“If you need me, you know I’m here,” Chogyi Jake said. I could picture him just from the way he said the words. Leaning forward a little. The light playing off the stubble of his scalp. He had laugh lines all around his eyes, and when he was being gentle, they almost vanished into his skin.
“I know,” I said.
“All right, then,” he said.
“I’ll call you later. When I know more.”
I dropped the call and sat on the edge of the bed for a while. The voices on the radio chattered and slid around in an increasing and angry sizzle. The smells of garlic and tomato and onion and the dust that the heater kicked up. I wondered if crying without intending to counted as a symptom. Was I crying, or was it someone else? I hated the thought.
Ex knocked gently on the bedroom door and then let it swing open. I looked up at him through my hair. I probably looked like the bad guy from a Japanese horror film, but Ex just leaned against the frame, arms crossed. The light from the kitchen silhouetted him, making his loose white-blond hair look a little more like a halo.
“Chogyi?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell him yet?”
“No.”
“Jayné—”
“I don’t want to,” I said. “If we’re right, there’s nothing he can do we aren’t already doing. If we’re wrong, it’d just freak him out for no reason. Besides which, he’d tell Aubrey and Kim, and they have enough on their plates right now without worrying about me, right?”
Besides, I thought, I don’t want him to see me like this. I don’t want anyone to see me like this. Not even you.
“Dinner’s almost ready,” he said. “Fifteen minutes?”
“I’ll be there.”
He closed the door, and I went from feeling intruded on to wanting him to come back, like I was flipping a switch.
The best cook I’d ever known was a vampire. Chogyi Jake and Aubrey were about even for second. If there had been a pizza delivery that reached this far outside the city, Ex and I would have been smart to put them on speed dial. The evening meal that night consisted of slightly overcooked spaghetti noodles with store-bought marinara and frozen broccoli steamed to within an inch of its life. Ex closed his eyes and folded his hands, saying a silent grace. I just picked up my fork and started in. When he opened his eyes, he poured us both glasses of cheap red wine. Over the past weeks, it had become our ritual, and I couldn’t have said if it was a mutual acceptance—his faith and my doubt making room at the table for each other—or a constant low-level challenge.
When it had been the four of us, there had been a pattern. But now down to just two, and my life with Ex was built around the things we didn’t say. Things like I know you think you’re in love with me and You don’t have to be so patronizing and I need you. That’s what I wasn’t saying, anyway. I didn’t know what his silences meant.
I cleared away the dishes, starch and tomatoes sitting high in my stomach. Ex went back to the front room and stoked the fire, throwing on logs of dried cottonwood that burned bright and fast. He sat on the couch reading Thomas Merton. The clock claimed it was eight o’clock, but it was dark enough to be midnight. The single-glazed windows let the cold press in against me. I made myself a couple of slices of cinnamon toast and a cup of decaf tea as dessert. I ate and drank standing in the kitchen, washing the plate as soon as I was done. Then I went to bed.
When I was in middle school, I had a run of pretty spectacular nightmares. In the summer after my one and only year of college, while my love life and circle of friends dissolved around me, my brain had tried insomnia for a while. They were about the worst sleep disturbances I’d had until now.
I lay in the bedroom, wrapped in the dusty sheets. As soon as my head hit the pillow, all signs of fatigue vanished. My mind was more than awake; it was bouncing off the inside of my skull like a rhesus monkey in a caffeine overdose study. My thoughts flickered from the insurance we’d gotten on the new rental car, to whether I needed to fill out any tax paperwork, to my older brother’s impending marriage, to the way the lantern had hissed while I’d buried an innocent man alive, to the sound of Aubrey laughing when he’d just realized something. No thought connected to the one before it. There was no predicting where my mind would leap next. It was like someone had gotten my remote control and was channel surfing my head.
I tried the meditation and breathing exercises that Chogyi Jake had taught me to help focus my qi, the vital energy of life and magic. I couldn’t do it. Every time I started to focus on my breath, I got distracted with how my toe felt or whether my hand had moved on its own or what was going to happen next in Jennifer Aniston’s love life. An animal howled out beyond my window. If might have been a coyote, or it could have been a stray dog. From where I was, I couldn’t tell the difference.
I didn’t know I was falling asleep at all until I felt the shovel in my hand. The lantern hissed like a snake beside me, and something just under my skin shifted like a wave on the surface of a lake. A black coffin was in a hole in front of me. In a grave. Please, a voice shouted. I’m not dead. I’m not dead. I felt myself lifting the shovel, heard the dirt on the coffin. The dread was overwhelming.
I woke up screaming. My heart was racing, and I fumbled for the lights. The bedroom flooded white as daylight and the door burst open. Ex in a pair of dark green sweatpants and black T-shirt, and with a panicked expression. The light turned the windows into mirrors, and I caught a glimpse of myself huddled against the headboard. I was shaking, and I hated that I was shaking. Ex looked around the room, searching for danger.
There wasn’t any. There was nothing there but me. My phone showed 4:30 a.m. I said something obscene, and then, liking the way the words felt, I let loose a slow, steady stream of profanity, like air slowly leaking out of a balloon. The tension left Ex’s shoulders.
