“You’re shivering,” he said. “Let’s get back in the car.”
They did. “I usually give the noodles to my roommates and just drink the broth part,” she said. “You know, too many refined carbs and all. I avoid any food that’s white.”
“Really? Are you on a diet? You don’t look like you need one.”
“It’s just a healthier way to eat. You should read Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution. I’ll lend it to you. Listen,” Juniper said. “So next time you see me, say hi. I can’t drink beer with you, though.”
“Because of carbs?”
“I’m not old enough to drink alcohol yet. But I can drink coffee.”
“What about Jakob Dylan?”
She snorted. “Believe me, you wouldn’t be interrupting anything all that interesting unless you’re obsessed with writing the next timeless folk song.”
“Is that so?”
She was looking straight ahead, studying traffic, but she caught a peripheral glance when he turned to look at her. She saw how his eyes were the color of coffee, and his caterpillar eyebrows actually had a nice arch to them. Maybe he was cuter than she originally thought, but then he wasn’t walking around at the moment like a stork that had dislocated both knees—he was sitting in her car and they were talking about things they were both interested in. “Trust me. I’d way rather discuss coprolites than Eric Clapton’s amazing fingering on ‘Layla.’”
He chuckled.
She took her right hand from the wheel, waving it to try to deflect how badly that sentence came out—fingering? He must think I’m sex-obsessed. “I mean, you know, music is great and I do love classic rock. Who doesn’t? ‘Layla’ is awesome, but Eric Clapton stole George Harrison’s wife and then wrote a song about her, which is pretty awful, and really, I’d much rather hear about your classes at Yale. Who did you study with? Were there all kinds of brilliant visiting professors? Do they let you pick an area or do they make you study everything? How many anatomy classes did you take? I loved Anatomy and Physiology. I swear, after I took it, I thought about being a doctor for like ten minutes, but in the end I decided against it.”
“You get to choose a major coursework. Up to three cognates.”
She had no idea what that meant but she’d look it up later. “Sounds great.”
“I’ve never studied harder than I did there, let me tell you.” He paused a moment, then said, “It’s none of my business, but you’re way too good for that guy.”
“I am?”
He nodded, and she saw the way he was looking at her. For once it wasn’t about how she was too young to be in his class, it was something else entirely and it was making her feel a little faint. She rolled her window down an inch, grateful for the cold air. “Will you stop staring at my tattoo?” she asked.
He smiled. “You’re wearing a turtleneck. I didn’t know you had one until you mentioned it this morning. Where is it?”
She pulled the neckline of her turtleneck down for a brief flash. “It was a moment of madness. Now you need to forget about it,” she said. “That was great coffee. Just what I needed to perk me up.”
“Then the next time I see you at the Standard, I’ll buy you a cup.”
“And I’ll bring you some of my dad’s menudo so you don’t starve to death over Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, do you have any plans?”
“No.”
“You could come to Santa Fe. My dad cooks so much food you wouldn’t believe it. Really, think about it, okay?”
“Sure,” he said, but she could tell he didn’t mean it.
As soon as they entered Española there were all these old-timey shop fronts on either side of the road. “Look at this place,” Juniper said. “It’s as if the town stopped in 1952. I bet if we walked into that shop”—she pointed at a Western-wear shop with a sign in the window advertising Carhartts—“there’d be cowboys in there playing checkers, dusty old miners weighing their gold, and dance-hall girls trying to get them to buy them a drink.”
Chico laughed. “Visual anthropology is becoming a popular field. Does your mind always work that way?”
“I guess. Doesn’t yours?”
“Something similar.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“Not at all. What made you want to study anthropology? Family vacations to the Petrified Forest? Did you see dinosaur bones in a museum, or watch some TV special about Olduvai Gorge?”
“Nothing like that,” she said, and hesitated. If she told Chico about Casey, he might just feel sorry for her. She’d been burned before, and up until this moment, hadn’t told anyone in New Mexico. She took a breath. “When I lived in California, this girl went missing. Some years later, a dog uncovered some human bones way out in the middle of nowhere, and for a while, they thought the bones might be hers. It would explain what had happened to her, and her family would have something to bury, you know?”
“Did they?”
