Finding Casey: A Novel

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  “I don’t see a problem,” Elena said.

  “Bueno. Then may I suggest you consider Cynthia Madison for my replacement? We’ve served on the school board together for the last two years.”

  “May I have an official nomination?” Dr. Adame said.

  “Of course,” Joseph said, calling for a second. Then he asked for objections, and when none were forthcoming, the matter was voted on, unanimously passed, and so noted in the minutes. The remainder of the meeting went well, with a few items shelved for the January meeting. After it ended, only an hour behind schedule, Joseph lingered behind to speak with Elena Gonzales. “Elena,” he said. “Do you have a moment?”

  “Of course,” she said. “What’s on your mind, Joseph?”

  “Do you remember that Pojoaque child-abuse case last September? The verdict must have come when I was out of town visiting my parents.”

  “Oh, yes. The boyfriend went to prison.”

  “Good. I was wondering, did the little girl recover from her injuries?”

  Elena sighed. “Well, in a way. She recovered, but there was some brain damage. Those shaken-baby cases are tragic.”

  “Where did the child end up? In the foster system? Institutionalized?”

  “She spent some time in Presbyterian hospital. The maternal grandmother was awarded custody.”

  “And the biological mother?”

  Elena sighed. “In and out of rehab. She was ordered to submit to mandatory weekly drug tests, and four hundred hours of community service.”

  “Whew, that’s a lot of hours.”

  “Yes, Judge Eloy took a special interest in this case. You’re aware of his daughter’s drug problem?”

  “Who isn’t?” A judge’s life was public, and Eloy’s own daughter had been arrested too many times to count. Despite all manner of help, the situation seemed hopeless. “It’s very sad.”

  “The child’s in a good environment and the mother, who knows? Maybe she’ll accept help eventually.”

  “Outreach might be one way. Unfortunately, how far the arm goes depends on budgets.”

  “Yes, I agree. If I hear anything else about the case, I’ll let you know.”

  “Much appreciated,” Joseph said. That case had haunted him because the scenario—runaway kid, pregnant at fourteen—could have been Juniper’s had Glory not taken her in. “I’ll see you after the holidays. Merry Christmas to you and your family, Elena.”

  “To yours as well. Oh, by the way. I’d like to schedule an appointment with you to meet Ardith Clemmons. She’s a psychologist at Presbyterian, looking to do some volunteer work.”

  “Sounds great,” Joseph said. “Next week?”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  First Joseph headed to the Candela office, where a stack of paperwork awaited him. Jamie Reed, the beating heart of Candela, was on the phone. She found openings for women where there were none and knew exactly which attorney or judge would answer the phone in the middle of the night. Joseph sat in one of the chairs recently donated from a business in town. They could never have afforded them otherwise. Money was always tight, but this year so much more so. He was grateful to live in a community that invested in the women they helped, but he worried that if the recession continued, where would the money come from?

  While he waited, he looked at the print hanging on the wall, a local artist’s watercolor rendering of a bird’s nest with three blue robin’s eggs inside. Artists took whatever opportunity they could to show their work in a town of upscale galleries. The bird was plentiful in Santa Fe, and noted for building insubstantial nests. Every year the Wildlife Center in Española took in all manner of injured birds. He wondered what percentage were robins.

  He listened to the sound of children playing in the dayroom, which was partitioned off from the sleeping cots during the day. In another room, a local therapist offered massage and physical therapy. Snippets of conversations among staff members came and went and still Jamie was on the phone. Someone turned a radio to the Spanish station and not long after, someone else turned it back to classical. Out front a driver unloaded boxes from a truck that Joseph hoped were filled with donated coats and jackets.

  The radio had been playing Christmas carols for a month already, and by next week the shelter would be full, because while holidays brought out the very best in most people, they brought out the worst in others. This particular building had once been an independent nursery selling sacks of fertilizer, gardening equipment, and trees. The move to a bigger location was a bonus for Candela, but sometimes he swore he could feel the ghosts of gardeners and a faint whiff of fertilizer in the air. He thought of Dolores messing up Thanksgiving dinner and smiled. Why did she stick around? What kind of unfinished business caused a soul to linger and pull pranks?

