The Replacement Child (2 page)

The Martinezes, Garcias, Vigils, Trujillos—all the native Hispanic families in Santa Fe—were related somehow, their blood intermingling through marriage for more than four hundred years. The Spanish conquistadores came to Santa Fe in the early 1600s, and the settlers followed soon after. A Garden of Eden,
with a handful of Spanish Adams and Eves. The other Spanish colonies in America didn’t survive the eventual flood of immigrants. But in Santa Fe, protected by high-desert sands and a wreath of surrounding mountains, there was no flood. The colonists planted apple orchards and built adobe churches, all the while keeping the Old Ways. They were not Mexican. Not truly Spanish. They were colonial Spanish. Castilian.

Lucy waited until Tommy hung up the phone. She walked over to him and he told her what she had expected to hear: He had called the state cops, the Santa Fe police, the hospitals, the Santa Fe County sheriff, and even the city of Española police. Nothing.

“Tommy, you’re heading out to the police station tomorrow morning to do your cop checks, right? Maybe we can look into it more then,” Lucy said.

Twice a day reporters went to the Santa Fe police station to look over the incident reports to see if anything warranted a story. In the hot sheets last week, there had been a small item about a man setting fire to his house and running around it naked while singing “Amazing Grace.” It had made an amusing story and had been picked up by the national news services.

“Actually, the Gomez trial gets started tomorrow, remember?” Tommy said.

Lucy hadn’t remembered. Sam Gomez had allegedly shot into a crowd of people during the Christmastime performance of
Las Posadas
two years ago, wounding the woman who played the Virgin Mary. The trial was attracting statewide attention and had to be covered.

She thought for a second. “I’ll do it. I’ll go to the police station tomorrow morning before I come into work.”

Tommy looked surprised. According to newspaper etiquette, editors didn’t do grunt work. She should have assigned it to a different reporter instead of going herself.

“I have to get up early anyway,” she added.

Tommy looked doubtful but said nothing. He wished her good night as he left.

Lucy looked down at her desk. The dictionary stared back up at her, still opened to
S.
Lucy sat down and pulled the dictionary to her.

She found it right after
superduper. Supererogation,
with one
o
and two e’s.” It meant “the act of doing more than what is required or expected.”

She smiled to herself. She really did have to get up early—sort of.

P
atsy Burke sat in her easy chair, flipping channels. It was almost one
A.M.
She stopped when she reached
Law & Order,
her husband’s favorite. It was a rerun, but she didn’t mind. Her memory being what it was, it would seem new to her. She smiled at her joke.

A detergent commercial came on, but the announcer’s voice was too high for her hearing aid, so she muted the sound. As she watched a voiceless laughing woman get stains out of her skirt, Patsy thought about the conversation she’d had with her granddaughter three days ago.

“Grandma, what would you have been if you could have been something?” Brittany had asked. Brittany was doing a school project on choosing a career.
As if babies her age should be thinking about such things,
Patsy thought.
They should be making zoo animals out of straws or pasting oak leaves onto construction paper.

But in the end, Patsy had played along.

“An astronaut,” she said, thinking that it would please her. Brittany loved Justin Timberlake and—since the family had gone on vacation to Cape Canaveral last summer—space exploration.

“No, Grandma, you hate flying. Now really think this time.”

So Patsy thought.

She’d been born during the Depression and had grown up practical. What was that Doris Day song? “Que Sera, Sera”? Patsy had never been to college. She and John had married straight out of high school. The day after their honeymoon to Kansas City was over, she moved out of her parents’ farmhouse and into John’s parents’ home. But she had dreamed of college, even though her mother had always said, “Don’t live beyond your means, or dream beyond your dreams.” One of the town girls Patsy went to high school with had gone to college, but the girl had dropped out after only four months to get married. Not that the girl would have had much of a choice. In their day, proper women picked from only two careers—nurse or teacher.

Now her granddaughter was asking her to make the choice she’d never had. Patsy said the first thing that came into her head.

“A newspaper reporter.”

Brittany seemed pleased.

