Mara’s voice on edge, she didn’t answer Calliope’s question but repeated, “Come in. It’s not safe.”
It didn’t seem any safer inside with Mara. Calliope didn’t move, the heat rising in her face. “Where’s my family? Why were you shooting?” Ready to reach for Chance’s gun herself, she asked, “Have you done something?” She shouted past Mara into the cabin, her voice shrill, “Tía? Phoenix? Are you here?” No one answered. She searched past Mara, her limbs tingling with cold and fear, imagining them cowering on the ground somewhere inside, their mouths duct taped. Or worse.
She glanced emphatically at Chance, asking him with her eyes to cover her, and he nodded, then he moved quicker than Calliope had ever seen any human move, pulled the gun from Mara, and held the older woman tightly in his grasp, her arms behind her back.
Calliope rushed past them into the cabin, screaming her family’s names. Wood piled on the floor, dishes on the coffee table, blankets on the couch. It was messy but not unusual. No blood. The cast-iron fireplace was roaring, crackling with burning wood, but the house was otherwise quiet. No voices answered back. “Where are they?” she screamed at Mara, whose arctic-blue eyes brimmed with tears. She didn’t wait for an answer, but tore through the living room into the kitchen, half fearing she’d find the source of blood staining Mara’s clothes. There was an underground pantry past the kitchen. Calliope considered grabbing a knife from the carving board but decided Chance’s gun was enough. She opened the pantry, her body shaking, and called her family again. It was the twisted hide-and-seek of three days ago, in the sweltering dark of her own empty house—except they had to be here. This was their sanctuary. Their escape plan. Their last resort.
She returned to the doorway where Chance still grasped Mara tightly, though the woman wasn’t struggling. Calliope’s voice trembled. “What have you done with them?” The tears were pouring freely down her face, her whole body wracked with sobs.
Mara was shaking her head, her eyes pleading. She whispered, hoarsely, “I don’t know, sweetheart. I just don’t know. They’ve all … they’ve all … disappeared.”
Calliope let out a small trembling yelp like an injured animal, caught in brambles. “But they were here? You saw them?”
Mara shook her head again, her face crumpled. “No, I never saw them. Trudy’s gone, that’s all I know. And your cousin. Everyone at the hospital. In the town. But your husband and boy, they never came here.”
Calliope had split apart when that light had flashed and she’d crashed into the bridge, then again in the hangar, when all the air had been sucked from the room and her lungs had smashed together. Now she was shriveling and shredding like a burnt piece of paper, ashes scattering into the wind. Everything hurt.
Her family wasn’t at Tía’s. She’d been wrong. They weren’t here. They weren’t anywhere.
“People don’t disappear,” she managed, her voice strangled. Her eyes stung, and she struggled to breathe. Where else could they have gone? She pictured the Ancient Ancestors roaming away from Chaco Canyon, from their elaborate stone buildings, their mysterious religious rites and astronomical pursuits—all of it, abandoned. Chance had said the myths were real. Were Calliope and her family caught in whatever ecological crisis had caused the ancestors to become refugees, to scatter and decline and all but disappear, their whole culture lost from archaeological record until they emerged again as much more modern Puebloans, hundreds of years later, the evidence for their sudden fall lost to the rocks, not yet uncovered? Was her family still out there? It was freezing. She had to keep looking. She had to find them before they froze to death.
A voice whispered, What if they’re already dead?
Chance broke her thoughts, asking Mara in his lilting accent, “Whose blood you got all over you?”
Mara flinched. “Trudy’s dad’s.”
His voice level, he said, “You murder him?”
She shook her head. “Found him dead.”
“Where’s his body? Show me.”
Chance loosened his grip, although he still held Mara’s arm in a cop-like vise. Calliope wasn’t convinced the older woman was telling the truth, yet she was uncomfortable with a man steering a woman by the arm, especially an older woman whose fidgety, insecure demeanor could have been a sign of shock or exhaustion. Or she was hiding something. Calliope needed to see for herself whether Mara was being honest. She’d shielded Eunjoo once from seeing a dead man’s body, but she couldn’t leave the girl alone in the cabin. Calliope was still shaking, soaking from the waist down, but she grabbed Eunjoo’s hand and followed the others outside where the snow was accumulating atop the dead grass and dirt, covering the white moth wings with crisp white flakes. Their boots crunched the snow as Mara led them past a water tower and an empty pasture, toward a smaller cabin beside an outcropping of trees.
