Anywhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories, #3)

by Susan Fanetti

  But Reese was working, obviously, and three-quarters of the damn town was there. Her absence would be noted. Remarked on. Turned into a story. So she didn’t really have a choice, did she?

  As she slumped through the parking lot, she looked for Frannie’s Honda but didn’t see it. Well, that was good, at least. She’d been in town with Tyson, trick-or-treating. He didn’t really understand enough to do the sleepover party, so she must have gone home and stayed there. That didn’t mean she wasn’t sitting out front of the trailer now, with Tyson in bed, drinking with her friends, but at least she was home.

  Ellen’s car was here, and that sucked, but oh well. Gigi yanked open the door to the bar and went in.

  All that noise and rowdiness that had pulsed out through the walls into the night was a cacophony inside. Bright lights, loud music, dancing, laughing. She stuck a smile on her face and pushed through the crowd.

  She’d been to lots of huge events in her travels—Carnival in Rio chief among them—and dealt with the drunken crowds without a problem. It was different, though, when it was something like the actual Carnival, such a famous event it was practically mythic. And more to the point, it was different when everyone around was a stranger. She didn’t take stranger’s drunkenness so personally. It didn’t remind her of her own people, because her own people weren’t anywhere around.

  Here, she knew just about every shoulder she jostled against, every mouth that breathed fumes at her as they said, “Hey, Geej!”

  She took it personally.

  But when she got to the bar, where Reese and Linda were both serving as quickly as they could, and Kelly, Jodie, and Natalie were hurrying back and forth, Reese saw her, grinned, came right to her, leaned over the bar to kiss her. “Hey, baby.”

  And there was not a single hint of booze on his breath. Not beer, or bourbon, or anything. Not even the faint medicinal tang of vodka.

  “Hiya. You’re not drinkin’?”

  “I had a beer earlier.” He took a swallow from a pint glass of ice water. “You asked me to slow it down, so I’m slowin’ it down.”

  Suddenly, everything was okay. “I love you!”

  “I know you do.” He made her a Shirley Temple, full of cherries, and pushed it to her. “You gonna hang out and keep me comp—HEY! Nat!”

  Gigi swiveled to look in the direction that had snatched his attention. Natalie stood a few feet off, at the bar, with a tray full of full beers and shots. She looked like she’d been caught with the cookie jar.

  “What the hell d’you think you’re doin’, dumplin’? You’re gonna lose me my license!”

  “Kelly and Jodie can’t keep up. You said I could serve.”

  “Food. I said you could serve food. And soda. Not booze. Put the tray down and step away, or I’ll send your underage ass home.”

  “But the tips are so much better!”

  “Put. The tray. Down.”

  She did as she was told, her lip stuck out like a toddler’s. “They can’t keep up,” she pouted and stalked back toward the kitchen.

  Gigi slid off her stool and picked up the tray. She’d done her share of waitressing during her travels; she’d taken just about any job she could get fast. There was a tab ticket as well as the round of drinks on the tray; somebody was cashing out. The ticket showed the table number.

  “I got it.” She’d be sure to get the tip to Natalie.

  Reese frowned. “You sure, Mac?”

  “Positive. You need help, and I am helpful. See how that works out?”

  He laughed and gave her a wink. “I’ll tip you out later tonight, how’s that sound?”

  It sounded like she wasn’t going to hate Halloween this year after all.

  The table turned out to be two four-tops pushed together, and full of Reese’s friends—Heath and Gabe, Logan and Honor, Emmett, Paul, Victor, which might explain why Natalie thought she could take the tray, since it was her brother’s table. It wasn’t their usual table, and Gigi smiled, thinking how affronted they must have felt to be displaced. But then she noticed Ellen at the table, too.

  Gigi ignored the jealousy that burst like a Roman candle behind her eyes, and kept her smile in place. “Hey, everybody.”