  Ah, well. He picked up a pile of invoices that needed to be reviewed, initialed, and submitted to the board before payment. Protocol. That was what distanced him from helping, and the job offer was supposed to be the remedy for that. This morning when he left for Candela, he had fully intended to accept the position offered to him, but then, as the meeting went on, his mind wandered, impatient to get back home to his family. It was odd, but a strange dread crept into his thoughts, as if in taking this job he would cut himself off from another opportunity that hadn’t come along yet. Was it simply a matter of worrying about the baby coming? Glory had child care lined up for when her maternity leave ended. His mother was impatiently waiting to be asked to move up to Santa Fe to help. I have been waiting to be an abuela for many years, she told him in Spanish, as if Glory didn’t get how Latino families operated. What would Dolores make of a baby crying? Maybe that would finally send her on her way. When he worked in the Albuquerque lab, hunches and subconscious nudges had been tools he’d used on a daily basis. They were no match for scientific proof, but often they pointed the way. Such hunches had rarely led him astray.

  Where was this coming from?

  A vivid memory came to mind of their first year in Santa Fe. The house was undergoing serious renovations, getting new windows, a gas line, and of course the tile setters blowing grit everywhere. Juniper was sleeping in her room, but he and Glory were camped out in the guesthouse until the master bathroom was finished. She was tired of washing dishes in the bathtub and wanted the workers out of the house. To make Glory’s birthday special, he’d driven to “the Farm,” that hippie enterprise outside Española, to purchase a prizewinning hen. In fact, the Farm was in the next town from the shaken-baby case he and Elena had spoken of earlier.

  Nearby, on the San Juan Pueblo, the Tewa had been performing the Eagle dance the day he visited, so like everyone else he’d stopped to watch. The San Juan Pueblo was commencing restoration of their plaza, and officially reverting to their original tribal name, the Okhay Owingeh. Butterfly Garcia and Andy Garcia were on drum; Curt Garcia and Dee Garcia were dancing. Tourists were lined up on the dirt road and the day was warm and perfect, other than there was nowhere to park a car unless, like Joseph, you had a handicapped parking sticker, which, though medically necessary, shamed him. As the dance commenced, a dark-haired woman in her forties had come running into the visitors’ center, crying. I want to file a formal complaint against Seth White Buffalo, she said, and Joseph thought, Now there’s a phony-baloney name. Tribal police had given the woman a glass of water and patiently sat with her while she told them how this Seth had taken all her money for some sweat-lodge weekend, and when she changed her mind, he wouldn’t give it back. The tribal police told her, Sorry, ma’am, but we got no Seth White Buffalo enrolled here. Call the state police. Joseph had offered to call them for her. She had no apparent injuries other than monetary ones, and that was pretty much the extent of the help he could offer. He handed her a card for the women’s shelter, but she didn’t seem interested, and he needed to get the hen and back home in time to ice Glory’s birthday cake. He wondered what brought this to mind, reviewing his day thus far and finding nothing.

  Glor
y’s dismay at having to leave her hens behind in California was apparent. Even though her former foster son, Gary Smith, was taking good care of them, he could tell she missed the daily interaction. The Farm claimed to breed “organically nurtured, hormone-free Wyandottes, the happiest chickens in the state.” All Joseph knew was that they were a pretty breed, with lacy patterns to their plumage, and they were said to be good layers. In addition to the hens, and bilking women out of their savings, the Farm collected heirloom seeds for the national repository, something Joseph’s father did with his chiles. They ran “Weekend Retreats for Spiritual Seekers,” whatever that meant, and he guessed it was expensive. Their website was big on the Creator but fuzzy on particulars, with excerpts from the Bhagavad-Gita and the Bible side-by-side Native American quotes attributed to the Cherokee. Why did they always default to Cherokee? he wondered, Cherokee belief systems being so much more complicated than they knew, that it only made them look fake. Throw in the Buddha, haiku, and a howling coyote soundtrack, and that added up to New Age BS to the nth degree, but if someone wanted to pay for that, it was their business. Their policy on “freedom from government control” sounded like tax evasion to Joseph, but he’d be the first to admit that he had a suspicious mind that way. They worked the land, grew prizewinning vegetables, and raised fancy chickens, and provided jobs. What was wrong with that was exactly nothing. Their credo, “We Are All Family,” struck Joseph as if some aging hippies, hangers-on after the last of the communes had closed their tent flaps, were in charge.