“No. They were the bones of a much younger girl. This professor at UC Santa Cruz dated them, and suddenly this local ghost story kids used to scare each other with turned into a true story.” In a way, Juniper almost understood the way anyone she told couldn’t keep it a secret. The story was so dramatic that they had to tell someone. But that person would look at her differently from then on, and changing her name, all her hard work to become Juniper Vigil, would be for nothing.
“Then what?”
Juniper took a breath and let it out slowly. Just the idea of Casey made her want to stop the car, jump out, and run ten miles. “To be honest, I don’t really like talking about it. But my dad used to work in the Albuquerque crime lab, which, by the way, he says is in no way like that TV show. He said they were always scraping the coffers for equipment. Anyway, he knew this professor was a forensic anthropologist. It blew me away how much information the professor was able to tell about the bones, how old they were, what gender, how they fit into history, what had happened to them. Up until then I thought anthropology was like archeology, some poor guy sitting out in the hot sun all day using a paintbrush to remove specks of dirt from a pottery sherd while courting melanoma. As soon as I saw those bones, it was like something inside me came to life. I didn’t care if it meant I had to go to school for a thousand years, I knew that I wanted to be that guy, who can look at bones and tell their story.”
When he didn’t say anything, she thought, great, I sound like the geek of all time. Like my idea of perfume is formaldehyde! Like I grew up believing Indiana Jones movies were documentaries.
Chico looked at his watch. “We should probably talk about the interview.”
“You’re right,” Juniper said, her face bright red from embarrassment. Her stupid mouth did not know when to shut, but she couldn’t think of anything educational to say. “There’s the turnoff,” she said, and put on her blinker.
It was only a short way over the Rio Grande and down a couple streets before they arrived at the Ohkay Owingeh Cultural Center. They knocked, but no one was there and the doors were locked. “What the heck?”
“Did you call to confirm?” Chico asked.
“Of course I did, yesterday, as a matter of fact,” Juniper said. She peered in the window and knocked on the glass. Nothing. Nobody was in there.
“Some Pueblos operate on Indian time,” Chico said. “Let’s leave a note and head out to the pottery studio.”
“But we’re an hour early.”
“So? What’s the worst-case scenario? She’s not there, and we leave her a note, drive back into 1952-land, and find a coffee shop. If you want to do forensics, you have to learn to be patient.”
“You sound just like my dad. I don’t get it.” She thought of Casey, that endless wait. “I’m probably the most patient person on earth, actually.”
Chico laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Forget it,” he said. “There it is.”
Juniper pulled over at the white mobile home with the sign PUEBLO POTTERY. Its roof was w
eighted down with tires, and the trailer coach could’ve used a coat of paint. Behind the mobile home there was a rickety corral and a small barn. The unfinished wooden steps creaked as they went up them, and she thought of Dolores, how their ghost had taught her to pay attention to sound. No one answered this door, either.
“Great,” she said. “This day is just going from bad to worse. Maybe Anna knew something, not showing up. Or I should’ve had my tarot cards read or thrown the I-Ching or something. Are you going to fail me because my appointments didn’t show?”
“Did you even hear what I said about patience? Let’s sit in the car for a while and talk about the interview. Maybe Louella Cata is out riding her horse. Besides, we’re going to be here for three days.”
“How do you know for sure she has a horse? And if she does, why would she go riding in weather this cold? That doesn’t make sense. Maybe she got called into work or something. Although there is a pickup truck next to the barn, but it doesn’t have a trailer hitch.”
“Juniper, just get into the car already.”
“I will when you promise not to fail me.”
Chico held up a gloved hand. “I solemnly swear I won’t fail you for this course. Now will you get in the car? I’m freezing.”
They got back into the car and Juniper turned on the heater, hoping it wouldn’t run her battery down. She fetched her sleeping bag and unzipped it, pulling it over them like a blanket. “You have to admit you agree with me that she wouldn’t be out riding a horse. What’s the temperature? Twenty? Who rides a horse in the snow? How do you know she even has a horse?”
Chico pointed. “What do you see around the corner of the barn?”
“The same thing you do, a falling-down corral devoid of horses.”
“Currently devoid. Do you need glasses?”
“No. Why?”
