Barbara Samuel (40 page)

Luna took the phone without ceremony. “Maggie? What’s wrong, hon?”

“It’s my mother … she’s …” a huge, gulping sob. “I don’t know. There’s something wrong. My grandma’s not home and I didn’t know who else to call!”

“I’ll be right there. Don’t move honey. I’ll be there in one minute, okay?” She plucked her keys off the table and said to Joy, “Come on. You need to come with me.”

“You want me to drive?” Elaine said.

Luna gave her a smile. “I got it.”

• • •

Joy had a sick feeling all the way over there, and bit down on her thumbs so hard they hurt when she took them out from between her teeth at Maggie’s house. Every light was blazing, and the porch light was on, and Maggie, without a sweater or even any shoes, was standing there waiting for them on the porch. Her hair was in a ponytail and blew up like something out of the comics. Joy hardly waited until the car was stopped before she leapt out and ran up to her, putting her arms around her. “Are you okay?”

Maggie could only take a giant gulp of air, and point toward the house. “I can’t wake her up!”

But this was when it was good to have a mom who knew things. Luna took the steps two at a time. “Show me where she is, sweetie.” She pushed on Maggie’s shoulder, not unkindly.

The house smelled like dead fish, and it made Joy’s stomach hurt. Feeling ghoulish and curious and scared, she followed them down the hall, afraid to look, suddenly remembering things like slit wrists and gory stuff like that. But Maggie’s mom was just lying in the bed. Luna went over and spoke to her, “Sally? Sally can you hear me?”

Nothing. Luna said, “Maggie, get me the phone,” and while Maggie went to get it, Luna put her hand on Sally’s chest, maybe to check her breathing. She swore under her breath, and then looked around the night table picking up a couple of prescription bottles, one after the other. Her shoulders were tight and hard. She picked up the last one. “Shit!” she said aloud, and bent down to put her arm under Sally’s shoulders, dragging her limp body into a sitting position. She yelled “Sally! Sally!” and moved her around. “Come on, Sally, you gotta wake up.”

Maggie rushed into the room and Luna barked, “Dial 911 and tell them we have an overdose. Joy, go get a wet washcloth with some ice cubes inside and bring it back to me. Hurry, sweetie.”

Joy ran down the hall to the kitchen and pulled open drawers at random until she found the one with towels. She turned on the water in the sink, cold, and threw the towel under it, and while it was getting wet, she opened the freezer and found some ice cubes. There was nothing in there but the ice, so it wasn’t hard. She wrapped the ice cubes in the squeezed out towel, and was proud that her hands weren’t shaking.

When she ran back to the room, her mom was moving Sally, whose head bobbed just like a dead person’s, like she had no bone in her neck. Joy rushed over and put the towel in her mom’s hand, then went to stand with Maggie, who had her arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes were all red from crying, and Joy didn’t know if she ought to take her hand or not, so she did, just in case it would help. Maggie took it and squeezed it hard. “Is she gonna die?”

“No!” Luna said from the bed, rubbing the cold cloth on Sally’s face. “Sally!” she yelled. “Your daughter is here. She needs you. Stay with me!”

And then there was the sound of sirens and Maggie ran to let in the ambulance attendants, who rushed in with squawking radios and their neat uniforms. Luna said, “Thank God. Acute overdose, possible accident, possible suicide attempt. She needs to be admitted for evaluation.”

“Are you her counselor?”

Joy was looking at her mother’s face, and it went hard. “No. But I’m a therapist, and I’m familiar with her case. She’s extremely depressed after the death of her husband.”

Then the men were hustling around, getting Sally on the stretcher and rolling her out, calling in details on their radios. Luna came right over to Maggie and took her into a giant bear hug, and Maggie burst into tears and cried like she was going to die. “It’s okay, sweetie,” Luna said, over and over. She rocked Maggie back and forth. “You did the right thing. You saved her life. She’s going to be okay. She’s going to get some help. You did the right thing.”

And it was only then that Joy realized everything that happened. “Can she come to our house, Mom?”

“In a little while. Let’s go to the hospital now, huh? And Maggie, you can see for yourself that she’s okay.” She picked up the cold, wet towel. The ice cubes tumbled out of it and Joy picked them up off the bed as her mother bathed Maggie’s face.

