Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  Lisa and Anna followed as far as the hall outside and waited there for their husbands. Darden, following more slowly, stopped to shake Bernard’s and Jessie’s hands. As he did, Anna heard him murmur, “Lost a baby herself a few years back.”

  The men murmured back, relieved that Judith’s outburst could be written off to hearth and home, women and babies.

  Anna wasn’t buying it. If Judith had vulnerabilities—and if one was not a sociopath, it came with being human—she wasn’t the sort to wear them on her sleeve. She didn’t get to where she was by going to pieces every time a baby died.

  She struck Anna as more the type to kill and eat them.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Anna and Paul rode in the cramped backseat of Freddy Martinez’s four-by-four truck as they drove through the desert from park headquarters to Terlingua, the little town on the eastern edge of Big Bend where their rental car was parked at the outfitters who’d planned the float trip. Lisa and Freddy lived several miles farther south in Terlingua Ghost Town. Whether this was a real name or a nickname given because it was dead, Anna didn’t have the energy to ask; she hardly had the energy to breathe. Leaning against Paul’s shoulder, the hum of the tires on pavement, the contented warmth of a baby full of mother’s milk sleeping in her lap, Anna drifted in and out of consciousness, falling into a doze then jerking awake as a dream dropped her from a cliff, or shot her in the back, or sent rivers to snatch Paul or Helena from her arms.

  But for Carmen the Rio Grande would have taken the dead. The river was licking at Anna’s ankles near the canyon wall when Lori was killed. The alcove where Helena’s mother died was slightly lower than that. When the river crested it would have scoured out the alcove and caught up the two bodies. Corpses had a nasty habit of turning up, but there was a good chance neither of these two would be found. The giant reeds could swallow up elephant carcasses in their impenetrable tangles and never show so much as a lump or a trunk. The river could bury bodies of people as easily as it could canoes; they could wash up on the Mexican side and never be found, or if they were, the citizens might be afraid to report it. They could get lodged high enough on the canyon walls that rangers and rafters would never suspect they were there.

  Snipers were hard to catch. But for the bullets in the bodies, they left no physical evidence at the site of the crime. If it could be ascertained where the shots were fired from there was a chance a bullet casing, tire or foot tracks, cigarette butts remained—depending on how careless the shooter was. It was said the world’s best swordsman’s worst enemy was the world’s worst swordsman because of the unpredictability of the untrained. For law enforcement, perpetrators of random violence were the hardest to catch. They didn’t conform to logic.

  The truck pulled to a stop and Anna opened her eyes. The Honda Accord they’d rented in Midland was parked in front of the trailer that housed the business end of the rafting trips. The moon was nearly set and the landscape was featureless and shadowless, as stark as T. S. Eliot’s nightmares.

  The cold teeth of ambient anxiety nibbling at her insides, Anna handed Helena to Lisa to hold while she climbed down from the truck. Her knees buckled and she grabbed on to the door to keep from falling.

  “You poor thing,” Lisa said. “Do you want me to take Helena the rest of the way?”

  “No,” Anna said, then, realizing she sounded rude and ungrateful, she forced herself to add: “But thank you for offering.” The stilted formality added to the surreality of the night, and the nibbles became bites.

  Lisa looked infinitely sad, her round face limned in the faint light from the stars and the waning moon so like the sculpture of Mary holding the crucified Christ that for a breath-stopping instant Anna knew Helena was dead. Before she could cry out or fall to her knees, Lisa was snuggling a live and now thriving infant into her arms and supporting her as they walked toward the Honda.

  Paul drove, following the Martinezes’ truck. A mile or so south of the rafting concession they turned to the right. The headlights raked across a graveyard, old adobe monuments melting into the dun of the desert floor shocked into the present by the acid-bright reds and yellows and greens of plastic flowers left at the bottom of crosses. Before Anna’s teetering brain made sense of the images the car’s lights picked a sign out of the night, a child’s skeleton wearing red gym shorts and dribbling a basketball.

