The Whole World Over (23 page)

"Ray, I am not getting into that trick debate of when life begins.
That's not what it's about. It's about women choosing their fate. I hold
the line there."

"Well, what if these evil parents right here in this story said, 'We are
not getting into that trick debate of who's in charge of how these kids
get brought up.' There's no more an iron divide at the cervix than there
is at the door of these folks who ought to be gutted and shot." He
slapped the paper. "And
choose your fate
? Who do you think you're
kidding? So what about the poor sucker who gets AIDS from one slip of
the libido? Can you abort
that
consequence?"

"Oh Ray, that is so much not the same thing, and you know it."

"All I'm saying is sex has risks. I'm not preaching abstinence, boy oh
howdy no. I've been eighteen, alone with a girl in a pickup out in the
desert under those carpe diem stars. Talk about a freight train! But far
more unstoppable forces have consequences we can't turn back. They
do—and hey, that don't kill us neither. I don't even have to go religious
on you here."

Greenie looked out the window. The world it showed her could not
have looked more different from the one she'd seen while working back
in New York. Instead of ankles, weeds, and the tires of parked cars, she
saw mountains, treetops, and sky. But the sky, for nearly a month, had
been yellow, the mountains sheathed in smoke; after dark, flashes of
flame might appear. When at last the fires were contained, the horizon
came into focus again, but it was gray, a landscape painted with tar
and ash.

How odd it felt to share a kitchen most mornings with a man whose
face she had seen in the news, without caring, for years. She was no
longer intimidated, but sometimes she saw him across the room and
thought that he must be a hologram, a figment, that she was far lonelier
than she could admit.

"Look, Ray," she said, "I was lucky enough that I never got pregnant
when I didn't want to be pregnant. So I never made the choice I'm in
favor of preserving. But I do think it's private."

"And child rearing's not. Apples and kumquats, that what you say?
Welfare, reverence for safety and well-being, for plain old
being,
begins
when the cord gets cut. That's what you say?"

Greenie put down her knife and turned fully around, leaning back
against the counter. Ray was looking at her as a father might regard a
child who had disappointed him, just the way Alan had looked at her
the night she told him that yes, this was her decision; she knew it was
right and not just for her.

"That's not what I say," she said quietly. "Not at all. But there are
some places where what we know in our hearts just can't be the same as
what we stand up for in the world."

"Sheep manure."

"I'm, what, not just your cook now but your ideological guinea
pig, too?"

Ray did not smile, but he winked. "Bet your eastern liberal ass."

"Then I demand a raise," she said.

"No, but here's your bonus: How'd you like to come out to the ranch
weekend after this one, you and that back-talking boy? Only condition:
you got to bake. McNally does barbecue fine, but I would love a pie or
two. We're entertaining a buyer. George can watch my boys get the cows
fit and parade 'em around like peacocks. He'll see guys who wear Stetsons
and spurs when it's not Halloween."

"He'd love that," said Greenie. All at once she thought of her father,
the pride he'd taken in his boats not unlike the pride Ray took in his
cows: the way he'd spent nearly as many hours polishing, scrubbing, and
refitting as he had spent out on the water.

Greenie knew that the fires were eating at Ray's conscience. At night,
if she turned on the news (something she'd never done in New York),
there he would be—his televised self always shocking to her for an
instant, as if her own life had leaped to the screen. Without fail, he looked
stubborn and sure, defending the early decisions made by the National
Parks Service. But his cook knew something that others might not: Ray's
appetite had dwindled. After he left the kitchen that morning, she saw
that he had eaten only two chops and hadn't touched the ratatouille.

Greenie had come to understand that there was something sacred and
separate to Ray about his morning ritual. Whether or not it had anything
to do with her, she felt both flattered and uneasy. He might arrive
looking haggard or angry, but he never took it out on Greenie. Let the
chaos and recrimination flutter frantically about, like papers thrown to
a reckless wind; not even Mary Bliss was permitted to interrupt this
sliver of his routine.

