I walked into the stairwell and stared out the window at a black metal sculpture, La Grande Voile, that reminded me of a six-legged cat.
I dialed the number the man gave me. I introduced myself as Tweety’s eldest daughter, the one who had placed the obituary in the paper.
The woman who answered sounded exactly like my mother—her voice lilting, with all the hard consonants dropped at the ends of her words. But she sounded angry; she demanded to know what had happened.
I repeated the story of how my mother died. My throat felt tight with the well of tears I held back.
“I don’t understand. What happened?” she asked again.
There was a period of time when my mother was dead, but my aunt’s sister was still alive and walking her mother’s red earth. I could not reconcile that time. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know how to get ahold of you. The numbers I had were old, and I could only find a post office box number.”
“We don’t have street addresses out here,” she sighed, exasperated already with the things I didn’t know. “I should have known.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
My mother’s sister began to cry. I waited, silent.
“We have to do something for her,” she said, her tears stopping abruptly; the anger falling out of her voice. “A memorial.”
“Yeah, of course,” I agreed.
“Can you come out?” she asked. “Next week, maybe? The family can help.”
I hesitated; I hadn’t expected her to want to see me so soon. And I had taken so much time off work already—called out so many days—I wasn’t sure my boss would approve, but I knew I needed to meet my mother’s family more than I needed a job. I told her I would try.
She sighed. “I need to go. I’m at work. But I’ll call you later,” she said, adding, “Okay, baby?” the way my mother always did.
I nodded and told her okay.
“You’re not alone,” she said, ending the call.
I set my phone on the window ledge and felt my throat relax. I buried my face in my hands and let the tears arrive.
* * *
—
I CALLED MARC from the train and quickly told him about the obituary and the conversation with my aunt.
“Wow,” he said. “Are you going to go?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to try, I guess?” I had asked my boss if I could take the time off work; I assured him I wouldn’t fall behind on my projects, and he had given me his blessing.
“Maybe I could take some time off,” Marc said, thinking aloud. “We could drive out there—make a trip of it.”
“I don’t think there’s enough time. She wants to do it next week.” I didn’t tell him that I wanted to make the journey alone.
“Oh,” he said, sounding disappointed. “Yeah, I can’t get off work with that short notice.”
“It’s okay,” I said, relieved.
* * *
—
MY AUNT CALLED me later that night. She told me she had checked the card my mother sent for Christmas. The sound of a can cracking open punctuated the end of her sentence, and I held my breath. “Dale wrote something on the back,” she said. “ ‘May she rest in peace.’ I didn’t know what it meant.”
“He what?” I asked, trying not to scream. “He told me he didn’t know how to contact you.”
“He didn’t even write to tell me what happened,” she said.
I was grateful he hadn’t—that I had been the one, at least, to tell her. Relief, followed by guilt. I didn’t notice the silence on the phone until my aunt started talking again.
“I’m just sitting outside in my truck,” she said. “It makes me so sad.”
I could picture her then. I recognized the open, empty sound that surrounded her; felt the comfortable weight of the night air, like a thick quilt. I longed to be there.
She wanted to hold the memorial service the following Friday, but she asked me to come out early, to stay a week. I agreed. The plane ticket was outrageously expensive on such short notice, but I didn’t hesitate to buy it after we hung up the phone. It was just one more addition to my ballooning credit-card debt. I started packing, folding my clothes into my mother’s suitcase, the one I had found in her closet in Florida, the one that had held all of her things.
* * *
—
EVEN THE BOOK I brought with me on the plane could not distract me from thoughts of my mother, or that final day with her in the hospital. I remembered the feel of her skin, mortuary cold—a too-visceral reminder that the critical systems of her body were failing.
The hospice worker had given me a folder of information about their hospice program, an advertisement for cremation services, and pamphlets on death and dying. The pamphlets offered token pieces of end-of-life advice: that it is not unusual for your loved one to linger; that in order to let go, your loved one needs to know the people they are leaving behind will be okay; that it is important to say goodbye.
I was not convinced I believed in spirits, or that there was any presence in my mother’s body that understood what I might say. But I felt compelled to say something.
I scanned my mind for every movie or television cliché I could remember. “It’s okay to let go,” I began, self-consciously keeping my eye on the hallway. “I know you loved me, and Eileen. I know you did your best.”
But even as I said the words, I doubted them. Why should I tell my mother what I thought she wanted to hear?
“I’m glad I’m the one here,” I said, lowering my voice. I let the air I had been holding in the deepest part of my lungs out, in one foul breath. “I never told you what I meant to say. I never did anything because of you, only despite you. I am nothing like you, and I’m grateful for it.”
I waited. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for. There was no sign—no sudden twitch of her lips, no holy corona, no voice from above—to make me believe anyone or anything had heard me. I didn’t feel unburdened, only vindictive and cruel.
“I’ll be okay,” I sighed, finally. “You should go.” But I knew the machines and the drugs were holding her there, and the decision could not be made by her body alone.
