by Beverly Bird
“We’re going to get arrested,” she breathed.
“You won’t. You haven’t done anything. You’re just along for the joyride.”
“Oh, God,” she groaned.
He picked up the interstate and gave the Dodge enough gas to make it hurtle. “Maybe we ought to stick to the back routes,” she suggested weakly.
He shot her a hard look, then snapped his eyes back to the road. “The best thing that could happen to us is a cop jumping on our tail. We’ll lead him right to the reservation with us to find this bastard.”
If we can find him. “Oh.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to happen. By now everybody in the newspaper office probably knows what’s going on, knows what we’re doing, and unless the owner of this thing is a real pill who hates kids, they’re not going to report it or press charges.”
How could he think so clearly in the middle of this nightmare? But that was Dallas, she thought, always the survivor, always the one with the upper hand, the control. In that moment she loved him so much it hurt, and she felt immensely comforted by his strength.
He was right about the cops. They drove for the better part of an hour and no one came up on their tail.
“Start talking,” he said finally.
She flinched. “Where? Where do you want me to start?” Guide me in this. Help me, please, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.
“First I want to hear just how you thought you were going to worm your way into our lives and get him back again.”
Her heart lurched painfully. “You can’t think—no,” she breathed, stunned. “That wasn’t—I didn’t—”
“Was seducing me part of your goddamn plan?” he interrupted, his voice a snarl full of so much hurt. “Did you figure to make Daddy love you so you could become a nice, cozy part of the kid’s life again? Wrap me around your fingers so you could get to him?”
Love her? What was he saying? Then she realized that he thought that everything that had happened between them was some plot, some heinous machination.
“No, Dallas,” she said again. “I didn’t want that.”
He punched a fist against the steering wheel. “Why, then? What the hell did you think you were doing? You came into our lives, lady. I didn’t search you out.”
“I didn’t think!” she wailed. “I...didn’t...think. There was the Tsosie study, so I sent the letter—because then you’d contact Barbara and tell her how Ricky was doing and I’d know. All I wanted was to know! I needed something, some consolation...” No, no, no, she thought, she wouldn’t cry again, but she couldn’t help it. “That was all,” she choked. “That was all I wanted, but then it all got out of hand because Barbara didn’t know your wife had died and I screwed up and told her. And then she wanted Ricky in the study and you had to drive out here and set up these damned visitations. And even then I tried to stay out of it, but you wouldn’t let me. And then there was this wolfman business.
“I would have left you alone when it was all over, I swear I would have. Because...that night the wolfman broke into your apartment everything changed. But because it changed I didn’t want to lose it all until I had to.” She turned to him. “Damn it, I’m never going to see him again! I just wanted a couple more weeks to love him, to enjoy him! Is that so selfish, so wrong?”
And what about me? “Yeah,” he said flatly. “Under the circumstances, it stinks.”
He kept his eyes on the road, his jaw looking as solid as granite. He didn’t believe her, Ellen thought helplessly.
He didn’t want to believe her. God help him, he couldn’t let himself believe her. She had lied so fluidly, so many times.
“So what exactly is it that you were going to tell me?” he asked finally, tightly. “Just out of curiosity, how were you planning to get out? Were you going to tell me the truth, or something like ‘See you around, sucker, it’s been real’?”
She swallowed carefully. “I was going to tell you the truth tomorrow.”
“How long have you known where he was?”
“I found out when I got my nursing degree and started volunteering at Our Lady,” she said hoarsely.
“Did you do it on purpose?” How conniving are you? How far back does this go?
“What?” she asked. She wasn’t sure what he was getting at.
“Did you get your nursing degree so you could volunteer at Our Lady and find out who had your son?”
She flinched. “No. I got my degree because it was the only way they would let me work at the clinic. I’ve been a native healer since my grandmother taught me when I was little, but that wasn’t good enough for the health service.”
“So once you were all legal, you thought you’d try to find out where Ricky was.”
“No.” She was getting angry. He was twisting this. “Once I got my degree, volunteering was a chance to—to atone. To get my hozro back. It was...it was gone for so long.” And it had hurt so badly, had left her so empty, but he wouldn’t understand that. She knew instinctively that he didn’t want to understand. He wanted to hate her.
“I started volunteering, and I did it there because they were the ones who took my baby. It seemed to close the circle. And then, I don’t know, after about a year, I was there one Saturday afternoon by myself, and it occurred to me that I could find out where he was, what had happened to him. I could just look up his file.” She swallowed carefully. “So I did, and then I started trying to find out more about you and your wife. I found out that she had died and where you worked and where you lived and that he went to a private school. And it was enough.”
“For a while,” he snapped.
“It would have been enough forever,” she retorted, “but then that study gave me an opportunity I couldn’t turn away from, a way to be sure.”
“Who’s his father?”
She stiffened. “Does it matter?”
He thought about it. Did it? Yes. But did he want to know for himself or for Ricky? He couldn’t be sure. He finally nodded.