There were days when the smoke drifted everywhere, disparate yet
durable as rumor. It would defy the closed windows and doors, leaving
a fine dark grit on all the polished steel and tile surfaces of the kitchen.
Except for the way it smelled, the smoke reminded Greenie of the fog in
Maine: of its curious solidity, the way it could sit right up against a window
screen, soft yet firm like a pillow, and its equally curious ubiquity,
the way you could open a latched closet and find that it had invaded,
leaving your clothes droopy and damp. But Maine was farther away
than it had ever been before. When she took her clothes from the closet,
they smelled of cinders, not of the sea.

SHE HAD DOUBTS
, but she was not homesick. The mournfulness had
come at the beginning.

Greenie and George had left very early one morning, and Alan had
decided not to see them off at the airport. "Greenie, how weird would
that be? I'm sorry, it's too sad," he'd said to her the night before, after
they had made love. To George, over a sleepy breakfast, he said, "I have
way too much work today, guy. There are people counting on me to be
here later this morning." He carried George on his hip out the front
door. Together, they each raised an arm to flag down a cab. After lifting
suitcases into the trunk, Alan reached into both of his pockets and held
out four plastic dinosaurs, two in each hand. "Two herbivores," he said,
passing them from his left hand to George's right. "And two
carnivores,
"
he snarled, passing them to George's left.

"Wow, Dad, velociraptor and parasaurolophus!" George exclaimed
in grateful awe. "But I'm going to keep them away from these guys." He
waved the fist that held the stegosaurus and the dimetrodon, their sharp
plastic limbs and tails protruding between his fingers. Alan kissed his
son on the top of his head, his wife on one cheek (pointedly far from her
lips). He picked up George and hugged him tight.

"We'll call when we get there," said Greenie, and in the cab, as they
pulled away, she struggled not to cry. Already, George was staging a
showdown between the two meat-eating creatures. Alan, wise in these
matters as ever, had provided just the right face-saving decoy. By the
time they were deep in the Holland Tunnel, Greenie felt fine, her emotions
under control.

Within an hour of takeoff, George fell asleep. And then, so hard and
fast it stung, the anticipation of regret and loneliness overcame her. She
turned to the window and let herself cry, as quietly as she could. In four
hours, she never took out her book. Suburbs with affectedly curvaceous
roads and pools gave way to country highways and farms, their geometry
laid out in confident trajectories so absurdly unlike life: perfect circles,
perfect squares, fields rolled out like bolts of rugged cloth. For a time, the
plane passed over a seemingly endless prairie of clouds, their unbroken
surface like gently foaming milk. But this they also left behind, to glide
above a glorious calligraphy of rivers and then, as they approached Denver,
the rising mountains. The sun was so bright that Greenie could watch
the plane's raptor shadow undulate over and down the peaks, always a
little ahead, leading the way like a phantom guide.
Oh what have I done?
thought Greenie as they hit the bumpy air before they landed.

But when she woke George, he was cheerful and refreshed, and by the
time she had bought the two of them chocolate milk shakes and they
had boarded a second plane, Greenie felt the certainty she had expressed
to Alan the evening she told him that this was their chance, this was
his
chance, not just hers—if he was brave enough to take it.

"This is so rash, Greenie," he had said, shaking his head. "I can't
believe you are doing this to our family."

"I am doing this
for
our family," she said. "It's time for something
new. This didn't fall into my lap for nothing. It was a message, loud and
clear."

She had expected him to make a sarcastic remark about hearing
voices, but he had simply continued to shake his head, looking deeply
sad; and then, to her surprise, he had held her very close.

"Are you crying?" she had said, for an instant willing to take it all
back, to call Mary Bliss and say she was sorry, very sorry, but she had
made a mistake.

He pulled away from her. "I wish I were, Greenie. I wish I could."

Over the next two weeks, as she packed, prepared Tina to take over
in her absence, and answered all of George's questions, Alan had been
weirdly calm, even helpful. She half-expected to see him packing his
things as well. "Surprise!" he would say the morning of the flight, and
the three of them would fly west together, and as they did, Alan would
shed his recent angst, like an astronaut leaving gravity far in his wake.
But this was nothing more than a dream.

