Gateway to the Moon_A Novel

by Mary Morris

  Miguel nods. He wants to say to her that he isn’t really sure how safe his car is. He doesn’t have his driver’s license. He doesn’t even have his learner’s permit. He wants to tell her that she doesn’t know him. She doesn’t know anything about him. She hasn’t asked if he has any experience with kids or if he has ever been convicted of a felony. Outside of his astronomy she hasn’t asked who he is or what his father does for a living. When his father isn’t too drunk to earn a living, that is. Or that his parents were barely married, then they split when his father’s drinking got worse. He doesn’t tell her that sign on the road heading to Lake Abiquiu (“Danger. Slow Down. Lake Ahead.”) was put up after his father drove his car, filled with his friends, all insanely drunk, right into the lake one crazy Saturday night and that somehow all of them managed to survive. Instead he replies, “I’ll be here at three on Monday.”

  “Wonderful,” Mrs. Rothstein exclaims as she walks him back toward the living room where the boys are watching Road Runner and Coyote duking it out. “Boys—” she claps her hands but the only one startled is Miguel. “This is your new babysitter. He’ll be here on Monday.” Davie gives him a little smile, but the older boy doesn’t even nod.

  Mrs. Rothstein accompanies Miguel to the driveway. “Well, I’m glad that worked out. The boys need someone to distract them. And I think a boy your age…” She hesitates unsure of what she wants to say. “I think it’s a good idea, don’t you?”

  Miguel nods as he gets into his car. “I’ll be here Monday.”

  Mrs. Rothstein shouts, “Drive carefully.” He’s hoping she’ll go inside, but she doesn’t. He is embarrassed by the hepped-up sound his motor makes as he starts the engine. He tries to ignore the darkening sky, but as he drives away, a clap of thunder sounds. Mrs. Rothstein grows smaller in his rearview mirror. Above the mountains the sky is pitch-black.

  He rounds the bends quickly, hoping to get ahead of the rain, but as he crosses the stone bridge, the skies open. Torrents pour down. There is another crash of thunder, much closer this time, as a lightning bolt splits the sky. Suddenly forked lightning shoots all around him. Miguel can see nothing in front of him. He knows these storms and he knows how they come quickly into the canyons, filling the dry riverbeds.

  As he reaches the first arroyo, Miguel is relieved to find that it’s still dry. He crosses it and speeds down the mud-slick road until he comes to the next one. He halts at the embankment. A river of brown water courses through it, but Miguel doesn’t think it’s that deep. And if he doesn’t cross it now, he might not make it home tonight. He guns it, but halfway across his wheels start to spin, and he realizes his mistake. The water is already too deep and the current is tugging him along. He tries to gun it again, but his tires are slipping in the mud. The road recedes beneath him.

  His car is being lifted, carried along as the water races through the canyon. It has come rushing down from the mountains, bringing a wall of mud. Now his car is shooting along as if he is on a water slide and there is nothing he can do to stop it. He sails along a trench of muck and mud. As his tires spin, he realizes that he was wrong about the storm as he often is about many things. It had been coming his way all along.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE WELL DRILLERS—1992

  From her doorway Rachel Rothstein watches as the boy drives off. There is something about him that touches her. She believes that his coming is a sign, the way she believes most things are, but a sign of what she does not know. As her eyes follow the dust in his wake, she is trying to decide if hiring him was a good decision or a bad one. Lately she’s been prone to bad decisions, moving to New Mexico being high on the list. She makes those mistakes because she lives with the illusion that life will be better if she changes something—if she buys a new sofa, if she loses weight or, at times, gains it, if the kids go to a different school, if they move to another state. And yet none of it ever seems to make a difference and certainly not for long.

  Behind her the children are quarreling. She should go inside and stop them, but she is transfixed by the road and the swirl of dust that the boy has left behind. Though she can no longer see or hear his car, she sees the dust and her eyes follows it until he turns the bend about a mile down the road. Overhead black clouds appear. They seem to have come from nowhere. It occurs to her that the boy might be driving right into the storm. She wonders if he will be all right. She doesn’t think he has four-wheel drive.

  Davie and Jeremy huddle on the couch in opposite corners, Davie sniffling, watching cartoons. She looks out across the arroyo and wonders if the boy, whose name she cannot recall, made it safely to the highway. She ponders getting into her SUV and driving out to see, but it would mean throwing the boys into the car and what if she got stuck out there, so in the end she decides that he must be all right. He’s from around here, isn’t he? But still. She knows how these storms can take you by surprise.

  Though they’ve only been living here for a few months, she is already familiar with how Colibri Canyon quickly turns to thick streams of mud. She has almost gotten stuck once or twice and is grateful that Nathan made them get four-wheel drive in both of their vehicles. Two Jeep Cherokees because he needs a car to go to the hospital and she has to shuttle the children back and forth. But now she wonders about the boy. What was his name—Manuel? How can you hire a boy to babysit your children and not remember his name?

