Barbara Samuel (2 page)

Night sweats, her mother called them, but that seemed to be understating the case a bit. Especially when Kitty had them, she was probably thinking about things like the time she swore at her boss, or the night Luna and her sister Elaine saw her grabbing a boyfriend’s rear end on the way out. Kitty had just not done that much she’d have to regret.

Unlike Luna, with her AA pin and the daughter she’d lost custody of and the career she’d destroyed.

Oddly, though, none of those things were the ones haunting her tonight. Instead, she’d awakened thinking of her father, who’d left home when Luna was seven and never came back. She dreamed about him once or twice a year, so it wasn’t particularly unusual. Sipping her latte, holding the sharp, milky taste in her mouth for a moment, she did think it was amazing how long you could miss a person, especially when he didn’t deserve it.

Sitting now in Guadalupe’s lap, with a smooth wind blowing over her face, Luna heard the trained therapist in her head, Therapist Barbie, who wore big tortoiseshell glasses and her silver hair in a French knot, point out the truth:
Not too surprising you should dream about him tonight, when your own child is coming to live with you. That drags up a lot of old issues, doesn’t it?

Bingo.

She was wide-awake in the middle of the night trying not to smoke cigarettes because her fifteen-year-old daughter was coming to live with her for the first time in eight years. More than life itself, Luna wanted to get it right.

A smooth wind, warm from sunbaked rocks high in the Sangre de Cristos that circled the town like a ring of sentries, blew across her face and knees. It smelled of the fields of chamiso and sage it crossed, fresh and utterly New Mexico. She’d missed that scent more than she could say when she’d left home at sixteen. Tonight there was a hint of woodsmoke in it, and Luna imagined a pair of honeymooning lovers curled before a kiva-shaped fireplace. The picture eased some of her tension, some of that crawl of nicotine need.

It helped so much, she did it again, just breathed in the night, hearing crickets and the faint howl of the wind, or maybe
La Llorona
, the famed weeping woman of legend who was said to walk the rivers here, looking for her lost children.

Lost children.

Bingo
, said Barbie, dryly.

It was perfectly normal to be nervous, especially because there was quite a bit of murkiness surrounding the sudden change in custody agreement. Joy had been in a little trouble the past year, but it hadn’t appeared to be serious. Luna had flown down to Atlanta twice, a hardship financially, but hadn’t made much progress. Joy’s appearance had shifted, her attitude was sometimes hostile, and her grades were slipping, but there were no signs of drugs or other substance abuse. Still, Luna had been uneasy, and asked her former husband to consider letting Joy spend a season or two with Luna in Taos. He’d adamantly refused.

Things had grown worse over the spring and early summer, during which Joy had been forced to stay in Atlanta instead of coming to Taos as she usually did, thanks to flunked classes. And then, suddenly, Marc, Luna’s ex, had called to say Joy could come live in Taos. Luna, suspicious of a trick, had asked Marc to put it in writing. He had agreed. Even stranger.

Something was afoot. But whatever Marc’s ulterior motives, Luna had a chance to make sure her daughter was all right, a chance to see her and be with her every day, a chance to find out what had caused such a dramatic change in her behavior over the past year. A chance, as the old
Quantum Leap
show said, to put right what once went wrong.

She’d painted the second bedroom, framed the thick-silled window with gauzy curtains, brushed up on the nutritional aspects of cooking for a child, even shifted her schedule at work to make sure she could be home after school. Friends teased her about it—no fifteen-year-old particularly cared if mommy was home after school, they said—but Luna just smiled. Her own mother had worked nights to be at home for her daughters after school, and it had meant a lot to her.

The crickets went utterly still, as if a giant hand had squashed them. Luna straightened, hearing a gust of wind gather in the distance. It rolled toward her, and she covered her eyes and put a hand over her mug just as it slammed into the little porch. It wasn’t cold, just dusty, and Luna waited, eyes closed tight, for it to pass.

Smoke.

Not cigarette smoke, which she would have gladly inhaled to the very deepest part of her lungs. And not the gentle wisps of a honeymoon cottage. This was full-bodied, almost a taste, the thick smell of a fire that was pretty full of itself. When the gust of wind died, fast as
it had come, she peered into the darkness, wishing that moon wasn’t so bright so the flames would show. The summer had been painfully dry and fires were burning all over the Four Corners. The ancient neighborhood, surrounded by fields of dry grass and sage, was particularly vulnerable. Even a small fire could be disastrous.