MARY BLISS HAD FOUND THEM
a furnished guesthouse to rent, under
a copiously weeping willow on Acequia Madre, an old, quietly elegant
street where the houses and walls seemed to rise organically from the
burnt red earth, where an old irrigation ditch would brim and flow
whenever there was rain. The two small bedrooms opened onto a brick
portale
and a garden planted with herbs. When the doors and windows
were open, the rooms smelled like lavender and thyme. In the living
room, the fireplace nested in a corner like a beehive, and the beams supporting
the roof were so massive that at first Greenie felt the instinct to
duck whenever she entered the room. Two hanging Indian rugs, pale red
zigzagged with brown and white, faced each other from opposite sides
of the room.

"Look. Lightning's on the walls," said George when they arrived. "I
know what that's for: that's our protection. So we won't get stuck."

"Stuck?" asked Greenie.

George frowned at her confusion. "Stuck by lightning, Mom. Ford
says it's called voodoo, from another religion, not the one about God."
He looked at the ceiling. "Are those
whole trees
? Is this a house made
from trees? That's crazy."

"You've seen plenty of houses made from trees, George. Like Nana's
house in New Jersey. The trees have just been sawed into boards. And
log cabins—those are made of whole trees."

"Yes, but log cabins are into the woods,
with
the trees," said George,
patient with her misconceptions.

She gave George the larger bedroom, where Mary Bliss had put an
extravagant gift from Ray: a hobbyhorse, the old-fashioned kind that
bounced up and down (the kind now banned because fingers might
catch in the springs). The bed was large, with a puffy mattress and a
four-poster frame stained blue. On the bureau sat a lamp made from a
worn cowboy boot filled with plaster, another gift from Ray. Greenie
asked Mary Bliss what made Ray so generous. Mary Bliss said, as if it
were obvious, that Ray had no children of his own.

"Do you think he wants them?" asked Greenie.

"I believe so," said Mary Bliss, standing in Greenie's kitchen. "I hope
so." She smiled at Greenie, who wasn't sure how to comment. Sometimes
Mary Bliss said things that were almost shockingly forward.
Greenie admired this trait, and it made her feel more comfortable when
surrounded by politicians who were anything but blunt.

Greenie's bed, like George's, was massive yet soft. In her bedroom,
the beams (
vigas,
Mary Bliss had corrected her gently) were plastered
over, so that the ceiling resembled a great white ruffle. Lying awake her
first night there, Greenie found herself amused at the notion that the
interior of the little house looked as if it had been frosted, as if the hidden
walls were made of sponge cake. She thought instantly of Alan, how
she'd love to report this curiosity to him (how she would have, so naturally,
had he been lying beside her), but she would not call him a second
time. As soon as she and George had been left alone by Mary Bliss, she'd
called him right away, to say that they had arrived safely.

"I'm glad to hear it," he'd said, "though
safely
is a relative term."

FIRE MIGHT HAVE CAPTURED THE HEADLINES
—government probes,
impending lawsuits, calls for emergency supplies—but Ray McCrae
knew that a far thornier problem, a problem that would only grow
worse as time went on, was water. He tried to talk about it in public as
little as possible; talk of water, he told Greenie, was something he delegated
whenever he could. But this was a year of exceptional drought, so
talk about it he must.

The Water Boys, as he called them, were a loose and shifting posse of
commissioners, lobbyists, and freelance know-it-alls on everything from
Navajo water-rights litigation to the sorry future of the aquifer feeding
the middle Rio Grande basin. They met every other Thursday for lunch
in the dining room of the mansion. The group included the state engineer,
members of a drought task force and a water conservation committee,
lawyers, ecologists, developers, miners, ranchers, tribal elders,
and what Ray called the BLM grunts. ("Big-ass Louts and Morons, but
that's between us, Ms. Duquette.")

Greenie did not serve the meals she cooked, but through the swinging
doors she heard talk of irrigation, reclamation, river diversion, groundwater
mining, snowmelt, shelterbelts, dead pool, Godwater, ditch
bosses, cow urine, fishing seasons, growing zones, acid rain, and tribal
claims to water that wealthy ranchers took for granted and eastern
transplants like Greenie used with abandon to wash their cars, nurture
their gardens—and, thought Greenie, blithely rinse sand from leeks
down their kitchen sinks. Sometimes the talking turned to shouting. The
Water Boys were destined, by virtue of their fanatical and quixotic aims,
rarely if ever to find a consensus on anything.