  Dreaming, Anna thought, and eased a hand out from under the baby to rub her face hard. As they wound up a gentle slope houses in varying states of decline were snipped out of the darkness. Some had new additions, ramadas and trailers and bright new adobe rooms tacked onto the ruins.

  Another road sign leapt out of the headlights. This one was of a child—again a skeleton—wearing a T-shirt and shorts and riding a skateboard.

  A town of dying houses and dead children. Anna couldn’t stand being alone in her insanity anymore. “Did you see that?” she asked her husband.

  “Interesting, aren’t they? They sure catch your attention better than ‘Slow, Children at Play,’ don’t they?”

  “They do,” Anna said, relieved that her mind had not become as unhinged as she’d feared. In the light of day, without Helena in her arms, Anna would have found them delightful, macabre and funny. Given the day she’d survived, she found them unsettling.

  The truck’s taillight blinked, indicating a right turn, and Paul followed Freddy off the narrow paved lane onto a dirt track. Here, surely, there would be no skeletons of children frolicking under the stars. A hundred yards farther on, the truck pulled in behind a tidy house made of many things: natural twisting trunks of trees, cacti in painted tire planters, a ramada of sotol and sticks, a house trailer painted with a mural of the Chisos Mountains, rooms of adobe with arched windows and low tile roofs branching out to either side, walkways of crushed white gravel and benches of stone.

  The Martinezes’ home appeared to have grown from the desert itself, taking on various sheltering elements the way a hermit crab takes on the shells left behind by other organisms. The effect was as charming as the enchanted houses unwary children came upon in fairy tales.

  Uncharacteristically, Anna allowed herself to be taken care of. She and Helena and their luggage were unloaded and brought into the Martinezes’ home. The inside was as eclectic and perfect as the outside, bright with Mexican rugs and artwork, handmade furniture and colorfully painted tables.

  She and Paul were established in what Lisa referred to with a smile as the West Wing, in the room of their son who was away at college in Delaware. Lisa put Anna into a tiny shower, so small that if she fell asleep on her feet she wouldn’t have been able to collapse, and took Helena away to bathe and feed her once more.

  Much as Anna would have loved to stay in the tiny shower under the beat of hot water until it melted away every ache, if the hot water heater in the house were as cleverly scavenged as the rest of the building components, it was most likely small. The knowledge that her love for Paul was greater than her love for a hot shower after a couple of nights in the wild places cheered her up considerably. Another cheering thought came to her as she dried off. She got to sleep with him tonight. Not even her first husband, Zach, whom she had loved with all the passion a woman in her twenties has to burn, affected her the way Sheriff Paul Davidson did. Seeing him across a room, or covered in dirt and sweat from the backyard, gave her a rush she’d thought one lost the ability to feel after the age of sixteen.

  Not only did she get to sleep with him tonight, she could sleep with him every night. All she would have to do was quit her job with the Park Service and move back to Port Gibson, Mississippi.

  Once that thought would have made her blood run cold but then she’d fallen in love with Mississippi, with its stunning richness of creatures both two- and four-legged, and then she’d fallen in love with Paul. Should she truly and honestly fall out of love with being a ranger, his solid little two-story house in Port Gibson would be a soft place to land.

  “Your turn,” she said, step
ping out of a bathroom only slightly bigger than the coffin-sized shower stall. “I even left you some hot water.”

  “You are so good to me,” Paul said. He peeled off the filthy rags his boating ensemble had been reduced to and kicked them under the bed. “And you are so beautiful, naked and lovely.” He stopped to kiss her lightly before he enclosed himself in the miniature bathroom.

  Still toweling her hair, Anna wandered over to the small square mirror screwed to the back of the door leading into the hall. She didn’t give much thought to how she looked, one of the perks of wearing the same uniform every day and spending time in places without mirrors.

  Because Paul complimented her with every indication of sincerity, she looked hard at herself in the glass. Sun had had its way with her but she didn’t regret the wrinkles that had formed around her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. Cancer might be brewing in her cells but she wouldn’t trade the pure hedonistic joy of turning her face to the sun for smooth skin. Or even longer life, for that matter. Her hair was long, nearly to her collarbone, mostly because she didn’t take the time to get it cut very often. It startled her to see how much white there was in it. A streak that the bride of Frankenstein would have been proud of went from her side part down the left side of her face.