* * *
—
AS THE PLANE began its descent over the Sandia Foothills, down below the cloud cover, I distracted myself with the view out the window. I scanned the snow-covered ridges and paths between the conifer trees for any sign of movement, but all was still. The mountains transitioned to flat brown desert, and my eyes traced the veins of snowmelt and rainwater that had cut deep grooves in the earth.
My cousin waited for me at the gate. There was something about her—the shape of her eyes, or her shameless smile—that reminded me of Eileen. “You sounded white on the phone,” my cousin said, seeming surprised, “but you look like your mom!”
I laughed, and we hugged. “You look like my sister,” I said.
My cousin’s neighbor, an old white man who called himself Shorty, waited for us near the exit. He was the man who first called me after I posted the obituary—he had watched my mother and her brothers and sister grow up. As he walked to his truck, he told me he came to the reservation as an engineer, working at one of the uranium plants, but met and married a Navajo woman, and so he stayed.
We left Albuquerque, all pink concrete and metal painted turquoise blue, and drove north along I-40. The airport was a two-hour drive from where my family lived on the reservation, and my cousin spent most of the drive on her phone. The land around us turned brown and gray, though the sandstone mesas in the distance were streaked with shades of red and white. It started to flurry, but the snow wouldn’t stick.
As we drove, Shorty named some of the towns and geologic features in Navajo. “That’s Tsoodził,” he said, pointing toward a distant, snow-capped peak. “Can you say that?”
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“Soo—” I tried. “Sooo—”
“Mount Taylor,” he laughed. “That’s one of the four sacred mountains.”
“Oh,” I said.
Closer to the reservation, we passed the casino, a solid structure that looked more like a multipeaked white tent.
My cousin leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “That place is full of skin-walkers.”
“What’s a skin-walker?” I asked.
She gasped. “You don’t know what skin-walkers are?”
I shook my head and glanced at Shorty, suddenly silent in the driver’s seat.
“We have skin-walkers out here,” my cousin said, wedging her shoulders between Shorty and me. “They’re witches. They can turn into animals, and they curse people. And that’s where they all hang out.”
I laughed, which I immediately realized was the wrong thing to do. I tried to turn my laugh into a cough. “Do you believe in skin-walkers?” I asked Shorty.
My cousin eased herself into the back seat.
Shorty cleared his throat. “You hear stories,” he said, but that was all he would say.
We stopped in Gallup for groceries—my aunt wouldn’t have anything to eat, Shorty claimed. By the time we reached my aunt’s neighborhood, the sun was already beginning to set.
* * *
—
I VISITED THE reservation only once when I was a child, when I was three years old. My mother and my father packed my younger sister, my cat, and me into a car to drive from Florida to Window Rock, Arizona, to visit my mother’s family on the reservation and to register me and my sister with the Navajo Nation. The cat jumped out of the car somewhere in Texas, and my father was bitten on the leg by a brown recluse spider, and he was arrested on an old warrant and did a stint in jail, but we made it to the reservation otherwise intact.
My memories of that visit are small but incremental: a yellow butterfly in a jar on a windowsill; the warmth of the rust-colored earth; an old junker resting beside a fence. I pulled a wiper blade off the car and sliced open my inner thigh—a lasting scar, a pale recession.
My grandmother tells me I hated the reservation. When I came home, she said I sat in her kitchen and cried because my mother’s mother locked me in a dark closet while my mother went out drinking with her old friends. That my uncles scared me with their masks.
Years later, when I asked my mother about that trip, about the masks my uncles wore, she laughed. “I can’t believe you remembered that!” She told me they wore Halloween masks, a gorilla and a witch.
* * *
—
I DIDN’T RECOGNIZE my grandmother’s house with its little white porch, or the yard out front, or the road, pocked with wide potholes.
My aunt was still at work when we arrived, so my cousin and I waited at Shorty’s. She sprawled in a recliner by the kitchen table, as if at home, and Shorty scolded her, “Don’t sit with your pussy hanging out.”
My cousin laughed and rolled her eyes, and when I looked at her, she shrugged. “He’s just a dirty ol’ man.”
Still, I was relieved when my aunt showed up. I ran to the door to meet her, a woman as short and round as my mother. She wore a simple sweatshirt and jeans and a pair of black biker boots, but her hair was dyed and highlighted a dirty blonde, which reminded me of my sister. She started crying as soon as she saw me, and she pulled me into a hug.
The three of us sat at Shorty’s table, and he fed us fried chicken and potato salad. “When is the memorial service?” he asked.
“Friday,” my aunt said.
Shorty cleared his throat. “We all know Tweety had her faults,” he said, “but I think the two of you should celebrate her life. There’s no need to dwell on all the rest.”
“I know,” my aunt said, the tears creeping back into her eyes.
I pushed the potato salad around on my plate.
After dinner, I followed my aunt across the street to my grandmother’s house. The living room was dark; smaller than I imagined, somehow. There were Pendleton blankets draped over the couch and loveseat. One doorway led to the kitchen, and another to a room with a wood-burning stove.
