MEANT TO BE MARRIED

by Ruth Wind

  Fragments of memory assailed her – Eli on his horse, looking like some romantic figure from history, straight and tall and handsome, his hair very long in those days, falling down his back in sleek, heavy blackness. Eli bending over her, the first time he kissed her, shyly, not entirely sure of his reception. Eli's hands, those elegant, long-fingered brown hands that were so strong, and so gentle and so clever.

  Oh, God.

  She pressed her forehead harder into the wall, as if the pressure would halt the memories. Her reaction was ridiculous – it had been a long, long time. Everyone had some tragic tale of first love, and grown-ups didn't allow such memories to poison their entire lives.

  How could she have forgotten she would have to deal with Elias?

  Before each of her scattered visits to Taos in the past, she had carefully prepared herself for the possibility. Each time, she'd been braced, had even rehearsed imaginary conversations in which they were both distantly friendly and very calm and perhaps secretly admiring. She had created scenarios in which she turned up an aisle at the grocery store, and ran into him and his wife, with maybe a couple of children in tow. She had imagined seeing him at a gas station with a child on his hip. She had imagined—

  Oh, many, many situations. Dozens, over the years.

  Oddly, this time, she had forgotten to mentally prepare herself. She'd been very tired the past few months, weary of city life, of the hustle and bustle of the modeling world, sick of the travel she'd once enjoyed. The only thing she'd thought about was quiet. Silence. The blue of the mountains against the blue of the sky. The peace of finally healing the rift with her parents, something she should have done long ago.

  A ragged man with a filthy backpack walked along the edge of the road ahead of her, and Sarah straightened. Heading down the winding road that led to her parents' modest home, she forced herself to breathe normally. In. Out.

  This was no casual overnight visit, and over the next few weeks Sarah could count on running into anyone she'd ever known. The town was too small to avoid it. But it was unnerving to see Elias just as she'd made up her mind to make peace with her dying father. Feathery red tails of anger brushed against her need to forgive, tails attached to deeply buried, very painful memories that she really had no interest in facing. They'd been nicely buried for more than a decade, and there they could stay.

  She could face her father, and make peace with him. She would not dig up anything else. Period.

  But that, as the old saying went, was easier said than done. As she walked, memories spilled out of their hidden place, flashing in kaleidoscopic tumbles, like the revolving red light on a police car.

  Elias de Jesus Salimento Santiago. The syllables spilled unbidden through her mind, lyrical and lilting. E-li-ass d'Haysus Sa-li-men-to San-ti-ah-go. The sound was still beautiful, like a song or poem. She'd written the words on a hundred pieces of paper, and along the margins of her spiral notebook in history class, and on a scratch pad while she baby-sat late at night and talked to him on the phone.

  Elias.

  Resolutely, Sarah lifted her chin. With the rigid self-control that had seen her rise to the top in one of the most difficult, competitive careers going, she shoved everything about that all-too-brief period away from her mind.

  Several years ago, she'd discovered that walking banished her demons with a firmness that still surprised her. And it did not fail her now. Simply putting one foot in front of the other, walking around the curving road, past a field lush and green with recent rain, gave her a measure of sanity. Even as she remembered her unfinished business with Eli Santiago.

  After a few blocks, her heart had stopped pounding and her breath came naturally, and she found herself realizing it had been ten years – twelve. He probably had a passle of children and an adoring wife by now. High school, someone had quipped, was an event to be survived. It had no bearing on the rest of a person's life.

  First love was always wild, always intense, always more full of color than other relationships. That did not mean it was particularly important later on.

  Feeling better, Sarah lifted her head and rounded the corner to her parents' house. Her mother was in the yard, trimming marigolds. Her formerly golden hair had faded, and there were new lines in her beautiful face. Still, Sarah felt something warm and rich move in her at the sight of Mabel gardening late in the day as she'd always done. "How are the roses this year?" Sarah said mischievously, opening the gate.

  Mabel looked up and gave a little cry. "Sarah!"

