The Replacement Child (5 page)

G
il was getting up to leave when Officer Joe Phillips stopped by his desk.

“Good job last night,” Phillips said. Gil said thanks and was about to leave when Officer Manny Cordova came up.

“Gil, man, you are the man,” Cordova said with a slap on Gil’s back and a handshake. “I mean, you are my hero. You should have seen the look on that Mexican kid’s face when you read him his rights. The kid was like, ‘What the hell happened?’”

“What did happen?” Phillips asked Cordova. “All I know is that Montoya here,” he poked a thumb Gil’s way, “solved a murder case in two hours. Like it’s some office record.”

Cordova smiled and started the story before Gil could put a stop to it.

“So we get a 10-44 and I’m first on scene,” Cordova says with a swagger in his voice. “It’s a Mexican national. He’s already way dead, I mean door nail. He was stabbed or something. Lots of blood. So Gil gets there and does his thing and finds out that the dude was arrested for drug dealing last month along with his cousin. But no one knows where the cousin is. So Gil tells the wife to have the cousin come down to the police station as soon as he shows up.”

Gil glanced at his watch, wishing that Cordova would hurry
up so he could leave and get started on the Melissa Baca case, but Cordova was just warming to his story.

“So the cousin shows up here like within a half hour, wearing like jeans and a black shirt with one of those tye-dyed T-shirts underneath, and we take him to interrogation. The kid keeps whining and saying,” Cordova changed his voice to a Speedy Gonzales accent, “‘I didn’t do nothing.’” Phillips started to laugh, but Cordova shushed him with a wave of his hand before saying, “So Gil has me get the kid a Coke, which I’m thinking, ‘Why am I getting this a-hole a Coke?’ As soon as I set it down in front of the kid, Gil ‘accidentally,’” Cordova made quote marks with his fingers, “spills the Coke on the kid’s pants, right on the crotch, so it looks like he peed himself.”

Cordova started laughing hard and had to stop to catch his breath, before continuing. “Gil starts telling the dude he’s free to go but the kid won’t leave interrogation because he looks like he peed all over himself. So we get him a jumpsuit to wear. The kid is changing and Gil has me put the kid’s clothes in an evidence bag. Then Gil says to the kid,” Cordova changed his voice, moving it down an octave and making it sound monotone, “‘Did you know that when you stabbed your cousin it left blood on your clothes?’”

Cordova started laughing again. “And I’m thinking, ‘Damn, I’ve been staring at this kid for three hours and I didn’t see any blood splatter.’”

Gil was getting restless, but Cordova was almost to the punch line. “You know that T-shirt the kid was wearing I thought was tye-dyed, no? It was blood. The dude was stupid enough to wear the shirt he killed his cousin in to the station.” Phillips started to laugh, joining Cordova, who was almost doubled over.

Gil watched Cordova and thought about Melissa Baca. He knew that Ron and Cordova were friends, but clearly Cordova didn’t know about Melissa or he wouldn’t have been so
animated. Gil decided it wasn’t his place to say anything. That was up to Kline or the Bacas.

“Gil, man, you are the man,” Cordova said, a few more times before Gil could duck out.

A
fter she left the police station, Lucy took the highway north out of Santa Fe, the snow-covered Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the Jemez Mountains to the west. She followed the road past Tesuque and Pojoaque pueblos and turned toward Nambé Pueblo, heading into the moonscape desert that was blinding in the morning sun. The hodoos and mesas, whittled by wind and rain, cast a puzzle of shadows on the soft hills. As she drove, Lucy did what she always did—she watched the sky.

The huge clouds impossibly hugged the curvature of the earth, the immensity of the sky dwarfing the land below it. The clouds were crisp and God-lit. She thought of adjectives for the sky as she drove—
massive, turquoise, vast.
She dismissed every word as she thought of it—too stupid, too worn, too inadequate. She wished she had been born a poet so she could find a way to describe the Northern New Mexico sky.

Her best attempts had made her sound like a community college creative-writing professor or an advertisement—”an empty canvas of light and space filled with frothy clouds and azure nothingness that is all-encompassing in its beauty.” She laughed out loud—then watched the shadow of a cloud pass over a mountain, creating a moving stripe of slate across a brown hill.