“Any animals on this ranch?” Chance asked.
“Gone,” Mara said.
“Run away?”
“Like everyone else,” she said. “Just gone.”
Chance murmured something indiscernible.
“There was a mountain lion on the property,” Mara said. “I think that’s what … killed Loren. I don’t know what else or who else could’ve done … what it did …”
Calliope shuddered, thinking of the coyotes. Eunjoo’s bite. It could have been worse.
As they approached the front porch, a rocking chair came into view, and Mara warned, “This isn’t going to be pretty. You may not want the little one to see.”
Glistening from the oak of the porch and rocking chair in fat streaks and globs, dark rust-colored splotches of blood. Copious amounts of blood, splattered across the wood. Calliope braced herself for the body, saw nothing but red stains. “Where is he?”
Mara nodded toward a patch of juniper fifty feet away, where a dark trail of blood led from the porch toward the ground then stopped, buried by snow. “I couldn’t just leave him carrion for the vultures, not Trudy’s dad. She wouldn’t have wanted that.” Mara let out a coarse laugh that gave way to a look of utter dejection. “Trudy wouldn’t have wanted any of this. I buried him over there. Not a proper burial, not deep enough. But better than nothing till I caught that son-a-bitch lion did this.”
They followed her to the junipers, where a mound of earth was raised higher than the rest, camouflaged by snow—Calliope wouldn’t have known it was a grave if she’d stumbled across it unaware. The thought made her shiver harder, imagining they were surrounded by graves, her family beneath the earth everywhere around them. She’d known Mara for years—eccentric, a free spirit, never vicious or violent. Calliope couldn’t really believe Mara had killed her aunt, or anyone else. Could she? Still, the blood was harrowing.
Apparently, the burial mound wasn’t evidence enough for Chance either. He asked, “Where’s your shovel?”
“Back at Trudy’s.”
“Let’s get it. Mujer, you two should get inside. It’s freezing. I’ll investigate, make sure her story checks out.”
A stubborn refusal coursed through Calliope. She needed to see the body. Needed to confirm it wasn’t anyone she loved. She felt callous hoping the dead man was Loren.
“We’ll wait out here for you,” Calliope said.
Chance shook his head, as if he’d already realized in the nearly forty-eight hours he’d spent with Calliope there was no reasoning with her once she’d made up her mind, and he led Mara back the way they’d come.
Alone with Eunjoo, the two stood facing the snowy mound, funereal.
Eunjoo said, “It’s not Phoenix.”
Calliope dropped the girl’s hand as if it’d burned her. She turned and faced the girl, whose moon face gleamed bright against the snow, her cheeks pink with cold. “What makes you so sure?”
“I told you. I’ve seen things.”
“Those are dreams, chica. Not real.”
“If they are dreams, then we’re in the dreams.”
Calliope’s legs spindly, paper-thin, she knelt beside the girl, the ice prickling into the knees of her sweatpants, stinging her skin. “If this were a dream, would my gut ache this way? Would I be so scared and hungry and feel like I’m dying? Aren’t you cold, baby? You wouldn’t realize how cold you were, if we were dreaming. You’d be able to fly, or build a fire in your hands. You know? Magic. There’s magic in dreams, and we never realize how bad things are.” Calliope wiped her eyes on the back of her palm; she hadn’t meant to cry, to come across so harshly. But she was tired of thinking they were dead or dreaming. Her boy was missing. She should have found him by now, and she was failing him every second she was not looking. She didn’t have time for dreams.
“Don’t cry, Phoenix’s mama. Phoenix isn’t in the ground. You need the rock to find him. That’s why you haven’t found him yet. But you will.”
