by Amber Foxx
“That’s what everyone would think.” She tossed her hair back and fixed her gaze on his face. “But as long as we do, I won’t say we did. You see how this works? You’ll have to fight me so hard, I’ll have bruises, and when I explain how I had to struggle with you, people will believe me. Your wife,” she smiled, “might even hear me scream. And then I’d tell her about Mom, too.”
Mackenzie started again to stand, but Lily grappled him. As she opened her mouth in a dramatized pre-scream, he sank back down and closed his eyes, with the face of a man being taken to prison. Lily crept onto his lap.
The vision changed again, to Lily and Naomi in a car. Naomi was driving. “Lily, please, I’m asking you one last time, just tell me whose it is.”
“You’ll hate him.”
“Is it Gerry’s? I thought you broke up with him.”
“I did.” Lily smirked.
Naomi, eyes on the road, took no notice. “I won’t hate him, whoever he is. He must be important to you. If you’d put this off much longer, you’d be having his baby. I was starting to think you wanted—”
“You wanted it.”
“I said I would love and welcome my grandchild.” Naomi’s voice caught. “But if you decide to have sex again, with this boy—or anyone—let’s make sure to get you on the pill, and get you condoms too. You can’t be too careful.”
“Why? ’Cause he screws other people and I’d catch something?” Lily verged on laughing.
“My god, honey, I hope he doesn’t.”
“Oh, he does. He definitely does.” They pulled into a parking lot, stopping close to the entrance of a one-story brick building. “He’s not a boy. He’s a married man.”
Naomi was reaching into the back seat for her purse. “What?” She paused in mid-turn, staring at her daughter.
“He’s got a good thing going, with that miserable half-dead anorexic wife as his cover, and all the bored ballet moms at his service.”
“He does not have all the—” Naomi stopped. Her face reddened and her eyes filled with tears. “Lily—how could you?”
“Why not? It’s good sex. You should know.” Lily locked her violet eyes onto her mother’s, her expression not quite smiling, not quite anything. “Well, shall we go take care of this inconvenience?” Lily opened her door and swung her long legs out. “I’d hate to have a belly for the Nutcracker. It’s gotten big enough already.”
Mae recoiled so strongly she left the vision. She had an emotional aversion to abortion even though her rational mind accepted it as sometimes necessary. This one had been appallingly unnecessary, and deliberately late, delayed to make Naomi want the baby. If there was a soft spot a healer could reach in Lily, Mae had no idea what it would be. There didn’t seem to be one. Lily had created a life for the sole purpose of destroying it. From the moment of conception, she’d never seen her fetus as a child but as a weapon.
Jamie emerged from his nap around four o’clock, foot-groping down the stairs with his eyes half-closed. He slumped onto a lower step, head in his hands. Was he depressed or just not awake yet?
“Hey, sugar.” Mae joined him, wrapping her arm around his shoulders. He was oddly floppy, not his usual nervous self, and it made him softer to touch. “How are you feeling?”
“Dunno.” He leaned into her as if to sleep again. “Need to talk to Mum and Dad.”
Was he going to cancel dinner? She hoped not, though she could see he might not feel up to going. She needed to meet his parents. Other people who understood what it was like to love him. “About tonight?”
“Nah. Therapy homework. S’posed to tell ’em everything I held back.”
“That’s good. You know they’ll understand.”
“Worry, though. Got to tell ’em I threw a wobbly with the cacti, too.”
“If you don’t, someone else will. You don’t want them to hear it that way. Anyway, you’re ...” What was the word for it? “Perforated. They’d ask what happened.” She kissed his cheek, moved a strand of hair out of his face. “You need some coffee before we go?”
“Mm. Sleep on the way. You drop me off, come back for dinner.”
She helped him load the cat, cat supplies, and few days’ worth of clothes into her car, and left him at his parents’ house in Tesuque, watching him go in before she went on to Bernadette’s. It was hard to let him go, but at the same time it was a relief to have a few hours to be alone.
Mae took a mind-clearing run in the broad dry riverbed, showered, did some reading, and returned, both eager and nervous to finally meet Jamie’s family.