  Sarah wrapped her in a heartfelt hug, smelling the familiar scent of lavender on her neck. "I'm so glad to see you, Mom."

  "Thanks for coming, baby." Her mother squeezed her hand.

  Sarah nodded. "How's Dad?"

  A short hesitation. "He's all right. He was a little agitated earlier, so he had to take a sedative. He made me promise to bring you in to see him when you got here, but I doubt we'll be able to wake him up."

  "All right."

  "We can look in on him, then have supper out in the backyard, where we won't disturb him." She squeezed Sarah's hand and smiled. "Then we can have a nice visit."

  A quick, odd pinch touched Sarah's heart. She let her mother lead her inside the house, with the evocative smells from childhood in the air, and the familiar red corduroy couch and her father's easy chair with its footstool.

  In his room her father, Garth, lay sound asleep. His color was too red, and she could hear the labored sound of his breathing – a complication of the asthma he'd had all his life. A big black cat slept on his feet.

  It was strangely unnerving to see her bluff, burly father so still and quiet. A stubborn man who had lived with one constraint all his life, he had refused to give up his ranching-family habits of red meat, eggs, butter and bread, and he'd been fifty or sixty pounds overweight for most of his life. Now his stoutness was reduced by half. "He isn't still smoking, is he?" she whispered.

  Mabel snorted softly. "Only because he can't get to them."

  Sarah smiled in understanding, feeling suddenly lighter. Her stubborn father was still himself.

  "I'll be out back," her mother said. "Come out when you're ready."

  Somehow, Sarah found herself tiptoeing into the room to sit on a straight-backed chair her mother had left near the bed. The room held a scent of Old Spice and something that made her think of Saturday-morning chores in childhood.

  Her father shifted, rubbing his nose in a familiar way, but did not wake, and Sarah found herself smiling gently. She was weary of everything in her life, but she was also weary of the long war she had waged with this hard-nosed policeman. They were too much alike in some ways, and too different in others, but she loved him. She had missed his acerbic humor, even his blustering.

  It was time to end the war. Impulsively, she stood and kissed his brow, very, very lightly.

  He stirred, and his hand – that big, strong, dark hand – came up and gripped hers. "Sarah."

  "Oh, Dad, go back to sleep. I'm sorry to wake you."

  "I'm sorry about the baby, sweetie, I was only doing what I thought was best."

  A deep sense of dread twisted in her gut. "Go to sleep, Dad."

  But he was already drifting off, his breathing labored. His grip on her hand eased. Sarah stepped back, and unconsciously wiped her hand against the leg of her shorts, staring at him, an involuntary rush of images rising against her inner eye, flashing red against a black night.

  Swallowing, she stiffly moved into the backyard, where her mother was humming as she set out plates on a wooden table covered with a bright blue umbrella. Chamiso in full yellow bloom clustered against the fence, along with clumps of cosmos. Breathless, Sarah stared at the plants, trying to shove away the emotions her father's words had kindled.

  "It's almost ready," her mother said. "Come sit down."

  "Mom."

  Something in her voice must have told Mabel something was wrong, and she looked up warily.

  "Dad woke up, for just a minute
. He said something about the baby." She forced herself to take a long breath, then blew it out. "Please tell him that is not a subject I want to discuss, okay? I can't."

  An odd expression crossed the older woman's face, but then she put down the fork she was holding. "He wanders a little when he takes some of these pills. You'll get used to it."

  For a moment more, Sarah paused, wondering if she was strong enough to bear even the small step of healing her war with her father. Because she saw suddenly that everything was interconnected – her father and the baby and Elias and all the tangled mess of betrayals.

  Her mother reached out, and Sarah noticed that there were veins showing under the thin flesh, and a couple of knuckles were gnarled with the beginnings of arthritis.

  "Please, Sarah," she said. "Please, let's just sit down and eat."

  And for one blazing moment Sarah thought that this had always been her mother's way, to avoid whatever was most painful, never confront it.

