“Echo Louise the Second, I missed you oh-so-much,” he sang, and she rolled over to show him her belly.
Margaret shook her head as he reached back to ruffle the dog’s fur. “Peter, I wish you’d let me know you were having surgery. Did everything go all right?”
“Of course it did. Look at me. I’m strapping and healthy, all that. You worry too much. Want me to drive?”
“Not right now,” she said, not wanting to limp around the car to switch seats. “You must be tired, so just relax.”
“I slept on the plane.”
“I can’t imagine how. Those commuter jets have no legroom. School going all right?” she asked.
“Can we talk about work later? I just want a real spring break. No students e-mailing me, no meetings, just quiet.”
Well, you came to the right place, she thought. She drove back to Ave de Colibri, and though traffic was light, he still managed to nod off a couple of times on the short trip. He probably does need a nice, quiet vacation, she thought. I’ll let him use the car. Maybe I should give it to him. After her fall today, she was thinking maybe there wasn’t as much “normal” time left as she had imagined. If the MS got bad this early, she should stop driving. God, what next? Near tears, she parked in the carport that barely fit a car, let alone her ancient Land Cruiser.
Indoors, Peter spit out his gum and put it in the trash. He leaned against the kitchen counter while Margaret made coffee. “Look in my mouth. Way back, the molar on the right side.” He opened wide and showed her what looked like black plastic covering one tooth, held in place by a retainer.
Margaret smelled alcohol on his breath. Maybe he’d had a drink on the plane to numb his fear of flying. “What is that? A temporary crown? You’re awfully young to need one.”
“Nope. It’s a study I volunteered to be part of. With the cochlear implant, I can hear with my left ear. This device conducts sound from the bone in my left ear to the one on the right, allowing me to hear with my right ear, too.”
“What study?”
“Does it matter? Mom, I can hear. Both ears.”
Years back, a surgeon had told Margaret the auditory nerve in Peter’s right ear was likely beyond help. She’d thought, One ear is better than none, but he’d obstinately refused the surgery that would allow that ear to function. It had taken her years to accept that it was his choice to make, not hers. Clearly he’d finally changed his mind. “Does language sound like you remember?”
“It seems tinny, but hey, it’s been ten years. I’d still know your voice anywhere. And I can listen to music. I just have to remember to charge the apparatus.”
“Peter, I’m floored.”
“It’s not that big a deal,” he said, but his smirk told her otherwise. He sat at the table.
“Well, I’m very happy for you. Is there anything special you’d like to do while you’re here?”
“Ride Red. Hike Bandelier. Eat home-cooked meals.” He smiled at her hopefully.
“I’ll cook whatever you want. Just give me a shopping list.”
“I can cook, too,” he said.
“I know you can. So, where’s Bonnie? She couldn’t take some time off work to join you?”
Peter scratched Echo’s neck, and the dog groaned in pleasure. Ignoring Margaret’s questions was an art form Peter had developed since adolescence. She opened the fridge, and the dog got up. The sound of Echo’s toenails on the linoleum sometimes drove her crazy, but if the dog had a single bad attribute, it was going nuts when someone had to trim her nails. Margaret needed to take her to the vet and pay them to do it in order to keep the peace, but she hadn’t made time. Now that Peter was here, maybe he could take her.
Margaret looked out from the fridge. “I can tell you right now, there’s sprouted bread and lemon tarts in the freezer, almond butter and one leftover green chile enchilada. I haven’t had a chance to go to the market yet, so we could go out to dinner. La Choza? Plenty of restaurants within walking distance.”
“Maybe I’ll just have a cheese sandwich,” he said.
Peter still ate dairy, which Margaret was supposed to remove from her diet immediately. He’d been a vegetarian since his early teens, which she blamed on a school report on factory farming. She always thought one day he’d pick up a burger and that would be the end of it. But he’d stuck to his principles, and just look at him, so trim and healthy, with a bloom in his cheeks.
