Rust

by Julie Mars

  “I used to think I could control things,” Vincent said, as his story drew to a close. “My big lesson in life was learning I can’t.”

  Rico wondered if Vincent expected an equally long story from Margaret. Rico would have liked to hear one too, but she was not inclined toward storytelling. “I never thought for one minute I was in control,” was what she said; and then added, “Tell me about my mother.” She only had Donny’s version to go by, and now she had the chance to hear more. To Rico, she seemed to be in a trance, which was probably a normal thing for a person in her circumstance, as she listened to Vincent’s love stories about her mother.

  It was close to six-thirty when Rico’s thoughts returned to the mother of his own daughters, his mother and his granddaughter back in Albuquerque. “It’s getting late,” he reluctantly observed, which caused Margaret to turn to Vincent and ask, “Do you think I could stay here for a while?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Please. I can’t possibly let you go. And Alice wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  So Rico and Vincent carried the two boxes from Pearl Paint inside, while Margaret unloaded the bag of dog food and searched around under the front seat of the car for the protein bars. She left two on the seat for Rico. A few minutes later, when Rico was ready to leave, they all stepped outside together.

  “Should I come back for you?” he asked.

  “How about in a week?” Margaret answered, and then she had turned to Vincent. “Would that be okay?”

  “It’ll be a start,” Vincent said, “and Alice will be back in a few days, so you’ll have a chance to meet each other.”

  Vincent shook Rico’s hand and, for no reason Rico could discern, said, “Thank you, thank you.” He stepped back inside while Margaret walked with Rico toward the car. At the driver’s door, they stopped and stood facing each other in the great silence.

  “I don’t have the right words, Rico,” Margaret whispered, and tears filled the green of her eyes like spring rain.

  “We don’t need any, Margaret,” Rico replied, his eyes brown and accepting, like fertile earth.

  When she moved toward him he felt the kiss he had been waiting for, and dreaming of, about to happen at long last, and he leaned down to receive it. She pressed against him, her hand wrapping around the nape of his neck. She lifted her face to him. He closed his eyes and waited for their lips to touch.

  Perhaps it was the afterglow of Vincent’s story, or the magical nature of deserts when the relentless summer sun begins its descent, but Rico felt suspended in a timeless place. In this place of altered time, he remembered the first moment he saw Margaret, when she had stood in the halo of light in the door of his shop, and he thought for one crazy second that she was the Virgin of Guadalupe. He felt, strongly, in that moment that she was his destiny, but now he understands that destiny is not singular, like a star falling through the night sky, but complex, a kaleidoscope with all the parts shifting, tearing apart fathers and daughters and husbands and wives, and shifting again to fling them back together.

  He felt Margaret’s breath sweet on his skin, like light, and in that moment he admitted the truth: he loved her. He loved her like an ache that demands to be experienced, one that has to get better or worse over time. But he belonged with Rosalita, with Lucy and Ana and Maribel and Jessica. Margaret belonged here with her father, whom she never would have found without his help, and that was what Rico would choose to remember.

  He had never experienced a more tender kiss, one that had so much not-said in it. They held each other, breathless, while the words they didn’t say swirled around them.

  Rico goes over and over this story as he drives east, as tractor trailer trucks speed past him on the interstate. He feels as if he has survived a flood. He feels both sad and deeply grateful. Somewhere between Grants and Tohajiilee, he realizes that he, too, has a long story to tell when he sits down to dinner at home, where he belongs, surrounded by all his girls.

  MARGARET RESTS in Alice Yazzie’s iron bed. It is too late to be wide-eyed in the extreme darkness, but Margaret cannot even think of sleep. There is no sound anywhere except, every now and then, the howls of a coyote pack far away. She wonders if there is a message for her in their voices, a story she needs to hear but cannot quite decipher. She knows she would never be here, in Alice Yazzie’s home with her long lost father just over the ridge in his, if, back in New York, she had not read in a travel magazine that coyotes run along the river, right in the middle of Albuquerque, and felt compelled to see this with her own eyes. But she realizes, as she muses, that she always imagined a lone coyote when the truth is they often come in packs. She listens more carefully to the coyotes’ call.

  Did they summon her here to New Mexico, she wonders. Because there are only three possible explanations for why she has come, and that is what Margaret is thinking about as she lies in Alice Yazzie’s bed in the cool night—cool enough now for Margaret to unfold the Navajo blanket that Alice herself has woven, and draw it up until it covers her heart. If not the coyotes, she reasons, then her father’s blessings, which he learned from Alice and threw into the sky every morning at dawn. Option number three has to do with the nature of randomness—perhaps understanding that everything is random, or perhaps that nothing is. Margaret isn’t sure which.