“A boy I went to school with,” she managed to say. “I was seventeen. The Res schools are mostly boarding facilities. It breeds a sort of cloistered, intimate world. It’s like...a kid can easily forget there’s another one, a real world, right outside those walls and that sooner or later they have to go back out there.”
“You couldn’t marry him?”
“No. He lied to me. He was clan.”
Dallas felt a jolt. “Would that put some kind of curse on Ricky?” Did this nightmare have something to do with her?
“No,” she answered. “It put some kind of curse on me. I fixed it by getting my hozro back, by balancing things with my work at the orphanage. I don’t know about his father. He left the Res.”
“Would you have married him if you could have?” He didn’t care, damn it. That definitely didn’t have anything to do with Ricky. “Would you?” he demanded more harshly.
He glanced at her and saw her chin came up. She got that prickly look.
“Yes,” she said defiantly. “To keep my child, yes, I would have.”
“Did you love him?”
“I was seventeen!” she repeated without really answering.
“Okay, you were smitten, then.”
“I was hormonal.”
“And he’s gone now.”
“He’s been gone for eight years.”
“And you’ve been alone all this time?”
He was shooting questions at her so fast she felt confused.
He knew as soon as he asked the last one that it was true. He wondered how he could have missed it all before. But he hadn’t, not really.
If a woman like you is alone, it’s by choice. He had said that to her, knowing even then, deep down, suspecting. He had known that this Jericho character wasn’t enough to make her fear intimacy—that she had chosen him because she feared intimacy. Only something deeply scarring could make her the way she was, so defensive, so intent upon pushing people away before they
got too close. He had known. And because he couldn’t bear to know, he had looked the other way.
“I have to think about this,” he said tightly. “Later.”
She managed to nod.
“Right now with Ricky—”
“I know,” she said softly, and her voice was husky again. And suddenly he understood that, too. Understood all the times it had dropped and thickened with emotion, beginning with the first time they had met. It had happened then because she had known who he was—he was the one who hadn’t had a clue as to how intimately their lives were already entwined. Because she had deceived him.
He felt like a fool.
“One more question,” he said roughly. “You told me once that family is important to you Navajo. I remember you said that at the Kinaalda when you were explaining about clans.”
“Yes,” she managed.
“And you said your parents were traditional.”
“They pretended to be.”
“And they let you give their grandchild up for adoption?”
“They made me give their grandchild up for adoption.”
He was quiet, waiting, but she didn’t continue. And he knew that this definitely wasn’t any of his business, that this didn’t have anything more to do with his son than the issue of her loving the father had. But he pushed anyway because he couldn’t fathom how anyone could make this woman do anything she didn’t want to do.
“How?” he demanded again.
“They threw me out.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, then she pushed the words out fast—as though to get them said and be done with it. “Shadow Tshongely—the woman we were talking about at the Kinaalda, the one carrying twins—found me eight months pregnant, camping out in a cave at the foot of Beautiful Mountain, and she took me home to her parents and brushed me off and fed me and saw me through. She’s like that, always saving something. I stayed with the Bedonies until the baby was born and then Shadow brought the Our Lady people to me right there in the hospital. I couldn’t stay with the Bedonies forever and I didn’t even have a job, so I let him go.” Her jaw hardened. “My mother killed herself six months later and left a note saying the whole thing had disrupted her hozro. My father left the Res. I haven’t seen him since the funeral.”
Dallas was appalled. A cave? Why not? She was so fiercely self-sufficient, almost as if she was trying to prove something. But her mother killing herself and blaming it on her mistake? He struggled to imagine a parent doing such a thing and felt only swimming uncertainty, dazing disbelief.
Something in him wanted to stop driving, to reach out and gather her to him. Some part of him wanted to share and soothe the ache that she must have been living with for so long. An inner voice hissed at him, demanding to know if he would have done any of it any differently. How could he sit in his ivory tower and judge—he, whose worst teenage trauma had been discovering that a disk jockey with a pure-sex voice was ugly?
In the end, he only tightened his hands on the wheel. Almost absently, he noticed that his knuckles were white.
“Where are we going?” he asked finally when he could trust his voice. She sent him a vaguely startled look.
“The Blessing Way. Uncle Ernie should be there, but if he’s not, maybe Jericho can help us.”
“The platonic paragon you were in love with?” He wondered, astounded, where that had come from.
Her voice dropped. Damn her voice. “I’m not sure that’s what it was,” she answered. “Not any more.”
He changed the subject. It seemed safest. “He’s a medicine man?”
She nodded. “One of the new generation. He’s good, but I don’t think he can tremble yet.”
“Why not?”
“It takes time, age, a very deep rapport with the Holy Ones.”
“Of course,” he said, then he grimaced when he realized that his voice sounded decidedly sarcastic. As she had said earlier, what other option did he have but to go along on this crazy ride?