Echo whined. “Why don’t you take her out for a quick walk? The air will do you good. Meanwhile, I’ll fix you a plate.”
“Sounds good,” he said, and stood up.
And when your stomach’s full, and you’re ready for a nap, I’ll tell you my news. The diagnosis. How I fell today. Why I’d better stop driving.
Chapter 4
Skye pressed the button on her watch, and the face shone blue. Two in the morning, officially Friday, thank God. It felt to her like anytime, any year, anyplace out here. Or some kind of dream landscape, maybe. But her dad had come for her. After ten years not hearing from him, he was like a stranger to her, but here he was. What Skye remembered about the day her father left was this: She’d just gotten home from school, lugging her books in the pink backpack he’d bought her for the new school year. She didn’t have any homework because she’d done it during lunch. She didn’t have many friends. Other kids didn’t like her because she was smart, always getting the top grades on tests and winning spelling bees. She also tended to hit first and try to work things out later, which did not go over well with anyone. Nobody sat with her at lunch, so she figured she might as well get her homework over with so she could spend the weekend riding her horse. She was twelve and a total barn rat. Not one horse, not even that insane Arab her teacher owned, scared her. When a horse bucked, she made herself limp as a sack of potatoes, hung on to its mane, and knew all she had to do was wait it out. A tired horse gave you a better ride.
Back then, she thought about horses constantly. How to improve her skills and win more blue ribbons in gymkhanas, the monthly riding competitions. Learning tricks. Did she want to be a trick rider more than she wanted to be a veterinarian? It was a tough choice. Why not do both? The veterinary degree would prove to be most useful, but training on the weekends seemed possible. When Mama and Daddy were seriously fighting, like lately, she had to think of something besides their yelling or go crazy. Horses it was.
Her parents were the kind of married people who never actually engaged in normal conversation with each other. Instead, they threw barbs and guilt bombs that would explode later. Daddy would come home from shoeing and say, “I picked up six new clients,” by which he meant this month the bills would be paid on time. Mama’s response should’ve been, Good for you, and congratulations, because I know how hard you work, but instead she’d say, “And when are you ever going to mow the lawn? Our house is the shabbiest one on the street.”
“I can do it, Mama,” Sara would say, but her mother wanted her dad to do it, because that was his job. This particular afternoon, it was clear to Sara that they’d been going on like this for some time. She heard them from the front yard—Daddy’s rumbly low bass and Mama’s screeching—which meant their neighbors could hear, too. Sara stopped on the porch before going in. When she heard the sound of plates breaking, her daddy opened the door. He was carrying a duffel bag. There were shorts hanging out of it and the zipper wasn’t pulled all the way.
He looked at her for a second, as if he were considering taking her along, but then he looked away and hurried toward his truck. Skye watched him throw that duffel in the bed and start up the engine as if it were a race. If he had just stopped and told her what was going on, she might’ve felt different, understood, in a way.
He didn’t even say good-bye.
Still on horseback, she heard the whir of a truck on the highway, though she couldn’t tell how far away it was in the early morning darkness. The air was cold on her face, and her nose ached from breathing in the chilly air.
Her fathe
r’s face was in shadow. Every once in a while the flare of highway lights caught on his belt buckle. He had attached a replacement tire for his truck to his horse’s saddle, along with a bedroll and God knew what else. It made him look homeless. It had been years since she’d heard one thing from him—and somehow tonight after midnight he shows up at Cottonwoods? “Daddy?” she asked. “How’d you know to pick me up?”
“A phone call from your mother.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No. She phoned to say you needed a ride back to Santa Fe.”
Well, that was the last answer she expected, which made her all kinds of curious. Was Mama listening to her phone messages after all? “You and Mama, how long have you been speaking to each other?”
“We’ve kept in touch occasionally. Yesterday was the first time we talked on the phone. So that makes it a total of one day.” He laughed.
