by Beverly Bird
“I’m going to.”
She thought about the baby’s bones and closed her eyes. Suddenly she was very, very eager to hold Cat and Jericho’s child.
“I just don’t know if she’ll be in any condition to mend my wounds,” she went on with a tight smile. And there would be so many wounds that no one could ever mend, she thought.
She realized that Mac didn’t understand. “My sister-in-law is a resident with the Indian Health Service. But she’s taken a leave of absence to have a baby. It probably came while I was here.”
Family, he thought. He had been right. She had that, and their numbers were apparently growing. He felt a rare sensation in the pit of his stomach. Envy? He clamped down on it, reaching for the few items she hadn’t managed to stuff into her sleeping bag.
“I’ll carry the rest of this for you.”
“No.”
His eyes snapped back at the intensity in her voice.
“No,” she repeated more softly. “Just...don’t. I want to remember you here.”
She grabbed the sleeping bag and clutched it against her breasts like a shield, he thought, as if to ward off any more hurt he might give her. He thought he had known pain before, but this was new, a vile, suffocating thing that filled his entire chest.
Stop her.
But there was no way he could. She had family waiting out there for her somewhere, and there was nothing on God’s green earth that he could give her to replace that. He’d never considered himself long on virtue, but he found he couldn’t do it to her, couldn’t ask it of her, just so that he could selfishly fill himself with her warmth a little longer.
He finally moved away from her. “See you,” he said shortly.
She took a single step past him. “Yeah.”
Finally, he heard her footsteps receding. He jerked around as though some mighty hand had him like a puppet on strings and was pulling him that way.
“Take one of my backpacks,” he said suddenly. “Then you can get everything down and it’ll be more comfortable.”
She kept walking.
Turn around, damn it. Answer me.
She answered, but she did it without looking. She did it with the easy, practical simplicity that had both infuriated him and drawn him to her from the first.
“I can’t do that. There’s no way I can return it to you.”
“So keep it, for God’s sake.”
“I’d rather not.”
And that was that, he thought. She had reached the opposite cliff wall. He turned away again because he found he couldn’t stand to watch her go. Then he had to look back because he was worried that she might fall for what—the fourth time?
She didn’t fall. She reached the top and looked down at him. He couldn’t quite hear her, but he thought he could read her lips.
“Be happy, Mac. Try.”
Then, finally, she was gone.
* * *
The trek down the mountain seemed inordinately long. Shadow made it blindly, stumbling too often, stopping too often to rub angrily at her eyes. She had known what she was getting into from the first time she had touched him. She wouldn’t tolerate self-pity now.
And she had a lot to be grateful for—such a glorious week in the sun. In six short days, she had known more passion than many women ever experienced in a lifetime. It was, she thought, a grand way to see in your thirtieth year, and they were memories she would cherish forever.
She told herself that, but she only felt the loss.
Her truck was where she had left it a lifetime ago, looking just the same, though that somehow seemed impossible because she felt as if she had been changed deeply. The storm that had stolen her tent had left some debris on its hood. She stalled a long time, wiping the stuff away before she got into the cab.
Come after me.
She leaned forward to peer up through the windshield at the mountain trail, but it was empty. She gave a ragged sigh and tucked her hair behind her ears, starting the engine. She jerked hard on the wheel and turned her truck around. As she drove eastward again, she considered that the Navajo had no concept of hell.
They should, she decided. She was pretty sure she was heading into it right now. But she wasn’t going to burn for eternity.
She was going to be cold and empty for a very long time.
Chapter 15
This time Shadow brought her truck to a full stop at the intersection in Shiprock. Cars began piling up behind her and someone bleated his horn irritably. The sound scraped along her nerve endings after the sweet quiet of Kokopelli’s Canyon.
“Oh, shut up!” she snapped into the rearview mirror.
She would go straight to Jericho’s house, she decided. For once in her life she needed him—needed everybody—more than they needed her.