Isolated from the more developed neighborhood, the Ellerbee house sat back from a dirt road, its front yard a natural desert. Its extended roofline reminded Mae of an Asian temple, though the walls were brown adobe. There was no doorbell. Instead, a huge gong hung in a wooden frame. Mae hesitated. She should probably just knock. No—these were Jamie’s parents. They had a gong. She picked up the clubbed striker from an earthenware pot by the red door and struck the metal disk. The sound resonated through her bones.
A short, vigorous woman with nearly-black skin and thick, dark hair touched with white answered the door. “Welcome.” She gave Mae a hug. “I’m Addie. Take your shoes off. We’re a barefoot house. Japan did it to us. Never could go back to tracking the dirt in.” Her accent was stronger than Jamie’s, and her features remarkably like his. She smiled broadly, holding the door open. “Nice to have you. Jamie and Stan are on the back deck. Can I get you tea or anything? Beer, wine? Drink all you like, stay if you need. Celebrating Jamie’s birthday.”
“It’s today?” Mae stepped inside and slipped her shoes off. “He didn’t tell me. I don’t have a gift.”
“Listen, love, every year he’s alive, it’s a gift. We don’t give things anyway, just love. What can I get you?”
Mae followed Addie into the kitchen. Its elegant simplicity, black and white, gray and steel, was softened by lived-in clutter, magazines scattered on the table and cartoons magnetized to the fridge. The air was filled with smells of spices and chocolate. “Iced tea would be great, thanks.”
“Jamie’s quite taken with you.” Addie took a pitcher of tea from the refrigerator and filled a tall glass. “Ice in it?”
“A little. And I’ll do the sugar. You won’t believe how much I use.”
Addie offered Mae a black porcelain sugar bowl decorated with a gold Japanese character. While Mae dumped in North Carolina levels of sugar and stirred, Addie said, “He’s in for good, y’know. For life. He’s like that. I hope you know what you’re in for. And that you are in for it.”
Addie’s jaw was set, her eyes black and bright, and her bluntness, though it was not unfriendly, took Mae off guard. This was not Southern-style small talk. Mae would have started the conversation by admiring the house. Too late for that now. She had to be just as honest. “I got a good look at what I’m in for, and I still love him. I’m not jumping in as fast as he is, though.”
“Good onya. Wouldn’t think much of you if you were.” Addie led Mae through a spacious living room, its décor a blend of Zen temple and cozy nest. “Got to take your time to get used to him.”
They went out through the sliding doors to a deck overlooking a steep, scrubby bluff and a deep arroyo. It was obvious that Jamie and his father, seated in heavy wooden chairs, were in a serious conversation.
When he saw Mae, Jamie’s expression changed from solemn to joyful like a fast-motion sunrise. Stan Ellerbee came over and shook her hand. He was the man from her vision who’d broken the news of Kandy’s death. In person, she could see he was taller than Jamie, similarly broad-shouldered and long-limbed, but slimmer and finer-boned, with only a hint of middle-age thickening around the middle. His voice was soft and quiet as he introduced himself and welcomed Mae.
Jamie met Mae’s eyes, his brightness fading. “So, I—I was telling Dad about—about ...” He leaned his elbows on his thighs and looked down at his feet. Addie came up behind him, laid a hand on his shoulder, and
Jamie jumped. “Mum, will you not fucking do that? Jesus. Let me be.”
“Not touch you?”
“Let me get through on my own, all right? You’d think I was crazy and that you were my fucking mother.” After a pause, both burst out laughing. Addie backed off, perched on the railing. Jamie said, “So, anyway, whatever in bloody hell I was trying to say, pretend I finished.” He gestured to his throat and heart. “Sorry, excuse me.”
He rose, walked down the steps of the deck and disappeared from view.
“He won’t go in the arroyo ...” Addie started after him.
“Let him be,” Stan said. “Hovering makes it worse. Let him breathe. He’s worked hard, telling us all that.”
“If he goes down there and has a wobbly—”
“You’ve got to let him go sometimes.”
