Isabel's Daughter

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  “Do you have any idea why?”

  “Probably she was too ashamed. I tried—” She pauses for a few quick, shallow breaths. “I tried to explain that a mother will forgive almost anything if she can see her child again, but…”

  I squirm in my seat, impatient, as Liza’s attention wanders onto a new path.

  “She was a good girl, Isabel. Not like they said.”

  “Like who said? What did they say?”

  “When a girl’s that pretty, there’s always talk.”

  “What kind of talk?” I whisper, wanting to scream.

  She stares at me and I can tell she’s trying to focus. “About the men, of course. If the truth be told, she wasn’t nearly as interested in them as they were in her. She pretty much ignored them all. Had her fill of all that, I suppose.” She unfolds one thin hand from the other and reaches for the tea mug. “Help me grab that, will you…what did you say your name was?”

  “Avery.” I hand her the cup and she drinks slowly, eyes at half-mast. “Thank you, Avery. Yes. Eventually they’d get tired of trying. All except that one. He just wouldn’t give up.”

  At that moment Cookie reappears with a piece of cloth folded in half, draped over her arm, and she lays it in my lap. It’s dusty, like everything else in New Mexico. I open it up.

  Northern New Mexico fall in all its golden glory, and if you saw it at a distance, you’d think it was a painting. Up close you can only imagine the amount of work that went into it. I never knew there were that many different colors of yellow and gold. Cookie shyly points out the different techniques—photo transfer, beadwork, silk ribbon embroidery, and loop-pile embroidery, which makes up the bulk of the piece, the same technique she used on the hummingbird. Thousands of densely worked stitches, almost like a rug, except incredibly fine. I can’t comprehend the patience.

  “Quite something, isn’t it?” says Cookie.

  “Are you an artist?” I ask her.

  She laughs. “No, not me.”

  “I’d say she is,” Liza contradicts her. “Sews like a dream.”

  “I sew, yes, but not like this. I just make clothes—”

  “You design them and make them,” Liza insists.

  “Okay, Auntie. If it makes you happy.” The two of them exchange a smile. “I never even heard the term ‘fiber art’ till I came here. But I’ve fast become a fan of Isabel’s work. It’s amazing.”

  “How do you know about all the techniques?”

  “Auntie’s told me some. I read a bit, visit the galleries, talk to artists.”

  I run my hand over the forest of threads, feeling their silkiness, watching how they bend, creating ripples of light and shadow.

  “He just wouldn’t give up,” Liza says suddenly, as if inhabiting another realm altogether. I suddenly remember we were talking about Isabel and a man.

  “Who wouldn’t give up? What was his name?”

  She sighs. “Heavens, that’s odd. I can’t recall. What difference does it make? He killed her, didn’t he?”

  Hot tea scorches all the way down my throat. “Who killed her?”

  Her bottomless eyes sweep up to mine, suddenly lucid. “That one who loved her. Of course.”

  I’m watching for his Mercedes because I don’t want him coming up to the apartment, but at about five after ten, a white Toyota Land Cruiser pulls up in front of our building and he gets out.

  Before he can get to the stairs, Linda’s outside the shop, shooing him away from one of the favored parking spots for Casa Blanca clients. I run down to rescue him, and she gives me a sly smile as we pull away from the curb.

  “I was looking for the other car,” I say.

  “We’ll need this one.”

  “You know, I really have a lot to do today, so I can’t be gone long. It’s my only day off, and I need to get groceries and do laundry and…”

  He turns south on Guadalupe, driving in silent concentration, eyes straight ahead. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt that looks like it’s been ironed and hanging in a closet.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Bluebird Canyon.”

  “Where the hell is that?”

  “Are you afraid of me?” His voice is casual.

  “Should I be?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you asking?”

  He signals for a right turn on Cerrillos. “You seem a little stressed, that’s all.”

  I fold my hands sedately in my lap. “I’m not.” I look out the window at the lowrider next to us, decorated with a picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe composed entirely of bottlecaps. “Now there is a work of art.”

