Louise jangled the keys. “Your rooms are next door to each other.”
The students took this as their cue. “See you,” and “Bye,” they said and moved on. Angel glanced over her shoulder at Corpse.
Mr. Handler opened the trunk and pulled out our suitcases, his computer bag.
“The rooms have Internet, but remember there’s no cell phone coverage down in this hollow. If you want to make a call, you have to hike up there.” Louise pointed to the top of the mountain behind us. A double-track road ran straight up it. Corpse sighed. We’d promised Gabe we’d call.
Mr. Handler laughed. “I remember well.”
Our rooms were on the near end of the closest building. Louise opened the first door and we followed her in. “This will be your room, Oona,” she said.
Two single beds, a kiva fireplace, a pine dresser, a bathroom sink with a mirror; the toilet and shower were in a room beyond. The wall of windows displayed that panorama of ridges. The afternoon sun splashed in. We stepped onto the patio.
Mr. Handler took another deep breath and savored the smell. “It’s so good to be here.”
We headed back in, and Louise showed Corpse how to control the heat in the room.
“Dinner is at six. Breakfast at eight. Lunch, noon,” she said.
“I remember,” Mr. Handler said. “Great food.”
Corpse thought how she’d miss Sugeidi’s cooking.
“Okay,” Louise said. “See you at dinner then.”
She left and Mr. Handler said, “Need anything?”
Corpse trailed behind him, running her fingers along the dresser. “No.”
He turned and caught her looking around the room, saw her doubt. “It’s good you’re here, Oona.” He closed the door.
Corpse ambled to one of the beds, plopped down on its edge, and buried her face in her hands. Pathetic. After a while, she peeked through her fingers, ran her pinkie down her new nose. She walked to the mirror over the sink. She’d been avoiding mirrors since that first day Gabe came by the house. Now Corpse stared at a stranger—still strikingly pretty, yet her nose seemed all wrong. Her gaze trembled. Traces of scar laced one cheek. The other cheek, her chin, her forehead were still faintly mottled. I’d noticed that people’s eyes bounced around her face, unable to take in the whole, as if searching for one trustworthy place to land.
She listened for the screeching that had accompanied mirrors for so long. Heard only silence. She pressed her two-fingered hand against her cheek, moved it until her chin rested in the gap where her ring finger and pinkie had been. That made her smile.
She recognized herself then. The Oona from way back, troubled, but able to laugh and crave soccer and have a purpose. She reached out, traced her mirrored nose on the cool glass. She peered into those eyes till it seemed she’d crossed a boundary.
Thirteen
From Oona’s journal:
… running water attracts our consciousness like a magnet and draws a small part of it along in its wake. It is a force that can act so powerfully that one temporarily loses one’s consciousness and involuntarily falls asleep.
—Viktor Schauberger
Corpse served herself tamales, beans, salad from the buffet and settled beside Mr. Handler at a round table in the school’s dining hall. It had obviously once been a restaurant. Eight tables were spread across the half-moon-shaped room, and a bank of windows looked out on the panoramic southern view. A swinging kitchen door was on the back wall. On one side stretched a buffet table. On the other, a table with bins for dirty dishes and silverware.
“Oona,” Louise said, “this is Dr. Yazzie, our headmaster.” Dr. Yazzie was the guy in the gold T-shirt with the long braid we’d seen earlier. Now Corpse saw the symmetry of his forehead, cheeks, and chin; a movie-star face, smooth but for creases at his eyes.
“Dr. Benson, our flute master,” Louise continued. “Ms. Cole, who teaches history, and Mr. Gonzalez, who teaches science.”
“Hello,” Corpse said. First names applied only for the counseling office, it seemed. The flute master’s face surprised her. It was light-skinned, and angled enough to cast shadows on itself, even in the dining hall’s low light.
“Oona is here with Perry to help me out,” Louise said.
Corpse took a bite and paused. Mr. Handler wasn’t joking about the food being good. While she ate, Mr. Handler asked about students he’d counseled last year. Corpse inventoried the room.