Ten miles later, the wrinkled cliffs and canyons of the desert plunged into the tiny valley of Chimayó, studded by old orchards and cottonwood trees that the winter had turned a soft brown. The trees blended into the nude-crayon bluffs like an earth-toned Impressionist painting.

It was January, so there were few tourists at the Santuario de Chimayó when she pulled up.

Lucy walked through the wooden gates and curved archway and into the small courtyard crowded with gravestones, wooden crosses, and tall cedars. She stopped to study the tombstones, which bore names like Seferina Martinez, Jacinto Ortiz, and Abenicia Chavez. Old Spanish colonial names that she couldn’t properly pronounce, but which made her wish her own name had a little more flair. She looked up at the church—wooden, adobe, and lopsided. She heard pigeons cooing in the twin belfries. The pitched tin roof gleamed in the sun, its silver ridges blending into the blue-white sky. A rickety ladder on the roof led to nowhere in particular. She walked though the church door and almost tripped in the near black. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, and, as unassumingly as she could, she slipped into a pew, trying to look like she belonged and hoping that no one would ask her anything Catholic. The pews were wooden, made soft over the years. The kneelers were wood as well, with no cushioning for the faithful. Old, uncomfortable Catholic furniture. Made two hundred years ago in the belief that those who seek God must suffer to find him.

She hadn’t been lying to Tommy Martinez when she said she’d been planning to get up early. She had been planning on coming here.

It had become her habit to sit in the church at least once a week for a few minutes, sometimes hours. She wasn’t Catholic—she wasn’t anything—but the church comforted her. The once brightly colored santos and retables behind the altar were faded. The crucifix, grisly with painted blood dripping from Jesus’ head and hands, was chipped and worn. Everything was shabby, ancient, and smelled of prayers and hopes and candle wax.

Someone behind her was praying the rosary in Spanish. She couldn’t understand the words; the quiet mantra was a murmur. A family came down the aisle, five in all, with the youngest, who looked about twelve, supporting the grandmother. They all genuflected in front of the altar before slipping into the back room, where the dirt was.

The santuario was famous for its healing dirt. During Holy Week, thousands of Catholics from Northern New Mexico made a pilgrimage to the church. Last year, the newspaper had interviewed an eighty-four-year-old man who had walked the thirty miles from Santa Fe carrying a twenty-pound cross over his shoulder. It took him twenty-seven hours. He made the walk for his wife, who was dying of cancer. He said that if he brought her some of the healing dirt, she would survive. Before that, Lucy had never heard a good explanation of faith.

The family was quiet. She could see them through the doorway as they scooped up the dirt from a hole in the ground and put it in little plastic bags. The hole didn’t magically refill itself, as some legends claimed. When the dirt got low, the priests replaced it with earth dug up from the neighboring hillside. Lucy wondered if the family knew that. Would it make them believe in the powers of the dirt any less?

Lucy never took any of the dirt. She felt that she had no right. It was a Catholic custom, and she was an intruder, an observer who watched the faithful but was not one of them. She had been to a Mass only once, with her college roommate at Easter. It was all standing, sitting, kneeling—confusing Catholic aerobics that had made her feel alien and alone.

But the little mission church was different. The faith of those who visited was plain and uncomplicated. She saw it in their faces—they simply believed.

The santuario had been her and Del’s favorite place to bring visiting relatives, who always used words like
quaint
and
rustic
to describe it. They would giggle as they scooped up handfuls of the dirt. At first, she had laughed along with them, joking that they could use the dirt and some holy water to make a divine mud mask—it would tighten pores and keep Satan away. But by the time Del’s dad had come to town about seven months ago, she’d had enough. She’d begged off the trip, claiming that she had to work. It had been her day off, which Del knew, but he never pointed it out.

It hadn’t dawned on her until later that Del hadn’t actually invited her along. That should have been a clue.

P
atsy Burke sat in her jewelry-making class, trying to thread a bead onto a piece of string. Next to her, Claire Schoen was swearing up a blue streak. Patsy had never met a woman her age who swore as much as Claire did. She and Claire were taking another continuing-education course at the community college. Claire called it “classes for crones.” And Pasty could see why. More than half of the class were women her age, their gray heads bent down over their worktables.

