ALL WAS CALM AT THE HOUSE. I stepped past Jim’s truck, past the Pronghorn. Belly lay on the porch with the mangled remains of one of my lucky red Chinese shoes in her mouth. I patted her head, but she was in such a red-shoe reverie she didn’t look up. I took a few deep breaths, for I was afraid, and went inside.
The house was quiet. There were two coffee cups on the table and some dry plates standing in the dish rack. Granma’s room was empty. I looked into Jim’s, and it was empty, too. In Cora’s, Daphne was the sole sign of life, snoozing under a blanket of cedar chips.
I walked outside. “Belly, where is everyone?” Maybe, I thought, I had been deluded in thinking I should come back, and we really were all of us Always Alone. Simon and Annette were each alone in their small red capsule, traveling overland at seventy miles per hour. It was a heart-piercing picture, and for a second I shut my eyes hard against it. I lay down on the hot hood of the Pronghorn, which was finally closed.
“Margie?”
“Jim—”
“Is everything okay? Where were you?”
“—where were you?”
“I was out back,” he said. He held a chicken in his arms, and he promptly put it down. Belly, feigning aggression she did not truly feel, so satisfied was she after my shoe, chased the bird around to the coop. “But what about you?”
“I was … confused,” I said.
“My mom and I were very worried. You can imagine what we thought.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Where are they?” I asked.
“With Josie. They went to watch the horse races at Crow Fair. I wanted to stay home.” He looked at my clothes—a pair of Simon’s trousers, which hung so long my flip-flops barely peeked out from under the hems, and Simon’s button-down shirt—but said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. He nodded with acceptance, but he had a discouraged look. “Jim,” I said.
“What?”
“Jim.” I pulled off my buffalo baseball cap.
“What is it?”
“I love it here. I love Granma. I love Cora …” Tears came with her name, tears and more of the awful gray shame.
“Margie, Margie.” He steered me into the house and down the hall into the one room I’d never actually entered—his. “Lie down,” he said. I sat on the edge of the bed, sniffling. I stared at him. “It’s okay to lie down. I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll be right back.” I fell back onto the brown woolen blanket. His buffalo skull regarded me from one corner of the room. His basketball rested on the dresser.
Jim returned with a handkerchief tucked in his hand.
“I missed Cora,” I wailed. “Dancing.”
“Here,” he said. “Blow your nose.” I turned sideways and blew, embarrassed by the honking sounds I made, and by what must have been—after a morning filled to the brim with tears—my disheveled appearance. And when my nasal passages were cleared, I smelled it again—the smell of both love and home, the smell of neroli, the same bright essence of orange blossoms that had announced itself so boldly when Jim walked through the front door on the night I first met him.
It confused me. I sat up, frowned, looked around. Was it coming from him? “Margie,” he said again. He pressed the handkerchief lightly, so lightly, to each of my eyes. They were badly swollen, and so was my mouth, and my face was hot, and having Jim’s big hands so close to it gave me an incongruous impulse: I wanted to kiss them.
“What happened yesterday?” he asked.
“Someone came for me.”
“Who?”
“An old friend. It was just like you said—there are old friends at Crow Fair. I thought I would go with him, but I couldn’t. I want this.”
I saw a brief blaze in Jim’s off-to-the-side eyes, but he quickly extinguished it. “You need some water,” he said. “Your cheeks are so red. I’ll be right back.” I heard him in the kitchen, choosing a glass, running the tap. I turned to examine his uncluttered nightstand. There was an alarm clock, a lamp, and a simple wooden box with a hinged lid. I lifted the lid up to peruse the box’s contents. I had already embarrassed myself completely, I thought, so it would hardly matter if I got caught snooping.
There was a snapshot, curling at the edges, of Cora and Granma taken years earlier. Cora was hummingbird-small, only three or four, and wearing pink-framed eyeglasses with lenses no bigger than quarters. Granma had not changed at all. There was a handful of loose tobacco, redolent of leather and earth. And there was a twisted bandage made out of paper towels, the very one I had fashioned for Jim when he’d grated his hand in the kitchen. It was blotched with brown blood. When he rounded the corner into his room, I blurted, “Jim, you still have the bandage.”
