Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  “I was?”

  Lopez nodded. “So was your Uncle Robert and Collin and anyone else who’s reincarnated. All that happened a hundred years ago.”

  “I’m older than you, Papá?”

  “Much older.”

  “How do the heavens work?”

  “No one knows any more. After the reincarnated people went into the sky, the mightiest nations made war on the heavens, but you all sent down a plague of very tiny machines that got into naturally born humans so we can’t make many children and hardly no girls. That’s why your sister is special.”

  “I still wish you hadn’t found her.”

  Lopez pointed at the moonless night sky, the host of stars. “You see that stretch of stars that twinkle more than the others?”

  “I see it.”

  “They are twinkling more because they are shining through one of the heavens. That particular heaven is called the Floating Bridge. It was passing over when we found you. Your sister might be from there too. When you leave this world, maybe you two will go back there together.”

  “What if I don’t want to go?”

  “You don’t have to anytime soon.”

  “Why did I come back down from the heaven, Papá?”

  “No one knows why you all come back. My guess is that it’s a bit like camping.”

  “Camping?”

  “Sometimes you’ll go with me and Uncle Robert to the coast and we’ll sleep in tents and hunt deer. We don’t have to do that. We got a cabin with a stove. But we like sleeping on the beach and drinking from streams and hiking up mountains.”

  Luis frowned with concentration. “Because it reminds us of what it was like back before we built cabins or used stoves?”

  “Exactly what I think. You got tired of being clouds and thinking lighting. You wanted to hear thunder again and remember sunsets and tamales and mosquitoes and laughter. So you reincarnated yourselves.”

  Luis thought about this. “Why are baby girls so dangerous?”

  “No one knows exactly why, but any man who picks up a reincarnating baby girl is bound to her through a special infection of small machines. If the girl dies, the father dies. So now all fathers have to be very good about protecting their daughters and keeping them well fed and healthy.”

  “So why does Collin say you’re chickenshit? You picked up the girl.”

  Lopez sighed. “I am scared of dying.”

  “You’re scared because you won’t go to a heaven?”

  “I won’t go to one of your heavens. I won’t go where you will go.”

  The boy hugged his arm.

  Lopez continued. “I might go somewhere else or I might just go out like a candle flame. No one knows.”

  Luis didn’t say anything.

  “But for now everything’s going to be fine.”

  “I wish you could come with me when I go up there.”

  “So do I.”

  Two days later, in the late morning, Lopez was working in the root cellar when he heard Robert call out. He took his daughter up to find Robert crouching on the patio, the Remington laid across his knees. The boys were nowhere to be seen. Robert gestured uphill. Two men were standing on the path as it came out of the redwoods. One held the halter to a shaggy palomino. A pale woman sat on the horse’s back. She raised a hand. When Lopez did the same, she and her group approached.

  “That the baby girl?” the Gringa asked. She was maybe fifty, short and slender. Her light brown hair was tied into a tight bun. It made her long forehead seem longer.

  When Lopez said the baby was his daughter, the woman introduced herself and the two men. One was her brother. The other—a younger man with a shotgun in the crook of his arm—was her husband. Both men studied him. “We’re all reincarnated, and I’ve raised two reincarnated girls. I got enough left in me for one more.”

  Lopez cleared his throat. “I appreciate that, ma’am.”

  “You’ll let me be her mother?”

  Lopez looked from her to the two men. “Can’t say.”

  The Gringa changed to stilted Spanish: “No se puede decir, o usted no va a decir? Estás esperando a una muchacha para levantar su falda?”

  Lopez answered coldly in English: “A daughter deserves a family.”

  “A daughter deserves a father who thinks north of his navel. I’ve raised two girls.”

  “This homestead can’t feed three more. There’s an abandoned cabin a mile on toward the ocean. Maybe you could join our outfit.”

  The woman looked from her brother to her husband. “Maybe. We’ll take a look.”

  Lopez pointed to a path. “One mile. Can’t miss it.”

  She didn’t move. “Tell me, Dad, is it true you’re natural born?