Calliope’s tears turned exasperated. She resisted the urge to shake the girl, tell her to wake up. “There are rocks everywhere, chica. Look around. We’re in the desert. Rocks aren’t going to help me find my son.” Her voice rose hysterically. She put her face in her hands and breathed deeply. The girl patted Calliope’s shoulder, as if she were the mother figure and not the other way around. Calliope felt ridiculous. She measured her tone. “Can you please drop this dream thing? I can’t take it.”
The girl nodded, her eyes bright with the unsaid. But Calliope didn’t want to hear it.
From the distance, “Mujer? What’s wrong?” Chance was jogging toward her, his cowboy boots kicking up snow. As he reached Calliope, he knelt beside her, worry lines furrowing his face. “Is it the babies?”
She shook her head, not admitting how much her uterus strained. “I’m fine. I was explaining to Eunjoo how this is real life, not a dream.”
He breathed out, relief smoothing the creases at his eyes. He turned toward Eunjoo, then back to Calliope. Though he addressed Eunjoo, he kept his eyes on Calliope. “Oye, chica. In quantum physics there’s a hypothesis of probability that asserts we could be dreaming at any given moment. The odds aren’t as low as winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning, they’re way higher. When we do the math, turns out the odds of us being in REM dreaming is one in ten. Some scientists think we’re not conscious in dreams, but others, me included, believe consciousness just means thinking and being aware of a world. Dreamworld counts, yes? You might say if this was a dreamworld, why would it be bound by the laws of causality? Well, reality follows a strict set of rules, even if it gets a little blurry at the quantum level. Imagine if we were in someone else’s dream, qué no? A simulation made by a higher-order reality. Maybe not a dream, but a computer simulation. Maybe not computers, but gods. There are scientists who imagine a time, perhaps centuries from now, when our descendants will have the power to model fully functional human brains in computers. These simulated minds could be placed in computer-simulated worlds, perhaps even re-creations of the past. They would never know they weren’t real. Scientists say we could be living in a rerun where some weird event in the past had been changed just to see what kind of ramifications it had. Whether it’s a simulation or dream doesn’t matter. You can still plan your life, causes will have effects, and actions will have consequences. But the reality we perceive is just a small slice of what really is. As the philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius wrote, The universe is change. Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
Calliope couldn’t decide whether she was more exasperated that he’d contradicted everything she’d told the girl, impressed that he’d conjoined Western philosophy with scientific quandaries and indigenous spirituality, or amused that he’d given a lecture at a snow-covered burial mound. She settled on amusement, but dialed her tone to chiding. “I was actually hoping you’d pinch yourself, Chance. Show her we’re all really here. Instead, you tell her we could be in a dream.”
“Children are too smart for anything but the truth, mujer.”
“Yeah, but whose truth?”
“Exactly.”
She’d been too engrossed in his speech to notice Mara digging the grave behind them. Sickness washed over Calliope as the wet dirt unclumped from the earth. She moved closer, Chance beside her. She realized Eunjoo was moving forward as well, and said, “Stay back, mija. Go stand behind that juniper bush.”
“You’re always telling me to stand in the bushes. I want to see the dead man.”
Calliope bristled at the thought of a six-year-old wanting to see death and glared sternly at Eunjoo, the way she did whenever Phoenix disobeyed, as if silently counting before doling out the punishment.
Eunjoo raised her eyebrows skeptically and sighed but did as Calliope had instructed, slinking behind the juniper. The girl was emerging from her shell, it seemed. Not the shy baby Calliope had met four days ago, but a rebellious, opinionated tween. Grief ages us.
It’s not my child in that hole, Calliope thought, forcing herself to peer down into the mud-gape at whatever Mara uncovered. Chalky and bloodstained, Loren’s lifeless face shimmered sickeningly against the dirt. His body mangled, his flesh shorn off. Was Calliope relieved? Did this prove Mara hadn’t killed anyone? Surely no amount of shock would derange her tía’s partner to this beastly act. Calliope glanced at Mara, whose head was bowed, red eyes blotchy.
“The Suuke,” Chance murmured.
“How do you know?” Calliope asked.
“This was no mountain lion.”
