Barbara Samuel (3 page)

“Grandma,” he said, bending to put his arm around her shoulders. “What happened?”

She made a pishing noise, dismissive. In Spanish, she said, “You could see. I caught the curtains on fire.”

He responded in English. It was their pattern. He spoke English. She spoke Spanish. The only time she ever used English, it was in a whisper. “How? Why so late?”

Placida Ramirez was old, but not feeble. “That’s my business.”

The woman standing on the other side of his grandmother made an amused little noise and he raised his head, gathering impressions. An air of sturdiness and directness, a headful of wild brown and blond curls, strong-looking legs. She’d obviously been inside the burning house—soot was smeared along her chin and the front of her shirt. One knee was scraped and dusty and she had a streak of blood on one arm. “You went in?”

“I broke the window,” she said. “I knew she was really old, and it scared me that she might be still asleep.”

“You know you’re cut?”

She frowned and looked down, not seeing it at first, then lifted the sleeve of her T-shirt. “Ah, it’s not bad. I’ll be all right.”

Her voice was smooth and green, like a pond in a forest. He looked at her muscled legs below her shorts, the looseness of breasts beneath her shirt. Rubbed his palm against his thigh. “You sure?”

She backed away. “Yeah. Now that she’s safe, I’ll just go clean up.”

“I’m Thomas Coyote,” he said, and extended his hand. A way to hold her another moment. “Thank you.”

She hesitated and put her hand into his big one, and
he liked the sensible feel of her fingers. Strong palm, a good grip. “Luna McGraw.”

His grandmother snorted and let go of an annoyed stream of Spanish, none of it complimentary. Thomas glared at her, letting go of the woman, feeling her flee the second he let her go. He thought it would have been neighborly to tell her they’d have her to dinner in order to thank her. Something. But he didn’t. He settled his face into a frown and watched her cross the street, breaking into a simple, athletic lope as she passed the house next door, then cut across the lawn to a house he’d often noticed, a small, well-tended adobe with a pretty yard full of flowers. She ducked inside. A moment later, light brightened a set of long windows to the back.

His grandmother cursed next to him, and he couldn’t make it all out—his Spanish was not that good—but he gathered it had something to do with the Anglo and the trickster. “She saved your life,
Abuela,”
he said.

Placida scowled up at him.

He knew she wasn’t trying to kill herself. It was a mortal sin, for one thing, and if she was anything, it was a good Catholic. But whatever she’d been doing, she wasn’t talking now. “C’mon, let’s get you home and in bed. You’ll be too tired tomorrow to do anything.”

Maggie’s diary

17 Agosto 2001,
Sta. Joan de la Cruz

Dear Tupac,
My name is Maggie and I just bought this notebook to write in a couple of weeks ago, because there is no one here to talk to anymore and I’m going crazy. This one time, a teacher told us you could write stuff down and it’s almost like talking, and she told me I was a good writer, that it would probably make me happy to do this, and I guess it’s better than nothing. I asked her who I’d be writing
to
and she said, just make somebody up, like this Jewish girl, Anne Frank, did. Somebody you think will listen to everything you say and want to hear it. So I picked you. Maybe if you’re really dead you don’t have anything else to do so maybe you won’t mind.

I haven’t started till tonight because I couldn’t think what to say, but tonight, there’s something to write about. Tonight, this is what happened.

There’s a
bruja
who lives behind me. That means witch in Spanish. Her house is across the field, and when it caught fire, I was sitting in the window of my room, wrapped in a blanket, my feet hanging out over the ground two stories below. My mom used to hate it when I did that, but she doesn’t notice anymore.

I don’t do it to be dangerous. It’s really not all that dangerous, though I guess a little kid could fall. I’m not little anymore, already fifteen, though I didn’t have my
quinceañera
like I was supposed to last June because my dad died and everybody forgot. Well, I didn’t forget, but everybody else did and I guess I understand. I’m not sure if you could have a
quinceañera
at, like, sixteen, but I’ve known the priest since I was born so maybe he’d let me. We’d already gotten all the stuff, too, really pretty napkins and things from Mexico, kinda too pink if you know what I mean, but I still liked it.

Anyways, I wasn’t asleep because there was this really, really bright moon. It woke me up and I heard all these weird howling noises outside along the creek, and it scared me, made me keep thinking of
La Uorona
, who is a really scary ghost who steals children and drowns them, so I got up because usually that’s all I have to do to feel better, just stop lying there, scaring myself. Because of course there’s no ghost on the creek. I could see that once I looked—and not even a ghost could have hidden in that bright light. Might as well have been day, only it was cold.

So, anyways, I was telling you about the
bruja
‘s house catching fire. I wasn’t looking that way, because my windows look out toward Taos Mountain, but when
I heard the fire trucks so close by, I went down to the backyard to see what was happening. Flames spit out of the back of the house like something on TV, bright orange against the night sky, beautiful when they popped up out of the roof, dancing and twirling along the edges of the wood. I stood there on the porch, blanket around my shoulders, watching the firemen with their hoses spray water on it.

The
bruja
is a skinny old woman who looks like an owl. She grows all the old plants in her garden, and my mom goes there for herbs for a cough or a charm for somebody or to ask about a dream she had.

I don’t believe in any of that stuff. Charms, saints, spells, prayers—like anything can keep you safe, right? Didn’t even keep the old woman safe, did it, because there was her house, burning down right before my eyes. I hate to tell you, but that made me a little bit happy. I didn’t want her to die or nothing, but she gave me the creeps with her big old eyes and hands like claws.

“Magdalena!” My mother’s voice, rough from sleeping, came out of a window behind me. “What are you doing?”

“The fire trucks woke me up,” I told her. “I came to see what happened.”

