Ernest, Sonja, and I had driven to Albuquerque to confront him. We arrived at the rental house he shared with Desiree, who was waiting for us on the front porch when we pulled into the drive. Edgar was taking a nap on the couch. When we walked in, he woke with a start and sat up. He didn’t say anything, but he looked terrified. I think he knew what was happening. I sensed that Desiree had already said something to him, and that he expected us. We all sat down at the kitchen table with him and told him we were worried, his drug use out of control, he was slowly killing himself, and we didn’t want to watch him die.
“You have to realize the harm you’re doing to yourself,” I told him. “We want you to get help before it’s too late.”
I thought the intervention had worked. He broke down, told us he would go to rehab as long as we paid for it. Sonja had already found a residential treatment center in Tulsa, where he agreed to check himself in the following week, but he never went. We couldn’t force him to go, and his relationship with Desiree was falling apart. We had spoken to him a few times on the phone, but he mostly kept his distance from us, which surely meant he was still using. I prayed he would come home.
In the kitchen I wiped my hands on a dish towel and turned to Sonja. “Do you think there’s any chance he’ll show up next week?”
“He knows it’s important to us,” she said.
“You think so?”
“I mean, I think so.”
“Tell him it’s important to Ray-Ray,” I said.
THAT NIGHT ERNEST WOKE ME from sleep. He was standing beside the bed with his hand on mine. I felt the coldness of his hand and sat up.
“What is it?” I said.
“There’s a noise,” he said. “It’s coming from somewhere outside. I have to go outside and check.”
“What kind of noise?”
“I don’t know, a hard knock. A clanging. I heard it outside. I have to go check.”
He started for the door. I didn’t want him going alone, so I put on my slippers and followed him down the hall into the kitchen, where he peeked out the window. He turned on the back porch light, unlocked the door, and stepped out. I waited by the door, watching from the window while he looked around. He walked to the side of the house, then to the middle of the backyard. He stood still for a moment, as if he’d forgotten something. Then he headed to the shed, and I saw the light come on in there.
I opened the back door and walked to the shed. Once, a few years back, we kept birdfeed in large sacks out there, but that had caused a problem with mice. That was the winter Ernest was hospitalized for pneumonia, and every day when I returned home from the hospital, I found another dead mouse in a trap. We never went into the shed anymore.
“I’m looking for the rocks Edgar was talking about,” Ernest said.
“What rocks?” I said.
“The colored rocks. I think he said green or red rocks.”
“When?”
He hesitated, confused, so I waited for him to finish. He kept looking around. The shelves were mostly filled with old paint cans and tools. There was an old basketball trophy in the corner of the shed. Ernest picked it up and held it so that I could get a good look at it. “Edgar’s trophy,” he said. “Basketball from junior high. When was it?”
Things were getting more difficult at night, much worse than during the day. Sleep problems, the confusion of dreams. He had always been a deep sleeper and heavy dreamer. We used to tell each other about our dreams, laughing at the absurdity, the surreal humor, even back when the kids were still young. But now it was too difficult to watch him mumble on about things he created in his mind—hearing noises, looking for figurines.
He stared at the trophy, looking sad. It was as if he understood how confused he was. Maybe he realized the foolishness of his actions, waking up in the middle of the night and dragging us both outside to the shed. But I let him have his time.
He said, “I guess he’s gone, Maria.”
I waited for him to look at me.
He said, “I wish he’d come home.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Let’s go back to bed.”
THAT NIGHT, unable to fall asleep, I sat at the dining room table with my notebook. I journaled intermittently, which had always helped ease my mind:
The bonfire is in five days. I have so much I need to do to prepare for it, but I worry Ernest can’t handle it anymore. I want Edgar here. I don’t want to lose him like we lost Ray-Ray.