  He smiles.

  “What did you want to talk about?” I ask.

  “Isabel. I know you have questions. I wish you’d ask me. Regardless of what you may have heard, I knew her better than just about anyone. Certainly better than Tom Hemmings.”

  I swallow silently.

  “Santa Fe’s a big small town, Avery. Particularly in the art community, there are no secrets.”

  At the next stoplight he reaches into the console and hands me a key ring with two keys on it—one small, like a padlock key, and one large, like an old-fashioned door key.

  “Hang on to those for a while.”

  We pass the Villa Linda Mall and Santa Fe Factory Outlets. Santa Fe falls behind us, and he crosses under the interstate and Cerrillos becomes Highway 14. The Turquoise Trail. I haven’t been down this road since the morning I hitchhiked out of Florales, bound for Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico. He puts a CD on, some kind of classical music. It doesn’t matter to me because I’m not listening. I lean my head back and look out the window.

  It’s already hot, and the sky is a deep, flat blue, like a painted backdrop for the dark cones of the Ortiz Mountains and the more gradual, rounded profile of the Sandias. The road curls like a sidewinder between mottled brown hills dotted with juniper, piñon, and chamiso. Tall cottonwoods mark the bed of a stream that’s invisible from here.

  As we crest a hill I see the small brown clapboard building ahead on the right, an island in a sea of pickup trucks. The Rio Bravo.

  Paul turns the music off. “Ever been there?”

  “Once. A long time ago.”

  “It’s surprisingly good,” he says.

  I look at him. “Why surprisingly? Just because it’s not in Santa Fe and you don’t have to get a bank loan to eat there?”

  He turns the wheel abruptly and we bounce down into the parking lot, stopping at the far end of a long row of trucks. No doubt so his precious Land Cruiser doesn’t get scratched by some careless cowboy.

  “Why is it that I can never say the right thing to you?” he asks, but he’s out the door before I can answer.

  Faint streaks of gray show in her long black hair and there are a few lines at the corners of her eyes, but essentially Bettina Jacinto looks the same. She smiles at us, picks up two menus, then turns back to look again, her lips parted slightly in surprise.

  “Avery,” she says, and her smile widens. “I don’t remember your last name.”

  “James. I’m amazed that you remember me at all.”

  She laughs, grabbing my shoulders and pressing her cheek to mine. “I don’t meet many people with eyes like yours.” She steps back to look at me again. “Dios mio, it’s been a long time.” Her smile includes Paul now. “Come in. Sit down.”

  The place is packed, just like the first time I came here, and probably with some of the same people. Paul studies the menu while Bettina and I catch up with each other.

  “Did you graduate from the university?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “But I learned some things and had a good time.”

  She wants to know where I live and where I work. When I ask about Ed Farrell she smiles, but her eyes are sad.

  “Oh, he’s still the same. He thinks he’s never going to die.” She flips her order pad open. “What can I get for you?” Paul orders enchiladas verdes. I give the menu
a quick once-over.

  “I don’t suppose you have any capirotada laying around…”

  Her eyes twinkle. “I don’t think we have any laying around, but we perhaps have some cooling that just came from the oven.”

  She even remembers to give me a corner piece.

  I was talking to Lindsey Hemmings.”

  Paul stops eating, his fork halfway to his mouth. “And…?”

  “She booked a party with us. I went to her house for the site survey and…she just started talking. Telling me about how she knew you in Paris and how you introduced her to Tom and…”

  He watches me stir the cream into my iced coffee.

  “She told me about Tom and Isabel. That’s why I called him. I thought—” My eyes shift away from his. “I don’t know what I thought. I don’t know why she told me.”

  He wipes his mouth with the napkin and leans back from the table. “You have to realize that she was devastated. It was the second time it had happened to her. Her first husband left her in Paris for some young girl. She was jealous of Isabel to begin with, and after that, she was just—”

  “What about you?” I cut in.