  The drive from the Pueblo to the Farm couldn’t have been more pleasant that late May day. The lilacs were in bloom, the trees all greened out, and birdsong was everywhere. Since the mid-1960s, the entire area from Dixon to Taos had been home to alternative lifestyles, including Arroyo Hondo’s New Buffalo Commune. Long since abandoned, it earned a spot in New Mexico’s unorthodox history not so much because it had been considered the mecca for the hippie movement, but because it had been featured in the film Easy Rider.

  Yet what was jarring to see was so many for-sale signs along the way. Overgrown orchards, riverfront property, vacation homes in default; there was not enough employment to keep things going. Even Embudo Station’s restaurant had closed, effectively canceling the opportunity for Joseph to enjoy smoked trout unless he learned to do it himself. Most New Mexico farming ventures barely broke even, and communes probably seemed like a great idea until you lived in one. One good blizzard and the back-to-the-land entrepreneurs usually hightailed it for Phoenix or L.A. Tourists bought only so many handmade beeswax candles and bars of soap featuring sprigs of lavender. Peppered all over the state were privately owned retreats promising a lifetime of spirituality packed into a weekend, and who could blame the Farm for trying to cash in on that? He wondered what their angle was. Mandala creations, and for a hefty sum a person could go away with a small bag of colored sand? River-rafting trips, or starlight ceremonies? Public sweat lodges, which, aside from pissing off Indians who considered the ritual part of their religion, could be downright dangerous?

  Then, as he neared the Farm’s entrance, he saw they’d opened a café. The chalkboard special that day was calabacitas, one of his favorite dishes: yellow crookneck and zucchini squash. He had just begun working on his cookbook, so this was educational and, if he ever published the book, he supposed he could claim a tax deduction, though that was pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

  Mag’s Pie Town bore more than a resemblance to the original Pie Town in Catron County, some two hundred miles south. The building had the same wooden facade, only a magpie instead of a thunderbird decorated its sign. Grandmother Penny had always said the magpie was an ally, good to have as a companion because of its ability to mimic other birds. But the magpie was also a tricky individual, a thief, like Raven, attracted to glittering things and fond of pulling pranks on humans. They also never seemed to be around when you wanted to see one. Some folks considered their feathers to be holy, but all that added up to a mishmash of stories to Joseph, who tried to see every bird as living its life and thus to be respected. He drove slowly into the Farm proper because near the Pueblo there were so many children and dogs. He saw a three-year-old girl playing with a brown dog that had a curly tail and swollen teats, which meant puppies nearby. The little girl waved as he drove by, but ran in the other direction. The dog followed his car, barking.

  He thought a cup of coffee would hit the spot, and rest for his aching back was always in order. Come to think of it, that was the very week that he’d begun using a four-pronged cane to get around, and he was grateful to have had it with him, because the Farm was on a slight decline toward the river, and those surfaces were the hardest for him to negotiate. With the cane, he could walk nearly a mile; without it, he passed for normal. Glory and Juniper were pro-cane from the start but for the longest time, he remained stubbornly against it. Yet it seemed as if every month he was unable to do one more thing he loved, such as twirling his new wife in his arms to dance music in the Plaza, or reaching for a book on the top shelf of his library. Walking in general took up much of his energy, but he refused to stop daily dog outings or the photo sessions with Juniper. Oh, her shots of the cottonwoods were stunning. She’d developed quite an aesthetic. Then one morning he and Glory had meandered along Canyon Road and stopped at the Teahouse for breakfast. He got up the steps into the café just fine, but he could not get down them without leaning on both Glory and a Texan airplane pilot who saw his predicament and offered his arm. Aieee, it was so emasculating he wanted to cry remembering it, but Glory said, Are you going to let three chunks of concrete keep you from enjoying your life? Right then he knew he had to accept the cane or turn into a cranky old man.