She turned hard and suddenly onto Route 666. The police subagency could wait, she thought, and so could the museum. She would go back to both places when she was strong, steady—when she was in control again. The police would probably still be reluctant to investigate what she and Mac had found anyway.
Oh, they would send a cop out to the canyon all right—and he would be one mighty unhappy camper. But he would battle back his inherent Navajo fear of chindis just as she had done, and he would go into the cave to find She Who Waits, the remains of five other unfortunate people, and a stash of pots and artifacts. He would report back to his supervisors and finally, eventually, some kind of surveillance would be set up to try to nab the thief. Maybe they would catch him, and maybe they wouldn’t. But in the meantime her heart felt as if it were bleeding, as if everything good inside her were ebbing more and more, the farther she drove from that canyon.
She certainly had a responsibility to tell them what she and Mac had found. And she would do it. Later. For the first time in her memory she felt no urgency to act expeditiously and responsibly, to tackle the problems of the world. She just wanted to be home.
She turned onto the side trail that led off Route 666 and wound up the side of Beautiful Mountain. Jericho’s house was halfway up the slope. She reached it, then simply sat in her truck, the engine idling, staring at the place.
Her brother’s carport and the small clearing in front of the house were clogged with vehicles. There was Uncle Ernie’s shocking purple Bronco and a rental car that undoubtedly belonged to Catherine’s father. Her own father’s old Dodge Ram was there, as well as Ellen Lonetree’s rust-ravaged Toyota. That raised Shadow’s brows. If not enemies any longer, then Catherine and Ellen certainly weren’t friends. Ellen had once had some pretty healthy grudges against Jericho’s wife—for that matter, she had been in love with Jericho herself. Cat’s arrival on the Res had forced Ellen into some painful self-discoveries, and Ellen was notoriously slow to relinquish such grudges.
Still, she and Catherine worked well together, with a certain professional distance and mutual respect. Ellen was the nurse at the Shiprock health clinic—she was also clan, which made her closer in some respects than immediate family. Suddenly Shadow understood. Cat must be having the baby now. She hadn’t gotten into Gallup or Albuquerque in time.
Guilt surged inside her that she hadn’t been here for such an emergency. Panic welled in her throat that something had gone wrong after all. She pushed fast out of the truck and rushed up the steps to the front door. She knocked once, got no immediate response, and barreled inside.
Six pairs of stunned eyes turned to her. For a long time she only stood there, breathing hard, looking around at them.
“The wind has returned her to us,” Uncle Ernie said mildly. “It is as I told you.”
Jericho finally closed his mouth. “Where have you been? And what happened to your hair?”
Shadow ran her fingers through it absently. It was loose, spilling down over her shoulders. Only then did she realize that Mac still had her hair band.
She wondered what he would do with it and her throat closed painfully.
“I’m okay. I just...I took a vacation,” she asserted.
“Catherine?” she asked. “The baby?”
“We’re fine, but what about you?” Catherine’s soft, quizzical voice came from the doorway of one of the two bedrooms Jericho had added on when they’d gotten married and had realized that Cat was pregnant. Shadow’s eyes flew to her.
Her sister-in-law stood cradling the infant in her arms. It—he, Shadow realized—was wrapped snugly in a blue receiving blanket. The room started moving oddly, in and out of focus.
The baby was fine, she realized. Catherine was fine. But Jericho’s jaw was clenched the way it got when he was suppressing his temper. Her mother stood behind the counter of the kitchenette, wiping her hands on a towel, and her eyes were too shiny. Her father and Uncle Ernie were trying to smoke a pipe near the fireplace—her father was grinning broadly but Ernie’s ancient, wrinkled face was bland and knowing. Catherine’s father looked from one face to another as if he were trying to decide what he should say or do now.
Ellen sank weakly into a rocking chair near the big bay window. “You’re alive. You’ve never done anything like this before.”
And then Shadow understood. They weren’t here because of Cat and the baby. They were here because of her. Ellen would never say so outright, but as usual, her heart was all over her face. There was amazement there, and consummate relief.