RAnother nightmare?” Ex asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
“Are you going to be able to sleep?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
He lifted an eyebrow and walked out of the room. I went to the bathroom, and I was still standing over the sink, washing my face and waiting for my hands to get steady again, when I heard him come back in. The squeak of the bed as his weight pressed it down. The soft, unmistakable zip of playing cards being shuffled. He was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, a legal pad and ballpoint pen beside him. The cards were a standard red-backed poker deck.
“Gin rummy?” he asked.
I pushed the hair back from my eyes. The prospect of trying to force myself back to sleep or else make it through the long hours until dawn with no company apart from my thoughts had been charmless anyway. The sense of relief left me smiling.
“Sure,” I said. “You deal first.”
We didn’t talk about it. Not about the secret thing living in my skin, not about the bad night in Chicago. Not about Eric or the nightmares or the shame that kept me from wanting anyone to know that I was struggling to make it through the day. Everything we said was about the cards or movies we’d seen when we were kids or the relative strengths of Wonder Woman and Superman. We were innocuous together. The anxiety faded slowly over the span of hours, but it faded.
It only occurred to me when the sky outside the window started shifting from black to charcoal and the distant mountains started to be a visible horizon that, with my dark hair and white T-shirt, I looked like I was trying to be a photo negative of Ex. I was up 620 points to 570 when Ex put down his cards, stretched, and yawned wide enough that I could see his back teeth.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
He touched my shoulder before he went out. Nothing more. Just a little contact, and then gone. While he banged around in the kitchen, I laid my head down on the pillow. I closed my eyes just for a minute to rest them. When I opened them again, it was almost noon. I heard the front door of the ranch house close, but then nothin
g, so I figured Ex had been heading outside. I got up, switched out my pajama bottoms for some blue jeans, pulled a thick gray wool sweater over my T-shirt, tugged on my boots, and headed out.
The kitchen and living room were shut down. Cleaned and everything put away the way it’d been when we’d arrived. The ashes were all gone from the fireplace. Ex’s suitcase and laptop carrier were by the door, ready to be packed out. I snagged a rubber band out of my pocket, pulled back my hair, and tied it into a rough ponytail before I walked outside.
The cold felt like being slapped. Sunlight that intense and total didn’t have a right to go with air that frigid. And it was dry enough I could feel my eyes getting gritty just walking across the wide gravel driveway.
Most of the places we’d gone, we’d rented minivans. But most of the places we’d been, there had been four of us and Aubrey had been driving. When I’d place. E met Ex, he’d had a little black sports car, a very pretty motorcycle, and a cot in a barely converted garage. Now he was leaning into a black and silver Mercedes two-seater with a roof that hardly seemed higher than my hips. Some tastes don’t change.
“Hey,” I said.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Ex said. “I’m just trying to figure out how we fit all the luggage in here last time.”
“With difficulty.”
“Yeah, that sounds right. Well, there’s still some coffee in the thermos there. I cleaned out the fridge, but we can stop in Española for some lunch if you’re hungry.”
“I take it we’re going somewhere?”
“We are,” he said. “Taos.”
I crossed my arms. “Taos?”
“Well, not in the city proper,” he said. “We’ll be going through it, though. There’s a little town about twenty minutes northwest of there called San Esteban.”
“I’m not going to see Chapin’s pet shrink,” I said.
“No. You’re not. The Catholic sanctuary in San Esteban is where Father Chapin and the others are. Their base of operations. We’re going to see them.”
“I don’t mean to be dim,” I said. “But why are we doing that?”
“While you were asleep, I figured out my Plan B. Father Chapin is … He’s the best at what he does. Better than I am. Better than those idiots in Hamburg. He and I have a history, but I thought that if I told him everything about your situation, we could ask him for help. That was Plan A, right? Ask for help.”
“That’s what I thought. So Plan B is … what? Ask again?”
Ex closed the car door. I expected it to have a deep, satisfying clump, but some hidden hydraulics kicked in at the last second, slowing the door down and settling it into place with a barely audible click.
“Plan B is insist.”
Chapter Three
Since Uncle Eric died, it felt like I’d spent more time traveling than being anywhere. I tried to count up the hours I’d spent in airplanes and airports, and came to the rough conclusion that I could have gone around the world five times. Marco Polo and Magellan were homebodies compared to me. I expected the drive north to Taos to be just another trip: a couple of hours in a vibrating metal box, ending someplace I didn’t know. Instead, going down the two-lane highway pointed out something I hadn’t realized. Pretty nearly all the places I’d been to in my long, slow survey of my domain had been cities with airports. With big hotels filled with smartly dressed people lining up to give me whatever I asked for because I’d bodysurfed in on a wave of money.
Now we drove through a handful of towns that were barely more than a few hundred yards where the speed limit went down. In a couple, I could have counted the buildings on my fingers. Twice, we passed little houses set back from the highway like some kind of suburban dimensional warp. I imagined some anonymous subdivision, thousands of identical houses with one inexplicable lot of mountain and grassland. It wouldn’t have seemed any stranger than this.
