Searching for Cate

by Marie Ferrarella

  He was such a handsome boy, she thought. He looked like his father. Tom Graywolf had turned out rotten to the core, but he had been a handsome devil, there was no denying that. Christian was twenty-nine years old now, but he was still her boy. And once, he had been her golden child.

  Until she had stolen his smile from him. His smile and his soul.

  Her face gave away none of her thoughts as she took another sip of coffee. Juanita smiled at the reflection instead of at her second born. “You’re up early this morning, Christian.”

  It was Monday morning and she’d risen early to have a little time with him before he returned to Bedford, California, which he and his brother now called home. But Christian’s bed was empty when she’d knocked and looked into the room. And she’d known where he had gone.

  “So are you,” Christian Graywolf pointed out.

  She sat up straight, like a young girl, he thought. People seeing them together mistook them for siblings, not mother and son. He was proud of her for taking care of herself. Proud of her for never giving up the way so many here did. She had always been the source of strength to him. She and Uncle Henry.

  “I have a flight to catch,” he reminded her.

  The flight had nothing to do with where she knew her son had been. For a moment longer, Juanita held her peace, even as her mother’s heart ached.

  “And I have a schoolhouse full of students to prepare for,” she said. Turning around now to face him, she nodded toward the old-fashioned stove. It was the same one that had occupied that space when she was growing up in this same house. “Coffee’s hot.”

  “And hard as usual,” he joked. Taking a cup, he filled it only halfway.

  At the other end of the small house, they heard Henry stirring, mumbling to himself as he obviously ran into something in the dark. The words were all in Navajo and hard for Christian to catch. He saw his mother smiling to herself as she listened.

  Henry Spotted Owl, his mother’s older brother, had come to live with them years ago, to take the place of the father he hardly remembered. And to help straighten out Lukas before his older brother was forever lost to them. Henry, an ex-boxer among other things, had done such a good job with Lukas, he’d decided to stay on and offer his own brand of rough-handed counseling to some of the other troubled teenagers on the reservation. He built a gym and gave them a way to work off their anger productively. In his late sixties and fifteen years’ his mother’s senior, the man gave no sign of letting up despite the emergency bypass surgery he’d received from Lukas some years back.

  Grit and determination against all odds ran in the family. Henry had pulled himself out of a self-destructive lifestyle that would have killed him before he reached forty. Lukas had become the first of their family not just to graduate high school and college, but to become a doctor. And Christian was the second.

  Christian’s mouth curved slightly. He and Lukas both owed a great deal to their mother, who had refused to follow a path of self-indulgence and self-pity, the way so many other of her contemporaries had. Just to put her sons through school, she’d worked two jobs without a word of complaint, behaving as if it was the norm.

  At fifty-three, Juanita Graywolf looked younger now than he remembered her looking while he was growing up. Back then, he thought of her as just his mother, who was also a schoolteacher. Now she was principal of the school where she’d once sat in the back row as a student. It was the reservation’s only school, taking children from kindergarten to twelfth grade. His mother had almost single-handedly brought up the standard of teaching there, so that now the school was held up as an example to other reservations.

  She was a remarkable woman, and he had grown up thinking that all women were that strong, that determined not to allow life to best them.

  His late Alma had shown him how wrong he was.

  Juanita suppressed a chuckle. “It sounds like your ride is grumbling,” she said as she nodded toward the rear of the small house.

  There had been just three rooms when Henry had come to live with them, a combination living room and kitchen and two small bedrooms. The first thing Henry had done was add on his own room. After that, he’d built on another room and expanded the living room, then added a porch. Henry liked to say that he left his mark wherever he went. Truer words were never spoken.

  Christian finished the remainder of the black pitch in his coffee cup and set it on the table. “Uncle Henry wouldn’t be Uncle Henry if he didn’t grumble.”

  Juanita looked at her son, her mother’s heart tugging hard. He looked so sad, so different from the boy he’d once been. Her brain told her to avoid the subject, to let it slide, because to raise it would serve no purpose, heal no wounds. The fact that Christian had gone there told her that the wound he bore was far from healed.

  Seasons had gone by. And it was time he let go of the past.

  Long past time.

  Juanita almost wished that Christian wouldn’t come home as frequently as he did. She dearly loved seeing him, loved seeing both her sons when they came to work at the clinic to tend to the sick and the forgotten. But whenever Christian came, he was also returning to the scene of his greatest heartache.

  She would rather never see him again than have him relive his pain, time and again.

  He needed to put it all behind him. And she couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. It wasn’t in her. She set down her cup again and looked into his eyes. “You went there, didn’t you?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” He met her gaze unwaveringly. Of her two sons, Christian was the more sensitive one. The one more like her.

  “Why should you?” Juanita challenged. She spoke quickly, before he could answer. Before he could defend actions that to her were undefendable. “Christian, every time you go, you come back with this look on your face, as if your heart has been torn out of your chest all over again. As if,” she emphasized, “what happened that day was your fault.”