Patsy was making a necklace for Brittany. It was her third try. The first two had come out wrong, with extra beads in silly places. Claire interrupted her with a, “Here, Pat, do this.” Patsy smiled and took the thread from Claire; after a few tries, she slipped the bead into place, then handed it back to Claire. Claire had insisted that they take the class despite her arthritis. “My joints might be stiff but they still work,” Claire had said in her heavy New York accent. Patsy spent most of her time in class doing both her and Claire’s work. But she didn’t mind.

For months after John’s fatal stroke, Patsy had spent long hours staring at nothing, trying to remember what it had felt like to be Mrs. John Burke. John Junior tried to get her to make plans. Did she want to move back to Kansas to be with her sisters? Did she want to move to Phoenix to be near Harold? John Junior yelled at her, thinking that her hearing aid was broken. What he didn’t understand was that she didn’t care. What did it matter where she was? She was lost without John. After several weeks, John Junior started to make plans to move her to Albuquerque, to live with him and his new wife. Patsy simply accepted this. She wandered around her house, thinking about packing things up into boxes but not doing it.

Claire Schoen showed up at Patsy’s door with a single, loud knock one day. When Patsy opened it, she saw a woman
dressed in white stretch pants, a big orange T-shirt, and a baseball cap. She had seen the woman before. She knew her name. She lived next door. They had said hi to each other over the fence, but that was it. Patsy had grown up on a farm, where you stayed out of other people’s business.

“Hey, Pat,” Claire said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Patsy started to say no, pointing out that she had no tennis shoes. Claire glanced at the orthopedic shoes Patsy was wearing and said, “What you’ve got on is fine. Let’s make hay while the sun shines.”

Patsy didn’t know what else to say, so she did as she’d been told. They walked in the warm sun, Claire pumping away loudly, saying, “Gotta keep these old bones moving,” and doing most of the talking. She talked about her husband, who had died twenty years earlier, saying, “Bless his heart,” and looking genuinely sad. She talked about some man named Henry from the senior center who was making moon eyes at her. As Claire talked, Patsy realized that they had things in common. Both had two sons, both had had hip replacements, both were the widows of police officers, both did their own sewing, and both played bridge.

After an hour, they were back at Patsy’s front door.

Claire said, “See you tomorrow, Pat. Same time,” and went huffing back to her house.

That had been three years ago. Since then, Claire had been trying to show Patsy how to “empower” herself. As Claire pointed out, in John’s death, God had granted Patsy something. What was that saying? Every time a door closes, somewhere a window opens? Or, as Claire put it, “We might be old, but we ain’t dead yet.”

Patsy now made her meals when she wanted to, went to bed when she wanted to. She dressed in T-shirts and, once in a while, ate spicy burritos with green chile—the kind John had never liked. It gave her heartburn, but she didn’t care. A little Pepcid AC and she was as good as new.

Not that she didn’t still miss John. Their life had been … dependable. He’d been a good provider and father. John had always said that Patsy took care of the emotions in the family and he took care of the money. He had left her with a good pension and health insurance. She still drove his last car, a Buick Skylark, but she was thinking of trading it in for one of those cute SUVs everyone in town had.

Claire had even talked her into using a laundry service. “Pat,” Claire had said, “in your lifetime you have hung out more sheets than the town bed wetter.” So Patsy, a former Kansas farm wife, had her laundry sent out. It made her feel mischievous.

Claire had said that the next thing Patsy needed to learn was how to pay her own bills. And Patsy was thinking about getting her first job. Maybe as a cashier at Hobby Lobby. She was going to stop by and get an application tomorrow, when she and Claire went on their weekly shopping trip.

Patsy slipped another bead onto the necklace, while Claire started a whole new stream of swearing. Patsy looked at her nervously. One of the other students had complained to the teacher last week that Claire swore so loudly that it made him uncomfortable. Claire did everything loudly because she was deaf in one ear but refused to wear a hearing aid. “I’m not sticking something in my ear where it don’t belong,” she would say with a snort. But Patsy thought she was just being stubborn.

Claire’s voice was getting louder and a student sitting in front of them turned to stare. Patsy poked Claire in the arm, saying, “Shush.” Claire turned and made a face at her and the two started giggling.