  They all greeted her with smiles and friendly words. These were Reese’s dearest friends, all he had left anything like family, besides her, and they’d had his back all these years. They’d been pretty chilly to her at first, in loyalty to him, but now that she was living with him, they’d begun to thaw a bit—also, she knew, in loyalty to him.

  Ellen gave her a muted smile, but there wasn’t any malice behind it, so Gigi returned it with interest. “Hey, Ellen.”

  “Hi, Gigi. You helpin’ out tonight?”

  “Not officially. He’s just swamped right now, so I thought I’d throw in.”

  As she figured out the drinks—club soda for Heath, a ginger ale for Gabe, bourbon for Logan, Emmett, Victor, and Paul, vodka twist for Honor, gin and tonic for Ellen—Emmett hooked his boot around the leg of an empty chair at a nearby table of three and pulled it close. “Why don’t you hang out with us for a while? Reese’s got his hands full.”

  “Thanks, but I got my drink up at the bar.” She liked these people, but she didn’t really want to sit here, with Ellen, away from Reese, and shout chitchat over the blaring jukebox.

  “C’mon, Geej,” Heath said, taking hold of her arm. “Hang out.”

  Well, he wasn’t drinking. Neither was Gabe. She wouldn’t be the only sober person at the table. They’d cashed out, so they weren’t staying much longer, anyway. And it would make Reese happy if she found her fit again in this group of people important to him. Even Ellen, who sat beside Gabe, still smiling kindly.

  “Okay. Let me grab my drink and tell Reese. Oh, and give him his tray back.”

  *****

  Still panting, Reese fell onto his back and pulled Gigi along with him. She settled her head on his sweaty chest and snuggled close.

  “Whew! If that’s the benefits package at the Jack, I might want to sign on full time.”

  He laughed and squeezed her closer. “You want to work with me, you just say the word.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I know.” He lifted his head and kissed her temple. “Anyway, I like sending you to work and welcoming you back home.”

  “I like it, too.”

  “Thanks for being good with Ellen tonight.”

  “It was okay. A little weird at first, but we’re okay.” She’d actually enjoyed sitting with everybody for a little while. They were different than they’d been back in the day. They were calmer. Ellen had treated her cordially, and she’d returned the favor. They’d been friendly once; maybe they could be again. “Thanks for not drinking tonight.” It felt good that he’d heard her and understood why she didn’t like it. There was just so much of it, everywhere she turned. She needed it not to be here. She needed to feel safe here.

  “Like I said, I had a couple beers, but I won’t make a habit of more than that. Leave me some room to have a drunk every now and then, though.”

  “Party drunk, not sad drunk.”

  “As long as I’ve got you, there won’t be any need for a sad drunk.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  For a moment, Reese was quiet, his chest still heaving from their robust sex, his fingers trailing up and down over her arm. Then he rolled, setting her on her back again, and loomed over her.

  He contemplated her eyes, reading them like a map. “I love you, Mac. Thank you for coming home.”

  *****

  November wasn’t an improvement over October, not in Gigi’s world. As soon as Halloween was over, the big holiday push started. Christmas was great, she was all for Christmas, and it was the only holiday Reese got truly excited for, so she was eager for December to roll around. First, though, they had to get through Thanksgiving.

  For Native peoples, Thanksgiving was no holiday. Sure, they got off work, and some used the holiday to bring family tog
ether and give a different kind of thanks. But for most of the people in her band, for her and her family, it was a somber Day of Mourning.

  The Native kids who’d gone to town schools had grown up getting force-fed the white party line, the whole buckle-hat and peace-pipe bullshit. Even in Jasper Ridge, which tended to be a little more respectful of its Native neighbors than most places, Gigi and her fellow Shoshone classmates had usually ended up on stage in school programs, dressed in primary-colored feathers and stripes of face paint. Even with a quarter or sometimes a third of the kids in class coming from the reservation, they got the old myth about the friendly savages and the kindly pilgrims. No word about the diseases and the deaths and the theft of land and life, the trickery and brutality. Just Plymouth Rock and British oppression. Even in a place so full of the lived experience of the horror the Pilgrims had really set in motion, the myth stayed intact.

