Barbara Samuel (4 page)

So to speak.

From the porch, she could see Placida’s house and decided to get a bottle of water and go take a look at the damage. Clouds hung low on Taos Mountain to the east, lending a deep quiet to the morning. The neighborhood, mostly old, square, small adobe houses— some old, some new—was built low along an acequia, an irrigation ditch that ran alongside the narrow dirt road. There were no large farms here, but it was rural enough—most people at least grew some beans and corn and maybe some melons or potatoes. Some people kept a few animals; a rooster crowed in the mornings,
but Luna had never seen him. She imagined him to be a cock of some importance, with deep red feathers.

It was a great neighborhood and she loved it. The main thing was the quiet. Just now, there was only the sound of cottonwood leaves rattling against one another, water chuckling through the ditch. The Medinas’ goats heard Luna’s feet crunching on gravel and rushed their fence, bleating softly, sticking their gray and black noses over the top to see if she had anything good. A lot of people didn’t like goats—thought their eyes were creepy—but Luna found them happy creatures, and patted all of their heads in turn, paying special attention to the kid, who leapt along the fence as far as he could.

She left the goats and angled across Placida’s yard, rounding the herb gardens filled with almost indecently healthy plants, to take a look at the kitchen from the back.

It was bad. Early morning light shone on a gaping, charcoaled hole where the window had been, and showed another, the size of a truck tire, on the roof. Feeling a faint, wavery echo of her terror the night before, she walked along the side of the house, looking at it, sipping her water, and went around to the front. Someone had taped a big piece of cardboard over the shattered window. She climbed the steps to the porch and tried to look inside. Light came in from the east, but there was so much soot on the glass it was hard to see anything.

Maybe it was smelling the faint odor of wet, burned wood, but suddenly Luna thought it very, very lucky that she’d been awake. The old woman had not been about to come out of that house. Stepping back, Luna wondered what the heck she’d been doing lighting candles in the middle of the night.

A dog barked and she glanced over to see a big tan
and black dog loping toward the house. Young and well muscled, with a black spot comically circling one eye, he bounded up on the porch and nosed Luna’s hand like they were old friends. She laughed. “Hey, guy. Where’d you come from?”

He sat down politely at her feet and grinned, his tongue lolling. “What a cutie!” She knelt to put her face on a level with his, scrubbing his head. “You’re a doll.”

“Good morning.”

The voice.

The voice of Thomas Coyote, the old woman’s grandson. Luna rose slowly, trying to cover the sudden shyness that overtook her. “Is he yours?”

“Yeah, the rascal.”

She kept her hand on the dog’s head, an anchor, finding it hard to look up at the man himself, able to take only little glances. He was a very attractive man. Not handsome or beautiful or anything like that—his skin was a little rough from a long-ago case of acne, and he carried a little extra weight around his middle—but very
present.
His presence colored the air, made it almost shimmer.

Truth be told, she’d had a distant sort of crush on him for months. It was a small town, and there weren’t that many eligible men past a certain age. Too many
artistes
in Taos—writers and photographers and painters, all who took themselves so seriously that a woman was an afterthought, a convenience. Thomas was … not ordinary, never that … but
real.
She saw him around a lot, at the Dairy Queen on hot nights, in a café, eating dinner by himself as he read the newspapers from Albuquerque and Denver. Mainly, she saw him at the grocery store where she worked as a florist. He bought Tide detergent and a lot of Chef Boyardee canned ravioli and frozen corn on the cob.

Silence stretched, longer and thicker with every second. Tucking a lock of wild hair behind her ear like it might help, Luna managed a question. “How’s your grandma?”

“Seems to be fine. She’s sleeping this morning.” He lifted his chin toward the window. “How’s it look in there?”

“Not good.”

He came up the steps and Luna instinctively kept a wide circle of empty space between them, watching as he repeated her gesture of a few minutes earlier, wiping the glass as if to get rid of the soot that was on the inside. She stood back safely, noticing that his hair, braided tightly into a single rope that fitted into the hollow of his spine almost to his waist, was still wet. It dampened the fabric of his blue-and-white striped shirt, a shirt that was tucked neatly into his jeans, the sleeves rolled up on powerful-looking forearms tanned the color of cinnamon.