  “What about me?”

  “Well, I—I mean she said that you were the one who walked in and found them…together. So why are you telling me about how Lindsey felt? How did you feel?”

  He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I was…upset. Of course. Angry.”

  “But you took her back.”

  “Yes.”

  I look at him very directly. “Why?”

  “First and foremost because I loved her. Then, too…” He rests his forearms on the table. “We weren’t really together when it happened. We had split up and she was back at Liza’s.”

  “Lindsey said there was a lot of that. Breaking up, getting back together.”

  He nods. “Mostly my fault. I had this idea that because I loved her, I knew what was best for her. She never seemed to see things that I thought were so obvious. I tried to guide her, artistically, socially, financially—” He shrugs. “She came to resent it.”

  I drink the last of my coffee to avoid looking at him, but he’s on a roll now.

  “It wasn’t just that I loved her, it was—I was in awe of her talent, the way she expressed herself, not just in her art, but everything about her. She was like no one else I’ve ever met before. Or since. Half sophisticated, half naïve. Strong in some ways, terribly vulnerable in others. She was passionate about the things she believed in, and she worked incredibly hard, in spite of the pain—”

  “What pain?”

  “Overuse injuries. Like carpal tunnel. She could work for hours and hardly change positions. Her wrists, her hands, her back, her neck. All started giving her trouble. I used to rub her back and her arms every night—”

  He breaks off suddenly, the palpable memory of their nights looming up between us.

  “Sorry.” He’s reaching for his wallet and signaling Bettina at the same time. “I didn’t mean to get carried away. Very few people will sit and listen to me anymore without suddenly remembering a dentist appointment or an overdue library book.”

  Bettina brings the check, eyeing Paul’s half-eaten lunch. “How was it?”

  “Even better than last time.” I smile at her.

  “You can pay Rosa up front.” She touches my hand. “Don’t wait so long to come back.”

  It’s past noon when we step out of the dim café, into a wall of heat. Paul puts on his dark glasses. We walk to the car in silence.

  Only a few miles later, he turns off to the right again, but this time it’s onto a seriously rutted dirt road. There’s a closed gate ahead and he stops in front of it.

  “So this is Bluebird Canyon?”

  He nods, his hands sliding on the leather steering wheel. “The small key,” he says.

  I climb down and insert the key in the padlock that secures the rusted chain. It clicks open stiffly. The gate fights me as I drag it back, scraping the hard baked earth of the road. The going is slow now, because the ruts are deep.

  “The last few winters have been very wet,” he says.

  We rise and fall with the road, crisscrossing furrows like small ditches, weaving through grasses and prickly pear cactus and jumping chollas with their menacing barbs. We pass a ruined adobe, walls melting back into the earth, vigas protruding like bleached bones. The land begins to rise steadily and outcroppings of rock like dinosaur spines appear on both sides of us, meeting in the distance to form a high ridge that steps up to a range of hills.

  “Those are the Cerrillos Hills,” Paul says. “Where they used to mine the turquoise.”

  “It’s redundant.”

  “What is?”

  “Cerrillos means little hills,” I say. “So Cerrillos Hills is redundant.”

  He smiles.

  It feels like we’ve been driving forever, but I can see on the odometer that it’s just over two miles when we come around a bend and he stops, turns off the ignition. At first I don’t understand why we’re stopping, but as my eyes adjust to the haze and glare, a tiny, low-slung cabin materializes, nestled at the base of a rock ridge. Built mostly of wood with a little adobe and rock, it blends perfectly into the background. I laugh out loud, and Paul gives me a quizzical look.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I was just thinking about how all that art bullshit like ‘inhabiting its space’ and interacting with its environment’ suddenly makes sense.”

  He nods. “Welcome to Querencia.”