  It made Gigi, and most of her people, feel invisible.

  She moved through November in a general fog of hostility and dislocation, trying not to growl at every cornucopia decoration she came across. Each Thanksgiving-themed ad, each news story or television special, just going to the damn IGA, was an exercise in trauma. All those people, people she knew, people she cared about, celebrating an inciting event of a genocide.

  Even the freaking Cahills, gods of the town, who’d married into the Sawtooth Jasper band, celebrated Thanksgiving and were at the head of most of the town events around it. They ‘identified as white.’ Well, rooty-toot-toot for them, to have the choice whether to ‘identify’ as oppressed or oppressor, predator or prey.

  ‘The First Thanksgiving’ was why so many of her people were scraping sustenance off the floor of an abyss of poverty, why so many were alcoholics and drug addicts, were sick and depressed, jobless and hopeless, abused and abusing, angry, desolate. The First Thanksgiving, in the seventeenth century, was the start of the cycle her family, in the twenty-first century, was still trapped in. Not only her family. Her neighbors, her friends. Her people.

  When she was away, she’d made sure to be out of the country in November, away from the whole misbegotten holiday, and had nearly forgotten what it was like to have her people’s suffering, their sickness and starvation, turned into a reason for people to gorge themselves until they passed out.

  Another reason Gigi hated the end of October: because it brought fucking November in right after it.

  Reese understood, and gave her space. He celebrated Thanksgiving, but he did it quietly and didn’t bring it up to her. When his parents were alive, they’d served a meal in the bar, welcoming anyone who didn’t have anywhere else to go. After his mom died, while Gigi was away, he’d become one of those people with nowhere else to go, and he’d started accepting invitations where they came. This year, he and Emmett were having dinner with Paul and his family.

  Gigi was spending the day as she always had when she’d been home: on the reservation, quietly. They’d spend a couple hours in the cemetery with their ancestors and their lost loved ones. Then, after nightfall, they’d all come together at the council hall for a silent meal.

  It was the first time in several weeks she’d spent extended time on the reservation. Since she’d moved in with Reese, her days had been spent working, and with him, settling into a new, improved home life. Not perfect—she still struggled with people in town, conversations still seemed to stop when she turned a corner, everybody was still waiting for her to bail again—but improved. Making Reese happy made her happy. She could probably live on only that for a long time.

  Today, on this somber day at home, away from Reese, who, as a white man, would not have been welcome on the reservation at this time, Gigi was restless. Her dark, dangerous impulses were crawling around in the corners of her mind, reminding her how freeing it was to be all the way out of the country on this day, away from the cycle, rather than here in a cemetery, surrounded by its toll.

  The cemetery was crowded with people doing exactly what her family was: visiting the graves of their loved ones, kneeling there and remembering, leaving small tokens of that remembrance. Refreshing the loss.

  The Mackenzies had brought their tokens in Tyson’s old red wagon. There were so many losses to remember: Maw. Paw. Three great-aunts. Four great-uncles. Three uncles. Two aunts. Daddy. And Frannie’s first little baby boy, who’d died of SIDS at six weeks.

  Those were only the deaths of people Gigi had known. In her immediate family. Many more who’d passed before her time, almost all of them far too soon. She’d calculated it once, in high school: the average life span of a Mackenzie was forty-four years.

  Car wrecks, fires, violence, hunger, untreated disease. That was what took her family. And at the root of most of it was booze.

  She knelt at the foot of her father’s grave. She’d been his favorite, and he’d been hers. He and Maw and Gigi had been a little knot of difference in the family. The calm ones, the ones who stood tall when things went haywire and figured out what to do next. From the time she could remember, they two had called her hubijo—old woman—because Maw insisted Gigi carried the spirit of an ancestor, one who’d lived when the land was free.

  Daddy had taught her to ride, and to work on engines, and he’d listened to all her weird talk about the world. He’d bought her an atlas, and watched PBS travel shows with her. In some ways, he’d primed her for escape, though actually leaving had never occurred to her until after he was gone.