Lightning whinnied, sending thrills up Skye’s spine the likes of which she hadn’t felt in years. Being on a horse woke up muscles she forgot existed. Her riding posture kicked right in. She loosened her reins so that Lightning could make up his own mind about the bit. That had always been their unspoken agreement. She’d be light and kind; he’d give her a nice ride. Haul out the spurs or a riding crop, even if it was for show, and she’d find herself dumped on her butt without having ever felt him buck. “Lightning,” she whispered, and leaned forward to smooch him on the neck. He smelled exactly the same, a touch of vinegar to that sweet, dusky horse musk.
Her dad had been quiet until she asked a question. What should she say next? Where the hell have you been? Everything’s forgiven and I love you? She felt her temper getting riled, and she shuddered under her hoodie sweatshirt, cold. Her goose bumps had goose bumps. “I have another question.”
“Let her rip.”
“What am I supposed to call you? Father? Dad? Sir? My hero? How about asshole who disappeared from my life? Bad Dad? What?” Her heart felt as if it might bust open with anger. “I never thought I’d see you again and now you’re here in the middle of the night, which casts a certain dreamlike quality on things.”
“I can see how that would happen,” he said.
She gathered her thoughts, trying to put them in a logical order, and boom! Her temper exploded. “Damn you, anyway! Now I have to readjust my feelings on everything. Feelings always get me into trouble. That’s what got me drinking and using in the first place. I’ve been sober nine months. If I slip because you showed up, well, I’m going to kick some ass your way.”
He reached over and patted her hand where it rested on the pommel of an Australian stock saddle. Her father preferred them over western saddles and rarely rode any other kind. She wondered where her western saddle had gone to. “Just hearing you say that means you won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Experience. You go right ahead—call me the Asshole if it’ll help you stay on track with your sobriety. Now that I’m here, right beside you, I ain’t going anywhere ever again except to the afterlife. Probably take me to the end of my days to make up for leaving you, but I’m by God going to. In no time at all you’ll be sick of me.”
Skye stifled the sob that threatened to bust out of her chest. In group, back at Cottonwoods, the endless weeping of other drunks and addicts made her irate. Duncan always stopped group to allow the person crying time to get it all out, to travel to the source of the trigger, which was often some ridiculous moment from childhood that didn’t mean anything important. “Losing a spelling bee? Wetting your bed? Seriously?” Skye blurted out one day. “That’s ancient freaking history. Delete it from your mind like a computer file.”
That afternoon, Duncan took her off bathroom-cleaning duty and sent her to crafts class. Pottery: throwing clay on the wheel. “Dude, you’re making a mistake,” she said. “I have no art skills, no desire to create anything, and frankly I’d prefer cleaning toilets.”
“Nah,” he said. “This is where you belong.”
He wouldn’t let her quit. For months she worked at that clay stuff, making lopsided bowls and ugly cups that cracked in the kiln—instant trash. One day, it was finally going well, and right there on the wheel in front of her she had done it, made something that was not half-bad. So what happened? She broke down sobbing. Her muddy, chapped hands left clay on her face like clown makeup. She ripped the perfect bowl from the wheel and squeezed it through her fingers until it was ruined, and out of her came this primal howl that released the floodgates. Duncan stood in the doorway watching her, and for the rest of her life she would hate him for that. Wasn’t it enough that he’d watched her detox? That she’d slipped? Smarted off? Would he not allow her a single shred of dignity?
The next group meeting, he told the story of the Long Walk, a tragedy that took place during the Civil War yet was entirely separate from it. His voice remained steady as he spoke. “General James Henry Carleton, commander of the New Mexico Territory, right around here, near Four Corners, had successfully exiled the N’de, or Mescalero Apaches, so took it upon himself to solve what he called ‘the Navajo problem.’ Pitting tribe against tribe, he ordered the Diné villages burned, wells poisoned, crops trashed, and livestock killed. Some ten thousand five hundred Navajo were marched four hundred fifty miles through winter and summer to Bosque Redondo at Fort Sumner. If you straggled behind, you were shot and left to rot. Some women were taken as slaves, and children stolen from their families. Smallpox, dysentery, and pneumonia ravaged the tribes. Of the ten thousand or so who started out, maybe eight thousand survived.”