Chance described their escape from the hangar, the two Suuke at their heels. This time though, he added a piece of information he hadn’t shared with Calliope before: “We Zunis believe we only see the ko’ko, that they only show themselves to us, when we’re about to die and join them.” He looked at Calliope from the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t want to scare you, mujer. But you might as well know the whole truth.”
“But we didn’t die.”
He murmured assent, as if surprised about the fact himself, then took the shovel from Mara and reburied Loren.
They returned to Tía’s, where an uneasy truce settled like ice-breath against windowpane, satisfied the threat was crouching in the shadows of the hills and not amidst the warmth and shelter of the cabin. Exhaustion replaced Calliope’s lingering doubts, along with any hope of finding her family huddled in a corner or bathroom, hiding, safe. They weren’t here.
Her clothes drying stiffly against her sore and frost-nipped skin, Eunjoo lying beside her on the couch in front of the potbellied iron fireplace, Calliope fell asleep. What else had people ever done when the night was long, the snow piling high?
SEVENTEEN
THE STRANGER
Phoenix chucked rocks at his mother. He picked them from the pocked ground, feverishly, his eyes malicious in a way no child’s should be. Or maybe they were angry, Calliope couldn’t tell past the painful thudding at her skin where the sharp rocks struck. She tried calling out, not Stop but Come back. For even as he was aiming for her, for blood, he was drifting further and further away, so the rocks had to travel vast distances, past a chasm in the rutted, red earth. He balanced atop one mesa like a vulture on a branch, and she another. Her tabletop mesa slipping, shaking, his rising toward the sky and away from hers. Wait—but no words came. She grappled, an animal on hands and knees, to keep from falling. The rocks pummeled her belly. Something rose in her throat and when she tried to speak, from her mouth she dislodged a rock. She was made of rocks. She couldn’t move from the fossilized casing she’d once called her body.
Heat crackled nearby. A conversation wove through the fire. A child’s sweaty body curled at her lap, chest rhythms of breathing, up and down, pressing against her.
“I didn’t want to believe it was happening again …” Mara’s voice drifted somewhere between dreamworld and the terrifying space Calliope would find herself still trapped if she opened her eyes: her family’s house with
out her family. “My dad was a scientist at Los Alamos during World War II. He helped make the A-bomb. Fucking scientists.”
Chance laughed. “I’m a scientist.”
“Oh yeah?” Mara joined the laughter, hers wry. “I had a nanny there, Chaiwa, who was of the San Ildefonso people.” Mara paused, looked imploringly at Chance. “You ever heard of Lizard’s Tail?”
“That it grows a new one?”
“Yeah, but it’s more than that. Chaiwa was the wisest person I ever knew, and like I said I grew up around scientists. She told me the story of Coyote and Lizard, how Coyote heard Lizard singing and wanted to learn the song but couldn’t remember it. When Lizard wouldn’t sing it for Coyote, wouldn’t let him steal it, Coyote swallowed Lizard. In his belly, Lizard began to sing. Coyote knew he would regret what he had done, and sure enough, Lizard cut Coyote’s throat to his stomach from inside and Coyote fell dead. Lizard emerged singing.”
Chance laughed anew, a deep belly laugh that made Calliope want to open her eyes to peek at him. She kept them tight.
“What about Lizard’s Tail though?” Chance asked.
“Oh, well, Chaiwa talked about Lizard all the time. She taught me lizards are associated with dreamtime. When we dream, we imagine different futures and decide which we’ll manifest. Lizard can break off her tail to escape predators, the tail left behind writhing, to take the predator’s attention off Lizard so she can flee. Lizard can only perform this feat once in her life, since the new tail is made of cartilage and not vertebrae. So even though she’s powerful and can rescue herself from danger by leaving part of herself behind, she has to be wise about her choice, her once-in-a-lifetime chance to flee.”
Calliope couldn’t stand it; she opened her eyes. “It’s just a metaphor.” Her voice cracked, her mouth still gluey with sleep paste. “It’s stories people tell to make sense of their world, their perceived chaos. It’s not real. It’s symbol.”
Trinity Sight Page 14