  Maybe it had surprised her because it seemed to have formed since she’d returned from Isle Royale, her hair turning white overnight the way it was said to do in old ghost stories. More likely she’d simply grown older when she was doing other things.

  Her mind in free fall, she lost interest in her reflection and sat on the edge of the double bed, thinking it small after so many years in queens and kings. Her parents had slept every night of their thirty-seven years of marriage in a double bed. Now they gave them to children because twins were too small. The double bed was the beginning and the end of the room’s romance. A boy’s room, it was decorated with things boys admire: adventure posters with climbers hanging in midair, photographs of proud kids with dead fish. Freddy and Lisa’s son did step out of the mold with two of his decorative choices. A black-and-white poster of Greta Garbo smoldering down at the viewer had pride of place at the foot of the bed, and a collection of kachina dolls were lined up on a shallow shelf above the dresser.

  As the shower came on, there was a light tapping on the door.

  Before Anna could get her mind around standing up, the door opened a crack and Lisa’s voice trickled in. “Are you decent? Can I come in?”

  “Please do.” Anna stood and wrapped the towel around her lest she offend.

  The door was pushed open and Lisa stood in the doorway holding two bundles of humanity. Both babies were wrapped in soft flannel blankets, swaddled from shoulders to toes, both had black hair as wispy as the new feathers of ducklings, both had button noses and eyes squinched shut. To Anna they were nothing alike. Edgar Allan produced her customary sense of awkward indifference and a loss of something nice to say to the proud mama. Helena was a different thing. She would have been able to pick her out of a thousand black-haired, brown-eyed infants. Indifference was not an option; Helena was fascinating, her smooth skin, plump and honey-colored with food and a bath a miracle of beauty and biological engineering. Helena made one believe that evolution was headed toward a greater good rather than random chaos.

  Without being aware of asking or reaching, Anna found Helena in her arms. A release of tension she’d not known she was harboring let her draw deeper breaths, smile with more than just her lips. Sitting on the bed again, with the baby held snugly to her chest, she managed a compliment for Lisa, the woman from whom all good things flowed. Not only the milk of human kindness, but actual real milk.

  “That must be Edgar Allan. He’s a cute little guy,” Anna allowed generously.

  “Our next-door neighbor was looking after him for me,” Lisa said. She jiggled him and he opened his eyes momentarily. Lisa was so easy with her son, relaxed and comfortable. Anna realized her embrace must feel to Helena like she’d been nailed into an apple crate. Consciously she loosened and rounded her arms around the baby. Helena didn’t respond by opening her eyes for so much as a nanosecond.

  “Are they supposed to sleep so much?” Anna asked. “Or is Helena—” Sudden superstition that if she named any malady—autism, retardation, dyslexia, hypertension, eczema, diaper rash or tax evasion—Helena would then have it.

  Lisa smiled and sat down on the bed beside her. “They sleep all the time. No, they wake up and want to eat and cry and poop when you’re asleep. They come with tiny sensors that let them know when you are really, really deeply asleep and then they wake up.”

  Anna laughed. She remembered having been reintroduced to laughing on the river. Shortly before all hell broke loose. She quit laughing.

  “Edgar is happy to share his crib with Helena. He is a perfect gentleman and promises not to steal the covers or any kisses.”

  Anna waited to hear herself accept the invitation on Helena’s behalf. A crib with sides so tiny persons could not roll out, a mattress that undoubtedly had been tested for the perfect firmness to keep them from suffocation, soft blankets and another warm baby to snuggle with, that was ideal and Anna wanted to say yes but she sat there, clutching Helena, wondering what was wrong with her.

  “Or would you like me to make up a little impromptu crib for her here? In your room?” Lisa asked softly.

