by Gin Phillips
Lynay did not want to keep her door open. She did not like the sad voices in her head and the pictures they painted. She wanted silence in her head—it was too full. She did not want to let anything in anymore. As she walked down to the water three days after her mother was put in the ground, she remembered what Non had told her of parrots. Their feathers held their power, and if they were killed in a respectful way that pleased the Creator, those who took the feathers would then hold the power. The feathers were plucked from both the wings and the tail, and the power was plucked off along with them. The parrot would go into the next world as something other than a parrot. Its being had been changed. Its gifts had been taken.
Perhaps she could cut off her own gift. Perhaps she could deplume herself and change her being. Close her door.
She walked down to the water and found a sharp rock. Non found her, hair jagged, as she walked back to the village. She had felt relieved from the weight of her hair. Free. Non knelt beside her and called her a word in the language of the north: multa. Warrior girl, she said. And then Non brought her back down to the water and washed off the loose hair, passing her palms over Lynay’s scalp as the water flowed over it and pretending she did not see Lynay cry. Lynay did not cry in front of anyone else.
“You cannot close the door,” Non said. “It always breaks open again. Eventually. Or you will break open yourself.”
No one mentioned her hacked hair, not even the sharp-elbowed boys who kicked dirt as you walked past, and she suspected Non had something to do with this circumspection.
Here was one question Lynay would have liked to ask the stars themselves—if her mother had lived, would Non have held so much space inside her? After Lynay’s mother was gone, Non expanded and filled her whole chest and heart. Until Lynay’s man carved out some space for himself in her chest.
Lynay’s brothers were already joined to women, and her grandmother had died many years before, so Lynay lived alone for a short period of time in the two rooms she and her mother had shared. She visited Non often, and on one of these visits she saw the two bowls Non had brought from her home in the north. They were not everyday bowls, so they were not left on the roof filled with corn or beans. They were kept inside the storeroom, resting in their carved-out spaces in the floor.
Lynay had come into the room to fetch a scraping tool for Non, and when she saw the bowls, she yelped loudly enough for Non to hear, then bounded up to the roof, breathless. Why had Non not shown her these treasures before? Non said it had not occurred to her—these bowls were certainly no better than the ones Lynay and her mother had created. And in fact she found Lynay’s art to be more striking.
Better or worse did not matter, Lynay had answered. What mattered was that she had never seen bowls like these. They held unknown stories. She nearly slid down the ladder back into the storage room and began acquainting herself with the bowls. She stared at them for hours, running her fingers over them and memorizing their feel.
The first thing she noticed about the bowls was the slight shine to them, unlike the finish of her own bowls. And, of course, the designs on the bowls were different. The mountains and the lines of the land looked foreign to her, and even a heron diving for fish had a strange shape.
She asked Non about how the bowls were made, though Non did not know much about the art of seeing and making. But she had watched the women in her old home work on the bowls, and she had an idea about the shine. She described what she had seen the northern women do, and Lynay listened and considered. Then she walked to the river to find the kind of stone Non had described. She chose a stone, returned to her roof, and selected an unfinished bowl. She slowly polished the smooth sides of the bowl with the hard bit of cobble rock, and Non was right—the rock added a pleasing sheen. Lynay thought it sharpened the patterns.
On a different day, Lynay asked Non about the designs she didn’t recognize, the diagonal lines that filled in spaces. Non used her finger to draw slanted lines in the dirt, like a crooked ladder.
“This is what you find unusual?” Non asked.
“Yes,” Lynay said. “It’s a pattern I haven’t seen before.”
“They say that it eases the passage,” Non said.
Lynay studied the lines and knew they looked like the ladders that led from the insides of rooms to the outside world. But she could not make sense of Non’s answer.
“What passage?” she asked finally, as much as she wanted to act as if she understood. She did not want Non to think she was slow.
“You always have a meaning behind your pictures,” Non answered. “You tell me how important it is for the patterns to be made clear. You want the meaning behind the pictures to leave the piece of clay and enter the thoughts of those who look at the bowl. How can your ideas leave the bowl if they have no way to climb out?”
Lynay absorbed this idea. She began painting crooked ladder rungs across bird wings or angry skies. She imagined the feel of the ladder under her feet as she climbed out of her room in the morning, as she felt the first rays of morning on her face. She wondered if that was what her mother felt when she took her first steps into the next world, if perhaps the next world was even brighter and warmer.
The summer after her mother died, Lynay joined hands with Non’s older son. The rest of the people called him Restless One, but Lynay never used his public name. She always called him Little Owl, as his mother did, because of a tuft of hair on the top of his head that never lay flat. When he woke in the mornings and peered around blinking, hair pointing to the sky, he was an owlet. She laughed aloud at him that first morning when they woke together, understanding the name fully for the first time.
She ran her hands over his hair as the light came down on them from the roof opening. Dirt rose from the floor and danced in the brightness, floating.
“The golden light appears in the east,” the people in the square had sung on their joining day. “The birds call a greeting. The sun lifts its head from the earth. Man and woman answer. As one, they lift their heads from the earth.”