  His escape was into a bottle. Like so many of their family. He’d been calm because he was sad, always so sad. He wanted to take care of his family, and every attempt he made failed. He’d never been able to hold a job for more than a few months. The best he could do was fix motors for folks on the reservation, and throw in his hand for what few odd jobs people could pay for.

  It was possible to live on the reservation without money; they lived on trade more than currency. But it was not possible to thrive.

  After he died, just a few weeks before her wedding-that-wasn’t, Gigi didn’t feel like an old soul. She was empty. The cycle took everything. All it left behind was grief.

  She knelt on the dried grass and hard earth of his grave and remembered those awful, desperate weeks. Losing her father—that was when the void in her had opened up.

  This was what she and her people did on the day the colonizers and settlers called Thanksgiving: they sat in their grief. They remembered their losses. They honored their dead.

  Frannie came and knelt beside her, with Tyson on her knee. Mom knelt at Gigi’s other side. They were all that was left of the Mackenzies.

  Gigi offered her hands, palms up, and her mother and sister took her offering and held on.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Hey. What’re you doin’ up?” Still pulling the drawstring tight on his loose sweatpants, Reese shuffled sleepily into the living room and flopped on the floor beside Gigi. He brushed a branch of the big balsam Christmas tree on the way down, and the tree shimmied, casting the light from its hundreds of tiny white bulbs around the otherwise dark room.

  Unable to sleep, Gigi had slipped from their bed an hour earlier and come to sit quietly beside the tree, in the peaceful silence of a snowy night, and let her mind do the laps it wanted to do. It was the middle of December, but she hadn’t been able to shake her autumn doldrums. A low hum of restlessness rumbled at the base of her head. Not an urge to run or escape, nothing so focused as that. Just this odd feeling, all the time, of not fitting quite right in her skin. It made her jumpy, and it made her sigh. Over and over, all day, she caught herself sighing. Like she couldn’t get her lungs to fill all the way.

  She didn’t want to run. She and Reese had been living together for about two months, and she loved him and this little life. People in town were finally giving up their prurient interest in her every move, and they were warming to her again, at least enough to be friendly. She liked her job at the Outfitters well enough, and she was able to give almost all of her earnings to her family, becaus
e Reese took care of her. He’d slowed his drinking way down. There was room to stretch out in this apartment, room she should be able to breathe in, and there was Reese, always ready to hold her close when she needed to feel safe. This was the life she could have had ten years ago. It was the life she wanted.

  And yet her lungs wouldn’t fill all the way.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “I like to sit here and look up at all the lights. It’s a pretty tree.”

  There wasn’t much room in the Mackenzie home for a tree, but they put up a four-footer in the corner between the peninsula counter and the dining table. She couldn’t remember any other tree but that one, always decorated with red, blue, and gold glass balls and a couple strands of red and green tinsel garland. The Christmas before he died, her dad brought home an electric star that played tinny-sounding Christmas carols on a motion sensor. It had been far too big for their little tree, and it went off so often that by the time Christmas rolled around everybody wanted to kill it dead. Everybody but Daddy. He’d loved that obnoxious thing. He’d stand there and wave his hand to make it keep playing.

  Reese had had an artificial tree, too, when his parents were alive. A big twelve-footer with pre-strung and fiber-optic lights, and glittering snow on the needles. They’d put up a big tree in the Jack, too, still artificial, but slightly less whiz-bang. Christmas had been a big deal with the Webb family. They decorated the bar inside and out, and every room in the apartment upstairs, too.

  Christmas was still a big deal for Reese, and this year they’d decorated the apartment together. Because she’d asked, they’d bought this real tree at the Boy Scout lot—ten feet tall and redolent with the foresty scent of the holiday. Her first real tree. They’d decorated with white lights and white and gold glittery ornaments, strands of iridescent pearls for garland, and an elegant angel on top. She liked that it didn’t sing, or twinkle, or do anything but glow softly.