  He nodded.

  She laughed. “Hell of a gamble, Dad, hell of a gamble just to get under a skirt.”

  That evening Robert sent Collin down the path with a dinner invitation. The boy came back with a report of an empty field. Robert snorted. “You scared her off, Wolfy! We can’t have you scaring off all the ladies with delicate sensibilities.”

  Lopez scowled. “She was no good.”

  A week later a man and a woman appeared on the path from town. Both carried rifles. He, short and stout, stood straight and wore a grave expression under a comically floppy leather hat. A thick bush of kinky white hair spread down his back. She was taller, with dark hair pulled back into a tight braid.

  Lopez called for Robert and walked out to meet the strangers. At first, he thought they might be Latinos. But closer up he looked like a Polinesio, she a Gringa. Or maybe she was Middle Eastern. He couldn’t tell.

  “You the natural-born man who picked up a baby girl?” the stocky man asked.

  Lopez nodded.

  His grave expression split into a smile. “Did the same thing twenty-two years ago. This is my daughter, Lani. She’d like to be a mother to a baby girl.”

  Lopez studied the woman. In her early twenties, she was neither slender nor solid. Her well-defined arm muscles suggested that she was no stranger to work. She nodded to him. Her eyes were quick and seemed intelligent.

  The father spoke again. “Perhaps we could stay a few days. She doesn’t eat much, and I’m handy in the fields.”

  Lopez looked at him. “Perhaps. Set your rifles down and meet the rest of the outfit.”

  Robert was waiting, the Remington leaning against the railing beside him. In the doorway, Collin held the baby and whispered to Luis. They met the newcomers on the porch steps.

  The father’s name turned out to be Joe. “Simply Joe. No other names.” They had come up from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Lopez had known that there were several Polinesio outfits in those parts. They hadn’t had a natural birth in seven years. Hence Joe’s long journey up the peninsula, across the Golden Gate, and into the redwood forests to help his daughter find a daughter of her own.

  When Collin brought the baby closer, Lopez watched Lani. Her brown eyes seemed to drink in the swaddled form. But her mouth tensed. Stiffly, she folded her arms. “Would you like to hold her?” Lopez asked.

  Then she was focusing on him. “Not just yet. I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

  The group went into the cabin. Lani never looked at the baby, but she was aware of the infant at all times. To her, the baby was like a bright fire that she didn’t have to see to know where it was.

  Four days later and a few hours past midnight, the baby woke Lopez with a sputtering cry. He picked her up, and she vomited down his sleeve. Her cloth diaper was wet with watery stool. She was warm, fussy.

  Lopez felt dizzy, couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He rocked his daughter, terrified that there was too much pain in this world for her and that she would go back to her heaven. His hands tingled, and orange spots swam across his vision.

  Someone sat on the bed next to him. He was so sure that it was Lani that he jumped when Joe spoke. “First time Lani got the shits, I was so nervous I didn’t shit solid for a week either.” He la
ughed. “You just lay down. This baby girl isn’t leaving yet.”

  Lopez obeyed and the spots left his vision. He and Joe took turns trying to feed the baby and changing her diapers. Joe insisted the baby wasn’t going back to her heaven. When Lopez asked how he knew, the old Polinesio only shrugged. Lopez fell asleep briefly but woke in a sweat. Stepping onto the porch, he discovered morning fog so thick he couldn’t see the barn.

  It made him think of his old life in Bodega Bay. For a year he had had a lover, a younger man named Alejandro who spoke mostly Spanish but sometimes murmured in Chinese in his sleep. Lopez remembered his cottage amid eucalyptus. He remembered the day he had decided to leave, Alejandro’s angry words, the relief to be going.

  In the growing morning light, Lopez felt darkness being draped around him. The old feeling he had fought before. He was going to die, perhaps not in that hour or even in that year, but he was going to die far too soon. No one could go with him. All his memories of eucalyptus groves and ruined cities and old lovers would vanish. He grabbed the porch railings and tried to breathe more slowly.