He eyed the open box and froze for a moment. The buffalo watched from his corner. The basketball rolled forward a fraction of a millimeter. “Yes,” he said. “I saved it.”
I tasted the essence of orange on the back of my tongue. “But Jim,” I said, “you don’t even look at me.”
He sat on the bed. He put one hand on each of my cheeks. He dipped his head, low enough to hold my eyes with his. And he held them, and held them. “This way?” he asked. And then I saw it. I saw the spot where Jim’s pair of perpendicular lines met, where the vertical line between his eyes and the horizontal line of his smile intersected. It happened at the very center of his bottom lip. And what was buried there, under that place? Tobacco seeds shining like stars? I held it for a moment between my top and bottom teeth, then between my lips. There was warmth there, and health, and kindness—all the same qualities that inhabited his hands. Jim made a sound. Then the words came out.
“I have been looking at you, Margie, from the first night I came home and found you here. I may not seem like I’m looking, but I promise you, I am. I saw the kiss you drew on the ground between us that morning, not long after you arrived—”
“The kiss?”
“Yes, you made an X in the dirt with your toe while you stood next to my mom, talking about root digging—”
“Oh!” I cried. “But I didn’t know that I … I didn’t mean … or maybe I did?”
“I’m just nervous,” Jim went on. “You know, I don’t really have all that much experience with women. And being so close to the one I want—it’s overwhelming sometimes.” Watching him closely while he said these things, listening to his words, I lost my breath.
“But I’ve been looking at you,” he said, “looking with all of my senses. When I taste the food you make with me, you’re in it—you, you just melt into everything you do, you’re so tender. When you’re close enough for me to smell, what comes through your skin is pure, prairie pure, but unfamiliar to me, too, like California flowers, and it’s the most delicious”—he paused—“distraction. When I hear your voice, it’s like your soul’s right there vibrating under every word, and I could lie down and dream, listening to it—I’d dream of all your life, your experiences, the things I don’t even know about you, the sadness and the sweetness. And when I turn my eyes on you, when you’re looking away and I can study you that way, well, I see just what all my friends at Crow Fair told me they saw, what I’ve seen from the very start: a beautiful woman.”
“What about when you touch me?”
“When I touch you … when I touch you …”
We folded into each other. Minutes, skin, eyelashes merged. The grasshoppers outside grew louder.
• • •
AT DUSK, THE SECRETS OF ALL HEARTS were once again suspended in the air. And what was suspended in the air between us? The tightrope that had so often hung there slackened, and that slackened rope turned to the softest of all yarns. And then I was found, and so was he, and for a while, Jim and I—just Jim and I and nothing else—were all of a piece. We were knitted together by that yarn.
“WHAT DID YOU THINK WHEN I CAME HERE? And you didn’t even know me?”
“I thought that my mom wanted someone to keep her company, and that she also wanted someone for Cora. A young woman. Someone who could be a frie
nd to her—”
“I doubt Cora will ever want me for a friend—”
“—and then, not long after you got here, I wanted you for myself. I’m glad you came back today,” he said. “So glad.”
LATER, JIM DID WHAT NO ONE outside of dreams ever had. He held the back of me against the front of him in a spooning embrace. He was the dark-haired stranger of so many of my dreams, but I was not asleep.
* rare bird
15 GRASSHOPPER (Asemoplus montanus)
THAT NIGHT THE TWO OF US SAT AT THE TABLE listening to the grasshoppers. The star-shaped ceiling lamp shone down on us, and the flecks of glitter in the Formica shone up.
“I missed it, too,” Jim said.
“What?”
“Cora’s Shawl Dance.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I was so worried about what might have happened that I went looking for you.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“I know.” Jim’s vertical furrow was deep. “She didn’t even ask why—that’s the worst part. She wouldn’t speak to me at all last night or this morning.”
I laid my head down on the table, wondering what I would say to her.