  Over and over, she re-experiences the moment when she saw her father’s name on the shipping label of the box from Pearl Paint. It knocked her to her knees, and yet, in some small way, she expected it, though not perhaps in that precise moment. She understands now, looking back, that she reserved a little hope that she would see her parents again and buried it deep inside her. When she saw her father’s name, she felt yes, finally, and she knew hope had always been there.

  He had come over the ridge, blinded in the glare of the sun, until he was almost upon her, and then he had abruptly stopped and whispered, “Regina?” Margaret wonders if he thought he was dying in that moment, and that his great love, dead for thirty years, stood ready to greet him. He had looked so old and beaten, so vulnerable. She remembered a father as big as the world, a father whose arms could sweep her up to the sky.

  “I searched for you,” he had said into her ear. “I searched and searched for you and I couldn’t find you.” Remembering that, Margaret begins to think about what she has searched for, and the answer is not much—not love, not money, not fame. Not really her parents, either. But then Margaret remembers her paintings, and she knows she has searched and searched for something there. Perhaps it was belief. Perhaps the will to go on.

  She imagines the three years Vincent spent in New York, looking for her. Had they missed each other by seconds? Had he followed a whim and ridden the A-train to the end of the line at Rockaway Beach when, a few blocks away, Margaret was walking Magpie in that same direction? They would never know. And Vincent could not have expected or even hoped, as he approached Alice Yazzie’s door, the autumn light dimming and the shadows of the rocks disappearing into darkness, that she was the person who would save him.

  Margaret wonders if it is Rico who has saved her.

  True, she did not arrive at the doorway of Garcia’s Automotive half-dead. She did not appear in his doorway with a hand-drawn map and a story to tell a grandmother filled with sadness. She had just wanted to learn to weld. But now, in Alice’s iron bed, she entertains the notion that perhaps there was something beyond metal that she was destined to forge through heat and fire. She wonders if it was something basic: connection.

  In her mind, she watches her days with Rico flicker by like an old-fashioned home movie. She can even imagine narrating it: here’s the moment where I first saw Rico. He held the torch above his head as he worked, and I saw sparks flying onto the concrete floor of the garage. I could see the heat in him, the way he took one thing and radically changed it into another.

  Here is the moment he showed up at my house later that evening. He felt my desire strongly and thought it was for him, the welding lessons just a subterfuge.


  And here is how his face froze and then contorted with shame when I set him straight.

  On through the images she could go, certain now that each moment, each conversation, each secret they exchanged, and each step they took toward each other, was another scrap welded into a mystery that would both solidify and unravel the instant Vincent appeared over the ridge in the sharp glare of the afternoon sun.

  She does not allow herself to linger on their one kiss, on the way her hand so naturally wound itself around his neck and pulled him to her. She will not admit that even now, hours later, she still feels the aftershock of his lips on hers. She knows she will never experience his lips again, but she will, once in a while, perhaps allow herself to recall the current, the way it arced between them, a memory that will last forever.

  Forever is a long time, and Margaret feels better contemplating it while on her feet under the night sky, so she slips from Alice’s bed. She wears a nightgown that Vincent has found for her in Alice’s tiny chest of drawers, and she pulls on her sneakers because her father has warned her against the ants, spiders, and snakes. She opens the door and steps out. She notices a shimmering edge against the big rock by the driveway, a crescent that reiterates the shape of the waxing moon, and she moves toward it.

  It is her self-portrait, her arms raised like streaks of dark lightning in the night, and her unblinking eyes warm on Margaret. Each small square of metal, each patch, shimmers like a mystery. Margaret squats down for a better look. She reaches out, her fingers tracing the edges of the rust that ride the metal. It seems to have splintered into a thousand parts, and she raises her head to look at the sky searching for the source of light.

  She sees a billion stars, star paths leading everywhere, and it suddenly occurs to her that perhaps each one has a story to tell. Perhaps each person’s story gathers force, collects details like particles of dust, and assembles a meaning. She scans the sky all the way to the horizon. Which one is her mother’s, she wonders. Which one is Donny’s? Which one is Vincent’s, and Rico’s, and Fernando’s, and Thomas Yazzie’s?

  Which one is hers?

  She imagines the stories swirling together, wrapping themselves around each other as they tumble silently to earth.

  “Tell me,” Margaret whispers into the night. She raises her arms up, like her self-portrait, to receive them.

  She listens carefully.