  The cabin door creaked. He turned to see Lani, nightgowned and barefoot. He stood up straight and tried to slow his heart. She paused, as if she might go back inside. But when he gestured for her to come closer, she eased the door shut and went to the railing.

  “I’m sorry if we made it hard to sleep,” he said.

  “I would have helped with the baby, but Daddy told me not to.”

  Lopez looked out into the fog.

  She said, “He said it’d be hard on you, raising a girl.”

  “He did it for you.”

  “I often wish he had been reincarnated—” she said, then seemed to interrupt herself. “Not for my sake. I just never realized what he went through by picking me up.”

  “He’s glad he did so.”

  “This is hard on you.”

  He tried to smile. “It’s embarrassing.”

  She laid her hand on his but didn’t say anything.

  The warmth of her palm sent goose bumps running up his arm. He wanted to say something but didn’t know what. The moment stretched on, and he felt as if he were not really himself, as if it were someone else’s hand she was touching.

  At last he said, “You should go to the baby.”

  She turned to him. Her eyes, searching his, seemed to be asking a question.

  He nodded.

  She left.

  Dr. Lo diagnosed the baby with a viral infection. Nothing to worry about. And, indeed, the baby improved over the next few days. But still Lopez suffered bouts of a racing pulse, ragged breathing, a sensation of darkness closing in.

  Then, on a cold evening, Lani hung a curtain at one end of the cabin to separate Lopez’s bed from the rest. She lay beside him, smiled in the half light, slipped out of her blouse. She joined him the next night and all the nights after.

  The next Sunday, Luis came back from town with a black eye. He had picked a fight with an older boy. When Lani asked if she could help, Luis yelled at her. In the following days, Lopez left the baby with Lani and took Luis to work in the fields. Joe was happy to join. Luis was sullen and didn’t talk much, but he stopped picking fights and was polite to Lani.

  Time passed. The morning fog burned off earlier and earlier until one night it failed to roll in at all. There followed crisp end-of-winter days that filled the forests with slanting light. Lani made peace with Luis when she bribed him with a bit of honeycomb. For Lopez, life regained a bearable rhythm. Each day’s work exhausted his worry, set him to anticipating the night with Lani. In the mornings, he watched Lani sit with the baby in sunlight, their two expressions of contentment.

  The cadence of days broke when large flat-bottomed clouds drifted in from the south. For a week, the outfit worked under cathedrals of air, billowing higher. Then came long, rolling sheets of rain.

  Confined indoors, the outfit became relaxed, talkative. At first they filled the hours by mending clothes, filling a chink in the roof, that sort of thing. But when the rain persisted, they lapsed into long conversations or card games played with an ancient, shabby deck.

  Lopez, Luis, and Collin were in a competitive game when a voice sounded from outside. Robert led the men onto the porch to discover a lone figure on horseback. A rifle, wrapped in leather, was tucked into the saddle. The rain was so loud that Robert had to yell to be heard. When the newcomer answered, Lopez realized she was a woman. Her hair was cut short. She wore a man’s riding coat.

  When Robert invited her in, she dismounted and stepped onto the porch. Her black hair had whitened around her temples. She called herself Melisa and came from a ranching outfit in the Central Valley. Her English was fluent but her cadence suggested she’d be more comfortable speaking Spanish.

  When she said she was searching for the outfit with the new baby girl, Lani stepped onto the porch with her daughter and a cool stare. The newcomer only laughed. “Don’t worry, Señora. I’ve raised five boys; I don’t need to be a mother again. I’d be happy just being an aunt to a girl.”

  Melisa was a handsome woman—long nose, high cheekbones, laughing eyes made more prominent by the few wrinkles around them. When Robert helped her out of her drenched coat, Lopez noticed that her breasts filled her blouse with curves impressive for any age. When Robert offered to help put up her horse in the barn, Lopez felt a sting of jealousy.

  When the rain stopped three days later, Robert took Collin and Melisa to examine the abandoned cabin a mile toward the ocean. The next morning, they took half the supplies and inhabited the old homestead. At first Lopez felt an emptiness of his cabin; the bouts of darkness-closing-in increased. But he saw Robert and Collin in the fields, and Melisa spent most days with Lani and the baby.