Soon, Josie’s truck rolled up to the house, radio blaring, and deposited two figures outside—one aged and slow, one young and quick.
“So, she’s back,” Cora said before the screen door slammed shut behind her. Her hair had been freed from its braids and fell in wild waves all around her face.
“Cor—” Jim started.
“Did she just come back to get her things?” she asked him.
“No,” I began, “I—”
“Or is she going to sleep in my room a bit longer?”
“Cora, we’re so sorry we missed your dancing,” Jim said.
“It’s all my fault,” I added. “I left, and your dad felt like he had to look for me.”
“I knew you were the reason.” Glaring in her regalia, with her hair so full of static and smelling so smokily of the fires from the teepee camp, her skin shimmering with prairie dust and slightly ghostly from the powdered sugar that covers fry bread, she frightened me. But then she tucked her lips into a small tight line and her eyes went stormy behind the spectacles.
“Grandchild—” Granma said, but the sobbing sprite stole swiftly into her bedroom. Granma sat down. She reached for me, and I noticed how much like Jim’s her hands felt. The same blood warmed them. “Where did you go yesterday, honey?”
“I’m sorry and ashamed. I was so confused, Granma. I felt so uneasy and sick.” I told her all that had happened.
Granma nodded. “I know that sickness you had. It’s called daásduupe—two hearts. It makes a person feel uncertain, insecure, faltering. Do you still feel it?” She stared into my face, studying it for signs.
“No. I got better. In the night, while I slept, and at dark face time. I knew what I wanted, and where I wanted to be. I want to be here with you,” I said. “But I won’t if it’s not okay with Cora. That means everything.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, like you belong here,” Granma said. She smiled at Jim, and then winked.
“Mom,” he said, shaking his head.
“What?” she asked. “I’m happy she wants to be with us. I love her.”
The grasshoppers called. We looked at each other across the table. “I love her,” Jim said.
• • •
THE ROOM WAS DARK. She was visible only as a slight shape in her twisted sheets. She had carelessly strewn her fine clothes all over the floor, and I stumbled over a moccasin before I made it to the bunk ladder. I ascended and lay flat on my back. The air felt compressed, as if Cora and I were inside of a watch that had been wound too tight. And sensitive Daphne was unwilling to release some of the tension with even a few squeaky turns of her wheel.
“Cora.” In the silence after I spoke her name, I thought about it, for the first time, in a Latin way, the way Simon had taught me. Cor, I realized, meant heart—“Cora, I’m so sorry I caused us to miss your dancing. I’m so sorry”—and mine hurt for her. She was quiet.
“I want to be here,” I said, “to watch you dance next year. I’m kind of like you. My mom hasn’t been a part of my life.” I felt her turn over in the bed below me. I couldn’t tell if she was listening, or if she meant to give the bunks a see-if-I-care shake. “And I’ve been looking for my place for a long time. I think it’s with you, and your dad, and Granma, but only if you think so, too.”
Cora offered not one peep. “And if you don’t think so,” I said, “I’ll go. But I want you to know that I have loved the time I’ve had with you. And I love you. I know you don’t like me at all right now. But I think you’re amazing. You’re brilliant, strong, gorgeous, funny, completely unique. I’m in awe of you. I know you’re going to end up doing incredible and unexpected things with your life. You’re going to make a difference, I just know it.” A breeze blew through the window, and I turned my face toward it, thinking of what Jack Dolce had called my “desperate” drive to make a difference. I realized that it had mellowed, mercifully, that make-a-difference mania, and it wasn’t any longer so misguided. “That was something I tried to do myself,” I said to Cora. “Make some sort of difference. And I hope to be around to see you do it better.”
Daphne took a few tentative steps on her wheel. Then complete silence cloaked the room, and we all—me, Cora, the hamster, and the ballerina upside down in her jewelry box—slept.