“Because if you look at the far edge of the corral, there’re some green hay bits on the snow.”
“Where? I don’t see them.”
Chico put his arm around her shoulder and leaned her forward and sideways and it freaked her out, him touching her. “Behold, open corral gate. Note pile of manure that looks like horse droppings. Either I have more skilled powers of observation, or I’m the reincarnation of Saint Anthony of Padua. Which do you think?”
“I think you have this unfortunately mistaken belief that you’re funny, like Patton Oswalt,” she said. “Trust me, you’re not.” WTH did I say that for, she thought. Her grade-point average was never going to recover.
Chapter 15
When I came out of the bathroom down the hall marked FAMILY RESTROOM (though there was no place to rest), the doctor posse was there again, standing outside Aspen’s room, talking in low voices. I started to run. “What happened?” I said before I even got to them.
“Mrs. Smith,” the oldest doctor said, the one who was always snotty to me.
His nametag said Morris J. Armstrong, M.D., and he had white hair but a bright red mustache. His face was long and his teeth reminded me of Brown Horse, and I realized I hadn’t thought about her, or my dog, Curly, and I was scared that maybe no one had taken over my chores, and the chickens, what about them? Chickens could live for a long time without food, but not water. I hoped that some of the snow had melted because then they could drink that. “Tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “Tell me right now.”
Dr. Armstrong said, “We’ve been reviewing your daughter’s case. The consensus is it’s time to disconnect the ventilator. We were just waiting for your permission to move ahead.”
“You mean stop the breathing machine? No.” I turned to Mrs. Clemmons, who was always on my side. “Can you make them go away? Could we get another doctor?”
She looked at me the way she did some days, like her mind was working on something else and her being in the room, talking to me, was only a small part of a much bigger thing going on. “Laurel, calm down and take a breath. Let’s listen to what Dr. Armstrong has to say. Nothing’s going to happen without your permission.”
Right there in the hallway with its shiny polished floor and that tart smell of medicine coating everything from Aspen’s blankets to the air molecules, the walls closed in until it felt like I was in the back of the van the day the Brothers Grimm took me. Even though that was many years ago, I still remembered it as though it had just happened to me. Later Frances told me the name for the machine was Taser, but I always thought of it as a bolt of lightning, like bright white cracks across the sky before storms. I thought I was going to faint the same way I had back then. I had peed myself and the bones in my legs didn’t work, so I couldn’t fight back. I just had to let them put me in the van. But this time I had to fight back, because Aspen’s life depended on it. Hot tears came into my eyes. “Can’t you see how hard she’s working to get well? Sleeping so much? She’s trying to get better! Why give up on her now?”
Mrs. Clemmons took hold of my shoulders. “Laurel, the doctors want Aspen to recover just as much as you do,” Mrs. Clemmons said. “That’s why they became doctors. Let’s listen to what they have to say.”
I crossed my arms in front of myself, and the top button of the shirt came unbuttoned. Mrs. Clemmons looked right at it, and I saw the way she looked at me, like I was disgusting and dirty the way that would never wash off. My neck was all hard muscle, the way it used to get when Abel yelled at me and I would crawl under the table to avoid what might happen next, and which usually happened anyway. He wasn’t as big as Seth, but he was stronger and meaner. “I thought you were Aspen’s friend,” I said. “I don’t believe you anymore.”
Mrs. Clemmons’s face went slack, like I had disappointed her after the nice clothes and food, but she wasn’t Aspen’s mother. I was. I am.
“Intensive care is expensive,” Dr. Armstrong said. He took the finger pincher off Aspen’s first finger and my heart beat faster while one of the lines on the machines went flat. “Aspen is stable enough for transport. We’re all in agreement. It’s time to disconnect these machines. We’ll transfer her to a long-term facility, where she’ll receive passive physical therapy. In order to do that we need to try to wean her off the machines.”
“Or you could just keep on giving her the medicine,” I said, hot panic filling my chest. “She never had medicine before, so maybe it’s just taking her longer to get better than other people.”
The doctors looked at each other and then they looked at Aspen. Not me. This wasn’t a good thing, not good at all.
“There’s a long-term facility in Roswell that’s a perfect environment for Aspen. They can do things for her there that we can’t.”
