Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  Anna pushed herself and Helena to her feet.

  “What did you hear?” Freddy asked. His head was cocked to one side, listening. Anna had written off the idea of voices in her own head but she wasn’t all that sure about the river ranger’s.

  “Nothing,” she said cautiously. “I didn’t hear anything. Why?”

  “I heard a noise. We’ve been having trouble around here lately. A bunch of punks—lost teenage nomads with lots of piercings and no hygiene to speak of—have been hanging around Terlingua for a couple weeks, homesteading in an old miner’s shack. There’ve been several break-ins. Wake Paul. I’m going to check around outside.”

  Freddy left her standing there holding Helena. Once again, baby in arms, Anna had been excused from danger. Once again, baby in arms, Anna let herself be.

  Paul woke quickly and, because they were closest, pulled on the ragged, filthy shorts and river shoes that Anna had deemed unsalvageable garbage the night before. Under different circumstances, Anna would have left the baby in Lisa’s capable hands and gotten dressed to lend a third pair of eyes to the search. Since it was her butt that had made the offending bump, she knew there was no danger to Freddy or Paul. She returned to the laundry room to finish what she had started.

  “Everything okay?”

  It was Lisa. Clad in a T-shirt and a pair of Freddy’s boxer shorts, she stood in the doorway to the hall.

  “I think so,” Anna said. Freddy had seemed to be after punks in the night but Anna wasn’t convinced. Why he would stoop to such elaborate theatrics when he could have shot her and told everyone he’d mistaken her for a burglar in the dark, she couldn’t fathom. “I think he heard Helena and me banging around in the kitchen.”

  The baby was laid out on the paper diaper and Anna was deftly taping it in place. Disposable diapers made infant care easier by far, if less environmentally friendly.

  Lisa drifted over to watch, her hand reaching out and holding on to one little foot, fingers caressing toes no bigger than pencil erasers.

  Helena liked the attention and was lying on the changing mat looking up at the huge faces looming between her and the overhead light, her eyes wide in awe as if such amazingly huge creatures who floated in the ether were a new miracle to her.

  She was looking at Anna and Anna was looking at her. “Hazel!” Anna blurted out.

  “Like the maid in that old sitcom? I like Helena better.”

  “Her eyes are hazel,” Anna said.

  Lisa leaned close, blocking Anna’s view of the child’s face.

  “Didn’t we learn in biology that brown always wins out genetically?” Lisa asked.

  Anna was remembering the same lesson but she couldn’t remember precisely what eye color came from what parent or if it mattered.

  “Her mother looked Hispanic,” Anna said.

  “What color were her eyes?”

  Casting back to when the woman had opened her eyes, once on the strainer then a second time under the overhang in the alcove, Anna tried to see. “I don’t know,” she admitted finally. “I thought they were brown but I might have just assumed that. The light was funky and my mind was on other things.”

  Clattering from the kitchen let them know Freddy and Paul were back from patrol. Lisa helped Anna thread the baby into the yellow onesie then followed the two of them out.

  Lisa put four glasses and a carton of orange juice on the table, Paul took Helena and the five of them sat around the kitchen table, no one quite ready to go back to bed.

  “Helena’s eyes are hazel,” Anna said to her husband. “Do you recall what color her mom’s eyes were?”

  “I don’t,” he said, and held the baby away so he could look into her face. “They are. Am I to assume this is anything more than just an observation?”

  “If her mother was a poor Mexican woman swimming the Rio Grande at the eleventh hour, wouldn’t her eyes be brown?”

  “Not necessarily,” Freddy said after a moment’s thought. “This close to the border there’s a lot of cross-pollination. Her dad or her mom could have been white.”

  “She’d still have had brown eyes, wouldn’t she?” Anna asked.

  “I guess she would at that,” Paul put in. “But Helena wouldn’t necessarily, not if her father didn’t.”

  “Helena’s father was a white man,” Anna concluded. “If her mother was married to a white person and most white persons are American in this part of the United States, why would her mother have to sneak across the border at the height of the river’s flooding?”

