The sweet, pungent smell of horse manure fills my nostrils. Feet shuffling past one stall and then two. I know where we are. I’ve been here a thousand times. Chad takes my palm and places it gently on the well-worn handle of the tack room. Cassie’s tack room. I take hold and pull the door. Then I stand still waiting for whatever’s next. I hear Cassie’s quick movements as she goes in.
She yanks the light chain. Then she comes for me, guiding me in with both hands. She loosens the binding of the bandana. The naked bulb flickers and sways on the wire. My eyes take a moment to adjust.
“It’s all here,” she says.
And it is.
Every page of it. Tattered. Torn. Caught up in branches and bear grass. It’s all here, pinned to Grandpa Norm’s rough-hewn planks.
“We collected it,” she says with pride. “For you.”
I reach for the workbench in disbelief and ease my way down to one of the grooming stools.
“It was weird,” she yammers on. “I mean, first I found one, then Chad, then Maverick. So I started collecting them. ’Cuz it seemed like you lost them.”
“I did… I lost it.”
Tears form in my eyes, ready to fall.
Then he begins. Chad reaches for the first poem. Running his finger tenderly across the line he says,
“‘I knew in my bones she was gone.’”
“‘I was certain that time had stopped,’” Maverick says from behind me, tracing the letters from a page on the back wall.
“‘We must have eventually walked away,’” Cassie says, not skipping a beat.
“‘The sun warmed us through the cracked windshield,’” Chad says, his tenor breaking with the force of the sudden memory. This time it’s his memory with his mom, the car overturned, glass everywhere.
“‘So we would never forget,’” Maverick says. Goosebumps rise on my skin.
“‘A girl becoming a woman,’” Cassie says, her fingers straightening a weathered page.
“STOP. STOP,” I plead. I can’t stand to hear them. I close my eyes unable to shake loose the threads of my story blanket. The words I left forgotten to the wind. I left them for a reason.
But they don’t stop. The lines of poems I had hoped to forget will not be silent.
Chad says, “‘And when she got to the end/The sections flowed together…’”
“To feed the light/And help us through/The dark season,” Maverick says, repairing a torn fragment.
“What are you doing?” The pain is almost too much.
Cassie refuses to listen. She runs her fingers across the natural rise and fall in the wood grain until she finds what she’s looking for.
“And the animals realized they were powerless. The sun will always shine/The stars will always come out/Even if there are clouds in the sky.”
Chad places the warmth of his palms on my shoulders and then squats down low.
“Don’t you see it?” he whispers in my ear.
I shiver ’cause that’s what happens anytime he gets that close. And strangely, the heat of his palms steadies me.
I pick my head up like I always do, like I always have, but from the low stool I am unable to fight back the tears.
“No, I don’t… I don’t see anything,” I say, straining a laugh. A tear falls and then another.
Cassie crouches low, too. “It’s a map,” she says. “Look.”
A map? I brush the tears from my eyes and stand. A map. The verses, scratched out on notebook paper, tested against wind, snow, and freezing temperatures are yellowed, curled and relentless. The passages, their passages, the ones that helped them understand something never seen before are starred and numbered, a constellation of lost words shining light into the darkness.
Cassie is insistent, “It’s you. You did it. You taught us.”
The pages are impossible, improbable. And then I realize it’s something bigger than me.
A map. Just like Ama said. A map.
And you know what else she said? She said someday I would understand.
Is it scary, Ama?
What, love?
Dying.
No, silly.
Why? Isn’t that the end?
The end?
Yeah, the end.
No, my love.
What is it then?
A continuation.
A what?
A continuation.
Of… what?
Life.
Like how there’s chocolate sauce on your ice cream, and then at the bottom of the bowl, after a lot of continuation, it all melts together?
She laughs. Sort of, she says. More like how day turns to night.
That’s not good.
Why, baby?
‘Cuz I’m really bad at this.
Bad at what?
Life
(found nailed to the rest of ‘the map’
in the tack room)
Chapter 29
“I’ll walk you home,” Chad says with his unfailing politeness. As if. Is all I can say. In my mind, of course. As if I haven’t been walking myself home all these years. As if I need him to show me.
But here’s the crazy thing, I say, “Okay.”
I say it ’cause I finally feel like I know where home is. It’s that place on the map formed in weather-beaten pages, Sicheii’s fires and pots of beans—the place where breath and prayer become one.
He steps out from under the barn roof and into the night, the cold starting to press in on him. He turns expectantly, exhales, breathing crystals. “Ready?” he says.
Then I find myself praying for more than I ever expected, ’cause who ever thought an Indian girl had a prayer with a prep school boy. And then I think, Maybe it’s the other way around. Who ever thought a prep school boy had a chance with me.
“I think so,” I say honestly.
He doesn’t say much. He draws his collar up. And I try not to get caught up in his sturdy presence, my footsteps beside his and the way the moon mingles with his frozen breath. After rising out of Cassie’s driveway and up on the road, he turns and says, “Okay. Truth or Truth.” I can hear him grinning. His green eyes flash at me from beneath blond moonlit streaks.