  Rain followed by weeks of clear skies covered the land with thick green grass. The baby suffered chicken pox, reducing Lopez to a nervous wreck until the spots disappeared. Then the days became warmer and warmer until, abruptly, the rainy season ended.

  Word got around that the Lopez outfit boasted three female members and only five male. It had become a small, reincarnated piece of the ancient world. In town, men treated Lopez, Robert, and even the boys with respect.

  When the summer fog began to roll in during the nights, Collin saw three strangers camping near their homestead. Robert and Lopez went out with rifles. Even at fifty feet, they looked like a rough lot, skinny and poorly clothed. Lopez suggested they talk. “All right,” Robert grunted and fired a shot above their heads. “That’s what I have to say.”

  The strangers leapt into chaotic action, firing two shots while retreating. The next day, there was no sign of them.

  The land dried out, turning the waist-high grass to golden brown. One night the baby spiked a fever so high she had a brief seizure. Panicked, Lopez ran the baby up to the doctor’s house. Dr. Lo put her in a cold bath and gave her a spoonful of bitter medicine. Though fussy, she passed the rest of the night without trouble.

  Lopez, on the other hand, fell asleep next to Lani on the doctor’s guest bed and dreamt of being endlessly shoved into a sack made of scratchy, hot fabric.

  Summer ended. On a trip to the coast, Robert discovered a baby boy floating above a tidal pool filled with spiny sea urchins. He brought the baby back to Melisa, who seemed neither excited nor upset about raising another boy.

  One morning, when they were mucking out the stalls, Robert told Lopez, “When I first picked up the baby, I thought I’d name him Jacob. My favorite uncle was named Jacob.” He paused. “For a while, I thought I was going to name the boy after Uncle Jacob.”

  “Now you think the baby is your Uncle Jacob?”

  “I’m certain of it. It’s the strangest feeling, you know?”

  “No, hermano, I don’t. I envy your certainty.”

  The winter rains came, and again the world was covered with thick green grass. The baby girl began to speak simple words and stand on her own. She had a tangled halo of black curls. She giggled and shrieked with
joy when Lopez would spin her about, hold her upside down. The boys wanted to be held upside down too. It was a good time.

  When the rains stopped, Lani missed her monthly and the outfit began to hope that she was pregnant. Joe especially was proud. But midway through the fourth month, she had a dull pain in her belly and then bled profusely.

  Afterward, she said she felt fine but didn’t want to talk about it. Joe had a harder time. When working in the fields, he felt a pain in his chest. Then during the hot, languorous nights of the late dry season, Joe drank too much in town. He woke up on the way home, a sour taste in his mouth. The next day he ran a fever, coughed up dark phlegm, complained of horrible chest pain. Lopez sent the boys for Dr. Lo. But during a coughing fit, Joe passed out. He fluttered in and out of consciousness for half an hour. Then he died.

  They buried Joe in a clearing east of the cabin. Lopez was the only naturally born person left in the outfit. He held Lani and she wept. The folds of unseen darkness closed around Lopez’s mind. Nothing had changed since he had picked up the baby girl. His death was closer now than it had been before. The events of the last year—the work, the sex, the long and beautiful days—were only distractions from a final terror. For a moment, he hated Lani and Robert because they knew what would happen to them after death, while he had to die into such uncertainty.

  But Lani’s despair was real, her need pressing. Twice her soft crying woke him at night. The comfort she took in him helped. Slowly the days regained their cadence. It helped to pick up his daughter and son, spin them around, hear them laugh. Summer’s morning fog dissolved into bright autumn mornings, darkened into winter rains. On the second anniversary of their daughter’s reincarnation, Lani and Lopez named her Olivia.

  Even at two years old, Olivia was talkative, mostly in English but also Spanish and a little Samoan. By three, Olivia was ordering Luis and Collin around. They spoiled her, just as everyone else in the outfit did.