“Come on,” Luna said gently. “Go get a coat and some shoes and we’ll go to the hospital.”

Maggie looked blank.

“Joy,” said Luna. “Why don’t you help her?”

“Okay. Come on, Maggie. Let’s get you some stuff.”

Placida hurt in every bone, even when she sat in the warm kitchen, wrapped up in an afghan one of her daughters had knitted for her a long time ago. She rocked in her chair, saying the rosary against the pressing darkness she felt rolling toward them, a darkness she couldn’t name, one that filled her chest, reached out all around and pressed down on everybody. Everybody. She told herself it wasn’t anything, that she was just tired and grumpy from the weather change. But her heart stayed heavy. She heard Tiny fighting with someone on the phone, and said an extra prayer for him to be peaceful, to learn grace. For a minute, when she heard him hang up, mad, she thought she could call him
into the kitchen for hot chocolate, the kind that came from Mexico in hard cubes and had cinnamon in it. But the thought of grinding up that hard chocolate was too much for her.

Tomás, good man that he was, sat with her in the kitchen, going over accounts. He, too, was worried about Tiny. Once he went into the other room and spoke to him in a firm voice, then came back and went back to his columns and figures. A good man, her Tomás. They didn’t make too many like him anymore.

She heard sirens on the road and felt even colder, but though they seemed to stop somewhere close, she couldn’t see which of their neighbors might be struck by bad luck tonight. Or maybe it wasn’t no big thing—a kid with a bad cut or something. Not everything was always death coming on big feet.

But when the doorbell rang, Placida cried out her fear. And when in walked
La Diabla
, pregnant as an old sow, her eyes all red from crying, and threw herself into Tomás’s arms, she knew what she’d been dreading. Oh, not this one! Not this one,
Madre!

But then she remembered her prayer tonight. She was a vain old woman. What did she know? Maybe this one would stick finally. And at least she was bringing a son with her.

Nonetheless, she was glad when Tomás pushed
La Diabla
away, as if she had a disease. Which she did. The unhappiness disease. No matter what happened to her, forever, she would be unhappy. She drew it to her like a cloud because she liked the thunder and lightning, got bored when she had simple good fortune in her hands.

In disgust, Placida rose. “I’m going to bed,” she spat, in Spanish because the foolish girl never understood it and she didn’t deserve to.

• • •

Luna called Elaine and Allie from the hospital and told them what was going on. They opted to stay and wait for Luna’s return, and Allie volunteered to track down relatives via the telephone numbers Maggie supplied. Two hours later, Allie reported that everyone had gone to a wedding in a little town south of Santa Fe. “Maybe that was what set her off, huh?”

“It’s possible,” Luna agreed. She hung up and found the girls sitting quietly in the waiting room. Maggie had just come back from seeing her mother, and there was about her mouth the sudden giving away of someone who has just about reached the end of her rope. “Come on, sweetie,” Luna said. “You come home with us tonight, all right? We’ll come back first thing in the morning if you want to.”

She moved like an automaton, but she went. Back at the house, Luna reheated the fondue and they all sat around the table in the dining room with quiet music in the background, and Maggie ate like a starving child. Which she probably was. Luna got her settled in Joy’s bedroom, and gave Joy her own bed for the night, and brought out pillows and blankets to the couch for herself. Elaine helped—cleaning up the dishes, getting the coffeemaker ready for morning (Luna didn’t have the heart to tell her that she hated the automatic feature because the water wasn’t cold enough to start, and so it wasn’t hot enough once it brewed). Allie packed the leftover fruits and veggies into plastic bags. They didn’t talk much. Allie left first, kissing Luna’s cheek. “Call me if you need anything.”

Then Elaine put on her coat and took out her car keys. “Was there something you wanted to ask me, Luna?”

Luna took a breath. “Yeah,” she said, and nodded for emphasis. “Yeah.” She chewed on the inside of her
cheek for a minute. “I wanted to ask you if you would go with me to the land tomorrow. I need to see it, and I’m scared to go alone, without you.”

“You just want me to drive, don’t you?”

Luna met her sister’s eyes. “No, not at all. I need
you.
Mom can’t do it, and I want somebody with me who will understand … everything.”

Elaine looked at her keys, flipped through them. “I don’t really remember him, Luna. I was only five.”

“I know. But it hurt you as much as it did me and Mom. Maybe more.”