Lying on their mats, he would argue with her, mock fierce, telling her to call him Panther or Deer or Eagle, to talk of speed and strength. He was not an owlet, he would say, and she would insist that he was, even as he slid a hard thigh between hers, as he flipped her onto her back and his chest and shoulders blocked out the morning sun and dancing dirt.
That piece of the story has fallen out of place.
First there was the joining, with their bare feet on the cool stones of the plaza. Even over the scent of the flowers across her shoulders, she could smell the juniper on him, and when they returned to her rooms—their rooms—she understood why. He had covered the floor with juniper leaves, plucked the needles neatly off the hard branches. As they knelt, she felt the needles press into the skin of her knees, and, deep inside the bone, she felt the leftover childhood pain from when a rock shifted and she slammed her knee onto hard earth. She was wincing at her knee when his mouth found hers. The juniper soaked into their skin as they moved over and under each other. She had always loved the smell of juniper.
seven
* * *
Scanning the landscape of the North American Southwest, even an untrained eye notes the . . . abandoned dwellings. . . . It is tempting to see these sites as the products of collapse or of a disaster of some sort. Otherwise, why would people move away? Although both collapses and disasters have occurred, movements were not always predicated on failure. Movements were also effective strategies.
—From “Abandonment Is Not As It Seems: An Approach to the Relationship Between Site and Regional Abandonment” by Margaret C. Nelson and Michelle Hegmon, American Antiquity, vol. 66, 2001
* * *
It surprised Ren how easily Silas fit into her house, setting up his computer on her dining room table, stacking his books on his side of the bed, laying claim to her Little Bigho
rn coffee mug. Ren left for work in the mornings, and he took his coffee to his computer. The first two days back in town were hectic at the museum, and she didn’t get home until long after dark. He did not seem to mind. Both nights she found him typing at his computer, glasses perched on his nose. His backpack stuffed with papers blocked her way into the hallway, and he’d left books on the kitchen counter. She found his socks in the bathroom, and he’d finished off the orange juice without telling her. He was not particularly messy or inconsiderate, but her house felt disordered and unfamiliar. She was not sure whether this was good or bad.
The second night he cooked an enormous vat of macaroni and cheese with chunks of Brie embedded in it. They ate it straight from the pot as they finished a bottle of cabernet. She fell asleep still tasting butter and cheese and wine.
The third night she arrived home thinking about corn. She was organizing an exhibit on the role of corn in pueblo culture. The Gifts of the Corn Mother, she thought she’d call it. She’d have the ceramics and the grinding stones and the tapestries all resting on a sea of corn kernels, reds and yellows and browns. Pretty as gemstones. She wanted the colors of the harvest, the feel of living corn infusing every display. She saw corn flickering under the surface of her driveway, her tin mailbox, the deep red of the front door, and the dead beetle by the welcome mat.
Corn. When she had first come to the museum, she had organized a couple of exhibitions based on the Crow Creek finds. She’d hardly slept at all, laboring over each piece. Since then, other exhibitions had come and gone, and all of them had to be devised and crafted and overseen. The work didn’t exactly keep her awake at night, but she didn’t mind it. At times she welcomed getting lost in the details.
Only when she closed the door and tossed her keys in the woven basket did she realize that the house was too quiet. Silas’s computer was closed and unblinking on the dining room table. She called his name, wandered through the house, and looked in the backyard. The silence unnerved her, even though until the last few days, it would have been reassuringly normal. She stomped down the tendril of unease. He had left his truck back at the canyon, so he couldn’t have gotten far. She called his name again, and she found herself walking more slowly, turning corners carefully, watching.
No answer.
She’d laid out the parrot woman’s words in one corner of her mind, spreading them out neatly. This gave her a space where she could move and rearrange them like puzzle pieces, trying to decipher them. Trying, really, to disarm them, to render them, through sharp analysis, harmless. She had not been successful so far. But she had been reasonably successful in barricading them off.
Finally she noticed a note on the stove, which informed her that Silas had walked to the bookstore and planned to be back by six p.m. Her watch read five-thirty. She briefly considered driving to the store and giving him a ride home, but she decided instead to take a bath. He would be fine. She would not let herself see a trip to the bookstore as a supernatural danger. She would not give the words that much power. And in the rush of work, she hadn’t had the chance to enjoy the luxury of indoor bathing again. She missed soaking until the hot water cooled.
Waiting for the tub to fill, she considered her face in the mirror. She was thirty-seven. The bathroom lighting was gentle. The only lines she could see on her face were the faint ones around the edges of her eyes and fainter ones on her forehead.
Lighting would be another issue with the corn exhibit. The MR16 halogen lamp hadn’t been warm enough. The corn storage jars, so intricate and eye-catching, had seemed washed-out. An amber filter might help.