About forty students were sprinkled across the eight tables in groups of four or five. Several students were lighter-skinned than Corpse. At one table, a girl she’d have guessed was white talked fast, her face a storm, while the girl sitting with her nodded. At another, guys threw something small and silver, and the girls around them giggled and squealed. But for the shape of the tables and the quality of the food, it could have been Crystal High’s cafeteria. I drifted toward the beamed ceiling, took stock of all those dark heads.
“You know the statistics, Perry. These kids are smart, but most need to feel they have a place within the school.” Dr. Yazzie’s words drew Corpse back. She studied him but thought of Gabe, whose friends picked on him ceaselessly for being a good student. Chingado they’d call him: “Fucked.” It was good natured, sort of proud really, yet Gabe endured a constant current of banter. She thought of the Chicano students she knew who cared about grades and wondered why Gabe didn’t hang with them instead. We’d avoided talking about it with him. Our being together was a similar thing. Except he’d been the farthest thing from chingado. Corpse snorted, and eyes around the table zinged to her.
Mr. Handler cleared his throat. “What about Susan?”
“She’s doing great,” Louise said.
“She’s a survivor, that one,” Mr. Gonzalez said. He resembled a young Albert Einstein: broom moustache, frizzy hair.
“You know her aunt is on the Navajo police force? That aunt’s been a good role model,” Louise said.
“Cindy made it, didn’t she?” Mr. Handler said.
Dr. Yazzie and Louise glanced at each other, then at Corpse, in the way adults do when they’re trying to decide whether to divulge a thing in front of you.
“Her father died.” Louise’s mouth, which arced down naturally, stretched down in a real frown. “Her mother had to get a job, so Cindy went home to help out with the kids.”
“She’s so smart,” Mr. Handler said.
Louise nodded. “But her family needed her. Her father drove his truck in the ditch. Drunk. Tried to walk home on a frigid night. They found him sitting, frozen, at the entrance to their driveway. Apparently neighbors were driving past, waving.”
Ms. Cole shook her head. “I hadn’t heard that last part.”
Mr. Handler cleared his throat.
Corpse focused on her tamales’ texture, hoping to hide her flush. Did the teachers know she’d frozen to death? From the corners of her eyes, she could see students glancing at her and talking to each other. She imagined them saying Why is she here? Have you seen how she walks? Look at her hand!
“What’s Roberta done that she thinks I’ll be disappointed in?” Mr. Handler said.
Louise laughed. “She skipped that summer internship you arranged at the hospital. Didn’t even call to let them know.”
“Damn,” Mr. Handler said.
Louise looked at Corpse frankly. To Mr. Handler, she said, “You know, she’s older than the rest. Turned eighteen last May.”
“Yes,” he said.
“She took a job as a stripper instead. Still goes back and works weekends. Calls herself ‘Destiny.’”
Corpse realized her tamale-laden fork was suspended in air. She moved it to her mouth.
Mr. Handler set down his fork and slumped back in his chair. He scanned the students in the room. Some of them had finished eating and were bussing their trays. Corpse followed his eyes to Roberta
, who sat with her shapely back to us. I had an image of Roberta in a string bikini, slithering along a pole over an audience of salivating men, some hungrily waving dollar bills.
“Doesn’t she have to be twenty-one?” Mr. Handler said.
Louise gave him a look.
We were eighteen too.
Angel sat across the table from Roberta, and I noticed how she watched Corpse. Corpse’s eyes met hers. Angel’s mouth turned down, but like Louise’s, it was natural. Her eyebrows arched on the same path, a silky brow above. Then Angel pushed her tray forward, leaned on her elbows, and focused her attention on the guy next to her, the one who’d read about his grandmother at the conference.
Corpse forced herself to look out the windows at the stretch of dormant grass and sidewalk illuminated by footlights. It was trippy, being in a room with these people who’d settled in our mind as an ideal. Like peering through a dream. A dream you couldn’t wake from. These weren’t the people we’d imagined inhabiting that flute music. The ones who’d made us feel poor. Maybe the bullshit had been those conference readings. And then she thought, Or maybe it was us.