Shadow held her arms out to them and they rushed at her. She would be all right now. For the first time in her memory, she buried her face against the nearest neck and she cried.
Madeline Bedonie finally pulled away and began organizing everyone like a drill sergeant. “Catherine, give me that baby before he gets crushed. Jericho, get her a glass of water. Ernie, put that pipe down now. The smoke’s not good for the baby. Martin. Where’s Martin?” She shot a glance around the room and made a harrumphing sound when she realized that he was already digging in the freezer for food. After forty years of marriage, he had finally learned how to get one step ahead of her.
“Ellen,” she said more quietly, “get the dishes.”
Ellen shook her head. “I don’t think food will fix this.”
“Food fixes everything. Paddy? Where’s that Irishman?” She whipped around to find him behind her.
Catherine’s father took a wary step into the room. It was readily apparent that he wasn’t accustomed to having a woman push him around, though he had raised six daughters. “I guess I’ll be having that smoke for you, Ernie,” he muttered.
“You will not,” Madeline snapped. “You’ll be going out to the carport with him to bring in that big table.”
Shadow watched them all dazedly, then she rubbed a shaky hand over her eyes. “Stop.”
No one paid her any mind. Madeline had set them to marching.
“Stop it!” she shouted.
They all froze again to look at her, but her eyes were fast on her mother. Was she like that? She heard Mac’s voice again. Sergeant. She closed her eyes and swallowed carefully. It was the Navajo way. Their women were their matriarchs. But Mac wasn’t really Navajo and he wouldn’t understand that. He would just have thought that she was bossy and high-handed.
No wonder he had let her go.
“I don’t want food,” she said. “I want...I need a Blessing Way. I’ve been exposed to chindi bones and...and sadness.” She ignored her mother’s gasp. “And please, I need to see the baby.”
Catherine took him back from Madeline and laid him gently in Shadow’s arms. Shadow felt something tremble very deeply inside of her.
He was so small, so perfect, so alive. He opened his eyes briefly to peer up at her and they looked green—Catherine’s eyes. But his hair was a thin thatch of black—Jericho’s. His tiny fingers closed over the edge of the receiving blanket, and his little mouth puckered as if he were considering either crying or eating and couldn’t figure which would bring more satisfaction.
“Did you...” She finally looked up at Cat. “I guess you made it into Abuquerque on time.”
“Uh, not exactly.”
Ellen made a snorting sound. “More like the windmill,” she clarified.
Shadow’s jaw dropped. “The windmill? Lance’s windmill? Where he goes to get drunk?”
Catherine shrugged and gave a surreptitious look at the others. “They were driving me crazy,” she said in an undertone. “Jericho was watching me like he expected me to change color, Ernie was chanting, and my father jumped out of his skin every time I sneezed. So I took a walk down the mountain to get away from them all.”
“And got as far as the windmill before she realized she was in labor,” Ellen said. “By then she was too far gone to make her way back up. Isn’t it great what Anglo medical schools teach you?”
Catherine stiffened. “You can’t teach a woman what it feels like to be in labor.”
They were going to start again, Shadow realized. Ellen had gotten her nursing degree only so she could legally work the clinic. She was much more devoted to Native cures than Anglo methods of healing. It was another point over which she and Cat occasionally clashed—though for the most part they each conceded that there was as much a need for the other’s skills as for their own.
Shadow interjected quickly. “Good thing Lance wasn’t there, I guess.”
Ellen and Catherine looked at each other and the tension between them dissolved. “He was,” Cat said. “He took off real fast though when he realized what was happening.”
“He came to get me,” Ellen explained.
“I’ll never understand how he can drive in that condition,” Catherine muttered.
“Not much to hit out here,” Shadow guessed. She looked at Ellen. “So you delivered the baby?”
Ellen looked very self-righteous, but then she gave a small smile. “Fleabane and untying medicine. Works every time.”
Shadow looked curiously at Catherine. “Did it work?”