I considered the complexities of time, how slowly and how quickly it moves. Fifteen sad years had passed since Ray-Ray died. We had started having the bonfire on the tenth anniversary of his death, and for the past five years it had become a way for us to get together and be honest with one another and focus on the importance of our family, our land. Even though Ernest and I had both grown up near here, I never felt such a strong connection to the land around us until we started doing the bonfires. But with Ernest’s declining Alzheimer’s over the past year, I feared this would be the last bonfire. Our very first bonfire, which was Ernest’s idea, he and Edgar went out to gather firewood together. They came back laughing about something Edgar had seen, a stick or twig he had mistaken for a snake, which had made him drop the firewood and run. Ernest kept laughing about that, I remember. And as we stood around the bonfire, reflecting on what we were thankful for, Ernest had said: “I’m thankful we can laugh even in times of sadness.” This was our gift to Ray-Ray, our way of understanding and making healing and sadness feel eminently right.
This is my hope, I wrote in my journal that first year, that the bonfire will continue as a memorial for Ray-Ray and to mourn for others who pass away in the years to come.
Edgar had made it to the bonfire every year, and since the intervention had failed, I hoped this year’s bonfire would be one more chance to help him back on the right path. I wouldn’t give up on him. I was consumed by an emptiness I tried to fill however I could: through prayer, meditation, journaling. For the first time in many years, I struggled to sleep at night, worried about Edgar and Ernest. At such times I always felt that an epiphany was about to come to me, but I was never able to put my finger on it. One night some months earlier, thinking Ernest had quit breathing in his sleep, I turned over in bed to see that he was in fact awake, staring up at the ceiling with the fear of someone who had been struck repeatedly across the face. “I dreamed about dead people,” he whispered, immediately closing his eyes and falling back asleep. The next morning Ernest had no memory of it, but the moment haunted me.
When I did manage to sleep, I often dreamed about Ray-Ray as a young child, maybe five or six years old. I never dreamed of him as a teenager, even though he was fifteen when he passed. In these dreams he would be missing, and I couldn’t find him. Ernest and I would show up at a gymnasium to pick him up, and he wouldn’t be there. Or we would be at a crowded park somewhere, searching for him. Those dreams were the hardest.
I had another recurring dream, about a man carrying an owl. I wondered who he was, this stranger. He was silent and kind, offering me beads or a piece of warm bread, a cup of dark wine to drink. There was nothing romantic or attractive about this, and certainly nothing suggestive about my feelings toward him. If anything, he appeared as a traveling monk, maybe a spiritual man, dressed in ragged clothes and holding the owl on his arm.
“It sounds like you’re dreaming about Skili,” Irene once told me. “He’s a ghost or bad spirit. He brings bad news.”
But I didn’t tell anyone about my dreams of Ray-Ray appearing in the form of a bird. When I woke and sat outside on the back deck in the mornings, sometimes a bird would fly near and land in the grass, cock its head as if watching me. It made me miss him terribly.
Sitting at the dining room table, I closed my notebook and turned off the light. I felt my way in the dark down the hall to our bedroom and got back into bed. My mind was alive, racing with thoughts as usual. Tomorrow the foster boy, Wyatt, would be coming into our home, this house made of strong brick and rock
. This house able to withstand bad weather and furious winds throughout the years, with its stable roof and walls and plaster that tightened when the earth moved. This house, our house, that creaked and ticked with the passing of time, welcoming the voices of strangers and the company of spirits whose laughter lifted like smoke through the chimney. I wondered how such a place remained firm, intact, solid, throughout its years of soaking up all the crying and pain, the laughter and longing, all the memories birthed from my swollen belly.
Edgar Echota
SEPTEMBER 1
Albuquerque, New Mexico
RAE AND I ATE in silence. Actually her name was Desiree, but I called her Rae, like my brother’s name. We were living in a cheap rental house with dirty windows and bugs behind the refrigerator and in the bathroom. I needed help. My drug supply was low. I knew I was spiraling into a meth addiction, and I took oxycodone, too, or whatever I could get. Everyone knew what was happening to me, how horrible I’d started to look and how bad my addiction was becoming. Doing pills had started as a way for me to avoid feeling miserable all the time, but the more I used, the more depressed I became. It was a fucking nightmare. I was only twenty-one and already at a dead end. Rae was about to leave me. I knew I was getting worse because I could look anyone in the face, even her, and tell a long, elaborate lie. It made me feel awful, even though I knew I was a terrible liar anyway.