“You know,” Mr. Handler said, “I read the statistics. You even told them to me, but the reality is a lot harder to swallow.”
“Yes, it is,” Dr. Yazzie said. He studied Corpse’s two fingers holding her fork, and his hand slipped into the pocket of his chinos.
After dinner, Corpse and Mr. Handler strolled along the road back to their rooms. The moon was new, and stars commanded the sky. Each step along the asphalt was like walking blind. Mr. Handler was quiet. I imagined I could see the students he’d discussed at dinner hovering in his thoughts as Corpse studied the inky gaps between the stars. We neared the dorm, which cast a frail light. A girl’s playful shriek and then muffled voices reached into the night.
At Corpse’s door, Mr. Handler said, “Why don’t you take your time tomorrow morning. Get homework done, relax, whatever. Come by the office in the afternoon. We should have some work for you by then.”
“Okay,” Corpse said.
“I’m going to get an early start. They serve breakfast till nine. See you at lunch?”
“Okay.”
He pursed his lips and nodded. He swallowed, and his Adam’s apple went up, down.
Corpse wanted to say I’m sorry about those kids, but I got in the way. She unlocked her door with the key. “Good night,” she said.
“Sleep well, Oona,” Mr. Handler said.
Before she closed the door, I saw Mr. Handler take three steps toward the mountain, cross his arms, rock back on his heels, and peer up. I supposed it couldn’t have hurt, that kindness.
Fourteen
From Oona’s journal:
Right in the middle of this rushing cold water … Schauberger pointed to the motionless stance of a so-called “stationary trout” … holding a stick over it, or even the shadow of the stick, was enough to make the trout dart upstream. The direction of escape was never downstream, but it always accelerated upstream. Very odd, because one would normally consider movement downstream to be the fastest avenue of escape …
—Coats, Living Energies
Corpse’s noisy breaths rose white before her. She continued her long strides up the steep double-track, hoping to get warm. The valley, shaded from the morning sun by the mountain, trapped the cold. She pictured Gabe’s breath clouds, hoped to reach them before he walked from his five-room, well-tended house along Crystal Creek, the one his family had owned since before the ski area arrived fifty years ago, to Manny’s bass-thudding Blazer for his ride to school.
She worked to lessen the bob in her gait, willed her phantom pinkie toes to disappear. Halfway up she pulled her phone out of her fleece jacket pocket and found she had coverage. Five minutes till Manny arrived. She speed-dialed Gabe and, as his phone rang, scanned the landscape. She unzipped her fleece and fingered her heart necklace. I perched in the branches of a juniper.
She’d emailed with Gabe last night. Emailed with Mom too, and learned Dad had fled to Chicago for the week. Corpse had lain staring at the ceiling, unsettled by his leaving, then wrapped herself in a blanket, ambled onto the patio, settled into a plastic chair, and gazed at the night sky like she was reading Braille. She’d woken hours later, stiff and craving Gabe.
“Hey,” he said, surprised.
“Hey,” Corpse said. I imagined her sliding along that strip-club pole. She rubbed her forehead. “I needed to hear your voice.”
Gabe chuckled. “So you hiked up that mountain?”
“Partway.”
“I must rate.”
“You rate,” Corpse said.
In their silence, she sensed me sensing her. She glanced around at the arid forest and listened to Gabe’s breaths, imagined inhaling his presence through the phone. Was his breath still breath when it reached her ear? She wanted to tell him that Dad had fled to Chicago. Yell it across the expanse. But she couldn’t even whisper it.
Gabe said, “I heard back from Harvard yesterday.”
“And?” She pictured him standing in his entryway, wearing his letter jacket with the big C.
“I’m in!”
After visiting Yale last summer, Dad striding around like he owned the place, we’d ridden the two-hour train to Boston, near Harvard. We’d told Gabe about that train connecting the two schools, thinking he’d never get accepted.