He pulled in at the next rest area to use the phone. Ellen knew as soon as he came out of the booth that the news had been frustrating, fruitless. He slid behind the wheel again and put the car into gear too hard. Her stomach hurt and her head was pounding.
“The cops have the lines tapped. They’re waiting, but there’s been nothing,” he said flatly before she could ask. “Not a word.”
* * *
Ricky sat at the lopsided card table and tried very hard to think what John Detective might do about all this. But most of all he thought about his dad.
Boy, this was going to blow him away.
He wished more than anything that the Navajo guy with the funny eyes would at least call and tell his father that he was okay. It would have been good if he had wanted some kind of ransom, Ricky thought, because then he would have to call. But he didn’t. He wanted those stupid pictures. Next to wishing he could talk to his dad, Ricky wished that that lady had never, ever stopped at his car that day in Albuquerque.
What if his dad thought he was dead or something?
Ricky got a squirmy, nasty feeling in the pit of the stomach. His dad had seemed pretty okay this past month. No matter what he said, Ricky was pretty sure he was in love and was consolimating with Ellen. But he was also pretty sure that if his dad thought anything bad had happened to him, then he would come all undone all over again, even worse this time than when his mom had died, because Ricky knew he was all he had left.
That made him feel like crying. But geez, he was eight years old and John Detective was only nine, and John Detective never cried no matter what. Ricky thought about him again, about what he might do now, because that was a lot better than thinking about his dad.
First John Detective always tried to find out where he stood.
“Hey, you,” he hollered at the Navajo man who had taken him.
The guy was standing at a dirty window at the front of the warehouse they were in. It was set into the kind of door that was usually in the front of a garage.
The man finally looked in his direction.
Ricky got up and walked right over to him, even though his legs felt a little bit shaky. He looked up at him with what he hoped was a tough look.
“Are you gonna kill me or what?” he demanded.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
Ricky’s stomach squirmed worse. “How come? What are you waiting for?”
“The pictures.”
“I told you where they were.”
“You lied, brat. Now go sit down and shut up.”
Ricky started to, then he decided that maybe he should be a pest. Mrs. DiNardo said that when he was a pest she couldn’t think about her crossword puzzles. And if this Indian guy wanted to kill him, then he didn’t want him to be able to think how to do it.
“I didn’t lie. I put them in the glove compartment of my dad’s car.”
“They weren’t there.”
“So then he found them and he’s gonna know. He’s gonna know you’re the one who took me and he’s gonna come and kill you.”
“We’ll see.”
“How’d you know I had them, anyway?”
“Because I’m a witch.”
Ricky laughed at that. “Yeah? So where’s your broom?”
“I don’t need one. I change.”
“Into what?”
“Animals.”
“Like a badger?”
“Exactly like that.”
All of a sudden he felt as if he had to go to the bathroom, but he managed to bring his chin up. “Okay, so show me. Turn into a dog. I always wanted a dog.”
“Go sit down and shut up,” the man witch said again. Something mean in his voice told Ricky he was really being a pest now.
“So how’d you know that lady gave them to me?” he persisted. “The pictures, I mean. Did you turn into a bird and fly over the car?”
“My men were watching.”
“So how come they didn’t just come and get the pictures from me right away?”
Yeah, he was being a pest, all right.
“Because we thought my secretary still had them, that maybe she just asked you for directions or something.”
Ricky thought about that. “So when those guys caught her and she didn’t have the pictures, then you knew I did.”
“Smart kid.”
The man witch smiled. It was a weird look, Ricky thought, because only his mouth moved. The rest of his face stayed sort of hard. That was why he had funny eyes.
He lit another cigarette. As big as it was, the place stank from them. They had been here all night and now the sun was going down again and this guy just kept smoking. He laid the pack and his matches against the little pane of the garage-door window and Ricky scowled, then suddenly he knew exactly what John Detective would do with those matches.
He tried not to look around for something burnable right away—at least not while he was standing so close to the guy. He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and shambled back to the table, deliberately scuffing his heels. That drove Mrs. DiNardo nuts.
“I’m hungry,” he whined.
The man shot a look at him. “Shut up.”
“And I gotta go to the bathroom,” he complained.
“Again?”
“Yeah. I got dysentery.”
“Huh?” The man gave him a weird look, but he finally nodded. “All right. Go ahead. Get out of my hair for a while. You’ve got three minutes, then I’m coming after you.”
Ricky got up from the table and ran to the back of the warehouse. There was an old paint can there that he had been using to pee in. Now he looked beyond it. Boxes! Cardboard boxes, maybe seven or eight of them. He looked up. There were even more of them, tons of them, piled up on rafters near the ceiling.
Suddenly he heard voices coming from up front. He hurried back that way.
The Indian guy was talking to two white guys—the same ones who had chased that poor lady up the street in Albuquerque that day, he thought. And there were fast-food bags on the table now. He really was starving, but Ricky ignored them. He figured it was more important to get close enough to try to hear what they were saying.