Since then, Patsy had played the game by herself, changing her chosen profession from day to hour. So far she had been a police officer, a beekeeper, a nurse, a florist, a professional traveler, and a TV news anchor. Today it was a talk-show host for the geriatric set, an Oprah in her eighties. “Okay, audience, today our topic is dentures.” Patsy smiled, thinking she would tell her next-door neighbor Claire that one.

The show came back on and she turned up the sound. It was about a small boy who had been killed. As they showed the boy’s body, she realized that he looked like George. Patsy quickly turned the channel. She flipped stations until she was sure that the shot of the dead boy was over, then settled back down to watch.

At least the tears hadn’t come this time. She hadn’t thought of George in months. She wondered if that meant she was
forgetting him. She closed her eyes and leaned back, trying to remember the last time she had thought of him. But she couldn’t. She got up slowly, her bad hip giving her a twinge. She tried to do the yoga breathing that Claire was teaching her. Something about breathing into the pain. But after a few puffs of breath in and out, she gave up and walked stiffly to her bedroom. She pulled open the drawer of her nightstand, rattling a few prescription bottles on top of the table. She opened the the cover of her white-covered Bible and pulled out four photographs. The top one was in black-and-white. George smiling back at her.

He was only a year old in the picture. George hadn’t cried at all when the flashbulbs went off, making that loud pop. He’d hammed it up, smiling even more. The photographer had called him “a natural.” John hadn’t wanted her to spend the money at the photo studio, saying that they should wait until the family Christmas picture. But there had been no more family Christmas pictures. Four months after the photo was taken, George was trying to catch pollywogs in the creek by their farm, with John nearby putting up fence posts. George was blue when they found him in the water.

That had been more than forty years ago. They had never discussed it. She and John had packed up the farmhouse and moved to Wichita within a week. For two years they lived in a small apartment with only one room and rusty pipes. She was never able to scrub out the rust stains from the porcelain sink. The floorboards creaked so badly that Patsy barely moved while she stayed at home all day, finding ways to silently iron, cook, and clean. As if any noise might remind her that George was dead.

Patsy pulled out the picture underneath the one of George. It was of her and her sons John Junior and Harold running in a sprinkler in front of a ranch-style home. On the back in her writing was: “Home. 1961. John Jr., 8. Harold, 6.” They had bought the house and moved out of the apartment as soon as she got
pregnant with John Junior. The house had been built in a new subdivision. All the homes looked alike and had big grass yards. John fenced their yard in as soon as John Junior could walk. When the boys started elementary school, they wanted to take swimming lessons at the high-school pool with their friends, but John said that they couldn’t afford it. Patsy didn’t ask him about it. Instead, she and the boys spent the summer days running and jumping in the sprinkler.

The next photo was of John in his long-sleeved police uniform. She turned the photo over. It said, “Wichita, Fourth of July Parade, 1963,” in her handwriting. John had been on the force almost twelve years by then. He looked tired in his navy wool dress uniform. He had just made sergeant a few months earlier and the extra pay went into their mortgage.

The last photo had been taken just a year ago, during a family reunion at John Junior’s house in Albuquerque. Patsy sat in the middle. Her two sons on either side with their wives, her six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Seven-year-old Brittany was her youngest grandchild. John Junior’s young second wife had wanted more children. Patsy took off her glasses and looked at the picture more closely, the photo almost touching her nose. She smiled. She looked pretty good for an eighty-two-year-old great-grandma. But she looked odd standing with her family without John next to her.

She and John had retired to New Mexico six years ago to be near John Junior. They had searched for homes in Albuquerque but finally settled in Santa Fe, where the homes were more expensive but the higher altitude was better for John’s health. Within three years, he died of a stroke. Her friend Claire said that retirement had killed John. And Patsy thought that might be true. He had wandered around the house all day, thinking up projects to do and then not finishing them. Out in the garage, there were still some bookshelves he had been making.

She heard a noise out in the living room and limped out
of her bedroom, once again trying Claire’s yoga breathing. It still didn’t work. The squealing was coming from the police scanner next to the easy chair, momentarily hurting Patsy’s hearing aid. She muted the volume on the TV and turned up the scanner.

“Medic One, 1225 San Francisco Street, elderly woman with chest pains.” Patsy wrote down the call in her journal and said a quick prayer for the woman.