Now he turned. “It looks worse than bad,” he said gruffly, and shook his head. “I can’t imagine what she was up to.” From his pocket, he took a set of keys and unlocked the front door. “You want to hang around a second in case I go through the floor or something?”

“Sure.”

“Stay,” he said when the dog would have followed him into the house. The dog whined, but obeyed, all but sitting on Luna’s foot. Thomas raised an eyebrow. “You, too.”

She smiled a little, looking beyond him toward the burned kitchen. “I don’t know that you ought to chance going in the kitchen. Those beams look pretty bad.”

“Yeah.” He walked slowly, looking up at the ceilings covered with black swirls. He stopped on the threshold to the kitchen. Without stepping on the charred floor, he
bent and picked something up, then dropped it with a yelp, shaking his fingers. He looked over his shoulder at her.

“Hot?”

He made a rueful face. “Not the smartest thing I ever did.” From his back pocket, he took a folded white handkerchief—how many men in the world still carried handkerchiefs?—and picked up what he’d dropped, carrying it back to where she stood. “Look.”

It was a heavy metal candlestick holder. “Why would she be burning candles in the middle of the night?”

“A ritual, prayers of some kind.” He turned it over, but it was the same all the way around. “Guess I’ll take it to her.”

Luna’s eye caught on a curve of black hair against his brow, and she backed away a little jerkily. It was slightly humiliating to have to admit the whole crush business to herself and she really hoped he didn’t pick up on it. “Good idea,” she said.

Then she turned and went back out to the porch and opened her water bottle to take a long drink. He came outside, too, and she didn’t look at him, choosing instead to focus on the blue rounds of mountains all around them. “Guess I’d better get going,” she said.

“How’s that scratch?” he asked.

She touched it. “A little raw, but nothing important.”

“Do me a favor.” He took a small notebook out of his pocket, along with a stub of a pencil and a pair of reading glasses, which he perched on his nose before he scribbled something on the paper. “My phone number,” he said, “in case you need to see a doctor.”

With the glasses on, he looked like a professor, somebody who’d be teaching ethnic studies or American Indian literature at UNM. For reasons she didn’t examine,
they made him seem more approachable. She could look directly at him as she took the paper.

It was a face both more and less than she’d thought from a distance. Unmistakably Indian, long and raw-boned, dominated by uncompromising cheekbones and a wide mouth. It was hard to decide what nation he belonged to—she didn’t think it was Taos or even Pueblo, but one of the Plains nations—Cheyenne, maybe, or Lakota. His long dark eyes were somehow sad, but maybe that was something she added because of the lonely grocery items.

Stop mooning, will you?

Right. Luna took the piece of paper he held out to her and the air changed, like the barometric pressure had dropped all at once. It made her want to yawn to pop her ears. His aggressive nose had a glow of sunburn on it, and he smelled like something she couldn’t quite name.

Suddenly, she wanted a cigarette.

Life was good. Life was excellent, as a matter of fact. “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she said, edging away from him. “See you around.”

He raised his head. Stood there holding his glasses, with his mouth turned down a little at the corners, and something in his expression made Luna realize that she wasn’t alone in her attraction, that while she’d been thinking about that hair, he’d been noticing things about her, maybe lips or eyes or breasts, whatever his thing was. It gave her a pang, made her want all kinds of things she’d told herself she could live without.

Thomas inclined his head, and she waited for what might come next, but he said only, “Let me know if you have any trouble with that arm.”

“Hope your grandma’s okay.”

He nodded, his eyes serious on her face.

There was nothing else to do, so she turned back toward her house and tried not to think about him looking at her backside. She couldn’t help wishing, as she tried to walk normally, that she had a nice flow of waterlike hair to swish around, or nice long legs, or something else to watch, something really good.

Joy would be arriving in Santa Fe at two. Since she had a little time, Luna ducked into an AA meeting, just to be safe. The thoughts of tequila and wine had been quite powerful the night before, and maybe the cigarette struggle was bringing up some of those old demons. It was a good move. She emerged an hour later fortified and stronger.