  But the sight of that aging hand would not let her be cruel. She folded the fingers gently into her own palm and managed a smile. "Good idea."

  She would deal with her father and her mother, period. They would simply have to respect her limits. She would not discuss the past, or allow it to be brought to her attention. They would go forward from this moment, as if nothing had ever happened.

  It was the only possible way to cope with it.

  * * *

  Seeing Sarah roused a restlessness in Eli that he found difficult to shake. He stopped for some supper before heading back to the ranch, and ordered a hamburger and home fries. Leaving the meal half-finished, he drove around aimlessly. Up and down the twisting, narrow lanes, where his ancestors had walked for nearly three hundred years, around the ribbon of road that circled the outskirts of town and back into Ranchos de Taos, the site of a church made famous in hundreds of paintings.

  His blood felt hot in his veins, hot with hatred and anger and vestiges of sorrow that lingered no matter how he tried to banish them. He could not go to the ranch with this much emotion still boiling in him. Someone would see, and when they learned Sarah had returned, they would remember his agitation tonight. He couldn't bear the speculation, the accusations, the sly proverbs that would prick him.

  So he drove and drove and drove, in the truck that he loved. He turned the radio off, and watched the storm roll in, dark and beautiful, over the endless fields of sage and chamiso, turning them a pale gray-green below the mountains circling the valley like a ring of soldiers in blue wool. Adobe walls captured the ghostly light of the incoming storm, and shone like the lost cities of gold that Coronado had once believed them to be.

  The land calmed him. It always had. He was as intimate with these views, this light, these hills, these fields as he was with his own body. And it was not just his own memory and knowledge, but that of his father and grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather before him, all those men who had lived here and walked here for generations.

  Even so, even with the calm, he found himself where he must have known he had to go, to wait for her. He parked beneath the thick arms of an ancient cottonwood tree not far from her parents' house. She would come by here on her way back down the hill, as she had when they were kids.

  Sarah. He didn't kid himself about being in love with her after all these years, but he was honest enough to admit there was unfinished business between them. That business stuck in his throat, hot and thick, in a way he'd thought he'd outgrown.

  Through the windshield he watched lightning twig over the horizon. Walking rain danced across the land to the west. Not long now till the storm broke over town. He welcomed it, welcomed the release of pressure he felt it would bring.

  He kept an eye on the rearview mirror as he waited, and the gesture brought back a tangle of memories – both bitter and sweet. This had been their meeting place after Sarah's father had forbidden their relationship. In those days, they'd both grown adept at lying. Sarah lied by telling her parents she had to baby-sit. Elias lied by omission, never explaining exactly what he was doing. His mother assumed he was with friends.

  Instead, they met secretly under this very cottonwood, and spent their evenings driving around, afraid to go any place where someone might know them. They often got out of the car and walked along the Rio Grande gorge, tossing rocks to the silver ribbon of water far, far below.

  Often they had made love.

  The memory burned a little and he moved his head, feeling stiffness in his neck.

  They'd been so very young, he thought now. So young, and passionate, and full of the melodrama of their situation, the children of families engaged in a mutual hatred that had begun more than a century ago, when a Santiago man raped a Greenwood woman and was hanged for the crime. Elias had heard the story told many ways, and over the generations it had taken on the mythical power of a legend.

  Eli glanced in the rearview mirror to the empty street. Sarah had known the story, too, of course. There was no one in town – no native anyway – who did not know it, or know that the families had been battling ever since in a feud of such virulent hatred that one was wise to leave any room if two members of the opposing families found themselves together.

  He shook his head. The feud was 150 years old. After the hanging of Manuel Santiago, it had led to the stabbing death of a Greenwood boy in the 1860s and the beating death of a Santiago in the second decade of the twentieth century. In the 1930s a minor war broke out that lasted nearly seven years, and took with it a half-dozen assorted Santiagos and Greenwoods, including one woman.

  In the years between there had been a host of lesser injuries, acts of vandalism, pranks and troubles.