“But he shouldn’t be alone after—”
“I’m not alone,” Jamie’s voice came from below. “Got Mum in my bloody shirt pocket.”
Stan looked to Mae. “It’s not always like this around here.” He resumed his seat and added dryly, “Sometimes there’s drama.”
He was a good balance to Jamie and Addie. Mae warmed to him immediately. She sat across from him. “I hope I didn’t cut y’all off in the middle of something.”
“Quite all right. He needed the break. He’s been at it for hours.” Stan glanced at Addie. “I think we’d about reached the end.” He paused. “Jill and his cactus attack today.”
“That bloody bitch. Blaming him,” Addie said. “As if he didn’t already blame himself enough.” She leaned over the railing. “Jamie, will you leave those alone? There is nothing still stuck in your hands. Jesus.” She straightened up. “Best keep him company. He thinks there are things in him and they’ll get infected. They will, if he keeps trying to get ’em out when they aren’t even there.”
She started down the stairs at a stamping, determined pace. No wonder he sometimes resented too much help.
Stan pressed his shoulders into the chair’s back, tapping his thumbs on the armrests. “We’ve got a long, bad history with Jill Betts. Have you read her books?”
“Bits and pieces. The introduction to The Urban Shaman.” Mae noted Stan’s subtle wince. “I thought that was awful.”
“Yes, it was. Is that as far as you got?”
“I read a chapter in each of her books this afternoon.”
“What did you think?”
“The Woman in the Light wasn’t bad, kind of an adventure story. I couldn’t get into Sacred Cycles, but I’ve met some women that like it. I’m only in the first section, about puberty—”
Addie called, “She stole the Apache maiden part right out of Stan’s work and turned it into a load of crap.” Her tone changed to a gentle nag. “Show me your hands, love. Look. There’s—”
Jamie snapped, “Bloody fucking hell. Don’t push on it. Ow!”
“It hurts because there’s a hole. There’s nothing in it.”
Stan half-smiled at Mae. “You were saying?”
“I think I was done. I didn’t know Jill borrowed from you. Seems weird that she’s got it in for you like she does, if she uses your work. She’s done you more harm than you ever did to her.”
“That’s not how she sees it. Jill started out as a real scholar, before she went commercial. She was teaching at a college in Connecticut, ABD—”
“I’m sorry. What’s that?” It sounded like the way Jamie would write “bad.” Jill is abd.
“All but dissertation. If you don’t finish in seven years your program won’t let you, and if you don’t have your doctorate in six years after getting hired you don’t get tenure and you lose your job. Jill went on that South American trip and turned it into her first book instead of her dissertation. She’s made a great deal more money than she ever would have as a professor, but she still craves being seen as a scholar.”
“Is that why she steals your work, then?”
“It’s more complicated. She applied for a teaching job at Eight Northern about six years ago. I think she wanted the tribal college affiliation to make her look good to her followers, as well as to reclaim her intellectual reputation. I wasn’t the first academic to criticize her in print. The whole search committee agreed her recent scholarship was limited and shoddy and she would be an embarrassment to the college. I wrote the letter that declined to give her an interview.”
“That took nerve for her to apply, if she knew what you thought of her.”
“Actually, I read her work for the first time as part of the search process. She had a how-to-be-a-shaman book out at the time, something she put out in a hurry after Woman in the Light was so successful. Her publisher let it go out of print after she recycled parts of it into her later books—she even steals from herself—but anyway, I started looking into neo-shamanism after I read it. I published my article on it about a year or so later, nothing personal, strictly an assessment of her work and that of others in that field. The others took it in stride. Jill fought back.”
“She should have just written you a letter.”
“That wouldn’t have made her feel as if she’d won.”
“So, she’d really have felt like she’d lost if Kandy had told you—I’m sorry—did Jamie explain to you about me—that I ...” Mae faded, unsure how to approach being psychic, even though Stan had spent his career studying people who used spiritual powers.