She walked to her mother’s house from the church basement where the meeting was held. It was still and quiet on the hill as she approached the house. This neighborhood, too, was built low, the dun-colored adobe blending into the landscape.

But these adobe villas ran to the millions of dollars. Cottonwoods and discreet plantings of native shrubs cushioned any noise that might offend, and hid the windows of the super-rich and even celebrity sorts who retreated here. Far below, children cried out in some game, and an airplane droned above the cloud cover.

As Luna approached the gate of the graceful courtyard and let herself in, she noticed a handful of leaves on the cottonwood were edged with gold, the first sign of autumn. It seemed too early, as if time was rushing too fast, and she fingered the leaves as she waited for her mother to answer the door.

“Luna!” her mother said. “You’re early!”

She’s the only one who called Luna by her real name. Everyone else just called her Lu. It was such an odd name, Luna as paired with McGraw. Luna came from
her father, who was charmed by her white skin and pale hair. Her mother was charmed by her father, so she did not protest. It suggested a certain magic to her, a child named for the moon. And if Jesse Esquivel had not disappeared when Luna was seven and her sister five, she would have been Luna Esquivel, which made some sense.

With a stab of surprise, Luna felt her demons from the night before suddenly rise up and start to howl.

She put a hand to her chest. There were things a person didn’t get over. No amount of therapy, journals, art, or rituals could take away the pain of some wounds. Period. Some of them lived on forever in big messy scars that were so tender they could bleed without much provocation at all. Luna’s father leaving home left a scar like that. On Luna, on her sister Elaine, on her mother.

Standing in the courtyard of Kitty’s luxurious home on a Saturday morning, Luna said, “Give me a minute, Mom.”

Kitty cocked her head, but then she nodded. “Come in when you’re ready.”

Luna moved away from the door, pacing ten steps out and ten steps back. One of the things she learned in recovery was to acknowledge emotions as they arose, instead of trying to stuff them behind a wall. Not that she was always particularly good at it.

The dream hadn’t been notable. Just her father and her, just before he left, in a tourist shop in Albuquerque, where he’d bought her a copper bracelet machine-stamped with thunderbirds.

Go with it
, Therapist Barbie said.

Jesse Esquivel had left home one morning wearing a hard hat covered with football decals and a white T-shirt tucked into his jeans, and never came back. Luna remembered his arms, dark brown and bulging from his
work, so strong that the sisters had swung on them like they were iron bars. He had loved them, their father. It was that fact that had made her wait, night after night, knees in the back of the couch so she could stare out the window, trusting that the smell of supper and her mother’s perfume would bring him home. She waited in perfect expectation, every night for what seemed like years but her mother said was only a couple of months, for him to come back through that front door.

And she knew just how it would happen, too. He’d just show up some evening, maybe one of those back-to-school nights when the dark was starting to swallow up playtime in nibbles. He’d come in at the usual time, and the girls would leap up from their play and screech, “Daddy!” like they always did, and barrel into his sturdy legs, and he’d roar and laugh and let them swing on his arms. And then, drawn by the excitement, Kitty would come out, wiping her hands on a cup towel. She’d be wearing the nubby blue dress he liked so much and she’d kiss him on the lips and then the whole family would go sit down to the supper Kitty had made, and it would never be spoken of again.

The fantasy had never come true.

Standing in the courtyard of her mother’s elegant home some thirty years later, remembering, Luna could still ache for that little girl. Luna had worn the copper bracelet for three years, never taking it off. Once a week, Kitty took a toothbrush to the green staining her wrist from it, but never insisted Luna remove it.

One early morning in the third grade, Luna slipped off the merry-go-round before class, and the bracelet caught on a screw that was just a tiny bit loose. It nearly wrenched her hand from her arm before the metal gave way in a twist. She still had the scar beneath her thumb.
The bracelet was not repairable, but somehow, she’d managed to keep the pieces all this time.

“Luna, sweetie, are you okay?” Kitty said from the door.