We stared into our plates, moving pasta around with our forks, pausing every so often to drink cheap wine from plastic cups. We barely ate anything. Light slanted in through the windows, pulsing particles of dust. The house ached with a sense of dread for me—I could feel it everywhere, on our street, or in every New Mexico town surrounding us. I wondered whether something bad was about to happen to me. I pictured other people like me, fuckups getting high and avoiding their own loved ones, looking out their windows with longing and terror, afraid of their lives falling apart. Thinking this made me feel better.
It was like this night after night. I had followed Rae to art school a year earlier, back when I still felt hopeful about our relationship and my future. I kept my drug use a secret for months, meeting people in the park or smoking when Rae was gone and I was in the house alone. It didn’t take long for Rae to notice that I was becoming overly thin, developing tooth decay and skin sores.
At the table I had a sudden coughing fit, bringing a napkin to my mouth, which made Rae stand up and take her plate to the kitchen sink. I heard the water from the faucet come on, then the grind of the garbage disposal. Her silence was a presence designed to put me on edge, a way of communication to reinforce what I feared would happen soon: that she would leave for good. Once Rae left, I knew I would be truly alone, since I had been pulling away from my family for months. Ever since they showed up for the intervention, I had been promising to go to rehab, and I wanted to go because I knew how much sadness and worry I had caused them. But I couldn’t bring myself to check in, and now I was way too embarrassed to go back home and face them.
I set my fork down and watched Rae rinse dishes in the kitchen.
“Put on Ornette Coleman,” she called out to me. “The record we were listening to last night.”
I downed my cup of wine and went over to the turntable to put on the album. I put the needle on the record and, as the music played, picked up the album cover and looked at it. Rae once said Ornette Coleman was the spitting image of her dad, who had been a jazz drummer himself. Maybe that was why she wanted to listen to it. Her dad had introduced her to free jazz in New Orleans, where Rae spent summers growing up. He died when she was a teenager. When we first met, we had bonded over our experience losing a family member. Death brought us together, that’s what we always joked.
I sat on the couch and listened to the frantic shrill of the trumpet, the wild cymbals and drums. Listening to jazz revved me. I could drum my hands on my lap for entire songs, long periods of time, which was something I did almost every time we listened to music. I could imitate Charlie Watts, Stewart Copeland. That drummer from Cheap Trick with the cigarette hanging from his mouth. Rae hated when I did this. She stepped out onto the back porch to smoke and talk on the phone. I never knew who she was talking to. I wanted to care more than I did, but our relationship had become so routine and dull that I never felt the desire to ask. When she came back into the house, she told me my mom had called her.
“What did she want?”
“I’m tired of making excuses for you,” she said. “Call her yourself. The anniversary is coming up.”
“I plan on going,” I said, but I didn’t know if I wanted to go home or not. I knew Rae was pulling away from me. I wondered whether she was cheating on me, although she had never actually given me any reason to be suspicious. All she wanted, I think, was some sort of physical tenderness from me, or maybe a sign of empathy, which I never gave her. I knew deep down it was my fault she was pulling away, but I almost wanted her to for some reason. I couldn’t understand why I would want to punish myself.
I looked up and saw that she was standing with her hand on her hip, giving me a look like she couldn’t understand anything I was saying.
“I don’t know,” I said.
She stopped herself from speaking, looking annoyed, then turned and went back into the kitchen, which made me want a hit from the pipe. I did not feel guilty or ashamed of this, of course, because the way I saw it, getting high could make me feel better the same way antidepressants helped people, even though it wasn’t doing anything anymore except making me feel worse. I understood, too, that I needed to get better so I could be a better boyfriend to Rae. I’d worked on a ranch with my friend Eddie for a while, which was good for me, but at the end of summer the work ran out and I had to get a job I hated at a hardware store. They let me go after missing too many days. Now I couldn’t get motivated to find more work. Rae worked at an art gallery and was able to handle the bills, and I felt guilty about not being more interested in helping out.