  Including prison for Eli.

  He rubbed his bottom lip, wondering how things might have been different if the art teacher at the high school had called roll by last name instead of first name the day he and Sarah met.

  Even so many years later, he remembered the day with a strange clarity. He noticed her immediately, a pretty girl in a blue shirt that made her eyes and hair glow with some inward fire. He thought she looked like the sky, blue and gold and full of light. And when she smiled shyly in response to his flirtatious teasing, he'd been euphoric.

  It was only days before they'd found out their respective last names, and by then it was too late. The connection between them had gone quick and deep almost immediately, and neither was inclined to give any weight to the silly old story of the backward generations that had come before them.

  They had underestimated the hate. In spite of the soul-satisfying melodrama of the old story, neither of them had taken the old feud between their families seriously until it was way, way too late.

  The first fat raindrops began to splat down on the hood of his truck, loud in the quiet, and Elias looked up to see a flash of gold in the rearview mirror, just as the skies opened up and rain roared down in a thundering deluge.

  He turned around in the seat, and saw Sarah standing on the other side of the tree as if frozen, oblivious to the rain soaking her to the skin. With a quick gesture, he moved over and flung open the passenger door. "Get in!" he yelled over the torrent of sound.

  For a moment he thought she was going to refuse, but a bright flash of lightning blazed over the landscape, quickly followed by a clap of thunder that was all too close, and she bolted for cover.

  Dripping wet and out of breath, she ran to the door, and halted. "I'll ruin your seats!"

  "Get in, Sarah."

  With a shrug she jumped up onto the seat and slammed the door behind her, then wiped water off her face. "Thanks. It's wild out there," she said.

  Eli narrowed his eyes. She sounded so polite, so unruffled. "It is."

  Cocooned in the cab, with rain pounding all around them, they looked at each other face-to-face for the first time in over twelve years. Eli had heard bits of news about her over the years; he'd seen some of her photographs, and knew she traveled in exalted circles. He had a picture in his head of what women i
n New York must look like, and he'd mentally cut and pasted until he had a transformed picture of Sarah he could live with: a leather-miniskirted woman with her hair cut in some severe style.

  It had been a defensive picture he'd created. If he had allowed himself to imagine her the way she always had been, they would have had to lock him up a long time before, driven insane with loss and grief. But then, their relationship might have only been first love, made more dramatic by the old tragic story.

  It had also been real. True love, he'd thought then. These days, he wondered bitterly if such a thing existed at all.

  Whatever. As he looked at her now, a pain squeezed his chest. She looked like his Sarah, only grown up – and adulthood had done good things to her. Her mouth was firmer and there was strength in her shoulders, knowledge in her eyes. Her body, almost boyishly thin in those days, had ripened to a delectable fullness at breast and hip. Funny. He would never have guessed she'd ever have much of a chest, but the cloth of her sodden T-shirt clung to the ripe slopes with uncomfortable accuracy. Frowning, he looked away.

  She was the first to break the silence. "Success suits you, Eli."

  A thread of anger wound through him. "Is that what we're going to do here, be polite?"

  The old Sarah would have looked hurt over that. The woman who had taken her place regarded him steadily. "That would be my preference."

  With an edge of bitterness, he said, "Well, all right. How are you, Sarah?"

  If he had not been staring so hard at her, he would have missed the flicker of light in her eyes as her gaze fluttered over his mouth. He remembered suddenly how much she had liked kissing – kissing and kissing until he was mad with need for her.

  "I'm very well, thank you," she said, her calm voice an almost violent contrast to the expression in her eyes. "You?"

  "The same."

  This time he let the silence stretch, wondering how deep the shell of civility went. As if he made her uncomfortable, she shifted to look out the window, but Eli didn't stop looking at her, at that smooth profile, dewed with remnants of rain, the full lips that had given and taken so much pleasure, the tendrils of hair on her shoulders. He drank in the details with a surprising thirst, and discovered an alarming fact. The spell she had always cast over him had not mellowed with age.