My mom came out on the porch in her bare feet, her hair all long and dark on her shoulders and back. Pretty long now. She had on a plain white nightdress, and under that awful moon, I thought she looked dead, her eyes all hollow, her skin pale gray. I guess my mom doesn’t always sleep that well either, though you’d never know it in the daytime when she has on all her makeup for work. Everybody says then that she’s really pretty and doesn’t look her age, which is thirty-six.

Now she came outside like it was totally normal to be
wide awake in the middle of the night. She lit a cigarette. The smoke drifted out in little clouds, and she coughed. “D’you see Placida anywhere?”

“Yeah.” I pointed to the shadow-people standing in the yard. “Somebody got her out.”

All glassy-eyed, my mom says, “I gotta see her. Been having dreams again.”

I told her, “Mom! I’m sick of your dreams!” I yanked my blanket around me. “Not every dream means something you know!”

“Not every one,
h’ita
, but some do.” She petted my shoulder and I wanted to move away because I was mad, but I also kind of liked the feeling of her strong hand. She’s crazy most of the time now, which really isn’t fair, considering. A person should get to keep one parent the same if she’s only fifteen and still needs them.

But like somebody wanted me to know that she was big-time crazy, my mom said, “The dreams about your dad were real. I didn’t want to think so, but I saw all that coming a long time before it did.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Night, baby,” was all she said. I looked at her through the window and she was just sitting there, shoulders hunched, smoking in the dark, all alone. It made me want to smash something, like when I went loco at school last year and tore up this classroom because nobody would listen to me and I was so upset about my dad and they all wanted me to act all normal, when I wasn’t. Now I wanted to smash the windows or one of the big glass bowls she used to like to collect. Now they just sit there, getting all dusty like everything else in the house. Like everybody here is dead, not just my dad. Pretty soon, spiders’ll start building webs over things.

Well, I don’t want to be dead. And I don’t want her to be dead, either. I didn’t even want to smash anything, really, because to tell you the truth, it didn’t help all that much. Maybe for three minutes I felt better, and my dad was still just as dead.

I just want us to get on with things. Have normal supper at the table again, and laugh sometimes and just sit around and watch TV. That’s all I want. It just doesn’t seem like that much.

That’s enough for now. My hand is tired and I’ve filled up four pages.

Love,
Maggie

When Luna was little, they didn’t drink coffee. Nobody did. Her mother and grandmother drank tea, and Luna and her sister, Elaine, drank it with them, strong and hot and sweet, with milk in it, or iced and sweet. No milk, of course, though Luna guessed that was the idea behind chai, which she liked almost as much as a good latte. Almost.

Luna discovered coffee on her own, when she started working in a restaurant in town at the age of fifteen. All of the other waitresses and cooks drank it. It smelled so good it tempted her for a long time before she fell to its call. And once she fell, there began a love affair of great depth, and she was a person given to deep passions. Coffee had outlasted nearly all of them.

In spite of all the excitement overnight, or maybe because it distracted her from everything else she’d been worried about, Luna fell asleep immediately upon returning home after the fire incident. She awakened just after dawn, the kind of grumpy but indelible awake that wasn’t going to turn back to sleep anytime soon. She got up and pulled open the freezer to look over her choices in coffee beans. Something bracing and full-bodied this
morning, maybe a little spicy. From the seven bags of beans on the shelves, she chose a French roast they blended specially for her at a local coffee shop, ground it for the auto drip—a much coarser grind than for espresso—and stumbled into the shower. She washed the smoke out of her hair and soot out of her pores, then dressed in a pair of shorts and a light pink man-style shirt that she liked for its ambiguity, and also because it made her bust look a teeny bit bigger to balance out her not-so-flat rear. She combed her hair while it was still wet, before the curls turned to tangles.

And even drawing it all out, she was finished before the coffeemaker, which was what she’d wanted to avoid, because then she had to stand at the back door, looking up at the sky, wishing for a cigarette.

No,
wishing
hardly said it. Luna
ached
for a cigarette. For the ritual of tapping one out of a fresh pack, taking out one of the tiny lighters she liked, setting flame to the end, and inhaling deep. Deep. Then tilting back her head to blow the smoke toward the sky.

Instead, with a cranky scowl she tried to loosen and couldn’t, quite, she yanked open the drawer in the kitchen and took out a new patch. The instructions said you could leave them on overnight, but she wanted to hasten the exit of nicotine from her system, so she took them off. She tugged up her shirtsleeve and saw the raw mark left by the adhesive from the day before, pulled up the other sleeve and saw the remains of the red square from the day before
that
and got the creeps a little bit. Disgusting to think what the drug had been doing to her body all these years if skin contact could do that much damage in a few hours. She’d read somewhere that a few drops of pure nicotine in a reservoir could kill an entire town. Or maybe it was a tube full.

Whatever. It wasn’t much.

Behind her the coffee machine gurgled as it finished its cycle. Coffee, cigarette, morning begins. She stared at the Band-Aid colored patch with dull fury for a few seconds and wondered what the point was. She’d die of something anyway. Why aim for another ten years of life if every second was misery?

Stop.
That was the voice of addiction. Taking a deep breath, deep, deeper, deepest, into her lungs, she held it and blew it out just like it was a lungful of smoke. It helped a little and she did it again. Something else she read—this was not her first attempt to quit—said smokers forgot to breathe deeply.

Just breathe.

The tension started easing out of her chest and she slapped the patch on her side. By the time she fixed a cup of coffee, the patch was starting to sting and tingle a little.

But it was still impossible to just sit on the porch and watch the neighborhood wake up, especially because she downed two cups of coffee in no time. Joy’s plane didn’t arrive in Santa Fe until after noon. A lot of time to burn.