The cottonwoods by the roadside were black barked and dead looking. The names on the signs were places I’d never heard of, some of which seemed like jokes. I had a hard time believing there was a Rat, New Mexico, even if they were saying it in Spanish. Ex pointed out that there was Boca Raton in Florida, and Rat’s Mouth wasn’t particularly more dignified.
After we passed through Española, I let Ex change the road music from Pink Martini to the jazz piano that he preferred. There was more snow on the ground. At first, it only clung to the shadows where the sunlight couldn’t reach it, but every northward mile gave it more courage. By the time we were threading our way along with a frozen river to the left and sheer and towering cliffs to the right, there was as much white snow as brown earth or green pine.
I wondered what it would be like to live out here, away from the world. I had a reflexive longing for it, as powerful as hunger. To fill up the heating oil, haul in a stack of books as high as my head and enough food to get through the winter sounded like a little slice of heaven. If I’d tried it, I’d probably have been walking the fifty miles to Starbucks within the week. It was a nice fantasy. That was all.
I’d also thought that we’d stick out on the road, a gleaming back sports car twisting through the back roads of rural New Mexico. We spent about half the time from Española to Taos between a silver Lexus and a Cadillac Escalade with a ski rack mounted to its roof. The closer we got to the city, the more the traffic seemed divided. Beater pickup trucks and fifteen-year-old Saturn sedans grudgingly made way for hundred-thousand-dollar SUVs.
The car had a GPS, but Ex didn’t use it. We went straight through town and out the other side before we took an obscure fork from the main road. The road angled north and west, winding along the contours of the land. The asphalt didn’t look like it had ever been adulterated by paint. The roadside was mottled with snow and ice, but the pavement was clear. A chain-link fence rusted in the middle of a field for no discernible reason. The traffic signs we passed were crusted with old snow, the top half of the speed-limit numbers fading to gray. I didn’t realize we were getting close until Ex pulled the car to the right, eased down a short road, and killed the engine.
San Esteban spread out before us. Three streets with a few buildings on each one, like a giant had scattered a handful of gravel. About half were clapboard with pitched roofs. The others were flat-topped adobe with brown stucco and windows so deep that birds had built nests on the sills. A couple of metal Quonset huts crouched together at the north end. Once, they’d been painted in psychedelic swirls that still hung on as paint flakes. One had a gas pump out front so old it wouldn’t read credit cards.
Ex had stopped by one of the adobe buildings with the deep-set windows. At a guess the sanctuary might have been a school once. Or a nunnery. There were no signs on the building to say what it was used for now. There were no street signs. When I looked at my cell phone it was wavering between digital roam with one bar and no service. The whole town was well on its way to not existing at all. Ex put the keys in his coat pocket, took a deep ath, and nodded to himself.
“Stay here,” he said.
“Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”
I thought he smiled a little as we got out of the car. I trailed him down the walk to the blue-painted double doors. They were wood, and so worn by the years it looked like the paint was holding them together. The air bit at my earlobes and made my nose run a little. I kept my hands stuffed deep in my pockets and reminded myself to buy gloves next time the occasion arose. And maybe a scarf. A motorcycle blatted past, the only traffic sound there was. Ex knocked on the door.
We waited. I looked around. Across the street and about twenty yards farther along, a small house hunkered down in the snow. The windows had sheet plastic over the screens and a television flickered inside, blurred to mere light and movement. On the street, a beat-up gray Yukon and a sedan that had first hit the road when I was getting out of grade school.
Thirty or forty crows perched in the bare cottonwood across the street, calling to one another and shifting uncomfortably like old men at a bus station
.
There was something wrong. It wasn’t the stillness, exactly. Or the cold. Or the quiet. The world felt thin here, the spiritual world just outside ours—the place that we called the Pleroma or Next Door—close enough to touch. The sanctuary at San Esteban felt like magic, and it made my flesh crawl. Ex knocked on the door again.
“Maybe they’re out doing the thing,” I said. “Wind demon busting.”
“They’re here,” he said, nodding toward the car and Yukon.
The crows clacked at one another accusingly. There was a term, I thought, for a group of crows the same way there was for a school of fish or a pride of lions. It was right on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t quite remember it. With my black coat and hair, I felt like I should be able to spread my arms and fly up to the winter-killed tree, squat on the branches, and look down at the world.
As if alarmed that I’d even think it, the crows took to the air, cawing and beating their wings. They circled up into the hazy white sky, turned south, and departed. I watched them go, and behind me, the blue doors opened. The man who stood in the shadows beyond was maybe thirty. His skin was the brown of eggshells, and his black hair was combed straight back. A sense of weariness weighted down the air around him; I kept expecting him to sway on his feet. He wore the Roman collar under a thick wool sweater. When he spoke, it was with an accent that made me think of being eight years old with a crush on Ricky Ricardo. Old Havana, as romantic and unreal as Middle-earth.
“I’m sorry. You’ve come at a very bad time. You’ll have to go away. Come back later.”
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” Ex said.
The man in the doorway looked up, shocked. His eyes were so brown they were black, and his expression changed from a shock that was almost fear to disbelief to an incandescent joy in the course of a single breath.
“Chewy? Is that you?”
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