  Perhaps she should have told him more. Full disclosure, that is what her father always said. Should she have told him that Davie is hyperactive and that she is beginning to suspect that Jeremy, her sweet firstborn, is in the process of becoming a bully? Should she have warned him that she has difficulty putting a meal on the table, that she herself rarely eats but tends to pick at her food, that her husband, a doctor of some esteem, doesn’t notice, and that despite her having hired a babysitter, it is unlikely she will get anything done. But if she tells this to the boy, then perhaps he will not come to work for her. And she desperately wants him to do so because, among other things, he is the only person who answered her ad.

  Across the way the well drillers are staring into the well. It is what they’ve been doing for the past two days. As they stare down, she stares at them. Sometimes they shout into the well and a voice from deep inside the earth shouts back. This seems primitive to Rachel. You’d think they’d have some system in place for this sort of thing. She recalls years ago when she was a student traveling in Italy, and a boy with a faulty heart fell into a deserted, dried-up well. No one had ever bothered to seal it and the boy tumbled to the bottom.

  For days they tried to dig him out. In the newspaper there were all kinds of images of the engineering problems the well presented and why they just can’t go down and get the boy. The boy’s mother spent days calling to him in the well, telling him that he will be rescued soon, that she loves him. Rachel shudders when she thinks about anyone being dropped down a well, let alone one of her children. The darkness, the wet, the cold. And you cannot get out. The moment you realize you are stuck. Of course the boy died before they could rescue him and in the end they closed up the well and left him forever. She has not thought about this boy in years, but now as she stares at the diggers, she thinks of him again.

  Suddenly there is forked lightning all around them and the skies open. The well drillers rush into their truck as the storm moves closer. Thunder seems to be right over their heads and with a huge clap her boys start screaming.

  * * *

  Rachel Rothstein is not a happy woman. And she has not been happy for some time, though this isn’t something she’s been able to articulate. Recently she read that people with meaningful lives are healthier than people who claim to be happy. She is neither but prefers to err on the side of meaning, happiness having eluded her thus far. Still, most people, including her husband, wouldn’t call Rachel unhappy. They call her scattered. A flake. A free spirit. A loose cannon. Restless. It is true that she can never get anything done—ever. Around her nothing is ever fini
shed.

  When she complains to Nathan that she can’t finish things, he has little patience. “Imagine,” he told her once, “if I paused to do the crossword puzzle instead of sewing my patient up.” She has to admit that he has a point, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Her life seems to be about incompletion. Half-made beds, unfinished projects. She makes meals in fits and starts. She’ll have the pasta ready before she starts the sauce. There are many nights when she forgets to serve the salad.

  The children’s quarrel goes on, as they tend to do. She should stop it. At times it seems as if they are engaged in one endless feud. She should go in and tell them to cut it out. Of course it is probably Jeremy punching Davie for some minor infraction. She should go in and shout that they are brothers. They need to learn to love each other. But at the moment she cannot bear to think of Jeremy’s bullying and Davie’s tears. And she can’t move. Her head is about to explode. She is obsessed with the voice coming from inside the well. She wants to rescue him. She wants to rescue somebody. That would give her life meaning, wouldn’t it? But the man in the well doesn’t need rescuing. In fact just as the black clouds are about to open he climbs out of the hole in the ground and into the safety of his truck.

  What began as a dull aching near the back of her reptilian brain is steadily inching forward. There is nothing she can do to stop it when one of these headaches is coming on. Soon it will engulf her entire brain. She should fix something for dinner, get the boys ready for bed. Instead she watches the storm clouds heading her way. As her headache comes on with its full force, the rains pour down. Rivulets of mud rush past, and Rachel Rothstein knows as surely as she knows anything that she is trapped.

  She has only herself to blame. It was she, not Nathan, who wanted to move to the Southwest. She wanted a simpler life. And Nathan complied as he often does. He found a job with the pediatric unit of Mercy Hospital and took the New Mexico boards, which, of course, he passed. It’s the way Nathan is. Things come easily to him. He slides from one to the next. He was only too happy to leave the rat race behind. And now here they are, and here she is. Two small boys who can’t get along and a studio out back that she has hardly used, except to play solitaire on her computer, and a husband who always has a patient whose demands are always going to be more urgent than whatever hers might be.

  Nathan is content saving the lives of children. He could be happy anywhere. He has a sense of purpose that Rachel knows she lacks. And he has a knack for looking on the bright side. He is always finding things to do. He likes to be busy. He has hobbies, interests. Once a year he volunteers for Doctors Without Borders. He goes to the most desolate places on Earth and saves lives. He weeps when mothers thank him. One brought him the family goat in gratitude. Once in the Sinai a tribe of bedouins set up an encampment and roasted a sheep to honor him for saving their chieftain’s son. Where Nathan sees hope and possibility, Rachel sees despair. Sometimes when she looks at people’s faces she imagines what they’ll look like when they are dead. To Rachel death and calamity are just outside the door. She blames this on her mother, who always threw history—her history—into her daughter’s face. Rachel envies her husband his sense of purpose. His ability to be content. Rachel thinks of herself as an amorphous creature like the blobfish. Something without cartilage or bone. Without a spine.