A soft slight bird’s foot spread from the edge of each of her eyes. But these lines in her face were not always there. She could still make them disappear altogether when she rubbed in moisturizer slowly—gentle strokes with two fingers—and then the face in the mirror was the same face of a decade ago. She could see that younger version of herself whenever she wanted. It still existed, ready to rise to the surface at a touch. Then a tilt of her head, a shadow, and there she was at twenty. No time had passed at all. And it was during these moments, the moments when she saw no evidence of the passage of time on her own face, when it seemed most surprising that she would be gone in thirty or forty or, if she was lucky, fifty years. She had lived thirty-seven of her allotted years, and she did not feel thirty-seven years closer to death. All day she studied the ruins of civilizations, of families and bodies and babies—she had picked up an infant femur accidentally in a bucketful of dirt, had run her fingertips along the holes in skulls—and still she found it difficult to believe death was coming. She could see her other selves just underneath her skin—the teenager with eyes that dropped to the floor too easily and the college student who only looked forward and the youngest member of the team, hungry-desperate. They all waited, and they watched her in the mirror.
The hinge on the bathroom door creaked, and the door swung wider. This was not unusual: The foundation of the house had settled, and the door was loose in its frame. Still, when she saw the movement from the corner of her eye, she turned toward it quickly.
Nothing there. She’d half expected to see feathers or clay-covered hands, and there was both dread and excitement to the thought. It wasn’t fair, she thought, that when she’d finally come face-to-face with the girl she’d spent years trying to find—a girl who’d called to her clear and loud across centuries—Ren hadn’t had the chance to bask in the joy of seeing her face. Of seeing the hands that had shaped the bowls. Instead, the parrot woman’s words had overshadowed the sweet solemnity of the artist’s face, the grace and quickness of her hands.
She closed the bathroom door. There had been a time when a shifting in the air was an unmistakable sign of Scott’s arrival. Once he joined her when she found a caterpillar lying on the sidewalk with green blood oozing from its side. He came only when she was alone.
For a while, she felt guilty for not telling her parents, but she didn’t think they would believe her. She thought her mother would cry, and she was tired of watching her mother cry. And then silence seeped into the house, and it did not occur to her to speak. Her parents did not play on the kitchen floor anymore. When they spoke to her, they said nothing. She couldn’t stand the pain of their faces, so she stopped looking at them. Scott had left a hole in the house, and many other things fell into it.
She turned thirteen . . . then fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. They must have been forgettable birthdays, because she could barely remember them. Scott still came to her during those years, but less often.
Then toward the end of tenth grade, without warning, she realized something: She had missed things. She realized this when Andy Layton asked her to the spring dance. She hardly knew Andy Layton—she hardly knew anyone anymore. She said hello and held long conversations, shopped at the mall with gaggles of girls, went to parties when invited, but she knew none of these people.
Andy Layton was in her homeroom, and she knew he was popular and supposed to be handsome. He played football and scored many points. He had a jaw like a cartoon character, and his teeth were too white. He smiled and she winced. She had no idea why he had asked her, but she said yes because it seemed the easiest answer to give. Then she considered the phenomenon for the rest of the day, all through biology class and French verb exercises and a lunch of rectangular pizza. She had never gone on a date with a boy. She had never kissed one. She had never snuck out at night, had never tasted beer, never smoked a cigarette. She heard girls talk about it all, but she hadn’t listened with any real interest.
After school that day, she drove home, thinking. She had not been pretty as a child. She hadn’t been ugly, but her features never came together in a way that brought out smiles from strangers. Then sometime before the accident she hit a phase where she grew lanky and angular and her head did not fit her body—she thought it wobbled weirdly on her neck—but she didn’t care very much. Her own looks had ne
ver struck her as a particular pro or con. Then Scott died and she stopped caring about most things.
So Andy Layton asked her to the dance. As his date. She shut herself in her bathroom at home and stared at herself in the mirror, at this girl who was going to a dance with a boy who had teeth like lightbulbs. Her once not-blond-not-brown hair had turned dark honey with gold streaks, mysteriously sunlit even though she never spent time outdoors. She had her father’s olive skin, smooth and ever tan. She had brown eyes, not dark chocolate like Scott’s, but clear like the brandy her father sipped from dinnertime to bedtime. Her nose had always been too big for her face, long and straight, but now it seemed to have reined itself in, and it sat tidy and proportional in the middle of her face, just as it should. But her mouth looked larger, wider, so she smiled carefully. It was a fine smile—more lips than teeth—which she could extend into a wide grin that crinkled her eyes.
She felt her jaw, the slope of her neck, then ran her hands down her sides. Her lankiness had turned into long, strong lines, but she could feel how her hips flared under her hands. She lifted her shirt and stared at her belly, which seemed flat and reasonable and didn’t make an impression on her one way or the other. She took off her shirt, along with her jeans, then, after a pause, her bra and panties. She climbed on the counter, standing on her knees. She was soft and rounded—she cupped her breasts with her hands, contemplating their weight and wondering if they shouldn’t angle more upward. They fell slightly when she released them, and she shrugged. She’d gained some weight, no doubt, but it seemed to be mainly in these breasts and hips and—she skimmed her hands along the inside of her thighs—maybe wider thighs. She had hair in all the usual places.