  “Because he never married her,” Freddy said flatly.

  The four of them digested that unsavory thought for a minute. Paul kissed a sleeping Helena on top of her feathery head. “Lucky for you Hollywood made being born out of wedlock a badge of honor,” he told the baby.

  ANNA WOULD HAVE liked to sleep in—she would have loved to sleep for a week—but it was not to be. Helena and the National Park Service deemed the Davidson and the Martinez families were to rise early. Anna was still in the changing room, marveling at how much stuff it took to tend to one small scrap of humanity, when Freddy grumbled out of the master bedroom and called Paul to the phone.

  Curious, Anna carried the baby back into the kitchen to listen in on the conversation.

  “Sure,” Paul said. “We can be there in an hour, does that work for you?” He listened and Anna listened and his face grew stonier.

  “What?” she whispered.

  He ignored her. Into the phone he said: “No. Anna’s the only one who saw her. Your best bet is Anna. Do you want to talk to her?”

  Anna was reaching for the phone with her free hand but evidently whoever was on the other end of the line did not want to talk to her.

  “No,” Paul said again and coldly. “I’m afraid I can’t be of much help.” Again he listened briefly. His face softened up. “Sure, no problem, we’ll see you in an hour or so.”

  “That was Jessie Wiggins,” he told Anna before she could ask. “They’re doing the body recovery today. They want us to go with them and show them where Carmen fell.”

  “They want you to go show them where Carmen fell,” Anna said hollowly. Immediately she was ashamed at her naked emotion. Evil she could deal with, stupid was harder, pathetic curled her insides. Where was her righteous anger? Righteous rage was what she needed right now, a shot of good old-fashioned hate to buck her up. She couldn’t find it.

  Hollowness wasn’t precisely an emotion; it was a lack thereof, a confusion of nothing because, other than the elusive anger, Anna didn’t know what to feel. A little insanity, a little maternity and she was cut out of the life she’d known for the past decade or more. Sexism was a word she’d never use out loud, not in front of the boys, certainly. It wasn’t near as bad as it had been when she started out and she dared to hope it would be virtually nonexistent to the women coming of age in the twenty-first century. For now it was damped down but it was not gone. Societal pressures had forced old practitioners of the dark art underground, but time had yet to cull them from the collective conscious.

  Men around her had occasionally shot somebody. Rangers had burnt out, gone over to the other side, fallen apart, showed up drunk at firearms practice. A few had been fired, one she knew of put in jail, most had quit of their own volition. These guys would have been frozen out to some extent before they found their way out—or were tossed out—of the NPS.

  But Anna had done none of that. She’d burst into tears in a shrink’s office and she’d carried a seven-pound Homo sapiens in her arms for less than twenty-four hours and yet she was given the pariah treatment as surely as the ranger/felons and ranger/drunks.

  No, she realized. She was not being treated as a leper. She was being treated as a helpless, ignorant member of the general public. In other words, as if she didn’t count when it came to taking actions or making decisions. The shunning wasn’t because Bernard or Jessie or anybody else disliked her or even particularly distrusted her. They didn’t want her on the b
ody recovery because she did not want to stay in the box they had put her in.

  “There’s no reason I should go,” she said. “I am on vacation.”

  “The rockslide is a gigantic maze,” Paul said. “I doubt I can find where she fell. Between the two of us we should be able to.”

  He was lying. They’d left marks all over hell and gone coming up that slide. The ledge where they’d camped out for a while probably still had smudgy muddy butt prints from where the kids had sat, not to mention the smear of blood on the face of the boulder where Carmen had bounced on her way down.

  She loved him for the lie but in a flash of insight she knew she didn’t need it. The hollow feeling wasn’t because she was rejected or female or petty or suppressing anger; it was because she was feeling nothing. She simply did not give a rat’s ass what the guys were doing or thinking. There were things she needed to do and was better doing them alone.