“What?” I say, partly to wake myself from the dream and partly cuz I’m not sure I really heard him. “Isn’t it dare?”
Then he gets all weird and flustery. “Yeah, but… you’re like… an Amazon warrior princess… mounted on your trusty steed… and, honestly, I’m scared to dare you to do anything.”
Okay. Hold on there.
He turns to face me, walking backward at this point, seeming to rely on his childhood memory of the road to guide him. He picks my chin up, slowing his steps. In the semi-darkness, I see him raise an eyebrow. “I’m scared to dare you ’cuz I know you can do anything.”
We’re stopped now, and I tell myself, Don’t look down.
“How does it work?” I say, sure to return his gaze in the half-light.
“You mean Truth or Truth? I tell you something true, and then you tell me something,” he says.
“Oh. You mean like… talking,” I say with unmistakable irony.
“Right,” he says, breathing a laugh. “So, you wanna play?”
I don’t know what to say, but what I should say is something, anything to blur the miles of trail, intermittent streams, and tableaus of radiant starshine that knit us together. Anything to pull this conversation back into the friends zone. He belongs to Cassie. And she belongs to me. We belong to each other.
So I say, “Okay. I’ll start.”
He looks relieved and starts to continue the walk. He turns, sees me standing right where he left me and says, “Wait, I can’t hear you from over there.” He holds his ground, stretches out his hand and invites me to walk beside him. There goes the friend thing.
Even though, I want to be made of Amazonian iron and woodland princess lace, I’m not. And telling the truth is so… like… true. So I sidestep him and say, “I like peas with meatloaf.” You know�
� it is true and friendly. I really do… like peas.
“What?” he says, drawing my tentative hand deeper into his palm and laughing.
“Start small, I always say.”
“Peas are small,” he affirms, playing along. Then he says, “I like the winter moon, the kind with the ring around it. Kaboom! Go big or go home. The moon is definitely larger than a pea.”
“Wait, let me get this straight. You like the moon?” I say. “That’s an enormous truth. I never would have guessed.” I mock him now, giving his hand a squeeze.
“Okay. Okay,” he relents, laughing now. “Ummm, let me think of something else.”
I’m like You’re the one who started this game, so let it out. What truth are you dying to tell me? But taking a risk to do something completely unlike me, I shut up and wait.
“You mean a lot to me, Ahzi,” he says.
“Another huge revelation,” I say. And then I hate myself for saying it. He’s trying, and all I can do is tease him.
“I couldn’t be without her, without you,” he says, ignoring me. Somehow he realizes that makes no sense, so he clarifies, “I couldn’t be without my mom, without you. I thought if I watched you, you would show me how to do it, how to be without her.”
And while that’s deep and all, I know that’s not what this is about. I know this is not the reason why he started this Truth or Truth thing.
So I say, “And I like roasted potatoes with chicken.”
And he gets it. “Ahzi,” he says, frustration rising. “You’re right. You’re right,” he says. He stops and moves his arms as if to erase every other thought from the blackboard. “I want… to say…” By this time we are at the base of my driveway, and the night gets impatient with him, too. The wind begins to blow, flaring ice crystals against us, and he draws me in. “That…”
“Dare!” I say all of a sudden stepping back, putting distance between us. He looks at me puzzled. So, I repeat myself. “Dare… I dare you to run to the top of the mesa.”
In the night there is an uncertain line where the snow-covered mesa ends and the black begins. I don’t give him a chance to answer. I bolt from him, picking my way through chamisa, mountain mahogany, scrub oak, piñon, grasping at roots, branches, and crushing last summer’s blossoms on the rise. I don’t look back. The scent of churned snow, gravel, and shale fills me, and I won’t stop. Not until I get there. My footing falters here and there. I push on and on until I make it. Reaching the top, I practically fall into the sky.
I collapse on the snow, exhausted. I pull my coat around me and wait. I don’t hear anything except my heart pounding in my ears. I cough some to clear the cold air from my lungs, and I stare up at the moon. My breathing slows, and cold begins to seep again into my hair and jeans.
I stand and look carefully through the darkness, trying to find the mesa edge, straining to hear him climb.
I hear him giggle from behind me, and I jump. Here I am, teetering from the top, and he chooses this moment to scare me. Seriously? He grabs me. Pulling me into the circle of his arms, he says, “I wanted to see how long it would take you to notice me.”
Since there’s really nothing much else to say, and since the wind is conspiring with Chad, making it so warm in his arms, Chad makes us both shut up.
“Azhi, I love you,” he says. Flooded in moonlight at the peak, sheltered from the storm, he presses his lips against mine.
Chapter 30
The first rays of light push through the checkered windowpanes of the tack closet, and all I can think of is how Sicheii must be worried. I didn’t mean to stay out all night. It just… happened.
“It’s not his fault.” Cassie’s voice rises out of the early morning silence. Her footsteps are muffled in the snow as she approaches the barn.