Skye was looking at her rehab-issued ugly slip-on tennis shoes at the time, doing her best to block out his voice and almost succeeding, which was a mistake, because Duncan had freaking radar for that kind of thing.
“Skye?” he said. “Look at me.”
She lifted her head and was surprised to see tears coursing down his cheeks while he maintained his poise. God, was there anything worse than seeing a full-grown man cry? “Look, I get it,” she said.
“What is it you get?” he asked.
“That it’s awful, that persecution happens, only the strong survive, what the hell else do you want me to say?”
“Right this second? I’d like to know what’s in your heart.”
“You want to know what’s in my heart? All right, I’ll tell you. I’ll freaking tell all of you. Half of you are whiners, plain and simple. You,” she said, pointing to Duncan, “should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Why?”
“How can you minimize something so terrible, turn it into an anecdote for a bunch of worthless alcoholics and addicts?”
He waited a beat, never a great sign, she had learned, and he said, “History is evidence of cultural extermination. Culture is built on dreams. Dreams become art. Art comes from the gods. Tell us about learning to throw pottery.”
He just loved making her cry.
“I’m sick of you already,” Skye said to her father. “What is it? Three a.m.? I can’t even see your ugly old mug, and the horses probably can’t see where they’re going, either.”
“Never said I was handsome,” her father said. “But you are just about the prettiest girl I’ve ever laid eyes on. People love to say, ‘She favors her mother,’ or, ‘She’s got her dad’s ears,’ but honey, you are a hundred percent your own self.”
Skye could not admit how happy she was to see him because in equal parts she also wanted to slap him. “Oh, shut up,” she said. “Compliments aren’t going to make me forgive you.”
“Didn’t expect them to,” he said. “Just saying what’s in my heart. It’s up to you to say your piece.”
What’s in my heart? It was like he was channeling Duncan. “There’re some things about me you should know,” she said. “It’s way too much to say in one conversation.”
“I read your letter a hundred times. I got so I could fill in the blanks.”
He laughed that same old chuckle she remembered from childhood.
“I even talked to Mr. Duncan a time or two. Heard about the night you were in the hospital. I was worried sick.”
“He called you?”
“I am your next of kin.”
“He shouldn’t have. I’m over eighteen—I’m a legal adult. It’s supposed to be confidential! That’s a violation of HIPAA or some damn thing. After I beat the shit out of him, I’m getting a lawyer.”
“You almost died.”
“I did not.”
“Yes, you did. Maybe you should take a look at the doctor’s chart.”
Beneath her, Lightning trembled as her temper rose. She breathed out, trying to stem the anger.
“Now, Skye, before you explode, listen. He was doing us both a kindness. He cares about you and wants more than anything to see you succeed. That night might not have gone by the book, but he’s invested in you, just like I am. He helped me see my part in all this when I was inside. I wasn’t a good father to you.”
“A kindness? Breaking the law is more like it. And what do you mean ‘inside,’ anyway? Inside of what? Were you in the hospital or something? Next are you going to tell me you’re dying of cancer?”
He let a minute go by. “I went to prison.”
“Excuse me?” All the air went out of her lungs. She had to gasp to take it all in. If I ever needed you, Higher Power, this is the time to show up, Skye thought. She waited, bit her tongue, but he didn’t say anything and she was out of words. God stayed in his heaven or did whatever he did when he wanted you to figure things out on your own. They rode along in silence, listening to the sounds of the night and the crunch of underbrush the horses were trampling. She was on her beloved horse, and right there next to her was her father. Who was an ex-con. For what? She pinched herself to make sure this wasn’t a dream she was having back at Cottonwoods, the kind that always made her wake up in tears, with Nola, that crazy, bone-thin bitch, trying to freaking hug her. Skye was not, had never been, nor would ever be, a hugger.
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