AT SEVEN, I WOKE TO THE SOUNDS of Cora’s precise morning routine. She rose, scraped her spectacles off her dresser, brushed her hair, poured pellets into Daphne’s bowl. I heard her pick the various pieces of her regalia up off the floor, shake them out, and arrange them on her bed. Then all was still. Granma had breakfast sizzling in the kitchen—I smelled it. But Cora didn’t open the door and bound out for a bite. Minutes passed, during which all I could hear was the regular rise and fall of her girlish breaths.
I opened my eyes and saw her standing in the center of the floor, staring at me. “Hi,” I croaked. But she just looked a little longer and left the room.
IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE THEY CAME. Still bedbound, I lay and listened to the muffled sounds of Granma and Cora in conversation.
“… so many more of them today.”
“… know where they all come from?”
“… only the males who make that sound.”
A car pulled up to the house. I pushed back the daisy-printed pillowcase curtain, peeked out the window, and saw a sedan, black and shiny as a wet stone despite the dusty terrain it had traversed. For a short, sleepy moment, I was intrigued. But when I saw the brown and green splots all over its windshield and hood—dozens upon dozens of dead grasshoppers—I knew.
“Who’s this?” I heard Cora ask. “And where did Dad go?”
Granma said, “Let me go to the door, Cora.”
I sat up and stared at my hands. Panic seeped from my palms. Simon’s letter was right. They had started watching him before they’d begun watching me. Maybe they had lost track of me for a while, but they had always kept their eyes fixed on him, and when he’d come all the way to Crow Country to retrieve me, they had followed.
I watched them get out of the car: two men in suits. How strange it must be, I thought, for Granma to see once more what she had first seen some sixty years before, two men in suits stepping over the prairie grass, coming to knock on her front door. Now I was the one hiding beneath a buffalo blanket.
I heard a man’s voice, the same one that had sounded outside my Middletown studio so many months earlier and called me out of bed by my first and last names.
“Ma’am. I’m Agent Fox with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and this is Agent Jones …” The introductions, the reason for their visit, rolled into my ears and out of my pores, slicking me with sweat. “We have reason to believe that this woman is living with you.” I knew the photograph (they were showing it now, pressing it up against the screen), the one they had
snapped at the San Diego County jail when they booked me, the one that was published in the Sun—me after a long night of wine, with worried eyes, uncombed curls, and a mournful mouth. “Her name is Margie Fitzgerald, but she may use an alias. Do you know her?”
Granma let spill a long string of sentences—all of them in Crow.
“Do you speak English?” asked Agent Jones.
“Baaleetáa!”*
I discerned a little bell through the bulk of the buffalo hide. It was Cora’s ringing voice. “Can I help?”
I buried myself deeper still. I imagined her studying the photo with her mathematician’s intensity, squinting through her cat-eyes. There was a long, long pause during which I knew she was constructing the succinct and sword-sharp statement that would seal my doom: You are utterly correct, gentlemen. That woman is living here. In fact, she is sleeping on my bunk bed right now.
“This is what she looks like?” Cora asked.
“Yes, miss.”
An eternity passed. A thousand times, the sun set and the moon came up and ripened the wild plums, and all the Crow children jumped and grew up strong.
“I’m sorry,” Cora said, “but we’ve never seen anybody like this. Right, Granma?”
҃eh.Ӡ
“Are you sure?” Agent Fox’s high whine was dubious and exasperated.
“Utterly,” Cora said.
I WAS ALREADY TRIPPING DOWN the bunk ladder, saying “thank you” over and over, when they burst into the bedroom. Granma hugged me. Cora stood apart with one hand slipped into the other. Still, a smile repeatedly threatened to break open on her staid face.
“They’re going to come back,” I said.
“That’s right.” Granma nodded. “They always do.”
“They’ll have a search warrant,” I said. Cora wouldn’t let me catch her eye. Her decision to preserve me had made her shy.
Then a pervasive purr rippled through the air and hummed through the house, as if the lions sleeping beneath the prairie had finally awakened. It was the Pronghorn coming down the dirt road, and Jim was behind the wheel. “She drives!” Cora exclaimed. We awaited him on the porch.
The Lovebird Page 28