“You’re going to share my room,” my cousin said, leading me down a short hall. She flicked on the light and walked over to a plastic cage. “This is my hamster!” she chirped, opening the top of the cage and cradling a ping-pong ball of fur in her hands. She held him toward me and smiled. “Isn’t he cute?”
I watched the hamster nose at the crevices between her fingers and laughed. “Yes.”
My aunt, opening a can of beer, appeared in the doorway. “We’re meeting with the priest at ten tomorrow morning to go over the service,” she said, “but I’m going to go cruise with my friends.”
It didn’t sound like I was invited, but I told her I was tired and just wanted to go to bed.
We woke in the middle of the night to my aunt shouting my cousin’s name.
My cousin stirred and groaned loudly, “What!”
“Your hamster is out of its cage again!” she hollered back.
Throwing off her blankets, my cousin disappeared into her mother’s room. A few minutes later, she returned, switching on the light with the cage of her hands. “It’s broken,” she mumbled, dumping the hamster back in its cage. She wiggled the door around until she felt it was locked, then turned off the light and climbed back into bed.
We woke again to my aunt shouting her name.
When my cousin didn’t respond, my aunt flew into the room. “Your hamster escaped!” she yelled, turning on the lights.
Reluctantly, my cousin rolled out of bed. I lifted my head and listened to a rummaging sound in her mother’s closet, which must have been connected to her own. “I can’t find it,” I heard my cousin complain before returning to bed.
I woke again to the sound of small teeth chewing on something like cardboard. I rolled over and whispered, sleepily, “I think your hamster is back in its cage.”
“No, it’s not!” she yelled, jumping out of bed and turning on the light. She dove into her closet to find it, and I sat up. As she threw clothes from one side of her closet to the other, I watched the hamster dart between her feet and toward the dresser.
“It’s behind you!” I yelled.
My cousin spun on her knees and pounced on it with both hands. She stood and dropped it into its cage.
“Does this happen every night?” I asked.
“No,” she laughed, turning off the light.
My aunt was the first one awake the next morning. When I walked into the kitchen, she was cooking bacon and eggs. She raised her head from behind the open refrigerator door and handed me a block of bright-orange cheese. “Have you ever had commodity cheese?” she asked.
“No,” I said, hefting the cheese in my hand. It looked a little bit like Velveeta.
“It’s so good,” my cousin gasped from behind me, and she snatched the cheese from my hand. She grated a large pile on top of her eggs, then handed it back to me.
I was more conservative. It was a little milky, a little rubbery.
“Do you like it?” my cousin asked.
“Yeah,” I said, hoping she couldn’t hear the lie.
My aunt sat across from us at the table and glanced back and forth between us. “You guys are sisters,” she said. “In the Navajo culture, you’re sisters through your grandmother.”
I had read about this when I had taken a few anthropology classes as an undergraduate. The clan system was a system of familial relationships, and our blood clans were inherited along the maternal line. My first clan was my mother’s mother’s clan; my second, my father’s mother’s. The Navajo language has more words than English for all the tangles of a family tree, but the way I understood it, the people who also shared my blood clan were considered my close relations—my sisters and brothers
, my aunts and uncles—even if we did not know how or through whom we were related. But before I met my aunt and my cousin, I hadn’t connected the dots about what this meant for me.
“You’re sisters,” my aunt repeated, “and you’re my daughter now. I’m your little mother. You have a lot of family out here.”
I nodded and smiled at my cousin, who had felt like a sister to me from the moment we met.
“Your blood clan is the Tsi’naajinii,” my aunt continued. “You say, I’m born to the Tsi’naajinii, born for the Bilagáana.”
My cousin-sister looked up at her mother. “I have the same clans, huh, Mom?”
“Yes,” she said.
My cousin-sister smiled at me. “My dad’s white, too.”
Suddenly, my aunt leapt out of her chair and yelled, “We have to meet the priest!”
“I’ll get dressed fast,” I said.
Minutes later, we were in the truck, pulling out of the backyard. I noticed a large bird with a black-and-white speckled chest perched in the tree above the driveway.
“What are you looking at?” my cousin-sister asked.
“A bird,” I said, leaning forward to watch him through the windshield until he was out of sight.
* * *
—
MY GRANDPARENTS AND their children converted to Catholicism when my mother was in high school. They were baptized at St. Michael’s, a Catholic mission, and my aunt decided to hold the memorial service there. The sandstone church sat atop a squat hill. As we followed the drive, a small pack of rez dogs chased a squirrel across the yard and up a tree.
The priest invited us into a small room, empty except for a large wooden table and chairs. My aunt sat down next to the priest, and my cousin-sister and I claimed chairs across from them. The priest opened a pocket-sized notebook and began clicking his pen. “First, I’d like to learn a little about your mother, so I can say a few words about her. Her name was Laureen Lee—what was her middle name?”
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