  “No,” she told her husband. “You go. I want to drive up and check on Cyril and Steve and Chrissie.”

  “I’d guess they’re flying home today after all that’s happened,” Paul said, eyeing her narrowly, looking for pain she might be trying to hide from him.

  “Maybe but I need to go anyhow.”

  The return to normalcy of her tone reassured him.

  “Okay. I’m off to find a corpse.”

  “Have fun.”

  “Give me a kiss. Men who kiss their wives good-bye are significantly less likely to have automobile accidents on their way to work. Did you know that?”

  “You’re not driving,” Anna reminded him but kissed him anyway because she could.

  Anna was loath to leave Helena, not because she didn’t think Lisa would take good care of her—better care than Anna could—but because she was afraid by the time she got back one or more bureaucracies would have conspired to spirit the little girl away into places children were better off avoiding, like foster care. Helena had sufficient birth trauma for a lifetime’s neurosis should she choose it. She did not need any more.

  Lisa promised she would keep the forces of evil at bay and that Helena would be safe and sound and there when Anna returned.

  “We won’t camp in your guest room forever,” Anna promised after thanking her. “We’ve got reservations at the lodge tomorrow night. That was when we were supposed to come in off the river.”

  “You have to stay here,” Lisa said. “This little one has to eat.” She was holding Helena, Edgar in a sling snuggled in where arms and breasts and cuckoo babies hadn’t usurped his mother’s chest.

  Anna hadn’t thought of that. She could buy formula but there was no place to heat it in the rooms at the lodge. It wouldn’t matter in the end. Helena wasn’t hers to keep. She needed to go to a loving home where she would be treasured and taken care of. The problem was Anna had no faith in the child-care system as it pertained to unwanted or unidentified children. By the time the decision to allow adoption was ground out by the slow wheels of justice and the process of screening prospective parents had been crawled through, Helena would have been in foster limbo for months and months, maybe years. By then what sparked pure and beautiful in this little river nymph might be dead.

  “You’re sure keeping Helena today won’t interfere with any of your plans?” Anna asked.

  “I have no plans and today is Freddy’s lieu day. I hope he will stay home but I think he is going to talk himself into unemployment instead.”

  The comment was sufficiently cryptic Anna might have pursued the meaning on another day. This morning she was too distracted to bother.

  Driving out in the clear light of a desert morning the macabre signs of skeletal children in ball caps enjoying various sports was as charming as Anna had known it should have been the previous night. The ghost town, with its casual and comfortable mix of the dead and the living, decadence and growth, and the idiosyncratic lunacy of people at the end of the line—those who wash up on the shores of Caribbean islands, ski slopes and other destinations most of humanity chooses only to visit. Paradise doesn’t work as a steady diet and those who remain there are tough and, as Carmen said, the goods are odd.

  Anna loved the intrinsic art in the psychedelically painted trailer-cum-ramada that sold cold beer, the lot where a long-departed entrepreneur had put a life-sized pirate ship in hopes of luring tourist dollars, but mostly she loved leaving Terlingua and heading into the open spaces of the park.

  Pushing buttons, Anna lowered all four windows and let the dry, fragrant air blast the confines of the Martinezes’ home from her mind, the smell of talcum powder and formula from her nose. Freedom blasted in on the desert wind and she realized it was the first time she’d been free in a long, long time. District rangers were tied to their radios, wives to their husbands, mothers—or caregivers—to their charges, farmers to their fields. Where one loved one was tied. Responsibility for the welfare of others was an anchor and chain.

  Once she wanted to sever those ties and walk deep into the backcountry where she owed allegiance to no one. That hadn’t been her wish for many years, certainly not since she’d fallen in love with Paul. Still it was good to leave the fetters of the heart behind now and then.

  This Eden, like those she’d been contemplating on the drive through Terlingua, wasn’t a place she could do more than visit. The closer she came to the Chisos Mountains, a ring of peaks, an entire circular mountain range marooned in a sea of desert, the more heavily thoughts of Cyril and Steve and even Chrissie weighed on her mind.