  He tried not to think about what concessions old age would bring. Looking at his beloved mother-in-law broke his heart. They had in common the anger at having to accept pain medication, but, he reminded himself, they also had each other, and a family accepted whatever challenges came its way. Now she had this lupus, an insidious disease, and none of the medicines improved her situation. Just looking at her he could tell she was not getting better. In fact, he wondered what next year would bring, but he’d kept his concerns from Glory.

  He’d watched his wife linger over photos in Backyard Poultry magazine, her brow furrowing as she planned her dream flock and ways to budget for it. He’d tried to convince her that money wasn’t as tight as when she lived alone, but Glory insisted on working part-time at the feed store, putting her checks into the household account. Dios mio, she only owned four pair of shoes, which included her flip-flops, tennis shoes, and hiking boots. When she spent money it was on Juniper, who went through blue jeans like a lumberjack eating pancakes. For herself, Glory wore jeans and T-shirts in the summer or jeans and Pendleton turtlenecks in the winter, a dress or skirt only when she had to attend a fund-raiser with him. His father adored Joseph’s new wife, but the day he met her he’d taken Joseph aside and warned him in Spanish, “Be extra generous with her, because she will always put her needs second. You can take the señorita off the farm, but you can never take the farm out of the señorita.”

  It was advice Joseph had taken to heart. It wasn’t every day a wife had a birthday, and if the wife loved hens, then the husband found the perfect hen, even if the journey to fetch it jarred his vertebrae.

  To the left of the café building he remembered a spinning windmill, its gray metal blades turning atop a red tower called a nacelle. Beyond the windmill were planted fields, one pasture lying fallow, and two hoop greenhouses. The Farm was on choice acreage. There was a two-story adobe house, a scattering of yurts, and a barn in addition to the café. He parked in front of the café, next to a Jeep that had seen better days, a windowless panel truck, a newer Ford truck, and a dusty Subaru with bumper stickers all over it, including a faded FREE LEONARD PELTIER.

  Now that was an oldie but a goodie—probably add a thousand to the car’s worth. Even with a hundred thousand miles on it a Subaru cost you plenty. He’d be
en on the lookout for one to buy for Juniper, now that she’d learned to drive. He left his window down and didn’t bother locking the car. Two enormous cottonwood trees to his right clattered their leaves in the breeze. The porch of the café faced the mountains. The brown mutt followed Joseph to the doorway and then lay down across the threshold so that Joseph had to step over her.

  He pushed open the screen door and found himself in a sad little gift shop filled with the usual suspects: arty photographs of bees on flowers, snowcapped mountains, and startled wildlife. He admired the pieced quilts, preserves, and some rather utilitarian pottery. The floor creaked, and he wondered about the foundation. They’d managed to evoke Pie Town on what was clearly a tiny budget. Four tables were covered with red-and-white-checked oilcloth, and the ladder-back chairs had seen better days. A faint scent of lavender wafted through the window. Overhead a ceiling fan churned the air.

  There were glass sugar jars with the fingernail-sized metal flap that opened when tilted, with a sticker that said, EAT ALL THE SUGAR YOU WANT, DIABETES IS YOUR CHOICE. He smiled, remembering how his mother used to smack him in the head when he put too much sugar on his oatmeal. Glory accused him of having a sweet tooth, but he dared anyone to muster the willpower to refuse her freshly baked blackberry pie. Homemade fabric curtains blew at the corners of the open windows. They had red ribbon tiebacks—clearly handmade, so there had to be a woman or two in the mix at the commune. The screens let in a nice breeze. Whoever had built this café wanted it to appear welcoming. The absence of flies suggested tidy kitchen policies, and though he didn’t see a Health Department permit, he still wanted to eat there. He sat down at the table and waited.

  No one came into the café. He cleared his throat, said, “Hello,” and waited patiently. After a few minutes he called out in a loud voice, “Hello? I’d like to buy some lunch.”