“Why not? You’re doctors! You’re supposed to make people better.”
“Aspen is better,” he said. “Every day she’s on the ventilator will make it that much harder for her to live without it. Her illness has subsided. That fever spike resolved as soon as we changed antibiotics. We’ve been monitoring her blood gases and values. If you’d just listen—”
“Where is this Roswell?” I said. “How much more does it cost to stay here? I could get a job. I know how to clean houses. I could pay for the extra care and the breathing machine. Roswell—could I walk there every day? Because there are animals on the Farm I have to feed because it’s my job and no one else’s and I can’t just let them die. Isn’t that what you’re doing to Aspen? Taking away her breathing machine and then seeing if she dies? How much money are we talking about?”
The doctors just looked at me.
“What?” I said. “Why won’t you answer me?”
Mrs. Clemmons—how did she stay calm like that—placed her hand on my arm. “Money isn’t the central issue here,” she said. “There are programs Aspen would qualify for, so don’t give that another thought. As soon as we’re done talking here, I’ll be happy to drive you to the Farm myself to check on your animals. Roswell is in the southern part of the state. You can’t walk there, but there are other ways to get there, and if you decide that’s where to go, I’m sure w
e can find someone to look after your animals here. Everyone here can see how much you love Aspen. You’re a good mother. I don’t think you heard what the doctor said. Aspen is better. She’s well enough to be moved. Everyone in this room wants to see Aspen get well. Won’t you listen to the doctors for a few minutes? I promise you, nothing will change until we’re all in agreement as to Aspen’s best interests.”
That was the most amount of words Mrs. Clemmons had ever said to me, and I was having trouble working them out, separating them into categories, finding the stories in them. All I could remember was her last sentence. Set. Rest. Trees. “What do you mean, ‘best interests’?”
Dr. Armstrong made a noise. I couldn’t tell if he was clearing his throat or being disgusted, the way Seth got whenever I said more than a sentence.
Mrs. Clemmons looked at him the same way Abel used to look at me. She said, “Dr. Armstrong, I think now would be a good time to continue your rounds so that Mrs. Smith and I can talk this over.”
“Ardith,” he said, taking a step toward her and making his voice all nice. “I don’t understand what the problem is here. Her stats are within normal range. Her heart rate is normal, except for the murmur, and that can be handled with medication. The pneumonia is gone, she’s responding to stimuli; this is the protocol. Disconnecting the vent is a long process and carefully monitored every step of the way. Clearly if the mother can’t grasp what we’re saying perhaps there are competency issues—” he said, but she interrupted him again.
“Mrs. Smith and I will talk privately and get right back to you.”
Dr. Armstrong didn’t like that, I could tell, because his jaw flexed the same way Seth’s did when he was going to lock me in the barn, or back in California, in the shack. Already I knew Mrs. Clemmons was smart, but now I saw she was also powerful, because the doctors left the room. Power was something I’d never had. Abel and Seth made all the decisions for me. The Brothers Grimm.
We went into Aspen’s room that felt like home to me now, the way everything was the same every day. The whiteboard that said the name of her nurse in red marker, Susie or Phyllis or Carolyn or Ana or Leilah. The white blinds kept the light from bothering Aspen’s eyes, and gave me a place to look out of so I didn’t feel locked up. The clean restroom she’d never used yet and I wasn’t allowed to use because I wasn’t the patient. The janitor cleaned it every day anyway. Aspen was in the bed, still breathing from the machines that beeped fast when something was wrong and beeped more slowly when nothing was wrong. Puh-shoo-up. The feeding tube went down her nose feeding her. Cream-colored nutrition. She hadn’t had it long enough to gain any weight, but she hadn’t lost any either. I stroked her hair and wished I could wash it in the Waterfall Mist shampoo and conditioner. We only ever used bar soap on it at the Farm. So, sop, sap. Washing her hair would make her feel like the princess in my story. Leaves, save, leave. “In a little while, I’ll tell you more of the story,” I whispered to her. Then I asked Mrs. Clemmons, “Are you the Elder of this hospital? Do the doctors have to mind what you say or receive consequences when they don’t?”
Finding Casey Page 21