She put her cup down and dashed out to the road, turning in a circle very slowly to see if she could see it, breathing in the strong smoke smell for clues to direction.

“Oh, shit!”

The fire wasn’t at all distant. Bright orange flames poured out of the window of the very old woman who lived two doors down the street.

Charged with adrenaline—and likely caffeine—Luna dashed inside, phoned in the fire to 911, and then dashed back out, up the dirt road on bare feet, then up the grassy, prickly expanse of yard toward the old woman’s house. A goathead bit her arch and she had to stop to pull it out, hands shaking. Fire danced through the kitchen window, licked at a pine that stood sentry near the back, threatened to burst, any second, through the roof.

Thinking with a sick feeling of the old woman, Luna leapt onto the porch and yanked open the screen door. “Hello!” she cried, pounding with her fist on the door. “Hello! Are you in there?”

Nothing. She tried the door and found it locked. “Hello?” She pounded harder. No answer, and smoke thick enough it was making her want to cough. She tried the window. Locked.

There was a flowerpot thick with chrysanthemums sitting on the step. Luna grabbed it, smashed the window, unlocked it, and stuck her head in the smoky interior.
“Hello? Is anyone here? Grandma!” Maybe Spanish would be better.
“Abuela!”
she cried.
“Hola!”

The smoke, sharp and acrid, stung her eyes. An ache of some primal terror burned in her chest. For a moment, she hesitated. The firemen would be here any second. They were trained for this. It was arrogant of her to think it was her job to try to save someone, wasn’t it?

But then she thought of the wizened, tiny old woman, and there was no way she could just walk away and live with herself in the morning. Before she could chicken out, she ducked into the house through the window, dropping to the floor in some remembered bit of lore. The smoke wasn’t so thick down there, and the air felt cool. Crawling on her hands and knees, she made her way through the dark. Living room. Door to a bedroom, closed.

Her heart was skittering so fast that she felt shaky. The fire was beginning to crackle and breathe, an animal gathering power.
Get out, get out, get out.
Luna resisted the terror. Coughing, she opened the bedroom door.

The room was blissfully free of smoke, at least for this second. She stood up and checked the bed. Empty.

From the back of the house came a loud, cracking noise, and a strange groan. Luna almost choked on her fear, imagining the beams of the house coming down. But faintly, she heard a yell—not a scream, but some kind of curse—and she dashed out of the room, pulling up her T-shirt to cover her nose and mouth. Her eyes watered profusely, but against the hellish light of the kitchen, she spotted a wizened figure moving, a shadow in the light.

Bracing herself for a millisecond, Luna took a breath through the fabric of her shirt, then dashed down the hallway to the heart of the fire. The old woman was in
there, slapping a wet towel at the flames that danced up the walls. Hacking, coughing, sometimes nearly doubling over, she still kept swinging.

“Abuela!”
Luna cried. “Come
on
!”

Giving Luna a look of fury, the old woman backed away, her foot nearly into the flames, and uttered a spate of Spanish that Luna didn’t understand. Heat singed the hairs on her face, and it took everything she had to reach out, venture more deeply into the inferno, but she did it, connecting however she could with the old woman, who slapped at Luna’s arms and wiggled her legs when Luna picked her up around the waist and tossed her over her shoulder. She could hear the fire engines now, close and coming closer.

“No! No!”
Abuela
cried, smacking at Luna’s head and back, kicking her hard in the stomach. Luna grimly hung on and ran outside with more power than she would have believed she owned. When they were safely on the grass, Luna dumped her struggling bundle, taking an elbow to the eye for her trouble. At the influx of cool, mostly fresh air, she coughed hard and wiped the tears from her eyes, wondering if she’d be bruised tomorrow. Her cheekbone ached.

The old woman made a break for the house.

Luna grabbed her by the back of the dress. “You’ll kill yourself in there!”

For a long moment, the old woman stared at the flames with an expression of purest fury. She said something in Spanish, and tried to yank her arm away.

Luna held on. “Are you going to try to get back in there again?”

“No,” she said proudly, and slapped at Luna’s hands.

“All right.”