The scuff of the soles of her boots on the concrete is frightening. Panic, you know that kind that comes when you have to tell the truth, rises in me. I look at Chad in the peace of the morning, shacked up here with me in the tack closet. Mixed up, confused in poems, maps, manure dust, fighting off last night’s cold… uh… together… under the saddle blankets. Telling the truth to Cassie is… um… complicated. I know when Cass opens the door, she’ll get an eyeful. And that’s not good because she won’t like what she sees.
Grandma Alice says something to Cassie that I can’t quite make out. Her words are muted in fresh snow.
“It’s not entirely his fault,” Cassie insists, standing her ground in whatever they’re talking about.
“From what I could see last night, it looked like you were both at fault,” Alice says, her words coming in clearer. Like almost too clear. As if she can see me in here with Chad. Wait… what is Alice talking about?
Cassie sidesteps the question, well actually the statement, with silence.
“How do you know?” Alice says. “How do you know Maverick isn’t here to trap all the fur-bearing animals from here to eternity while sweet talking you girls into… into… well, whatever… You understand.”
Cass doesn’t say anything again.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Alice says. “I see how you can be convinced of his innocence with the way he… uh… is.” That seems to be the cleanest way to finish that sentence. It’s hard not to laugh.
“I just know… I have to believe him,” Cass says.
“Cassie, you can’t go around believing what you want to believe about people.”
“If I don’t, Grandma, then who will? It’s like… it’s like you and Officer Madrid and Jeremiah and the long list of other people you seem to know will turn out all right.”
“That’s different.”
“Why is that different?”
“Because it’s you, Cass. Because I promised I would take care of you.”
“Grandma… Mom and Dad are dead.”
“I know. I didn’t promise them.”
“Oh,” Cass says.
There’s a silence, and Cassie turns some toward the tack room. And Grandma stops her with this.
“What will Ahzi think?”
“About what?”
“You and Maverick.”
“What about us?”
“I know what I saw last night.”
Cassie doesn’t say anything.
Then I realize I’ve been all caught up in myself, or should I say Chad, and I have no idea what happened to Cass last night.
“Love is love,” Grandma A says. She sighs. “Love is love.”
And with that Alice retreats back to the house.
Cassie takes a few more steps into the barn, closing the distance between us. Her ropers shuffle fine dust up under the tack room door, marking the microseconds left in our friendship. So I decide there’s nothing I can do. I’ll just stand here and… well… face her… and… um… tell the truth. Her hand rests on the doorknob. There’s no hiding. The saddle blankets we shared are still curled around Chad’s sleeping form, and they will tell the truth about last night. I contemplate the planks on the door. The wood grain is the last thing that holds this friendship together. Cassie pauses. She pivots some like she might go after Alice… and save my skin all in one movement.
And then, just when I think I might have a prayer, I feel him on his feet behind me. Chad takes a step closer, to stand beside me, to curl his pinky in mine. Cass turns back to the door that separates us. Chad turns to catch my eye. Before he can wonder aloud about what the heck I’m doing, standing here, staring at the door, it pops open.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi?” Cassie says, “What are you doing here?”
Her eyes travel to our twisted pinkies and behind me to our twisted blankets, and I am at a total loss.
“So…” I say, savoring the S and O, the last shreds of decency I have left.
My mind travels to the clock on the wall in Mrs. Crumbley’s art class, the really big one that marks the hours, the minutes, the seconds, and I’m pretty sure the microseconds that, at this point, have stretched into hours. While I’m watching th
e hands in my mind’s eye tick tock the terror in my soul, Chad says, “Who’s hungry?”
And I say, “You heard the man. Let’s feed the man.” Like some kind of awkward game show host. The man, the man. Who says that?
And that’s what Cassie’s face says.
“Did someone say food?” Maverick says, coming up behind her.
“Maverick?” she says.
“Yeah, did you expect someone else?”
“Uh, no… I just didn’t expect to see you here… like this early and…”
I watch her face work out the details, running through the years of trust and loyalty between us. I recognize it. I recognize those details ’cuz they are the same details all over mine.
“Yeah, let’s eat,” I say.
Then I see Maverick’s expression, how his eyes rest gently on hers and linger just a bit too long before looking at the rest of us. I see his hand reach for hers, and then he thinks better of it.
That’s when I realize we have a lot of explaining to do. Or, do we?
Is it enough that we can read the truth on each other’s faces? Is it enough that some things will never change like tried and true friendship bound up in clay, snowflakes, horse hair, and Grandma’s Sunday brunches? Is it enough?
Psalm 147:3-4 (NLT)
“He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds. He counts the stars and calls them all by name.”
Catalina Claussen
There’s no greater feeling than getting lost in a book, in an experience. I hike, hunt, dance, fish, garden, ski, scuba dive, write, sing, swim, speak French, travel, read and do just about anything that gets me out into the world.
My happiest moments are spent feeling connected, present, both as a participant and a witness to the human experience.
Diamonds at Dawn Page 13