  She doesn’t want to be this way. She tries to have interests, but she has yet to find her sense of purpose. Her passion. The thing she believes she was put on the Earth to do. Because for better or worse Rachel thinks that people have their path and that path becomes their passion. She knows this is what Nathan would call touchy-feely. Various therapists have urged her to take medication, but she balks. She wants to feel whatever she is feeling—even if at times it means gloom and doom. And now she is here in the desert. She is surrounded by neighbors who wave when you drive by but won’t invite you over for tea.

  Across the way the well drillers are working again. They paused during the storm, but now they are back, standing beside the Lorca house in their hard hats and tool belts. Rachel and Nathan share the well with Julio Lorca, a famous Southwestern artist, and his girlfriend, who goes by the name of Cat, though Rachel has dubbed her Catastrophe because of the way she tears up and down the canyon road. Rachel has to be careful that the boys and Baxter never leave the yard. Lorca’s prints of Indian women weaving baskets sell for tens of thousands of dollars. His enormous adobe house has a huge stone wall around it. They don’t share the well with Lorca so much as have well privileges, and such privileges, as Nathan has made eminently clear, are delicate negotiations that can be broken in a heartbeat. As she stands in her doorway, Rachel Rothstein also knows that it cannot be a good sign if your excitement of the day is watching the well drillers return after a storm. The drill bit chews at the ground. The well has been turned off for two days, which has meant two days without bathing the children or flushing the toilet or rinsing the dishes without using cistern water or bottled water, and even then it isn’t enough. The high point of Rachel’s day—outside of hiring the Hispanic boy whom she hopes will run her kids ragged in the afternoons so that they’d tumble, exhausted, brows still sweaty, into their beds—is the fact that by six o’clock Lorca has promised that the well will be turned back on.

  The well drillers are pulling out the bit and reattaching it to their truck. They reseal the hole. They’re packing up and driving away. She’ll miss them, but now the boys can take baths and they can flush the toilet. She’ll wait for the housekeeper to come and do the dishes. She thinks about dinner. Heading into the kitchen Rachel opens the pantry. She’ll do mac and cheese for Jeremy and a hamburger for Davie with green beans on the side. It is rare that the boys eat the same meal. She’ll graze and she has no idea what time Nathan will be home. Will he have eaten?

  She calls his office but gets his voice mail, as she knows she will at this hour. She can’t call his emergency number and say, “Come home for macaroni.” Though she’s been known to page him for less. And it makes him angry. “Page me in an emergency,” he tells her, “not to let me know when the movie’s starting.”

  Rachel flicks on the TV in the kitchen so she can watch while she’s making dinner. The local news is on. There’s unrest on the Navajo reservation. Two people have been killed in protests surrounding the imprisonment of a former tribal council leader. And a court injunction has been filed by the Hopi Snake Society against Blaze Construction. The Hopi claim that Blaze Construction is disturbing the habitat of the rattlesnakes they use for ceremonial purposes. “Rattlesnakes,” Rachel mutters as if she can’t imagine such a thing.

  * * *

  The storm is over the way storms are around here, going as quickly as they come. The boys are staring at cartoons and Rachel thinks she’ll go out to her studio for a few moments before dinner. Maybe she can get something done. It has been days since she’s been in her studio. Weeks maybe. But perhaps now’s as good a time as any to begin again. Gingerly she makes her way along the slick patio stones that pave the way from the house to the adobe shed where she’s supposed to work. Inside it’s musty and dark. Rachel flicks on the light and, for a moment, feels as if she has stumbled upon a crime scene.

  The studio is littered with dismembered limbs—mainly hands. There are hands everywhere. Mannequins’ hands. Dolls’ hands. Hands from old sculptures. Plaster casts that she made of her own hands. Why all these hands? Nathan says it creeps him out. It used to be tiny heads. Well, actually one head, made over and over again. Her only subject. Her mother. In boxes she has dozens of these heads, all made of plaster, with different expressions, the permutations of her mother’s frowns, grimaces, looks of disapproval and scorn, of affection and heartache.

  She has captured her mother, sitting at her vanity table, looking at herself in a mirror, reading a book, walking into a crowded room. She has captured her as a young girl about to board a train for a place unknown. She has imagined her mother making love, giving birth. Expressions no child should
ever see on a mother’s face. These tiny sculptures resembled the shrunken head that her mother once brought back from a trip to Brazil, though it was, of course, a fake.

  When she was younger, Rachel tried to understand her mother’s dark story. It seemed as if somehow these heads would help her. Rachel knew what had happened to her grandparents during the war. But she couldn’t help wondering if her mother was the way she was because of the war or if she’d always been that way. Growing up Rachel didn’t know that her mother was a survivor. Rachel just knew that she had to do everything right. And that if she failed, she’d failed miserably. There was a moment, though she can’t remember when, that Rachel gave up trying.