“Wow, Gabe! That’s amazing! Congratulations!”
“Yeah, thanks. I know soccer helped because they said I wasn’t really supposed to hear yet, but they wanted to confirm I’d play. Offered a monster scholarship. Dad’s flipped out. Even with the scholarship it costs a fortune. Well, a fortune to us. Anything’s a fortune to us. But I tell you one thing—I’m not sticking around here to be a stone mason the rest of my life.”
Corpse traced her nose. She wondered how to be a new self. She hunched over, felt like she crumpled on the hollow space I’d left.
A hawk lit from the tree beside mine. I darted to Corpse as she flinched to the side.
“You okay?” Gabe said.
“Yes.” Her hand came to her heart. “Gabe, I got into Yale.”
Her keeping it from him stretched between them as silence.
“How long have you known?”
“A week.”
Silence again. The hawk soared out over the flat area at the mountain’s base and began a giant spiral.
“I just … ”
“It’s all right, Oona.” She could hear his hurt.
“You must be so excited. I mean, Harvard. Nobody gets into Harvard.”
“Nobody gets into Yale.”
“My dad made that happen.”
“Yes, well, being Chicano didn’t hurt me either. You’ve got to take a break when it’s there. Life is hard enough.”
The hawk hovered at eye-level a half-mile out, adjusting its wings in small movements to stay in place. Corpse imagined riding its back, felt herself right there in its feathers, the wind whipping her hair. It dove, so suddenly she felt suspended and stepped back. It disappeared into the sagebrush, only the tips of its stretched wings visible.
“You wouldn’t chose your college just to be close to me, would you?” she said, and heard Manny’s car honk.
“Look, I was never interested in anyone till you, Oona. I’ve never told you, but my dad has a saying: No macho here. Hernandez men love big, and they love once.”
A plane spewed a contrail across the sky. Corpse noticed contrails written by gone planes, fuzzy as they dispersed. She listened to Gabe’s front door close and the bass of Manny’s Blazer grow louder. The hawk’s wings disappeared into the sage. I wondered at the evaporation rising off the desert panorama before us: Water, a ghost here.
“Will you call tomorrow?” Gabe said.
“Chingado,” Manny said. “Hang up, married.”
“I’ll let you go,” Corpse said. She slid her phone into her coat pocket. “I’m such bullshit,” she said to the air. After a minute, “Rest of my life.”
Graduating from high school was the end of being not-adult. Gabe, eighteen and hardly kissed. I pictured him beneath Roberta’s stripper pole, looking up at Corpse. Corpse barked a laugh. Felt it tumble down the hollow space inside her as the hawk burst from the sage with something dangling from its beak. It climbed, crossing one contrail. Two. Three.
She turned away from the landscape, toward the school’s valley, and pulled out her phone. She took a deep breath and pulled up her texts. Forty-two. Mostly from Ash. Corpse opened the most recent one. Two weeks ago, our first day back at school: U r a user!!! She opened the next, two weeks before that: Where’s my crown???!!! The day we returned to Chateau Antunes: Wat hav I dun? The day we woke in the hospital: Text me!!!!! Pleez!!!!!!
Corpse’s hands fell to her sides. That tear trickling over Ash’s cheekbone rose in her memory: Ash’s pain laid bare by the moonlight. I pictured Ash on the stage at the winter formal, balancing that crown in front of her up-do. Saw that crown bobbing on Corpse’s head as the paramedics hustled our stretcher along that suicide trail, their moonglow shadows cast long. That crown growing looser, looser, till it bounced off, the paramedic in back stepping on it. Mashing it into the soft snow without noticing.
Corpse blew out her breath and erased all the texts. No way could she go back to being best friends with Ash, but she could at least show some compassion and smooth things over when she got home.
The sun lit her shoulders, making them tingle. She thought how Gabe’s handsome father had never remarried. Didn’t even date.
She heard steps. Angel, wearing navy blue sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt, jogged down the double-track.
“Hey,” Corpse said.
“Hey,” Angel said.
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