Catherine’s face took on a fresh look of amazement. “You know, it really did.”
Impossibly, tears burned at Shadow’s eyes again. For the life of her, she couldn’t control them anymore. They spilled over again. It wasn’t just that Ellen had saved this tiny, precious life or that Catherine possessed the magnanimity to admit it. It was the way that everything...went on. She had been gone a week and it felt like a lifetime, but everyone here was unchanged. Ellen and Cat were still squabbling, and everyone was still smiling the same smiles. They were the same, constant, these people who were all, in some measure or respect, her family.
Oh, Mac, you were so wrong. Life endures.
“What the holy hell is going on here?” Jericho demanded again.
Ellen and Catherine spoke in unison. “A man,” Cat said.
“It’s got to be,” Ellen agreed.
Jericho looked at them dumbly. “A man did this to her? Shadow? But she’s not—she doesn’t—”
He broke off in a grunt when his mother punched a finger into his ribs. “She’s a woman,” Madeline said. “And for as long as I can remember, there’s been a connection. Now don’t all you men have somewhere to go?”
When they left, she looked at her daughter again. “So what are you going to do about it?” she asked bluntly.
* * *
Mac slammed an empty beer bottle hard enough on the bar to make it shatter. If he was startled, then his expression didn’t show it.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“It is no problem, señor.” The bartender, a small, dark Mexican named Juan, came to pick up the pieces. But he kept one eye on his solitary customer as he worked.
“Another,” Mac said.
“Now that is a problem.”
Mac’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “I’m not drunk.”
No, he wasn’t. But he should be. He had come here the previous night after arriving in town, looking as if he had driven for days without stopping. He had returned early this morning, and since then he had put away one beer after another with steady, unwavering intent. Mac had a fire burning inside him that would take more beer to put out than there was on a
ll of the Baja peninsula.
The bartender lifted one bony shoulder in a shrug. “There is no more Corona,” he explained. “This is not a big tourist spot. We do not stock so much.”
“A Sol then.”
“That I have.”
Juan popped the cap and placed the bottle neatly in front of him, but Mac didn’t touch it. He went to the edge of the veranda and stood among the palms and the eucalyptus to stare out at the rain.
He’d wanted civilization, Mac thought. He’d told himself he just needed a change. Something so radically different from Kokopelli’s Canyon that thoughts of that place would be an absurd intrusion. He’d thought he’d tried. He wore jeans instead of shorts. The rough denim scratched his legs, irritating skin that had spent several long months uncovered. He’d stopped in San Diego and had his hair cut off. His neck felt bare and exposed. But in the end, he had only come here, to San Jose del Cabo, Mexico. An isolated scrap of a town, a spattering of white buildings in the hills overlooking the Pacific, a few forlorn boats bobbing at the shore, as far south on the Baja peninsula as he’d been able to drive. Beyond the palms, the narrow streets looked empty now—except, incongruously, for a cow that trudged by as if it had nowhere in particular to go. It probably didn’t, Mac thought. It was noon, time for a siesta, and the rain drummed down.
In the end he had done what he had always done, he realized. He had gravitated to a place where he’d be alone. And loneliness ached inside him like some kind of spreading cancer.
Guadalajara was as close as a ferry ride from nearby San Lucas. There would be tourists there, sunshine and browning bodies beside a pool. Mac went back to the bar instead and drank half the Sol in one long swallow.
“Do you stock tequila in this place?” he snarled.
Juan nodded cautiously. He poured the tequila and found him a sliver of lime. “It is a woman, no? It is always a woman.”
Mac made an ugly, snorting sound. “There’s not another woman in the world like this one.”
“I have heard that said many times before, over this very same bar.”
“Yeah?” Mac tossed back the tequila. He hadn’t intended to talk and found himself doing it anyway. “You’ve heard that she controls everything in her world with an iron fist? That she makes you want to choke her and instead you find yourself loving her?” He heard his own words and they shook him. They shook him badly. But he kept on.