While Rae was in the kitchen I stepped into the bedroom, quickly pulled off my T-shirt, and got the pipe from my dresser. A hit or two from the pipe always revived me. When Rae came into the bedroom, I was already smoking.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she said.
I was hunched over my pipe, taking another hit.
“What the fuck, Edgar?”
I finished one more hit, and when I turned to her, she was already gone. I set the pipe down carefully on my dresser, then went to the screen door and saw her pulling out of the drive in her Mazda, talking on her phone. She was always talking on her cell phone. I didn’t have a cell phone anymore. Or maybe I did and never used it. At the screen door, just then, I suddenly felt the urge to go after her.
Here’s what I did: I rushed out of the house into the cold air, shirtless. Across the street, a teenage girl was kicking a soccer ball in the yard, and she stopped to look at me. Rae glanced at me and sped away. I stood in the middle of the street and scratched at my arm. The girl turned away when I looked at her. Then she picked up the soccer ball and went into her house. My arm was itching terribly. I saw that it was bleeding from where I had scratched so hard. When I walked back into the house, Ornette’s trumpet was blowing like wild laughter.
I went into my room and put on a hoodie and sat on the edge of the bed. I thought of Rae and me in the beginning, when we stayed in bed all day. We spent many days like that, too lazy to get out of bed, which was one of the reasons we felt so attached to each other: we saw it as connecting spiritually, emotionally. I fed her soup, carried the dishes to the kitchen. I brushed her hair, then hugged her waist in bed and fell asleep with my head in her lap. We smoked weed and listened to music. Those were good days, and I knew it would never be like that again.
Now, sitting in the house alone, I was fidgety and agitated. How many nights had I sat there in the past, waiting for her to return? I pulled my hood over my head and walked back out the front door. I figured I would go meet my friend Jessie, who often sold jewelry in the
park nearby, and maybe hang out with him so that I wouldn’t sit around the house being depressed or angry about Rae. I walked quickly down our street, hurrying past the corner gas station with the green roof, past the small Assembly of God church with its motto JESUS IS HERE on the sign out front. Then I broke into a run down the street, crossing over to the park. My heart was racing when I arrived, and I felt immeasurably sad.
It was near sunset, and the park was mostly empty. There was no sign of Jessie. I walked to a bench and sat. I felt like a goddamn loser, wanting to get high. Someone would show up, this was what I thought, but nobody showed and I couldn’t sit around.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a bird, a red fowl, strutting like a rooster. I stared at it a moment. Spreading its wings, it saw me and started to charge, as some will do. I turned and ran away through the park. I ran until I couldn’t see it anymore. It was almost dark now, and when I crossed the street, I heard motorcycles coming. I kept walking in a hurry, and the cycles got louder, and when I stopped to catch my breath I turned and saw people riding past me, like a blaring windstorm, a whole line of loud motorcycles with rumbling pipes and red taillights.
* * *
Several months earlier, Jessie had given me a small red fowl in the park. It was harmless and small enough to hold in my hands. The fowl was partially red with spots of orange, a rounded chest, and a sharp beak. I lifted it and said, “What’s your name? I’ll name you Red Fowl,” and Jessie and his girlfriend Shawnee laughed.
They had their own fowl. The people around the park kept fowls and brought them to the park for exercise, feedings, sharing them with anyone who wanted to see them. Right there, I made the decision: the fowl was mine. I would feed it and watch it grow into something bigger, a rooster or larger fowl, whatever it was. The fowl cocked its head and looked around. I could see its little chest breathing. I put my hand on its chest and felt the tiny heart, the pulsing beat, rhythmic. The fowl was alive. I put it in my jacket pocket to keep it warm and safe. The fowl kept still then, never moving. When I put my finger in the pocket I felt the bird nibble, which tickled a little, but it was never painful. It never scratched at me or tried to get out of my pocket all night. I felt an overall sense of acceptance with it, as if it needed me and I needed it. It’s strange to articulate the feeling for me, but the others in the park felt the same way about theirs. Fowl, fowl, fowl.
The Removed Page 2