.

  Cassie and Amalia murmured in the backseat, but I couldn’t make sense of anything. Little orange and purple shapes like puzzle pieces hovered in front of my eyes, and when I blinked they fell away, to be replaced by others. The headlights searched for something to illuminate in the endless black tunnel we were speeding through. I lost all track of time, all sense of the wheels on the road; it seemed like we were flying, and I kept expecting one of Amalia’s shapeshifting coyotes to appear and claim me.

  I wasn’t exactly asleep when the car stopped under some bright yellow lights, but I don’t remember much about what happened. I was in a big bed and there were nurses in white gowns that rustled coolly. When they stuck needles in my arm I knew it should hurt, but I couldn’t feel it. I remember Cassie’s face hovering over me in a blue cloud, then her hand on my forehead. I could see her mouth moving.

  Another nurse was coming with a needle, but instead of sticking it in me, she shot it into a brown tube that was hanging next to me. I was afraid that if I fell asleep I might never wake up, but my eyelids kept falling and every time it got harder and harder to open them, till I didn’t care if I died or not, I couldn’t force them open again.

  I dreamed. Not the old bad dreams I was used to having, the one about falling down the stairs into the dark or the one about running from something in the dark. These were new and more frightening. I was in water. It was dark and cold and I couldn’t breathe. I could see something white above me and I kept trying to grab it and pull myself up, but my arm hurt so bad I couldn’t grip anything. There was something over my mouth, and my chest burned like fire.

  I opened my eyes to find my hair splayed over my face. It wasn’t going to suffocate me, but I couldn’t get it off. My snakebit arm was too painful and swollen to move, and the other one was taped to a board with a needle stuck in it. I jerked my head back and forth, trying to shake the hair away, and then a cool hand pushed the strands of hair back from my forehead. When it was off my eyes, I didn’t see anyone. Not Cassie or Amalia. No nurses.

  It was still dark, and I wondered what time it was. I started to call for a nurse, but the sound died in my throat. A woman was standing in the doorway. She was wearing a black dress with white sleeves. The multicolored beads on her dress caught the dim light from the hall and made it sparkle. She had long black hair and her face was shadowed. I figured she was an angel, and that seeing her meant I was going to die. Except I didn’t think angels wore black, so maybe she was a bad angel and I was going to Hell for not believing. I stared harder, trying to see her face, but I couldn’t. She just stood there like she was watching me.

  All at once I knew, and the knowing made the hair rise up all over my head.

  She was my mother.

  I must have shut my eyes for a second with the effort of trying to sit up, and when I opened them again, she was gone.

  Two days later I was back at Cassie’s. She wouldn’t let me do anything except sit in bed and read while she and Amalia watched me for signs of serum sickness—rashes and hives—and chanted over me.

  Poison, come out of the blood, into the flesh

  Come out of the flesh, and upon the skin,

  Off the skin and into the hair,

  Out of the hair, into the air.

  Sink from the air into dry sand.

  Go disappear into the land.

  After a couple days of this, I was going nuts, but they said if I didn’t behave they’d send me back to the hospital, so I tried to ignore them and concentrate on whatever book I was reading. Out of self-defense, I started reading out loud to them. They liked it, and it kept them from chanting nonstop.

  We plowed through Anna Karenina, which I was supposed to have read over the summer for senior English. To my surprise, they loved it, and they both bawled like babies at the end when she threw herself in front of the train.

  Personally, I thought it was a fitting end for someone who abandoned their child to run off with a lover.

  By the time I went back to school, the wound was small enough to be covered by a gauze patch taped to my arm. I wore it proudly, my medal of honor.

  I read one time that the reason cannibal tribes eat their enemies isn’t so much a taste for human flesh, but because they want to take their enemies’ characteristics, their bravery, skill, cunning. In that same sort of way, I felt altered by my encounter with the snake. Stronger, less worried that I wasn’t like the others. More accepting of myself, where I came from, what I might become. I hesitated to call it “optimistic,” because that was one thing I’d never been, but I allowed myself to be a little bit hopeful.

  As for the other thing—seeing my mother—I kept that locked away in a secret part of my mind. When I did think about her, it was more to puzzle over why she suddenly appeared that night—never before or since. It would have been nice to believe that we had some kind of psychic link and she showed up because I was in trouble, but I figured that was pushing it.

  And it wasn’t like I got a good look at her. I could’ve probably still passed her on the street and not known it. The whole encounter was sort of indirect, like something you see in a mirror, something standing behind you, and when you turn around to look at it straight on, it disappears. So I didn’t tell Cassie, but sometimes I’d catch her looking at me and I’d wonder if she knew.

  No matter how different I felt, in reality, nothing had changed. Everyone had heard about my run-in with the snake. Jimmie John asked me if the snake had told me anything. There was apparently a legend about witches kissing a snake who was really Satan, so that’s what I’d been supposedly doing. And of course, the fact that I survived was taken as further proof that I was a witch girl.

  nine

  When Amalia invited us to go to the posada with her family, I was torn. In most ways, the less I had to do with other people, the happier I was. I didn’t need anyone but Cassie. Actually I didn’t even need her, but we’d sort of gotten used to each other.

  On the other hand, there was this feeling that crept up on me once in a while. In Alamitos, I used to walk along Selden Street in the early winter darkness, when I could see in the lighted windows of the houses—pictures on the walls and mothers cooking dinner and kids with TV shadows flickering on their faces. Sometimes I let myself believe that if I could just live in a house like that and have my own family, I could get to be like those people.

  Even then I must have known better, but whenever something came up like this posada thing, there was a part of me that wanted to fit myself into it. So when Cassie told me we were invited, I sat on the fence.

  “I don’t care,” I told her. “We can go if you want.” I didn’t really think she would because she was definitely not into the Christian thing.

  “All right then, we’ll go.” She gave me one of her sly looks. “Food’s always good.”

  Esperanza had told me all about posadas in the village where she came from down by the border. It was an old Christmas custom for
the people of a church to gather on an evening during Advent to reenact Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter.

  When Amalia picked us up at 6:00 P.M. it was already dark and very cold, with a dry, keening wind out of the west. She and Cassie gossiped all the way down the valley. We had to park a long way off and walk down a winding dirt lane to the little pink church of San Seferino because so many people had showed up for the posada. We met up with Amalia’s daughter Juanita and her family in the parking lot, and I was surprised to see a lot of kids from school milling around. Cassie and I walked with Amalia and Juanita and her two youngest kids while Raphael and the three older ones trailed along behind into the church.

  Juanita muttered darkly about turistas coming to the posada or locals coming just for the free food. I shot a guilty look at Cassie, but Amalia hushed her daughter.

  “It doesn’t matter why they come, mija. Only that they are here.”

  After the mass was said and the offering baskets got handed around, and everyone said their Demos gracias a Dios, we all filed outside where two men with guitars were playing songs that I figured had to be Mexican Christmas carols because I’d never heard any of them before. People gathered in little clumps and moved from group to group, greeting friends. Children ran and laughed until they got shushed by their parents.

  Then all of a sudden a donkey appeared out of nowhere, ridden by a girl who looked about thirteen. She had on jeans and a heavy coat and a long white scarf draped over her head. The donkey was led by a bearded guy who looked like he’d rather be at some biker bar down in Española. He wore a serape over his shoulders, and his long hair was held in place by a scarf rolled and tied around his forehead.