“What do you think you’re going to find, Luna?” Her tone was angry. “Some letter saying, ‘Dear family, this is why I was such a jerk and left you’?”

“I have no idea, Elaine. I just know that I have to go. And I really don’t want to go alone.” She took her sister’s hand. It was cold. “Please, Sissie? We can take the girls with us, and maybe we can find some really great place to have lunch, and then we can go ahead with the sale and we’ll have plenty of money.”

A long pause. Then her glasses flashed reflected light as she raised her head. “Okay.”

Luna hugged her. “Thank you. Come over whenever you get up and we’ll get going after I take Maggie over to the hospital to see her mother.”

“What if she wants to stay?”

“She won’t be able to. Her mother needs inpatient psychiatric care for a little while. It’ll be better for Maggie to be moving, to be with other people.”

“Right.” She said it like it was a surprise. “Luna, why don’t you go back to counseling? You’re good at it, and like Joy told me, it’s a sin to waste a talent.”

Sudden tears, probably a response to everything that had gone on tonight, sprung to Luna’s eyes. “I’ll make
you a deal. Find a blues band to sing with and I’ll update my certification.”

Elaine laughed. “See you in the morning.”

Luna washed her face and put on a long-sleeved nightshirt with some sweats and her moon-and-stars slippers. No way she was going to sleep anytime soon, even if it was nearly midnight. She put the kettle on the stove to boil water for a cup of tea. The house hummed quietly around her, the heater blowing soft air efficiently through the rooms, and it gave her a sense of security to think of the shiny new furnace doing its muscle work. Gave her a lot of pride to have this home of her own, a place that could be an oasis for a lost girl, a place where her friends and family could gather.

And suddenly, she realized she hadn’t once thought of having a cigarette tonight. She didn’t even want one now.

Getting there
, Barbie said.

Yes. She supposed she was. Standing there in her long, cheery kitchen, surrounded by silence and herself, she realized she wouldn’t be anyone else in the world right now. And by extension, that meant she wouldn’t be able to change her past and still be herself, standing here in this room, flush with the knowledge that she’d helped Sally tonight, that there was a man in the world who made her feel good, that she was a good mother and maybe even a good person most days.

In some wonder, she touched her elbow, that scar that had always been a reminder of all she didn’t want to be. Now she wondered if it might just be a battle wound, a mark of life. She didn’t have to be proud of it, but she could embrace the fact that it had taught her something, carried her forward.

The kettle started to whistle and she picked it up
before it woke Joy or Maggie, pouring water over the tea bag and stirring in sugar.

The phone rang, startling her, and she grabbed it with a sense of dread, praying it wouldn’t be bad news about Sally.

“Hello?”

“It’s not bad news,” Thomas said.

“Thomas!”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No.” She took a breath. “I’m so glad to hear your voice. It’s been a long, long night.”

“Here, too. Tell me about yours first.”

Luna launched into the tale of Maggie’s mother, the trip to the hospital, all of it. “What’s yours?”

“You know, I’m listening to your voice and wishing I was seeing your lips move. Can I come over? We could sit on the porch.”

Luna smiled, her heart lightening. “If you promise to be very, very quiet, we can go to my workroom.”

“It’s a deal. Be there in three minutes.”

She laughed, and the sound was low and sexy. “I’ll meet you at the back door.”

“Luna!”

“I’m here.”

“What are you wearing?”

Her laugh this time was self-mocking. “A very old nightshirt and my sweats.”

“Don’t change. Promise?”

“Sure. What the heck.”

But she did check her face to make sure there was no mascara smeared under her eyes. Her face was devoid of makeup and she looked tired, faint dark circles adding age, her cheeks completely pale, as they always were without the assistance of blush. Not beautiful. Kitty would have touched a smear of lipstick to her
mouth, spritzed cologne over her hair, maybe put a little Vaseline on her lids and lashes to look dewy. Luna decided she’d rather just be herself for right now.

She heard his truck and hurried to let him in, shivering a little at the open back door waiting for him to cross the yard. His hair was down.

He leapt up the stairs, his body cold when he took her into his arms and kissed her. Luna pressed into him, loving the fresh smell of him, that distinctive scent that was his alone, fire and sage and a New Mexico wind. “Hi,” she said quietly. “Come in before I freeze.”