“He did.” Stan took a silent moment. “I’m grateful that you learned what you did. Furious with Jill, grateful to you.” He pushed himself up straighter in his chair, took his glasses off, and rubbed the back of one ear. “I wish we’d known what Kandy’s home life was like. Maybe we could have helped.” He put his glasses back on. “Now that I know what her mother let go on—not much of a mother—I suspect that Kandy may have seen Jill as a mother figure.”
“Another bad one.”
Jamie came into view in the backyard desert, kicking a small rock along. Addie caught up with him, and they appeared to argue. He reached up and grabbed a sturdy branch of a twisted old juniper and swung out over the arroyo in a failed pull-up. Mae’s heart felt jerked by a string. His right hand couldn’t hold his weight and started slipping. Addie shouted, “You could kill yourself!”
Jamie landed next to her and examined his palms. “Nah. I’m pretty bad at that.”
A pause, and then they both laughed, Jamie snorting, Addie whooping. His mama thinks his death jokes are funny.
They walked along the edge of the arroyo, talking more quietly. Addie pushed his hands down as he tried to pick at imaginary thorns. Jamie glanced up at the deck and smiled at Mae with a mysterious crazy radiance. The sun shone golden on his unlikely hair and caught the gold glint in his smile. He looked to his mother again, draped an arm around her shoulders, and said something that made her pull away from him, hands raised in exasperation.
They reminded her of Gaia’s Tuvan shamans somehow, the way every conversation was an argument, yet warmth flowed while they fussed at each other. “Y’all seem like a real close family.”
“Yes ...” Stan watched Jamie and Addie. “But we didn’t do right by him. Chaotic life growing up. His sister thrived on it, but it made him fragile.”
“That doesn’t mean you messed up.”
“We did.” Stan’s voice grew melancholy. “We went to Australia the summer after he finished high school and left him here for his apprenticeship with the Santa Fe Opera. He had a complete breakdown. We hurried back, but we didn’t know how to help him, how to choose a psychiatrist, or what kind of progress to expect.” He shook his head, a Jamie-like gesture, as if something disagreeable had landed on him. “We were incredibly unsophisticated about mental health. We kept thinking we were doing the right thing, and that his doctors must be, too.”
“At least the treatment kept him alive.”
“No, Kandy kept him alive. In March of his senior year in college—I think the prospect of graduating and having to teach depressed him—he took all
his meds at once.” Stan seemed to sink into a shadow, his gaze fixed on a place on the deck floor. “We almost lost him again. Jill’s entirely wrong that this was some sort of spiritual event, but it’s true that medications and hospitalizations weren’t working. He was still depressed when he got out. Addie and I wanted to stay with him, or bring him here, but Jamie wouldn’t have anyone but Kandy. She moved in with him until graduation, made sure that he didn’t just eat and sleep, walked him to classes, helped him study for his finals ... She dropped everything. That was huge. As a silversmith she had to make the jewelry and travel to art shows or powwows to sell it in order to earn anything. Addie and I went down on weekends so Kandy could do some of that, but she was his rock. A loss, that girl. A terrible loss.”
Kandy must have told Jill all of this in the elevator and at their room service dinner. Jill’s claim that Jamie dragged Kandy down, that Kandy had been subservient to men, came from this unselfish act of love, a love as deep as that of a wife or a sister. Jill had used that story to make Kandy give up and drink. All because Stan Ellerbee didn’t like her books.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Unable to sleep even with the cat and the light, Jamie left Gasser on his bed and took his classical flute out on the deck. The stars shone like a thousand diamonds above the empty blackness of the arroyo. Their light caught the bracelet on his wrist. Kandy lived in her work, her hands forever setting each delicate planet into the silver sky. When he’d finally put her gift on again, a part of his soul came home, like a lost moon that had found its orbit.
His birthday had brought her back to him, too. They’d both been born in June. Geminis. Twins. He could see her laughing as she cut into a silly cake he’d made her, decorated with a candy rainbow of jellybeans and frosting. Every year, they’d celebrated their birthdays together with a ceremony, telling each other this is why I’m glad you’re alive, renewing their promise to live and not to let each other slide into darkness. A promise he’d broken again and again.