With narrowed eyes,
Abuela
took three steps back, watching in something like disgust as the firemen
tramped up with their hoses, first hitting the old pine with a good soak, then addressing the fire licking up the roof. “How did it happen?” Luna asked her, finally.

Abuela
glared. Then she spat out something Luna didn’t understand, and waved her hand at the fire. She clamped her lips together and wouldn’t say another word.

Thomas Coyote was not sleeping when his phone rang. He was sitting at the kitchen table doing nothing much of anything, just sitting under the glare of the overhead light in the unbreachable silence of late night and loneliness, his hands folded in front of him. He examined them minutely. Big hands, even for a big man, which he was. They were brown, both from nature and the sun, a kind of reddish brown. The crayon color burnt sienna, which was what he always used to color faces when he was a boy, making them the same color as the people around him. Burnt sienna and brown and another one he couldn’t quite name just this minute. The one called peach he’d saved for ribbons or dresses.

The house was big and silent, though not empty. Sprawled across the threshold to the dining room was his dog, Tonto, a young and foolish Akita mix with a patch of black over one eye. His paws twitched as he chased a dream squirrel or rabbit. On the windowsill over the sink sat a fluffy black cat, Ranger, his tail swishing back and forth, back and forth, as he stared at the moon-bright landscape. In an upstairs bedroom slept Manuel “Tiny” Abeyta, one of his best workers, who’d appeared on Thomas’s doorstep six weeks before with a black eye, the just-out-of-jail hair greasies, and a beaten look around his mouth. Three months on an ankle bracelet for domestic violence, and a two-way restraining order—Tiny couldn’t approach his commonlaw
wife and she could not approach him. His wife, too, was under restraint, facing a similar stretch of anger management classes. They were halfway through, and Thomas frankly didn’t see much improvement, but you never knew when the turnaround might come. Tiny didn’t have anybody but Thomas just now.

Tiny wasn’t the first one to take the bed in that room, and he wouldn’t be the last. It had made his wife crazy, these strays Thomas found, people as often as animals. Or animals as often as people. The stray part was the bit that had bugged Nadine.

At the back of his mind, a niggling vision of his ex-wife tried to rise, and resolutely, he went back to his hands. Nails oval, neat because he filed them regularly while he was watching TV. Couldn’t stand raggedy nails. His work as an adobe layer meant there were inevitable bangs and nicks and cuts, and the clay sucked every bit of moisture out of a man’s skin, but every night after his shower, he rubbed them with Bag Balm to help the cuts heal and keep the skin soft, a trick he’d learned from his grandmother, who told him when he was eighteen and getting ready for a date that no woman wanted to feel rough hands scratching up her
chichis.

The memory made him smile, and he rubbed his hands together easily, liking the strength and flexibility in his long fingers, flat palms. Hands that had weighed a good number of
chichis
in their time, though not for a very long time. Maybe wouldn’t anymore. It made him tired to even think of it, all the trouble and turmoil that went along with women.

The phone, shrilling into the stillness, made him jump, and he stared at it, a green phone hanging on the wall, for a long moment. Middle of the night phone
calls were bad news. On the third ring, he got up and yanked the receiver off the hook. His hello was gruff.

A woman’s voice said, “No one died or anything, but is this Thomas Coyote?”

“Yeah.” A ripple of worry crossed his belly. “Is it Placida?”

“She’s fine,” the woman said. A good voice. Anglo, but western Anglo, with a little softness at the end of words. “But she … uh … had a bit of an incident tonight. She set her curtains on fire and the kitchen is damaged?” The voice rose on the end of the word, as if in a question, and he knew she was a native of the general area. He grunted acknowledgment, and the woman continued, “She’s going to need to stay somewhere else tonight.”

“I’ll be right there.”

It was a little less than two blocks, one block east and one downhill. He loped it easily, seeing the fire engines he’d heard and dismissed. A chill touched his chest. What if …?

His grandmother, technically his great-grandmother, stood in huffy silence to one side of the yard. She was dressed in an ordinary flowered housedress, her hair in a long braid down her back. Her skinny arms were crossed over her chest, and light caught on the thick glasses that distorted her eyes. Soot covered her in streaks, and her hair carried a layer of fine ash. A cold sweat touched him. Damn.
“Abuela!”
he said, censure and worry in his tone. He didn’t need to see her eyes to know she was irked, and that somehow, the woman standing beside her was—right or not—taking the blame.