L
ucy drove around the block a few times before she found a parking space in the dim light. It was just after 11:30
P.M.,
but the streets around the Cowgirl bar were still filled with cars. She sat in the front seat, prepping herself in the rearview mirror; she reapplied her lipstick, brushed her hair, and tried to do something creative with her black eyeliner, managing only to poke herself in the eye. She wiped the eyeliner away, but now it looked like she had a case of pink eye. Very attractive. Oh well, at least the red made her eyes look more blue. Accentuate the positive, right? She bent over in her seat and adjusted her breasts in her bra—a burlesque move she had been doing since she was fourteen. When she sat back up, she had cleavage.

She got out of the car and headed through a wrought-iron gate that was almost off its hinges, past a cobblestone courtyard, and into the crouching adobe building. The Cowgirl was packed. She scanned the tables for the copy editors she was supposed to meet. The adobe-brick walls were painted a sickly salmon color and covered in 1950s photos of cowgirls in short fringed skirts and red lipstick. The chandeliers were made of the antlers of deer and steers. Behind the copper-tin bar was a brass wall hanging of a naked cowgirl lounging seductively on a saddle. It made Lucy think of chafing.

The crowd was a mix of locals taking advantage of dollarbeer night, tourists in town for the ski season, and convention
goers with their name tags still on. A woman named Lisa Smiley—if her name tag was to be believed—walked by with four beers.

Lucy stood on the bottom rung of an empty bar stool to get a look over the crowd. The French had made up a word for someone her size:
petite.
And for that she was eternally grateful. She would have hated shopping in the “lady dwarf” section at Sears.

Lucy spotted the copy editors at a table in the corner. She made her way through the crowd and was about to sit down when she realized that the
Capital Tribune
copy editors weren’t alone—they were sitting with a group of reporters from the competing
Santa Fe Times.
Hell. Damn. She looked around to make sure Del wasn’t there. He wasn’t. Thank God. The table was split in half—women on one end and men on the other. She wiggled her way down toward the men.

In grade school, some students always sat in the front of the class and some always sat in the back; she always sat with the boys. Not because she was interested in them romantically—that became an issue only after she’d hit puberty—but because women made her uncomfortable. She could never figure out the social nuances. The female social system was too complex and required a set of emotional skills that she didn’t understand. And she was never very good at “girl things”—she hated shopping for clothes—and she loved action movies. Whenever she met a woman for the first time, Lucy always felt like she was skipping steps two through four in a required dance.

Men were easier. They made sense. She was never worried whether they were smarter than she or more clever—when it came to competing with men, she knew she would always win. With women she might not be the smartest or the prettiest; she might be average. She might be blah.

She was the middle child—sandwiched between two boys, a year apart on either side. She was neither the youngest nor
the oldest. Stuck in limbo. To get noticed, she became the toughest, smartest, and funniest of the boys. She simply ignored the fact that she wasn’t a boy.

When Lucy was twelve, her mother took her to the Clinique counter at Macy’s to get a makeover. When Lucy wore her new makeup to school the next day, the boys made fun of her and gave her the once-over, but it was the girls’ reaction that was more interesting—they talked to her. They asked her about shades of eye shadow and how to apply mascara. That’s when she got it—look like a girl, act like a boy. Last week she had spent sixty dollars on a haircut—not to attract men but to impress women. Two girls at work had asked her who her hairstylist was; they’d talked for twenty minutes about hair dye and wondered out loud if Lucy should get highlights in her dark blond hair. Still, at best, all Lucy could manage to strike up was a casual acquaintanceship with a woman.

As Lucy approached the table, she made one of the male copy editors scoot his chair over when she sat down. The two male reporters on either side of her moved over as well. The women eyed her from the other end of the table. Lucy hoped it was a friendly look. The waitress came over and Lucy ordered a Sprite, not wanting to fall into another Monday-night drinking bout. Last Monday, she hadn’t gotten home until six
A.M.
and had to throw up for an hour before the bathroom stopped spinning. She’d felt like an idiot. Drinking that heavily in college was expected; when you’re twenty-eight, it’s bordering on alcoholism.