  A tin-roofed portal shades the front of the cabin. The lock is so encrusted with dirt and rust that I can barely get the key in, and then he has to jiggle it and ease it in farther before it will turn, but the heavy wooden door finally swings inward and the cabin’s cool, dry breath is on my face. It’s oddly fresh, like it was just opened yesterday, but I can see that no one’s been here in a long time.

  He steps inside, ducking his head under the low doorframe, and I follow him. Surprisingly, the room is full of light. There’s a skylight set into the crudely sawn plank ceiling, supported by ancient log vigas; the floors look like dirt, but feel hard as cement, and the walls are partly wood plank, partly a grainy plaster. Except for one end wall, which is made entirely of stone, with a fireplace and hearth built in. A modern looking woodstove is set into the fireplace, its stovepipe disappearing up the chimney.

  Three pieces of furniture are pushed into the corners: a small table, a wooden stool, a rusted iron bed with a filthy mattress. The floor is a minefield of pack rat nests and droppings, and glass splinters under a boarded-up window. In some of the corners, the mud plaster has dribbled down, apparently from leaks in the roof.

  Gradually I tune into Paul’s voice, a soft drone, and his movements around the room.

  “…an old miner’s cabin,” he says. “She wanted a place to get away from town, to work, to sketch her designs.” He touches the wall. “It’s very well built. Do you see how the logs are notched, so they fit tightly? The roof is tin. She loved the sound of it in the rain.”

  “What did you call it?”

  “Call what?” He looks like he just woke up from a good dream.

  “This place.”

  “She named it Querencia. Do you know what it means?”

  I shake my head.

  “There is no exact translation,” he says. “It’s a bullfighting word. It describes the little space in the corrida, the bullring, where the bull imagines he’s safe. When he’s there, he believes nothing can harm him. So the closest translation would be something like a safe haven.”

  He reaches for my hand, which is bunched so hard that my fingernails have left marks in my palm. He pries my fingers open and presses the cold metal key ring into my hand. “It’s yours now.”

  My head turns in surprise. “I can’t. I mean—”

  “It’s strange for me, too, you know. Eight years after she—you just materialize. It’s not as if I knew you were coming.” He turns abruptly
and walks out onto the portal.

  I stand motionless, close my eyes, inhale deeply. As if I could draw her in. This was her place. Why can’t I smell her? Hear footsteps. See some glimpse of the woman who smoothed the hair off my face that night at the hospital in Darby. There should be something of her essence here. Instead it’s nothing but dust and old wood and scraps of curtains and broken glass.

  When I walk out, he’s checking the supports on the corner of the portal. Or going through the motions, anyway. I stand there in the shade imagining a garden—mostly cooking herbs, but some medicinals, too, like Cassie had. And maybe some vegetables and flowers. What I loved about her garden was the haphazardness of it. The way the wild plants would just show up and take over the empty spaces she left for them. Even plants that most people think of as weeds, like dandelion and cocklebur, goosefoot and scorpionweed, were welcome there.

  Paul steps off the porch, following an overgrown path that leads away from the road. “Watch where you walk,” he says over his shoulder. “Snakes are supposed to sleep during the hottest part of the day, but sometimes they don’t know that.”

  A shiver races down my back. The dark coil of a snake ready to strike, the cricking sound of the rattle. I force myself not to recall, but just to follow him, trying to step in his footprints.

  The sun is a hot, flat hand on the back of my neck, and the air is white with glare and dust. We walk slowly in the canyon’s stillness, gravel and dry brush crunching underfoot. Tiny grasshoppers start away and a rabbit scampers under a juniper where a bird perches—bluer than any bird I’ve ever seen.

  I see the grave even before he points to it, and I start to run, forgetting to care what might be lurking in the grass.

  The small marker is half hidden in the dappled shade of a piñon tree. Umbels of Queen Anne’s lace surround it, nodding gently in the parched breeze. I crouch down to read it, brushing aside scraggly branches and brittle weeds and startling a small gray lizard lounging on the stone.

  A flower that looks like a columbine is cut into the stone above her name.