  “Yes, here,” Anna said. She couldn’t say more because she didn’t want to cry, particularly since she had no idea what she would be crying over. Embarrassment, she thought sourly, for being such an idiot. Lisa left Edgar on the bed next to Anna and Helena and left the room. Edgar blinked unfocused eyes at Anna and moved his mouth sleepily as if dreaming of dessert.

  “Hey, Edgar,” Anna said, wanting to be polite.

  Within a few minutes Lisa returned with a cardboard box, a sofa cushion and several little blankets, all in yellow. Anna watched as she took the scraps of flannel out of the box.

  “I take it you didn’t find out whether Edgar was going to be a boy or a girl before the shower,” Anna said.

  “No. We didn’t want to spoil the surprise. We thought everybody would think it was fun. Jeez, you would have thought we were keeping the cure for cancer secret. People got almost mad because we wouldn’t find out. My mom even thought we had found out and just weren’t telling. I guess she thought we were just trying for an all-yellow layette.” As she talked, Lisa set the box near the side of the bed away from the bathroom, wrapped the sofa cushion in a yellow blanket with green shamrocks on it then made a bed of the other two blankets.

  “There,” she said when she’d finished. “She can’t fall out and she’ll be plenty warm and you can reach out and touch her anytime you feel like it.”

  “Sorry I’m being such a pain. You’ve got to be the most understanding human being I’ve ever met,” Anna said honestly. “Almost psychic.”

  “Just been there, done that,” Lisa said. “Having Edgar so long after his brother was like having a first baby a second time. Would you believe Freddy slept on the floor of the nursery almost under the crib for the first week, afraid of crib death?”

  Anna believed it, but she couldn’t picture it.

  The bed in the box neatly made and turned down, Lisa picked up Edgar and settled him against her shoulder in a practiced motion. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked.

  “We’ll be all right,” Anna said. “Thanks.”

  For a moment Lisa stayed, her face open and kind in case Anna had a last-minute breakdown. “Good night, then,” she said finally. “If you need anything, come and bang on me and Freddy’s door. We’re right across the living room at the end of the hall. The East Wing.” She gave Anna an encouraging smile and left, closing the door softly behind her.

  The bathroom door opened a crack.

  “Is it safe to come out?” Paul asked.

  Anna had forgotten Paul was trapped in the bathroom with nothing but a towel to wear in mixed company. Many men might have made
an entrance regardless, but Paul was not one of them.

  “It’s safe.”

  Leaving the towel to dry on a hook on the back of the door, he came and sat next to her on the bed, smelling of soap, his hair falling damp on his forehead and neck.

  “Whatcha got there?” he said conversationally.

  “It seems to be a small toothless, featherless, furless, clawless creature of some kind,” Anna said, looking down at Helena asleep in her arms. “I believe it to be a human larva.”

  Paul took the baby and laid it across his knees. “Do you think we should peel it before we eat it?” he asked as he unfolded the blanket Lisa had wrapped around the little girl like a tortilla around a bit of chicken.

  “Too small,” Anna said.

  “Shall we throw it back?” Helena was dressed in a yellow onesie with a green frog appliqué on the shoulder. Paul lifted her up, his hands the size of her torso and so dark from the sun, her golden skin glowed in contrast. Helena opened her eyes.

  “Hello, little citizen,” Anna said, awestruck by the rush of gratitude she felt.

  “We won’t throw you back yet,” Paul said. “We’ll fatten you up for when things get lean in the winter.”

  He cradled the baby to his chest as naturally as Lisa had and Anna was dumbstruck by the absolute perfection of man and child. For the first time in months she could believe that good overcame evil, at least on alternate days.

  “Time everybody was in bed,” Paul said, and laid Helena in the cardboard box on her stomach. Tucking the yellow blankets around the yellow-clad baby, he said, “I suppose Health and Human Services will be by to take her sometime tomorrow.”

  Reality slammed into Anna with the force of a punch thrown in anger, and the ghosts of the hurt, the murdered, the molested, the raped, the lost children handed from home to home, flapped and screamed inside her skull, harpies chasing her back toward the yawning pit.

  No. Not even on alternate days.