  He looked at her sharply with blue eyes that proved their lineage had allowed an interloper. “It was my fault. I was her husband, Mother. I should have seen it coming. I should have known.”

  The words might be different, but the conversation was not new. They’d had it before. Many times in the past three years. It never got any better.

  “The blood of the shamans runs through my veins,” Juanita reminded him. “And I did not know, did not see.” She leaned forward at the table, a new urgency in her voice as she pleaded with him. “Alma was an unhappy girl all of her life, Christian. We all saw that. We all knew that. How could we—how could you—have known that she would do such an awful thing?” she demanded.

  Awful thing.

  Words that could have been used to describe so many events. Somehow, they didn’t seem nearly adequate enough to apply to what had happened. Because what had happened that morning was beyond awful. Beyond anything he could have ever imagined.

  Afterward, every night for a full year he’d wake up in a pool of sweat, shaking, visualizing what he hadn’t been there to see. Alma, their six-month baby girl in her arms, walking out onto the train tracks, the very same tracks that had run by the reservation ever since he could remember.

  The same tracks where they’d foolishly played as children.

  Except that morning she hadn’t been playing.

  They were staying with his mother and Uncle Henry for a few days. He’d brought Alma and the baby with him on a working holiday, brought them so that his mother could visit with the baby. Alma had bid him goodbye as he’d gone to the clinic to work with Lukas. Both he and his brother returned as often as they could manage, to give back to the community where so many of their friends had remained.

  That last trip, Alma had asked to come with him. He’d thought nothing of the request, except that perhaps she was finally finding a place for herself in the life they were carving out together. He was hopeful that she finally had put the baggage from her past into a closet and permanently closed the door on it. Because he loved her so
much and tried every day to make up for the childhood she’d endured. The shame she had suffered at her father’s hands.

  Alma had seemed happy enough to accompany them. Happy enough when he’d left that morning. He’d turned one last time to wave at her before climbing into the car. She was holding the baby in her arms. Picking up one of Dana’s tiny hands, she’d waved back.

  There’d been no hint of what was to come in her manner.

  Alma had waited until everyone was gone, his mother to the school, Uncle Henry to the gym he still ran, and then she’d taken their daughter and walked onto the train tracks. To wait for the nine-thirty train. Not to leave the reservation, but to leave life.

  A life she could no longer tolerate, according to the note she’d left in her wake. She hadn’t wanted her daughter to grow up without a mother, the way she had, so she had taken the baby with her.

  Lukas was the one who had broken the news to him. He remembered screaming, cursing and not much else. Except that there had been a burning sensation where his heart had been. For days afterward, he’d thought about following Alma, about making the same journey she had. Lukas kept him sedated and Lydia, his brother’s wife, kept vigil over him, making sure to keep him safe when the others weren’t around.

  His whole family loved him and rallied around him. Eventually, he saw the reason for continuing to live. His tribe needed him. His patients needed him and his family loved him. So he continued. That was all the life he’d once relished with such gusto had become to him, a continuance.

  He set up his practice and was affiliated with the same hospital that Lukas was. Blair Memorial in Bedford. He banked close to every cent he made, bringing it back with him whenever he came to the reservation. With the money, he purchased much needed equipment for the clinic that retained only nurses now that Doc Brown had died. He, his brother and the handful of doctors they’d gotten to volunteer their time came whenever they could.

  The clinic needed so much, even now. The closest hospital to the Arizona reservation was more than fifty miles away. That barely amounted to a trip for most people, but in an emergency, it was a considerable distance, especially since most of the vehicles on the reservation were old and unreliable.

  His dream was to someday have a hospital on the reservation. But until that time, he did what he could. And worked until he dropped so that he didn’t have to think, or remember.

  Except that some days, it couldn’t be helped.

  Moving her cup and saucer aside, Juanita reached across the table, her hand covering her son’s.

  “Christian, beating yourself up isn’t going to change anything. Isn’t going to bring her or Dana back. And it’s wrong. It’s as futile as Alma constantly reliving everything that happened to her. She couldn’t let go of the past and it killed her. Don’t let what happened kill you,” she pleaded softly. “Learn from it, my son. Learn from it and grow.”

  He knew his mother wasn’t giving the advice lightly. She’d been through a great deal herself. Married at seventeen to a man who betrayed her on a regular basis, she found herself suddenly widowed at thirty-two when Tom Graywolf had been killed in a barroom brawl. From somewhere, Juanita Graywolf had summoned an inner strength and made a life for herself and her two sons. Christian was well aware that he wouldn’t be where he was if it hadn’t been for her.

  But right now, he didn’t want advice, didn’t want to be told what he should or shouldn’t do. The pain was there whether he stood over Alma’s grave, attended one of Blair Memorial’s surgical salons, performed an operation. It was always there to press against his chest when he least expected it and steal away the very air he breathed.