  They’d probably left and were headed for the safety and warmth of their parents’ homes by now, but she hoped not. Human nature was geared to escape from pain, run from danger, but she’d noticed over time that those who stayed close enough so they could work through the trauma with others who had survived it with them healed more swiftly and more completely. The bond formed under duress was allowed to hold them together in mutual understanding till they got a little more of their psychic strength back. Scooping up the survivors and shipping them to different destinations isolated them.

  Though people would deny it, adventure was a high. If there wasn’t anyone who had shared the feeling it was easy to believe the event had turned one into a monster.

  Lost in her thoughts, Anna had been driving blind for thirty minutes. The entrance to the campground in Chisos Basin whipping by her passenger side window brought her out of her brown study.

  Using the lodge parking lot to turn around, she headed back the short distance to the campsites. Awake now and paying attention, she noticed a black SUV pulling out of a parking space behind her. It stayed in her rearview mirror, following too close for comfort as she drove down the gentle incline from the lot to the turnoff. As she clicked on her turn signal the SUV did the same. Then it started honking its horn and flashing its lights.

  “What now?” she muttered, and pulled to the side of the road. Before the SUV had made a full stop behind the Honda, Anna was out of the car.

  The SUV, hulking like a great shiny dung beetle on the gray and tan landscape, hummed secretively for a moment, the life behind its tinted windows invisible to those outside. Then the driver’s door opened and the heavyset guy who’d been in the conference room, the one who knew how to hide in plain sight and fetched soda pop for the mayor of Houston, climbed out. Moving stiffly he uttered a little “ugh” as his weight shifted from the seat of his pants to the soles of his shoes. Anna couldn’t tell if he was as stove up as he was acting or if it was just that, acting.

  Leaning back against the car door, she crossed her arms over her chest and her legs at the ankles. The sun on her face felt like a sacrament.

  “Anna Pigeon, isn’t it?”

  “It is. Darden White.”

  “That would be me.”

  Anna watched the mayor’s security chief shake out the stiffness and walk toward her. Right off she’d kind of identified with this guy for reasons she hadn’t a clue about. White struck a chord that sounded of old and better days. Probably precisely
the chord he wanted to strike.

  “You saved an old man a trip down the hill.”

  Now Anna was sure it was an act. “That shtick ever work for you?” she asked pleasantly.

  White started a bit but then he smiled. “It does,” he said. “It can backfire on you but I’ve gotten some good use out of it. And lately there’ve been times I wasn’t sure where the act left off and old age began. Won’t work for you, though. It’s gender-specific.”

  “Women don’t need it,” Anna said, answering his smile. “We get underestimated without even half trying.”

  “Not by me you don’t.” He sounded almost grim. “The phones being what they are, I was going to drive down to Ranger Martinez’s place on the off chance you’d be in. The mayor wants to see you.”

  It sounded more like an order than an invitation. From what Anna had noted about Mayor Pierson the previous evening, she wasn’t a woman who took kindly to those who said no to her. “What does the mayor of Houston want to see little old me about?” Anna asked. Darden White stepped between her and the sun, providing shade for her. He thought he was doing her a favor.

  “You’d have to ask the mayor that,” Darden said.

  Anna liked that he didn’t say he didn’t know what it was she wanted. Choosing not to lie to her was respectful. She returned the courtesy by not pushing him to tell her what the unexpected summons meant.

  “Sure,” she said. Judith had rubbed Anna the wrong way. She doubted the two of them would become fast friends. But she found the woman interesting. More to the point, she found the mayor’s avid interest in what had happened to the woman in the river interesting.

  “I want to check on the rest of our ill-fated rafters, then I’ll come on up. The lodge dining room suit her? I haven’t had breakfast.”

  “She was hoping you’d come to her cabin.”

  “After breakfast,” Anna said, and pushed away from the Honda to let White know the chat was at an end.