  He’d married Alma, promising her that he would always be there for her, to protect her from everything. And he had failed. Failed to protect her from the inner demons that haunted her. And that failure was something he was going to have to carry around within him for the rest of his life.

  He offered his mother what passed for a smile. “I’ll do what I can, Mother.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Christian saw his uncle entering the room. Short, squat and built like a bull even at his age, Henry had a vivid three-inch scar across his right cheek that he liked to refer to as his badge of courage. He’d gotten it as a young man, and in all these years, it hadn’t faded. And neither had Henry.

  He helped himself to some of Juanita’s coffee, draining the cup in one long swig as if its bitterness was nothing. “You about ready, boy?” He put the cup down on the counter. “I’ve got miles to cover today, miles to cover.”

  “I’m all set, just let me get my bag.”

  Juanita rose from her chair, embracing Christian before he could leave the room. “Try to be happy, Christian,” she whispered.

  For her sake, he smiled and nodded, even though he knew that wasn’t possible. “I’ll try, Mother,” he repeated. There was no feeling behind the words.

  Chapter 3

  For a moment, Cate remained where she was, near the door. Looking at her mother.

  Ever since she could remember, she’d always believed in challenging herself, in seeing just how brave she could be. Her father had been her very first hero and she’d wanted to be just like him, an officer of the law who put herself out there, protecting people. Keeping them safe the way he made her feel safe.

  Being brave, testing that bravery, was the first step to getting there. It wasn’t something she even thought about in the beginning. She just did her job. Even now, she would draw a line in the sand and dare herself to cross it. When one of the other field agents had recently referred to her as being fearless, she’d taken it as the highest compliment.

  It was only privately that fear had gotten such a huge toehold in her life. Until the day he died, she had always thought of her father as being ten feet tall and bulletproof. Nothing could happen to him. Ever. When her mother would worry on those evenings that he was late coming home, she’d comfort her, saying it was just some loose end on the job that was keeping her father, nothing more. She never once thought that her father’s life might be in danger, that something could happen to him to permanently keep him from coming home.

  When it did, the very foundations of her world cracked. They became so badly damaged that they were never quite the same again.

  And neither was she.

  Like the snake that had entered paradise and ultimately brought about the loss of innocence for Adam and Eve, fear entered her life the day her father was killed, forever robbing her of her innocence.

  Losing Gabe had brought about another upheaval, another magnitude-nine earthquake that destroyed the foundations she’d so painstakingly repaired. Older, wiser, she was still that fifteen-year-old girl who had sobbed her heart out the July night her father was shot.

  She hadn’t bothered to attempt to repair her foundations a second time. She just patched the gaping cracks as best she could and went through the motions of living her life.

  Eventually, because she knew how badly her state affected her mother, she tried harder. Her enforced routine took, and while she didn’t exactly enjoy life, Cate found she could once again draw breath without pain. She rallied for her mother once again. Because the woman needed her.

  Receiving news that her mother had leukemia threatened to throw her down into the bowels of hell again. Secretly, Cate clung fiercely to the threadbare hope that her mother would survive, that this was some kind of trial she had to endure, but that she would ultimately emerge on the other end of this long, dark tunnel victorious. Cate refused to entertain the thought that her mother might not make it. That Julia Kowalski’s light would be extinguished and that the sweet-tempered woman would no longer be a presence in her life. She’d lost her father and her lover. The thought of possibly losing her mother as well was too heinous to contemplate, even for a second.

  And now, something besides death hovered between them. Something that threatened to destroy her world for a third time.

  Or maybe it was death—not of
a person, but of a belief. A belief upon which her very world had originally been founded. Each time she’d rebuilt, it was on that belief, that truth. That she was Catherine Kowalski, Big Ted and Julia’s daughter.

  Was that going to be taken away from her, too?

  Cate curled her fingers into her hands, as if to clutch what little power she had left. Silence blanketed the room. The only break was the sound of her mother’s labored breathing.

  Say it isn’t so, Mama. Tell me I’m your little girl, your own flesh and blood. Yours and Daddy’s.

  Cate remained by the door for a moment longer, trying to absorb everything she could about the woman. Holding off that first bite from the apple a moment longer.

  She was acutely aware, not for the first time, that her mother and she didn’t look at all alike. Julia Kowalski was a short woman with dark brown hair and lively hazel eyes. Until this illness had begun to eat away at her, her mother had been pleasantly plump and large boned, like her husband.

  Cate had always been thin, delicate, even as a little girl, despite all her attempts to bulk up and be just like her father. She was small boned and deeply frustrated by it when she was younger. To comfort her, her father told her she took after his only sister, who had died before she reached her twentieth birthday.

  “Josephine was a real beauty, just like you,” he’d tell her time and again.

  And she’d been content that she looked like his sister, Josephine. Even when he could produce no photographs to back up his claim, it never occurred to her to doubt him.