“Then, why don’t you put it off for a while? Maybe he’ll have time later.”
“Time isn’t really his problem,” she returned, pushing birthday party pictures toward him so he could divide them up. “He just doesn’t want to go through these. It’s too hard. But I’d hoped he’d come, anyway,” she continued as Rio, seeming to know exactly what she’d wanted, started picking out similar poses and putting them into two separate piles. “With him being so much older, we weren’t particularly close when we were growing up. I’d thought that going through these together might be good for us both.”
She reached into the box at her elbow. “Hal could have told me more about our oldest brother,” she said, laying a photo on the table between them and pointed to the oldest child. “Roy ran away from home when I was two, so I don’t remember him at all. He was named after my father, so I guess he’s really Roy, Jr.”
Rio picked up the photo, a Polaroid that had been taken in someone’s yard. Three blond kids faced the camera. The only one with a smile was the tiny little girl with huge blue eyes. The boys, one narrow-shouldered and thin, the other taller and beginning to show some muscle, looked as if they wanted only to get the shot over with.
Rio was already aware of Eve’s older sibling. He’d come across a reference to him while searching the newspaper’s archives for possible enemies of Olivia. She had spoken about her runaway son when she’d first announced her candidacy for office. Her own circumstances had prompted much of her interest in helping other women who were raising families on their own.
He mentioned the article to Eve and offered to get her a copy. She answered with a quiet “Thank you,” and took the picture back to study it herself.
“Mom said he ran off after Dad died. That would be over twenty years ago now.” She shook her head, her brow furrowing. “I don’t know that she ever heard from him again. I remember asking about him once, but all she said was that he was a very brave and special boy. I never asked her about him after that,” she added, setting the picture aside. “It was too hard for her to talk about him. But it wasn’t long after she told me that, that I started picturing my missing oldest brother as the white knight my present big brother was not.”
She made a face, the expression amazingly reminiscent of Molly. “Until I was about ten, Hal had no time and less patience for watching after his kid sister. The way he’d carry on about having to take me to the movies with him and his friends, you’d think I was his personal albatross.”
“What happened when you where ten?”
“He moved away to college. In Denver.”
At that, Rio smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile. Just enough to let her know he understood that separation had salvaged what little she and Hal had of a relationship, and to relieve the pensiveness she’d fought. It also encouraged a question of her own.
“What about you?” she quietly asked. “You have a brother and a sister. Did you get along when you were growing up?”
Rio had never said much about his siblings. With a glance that said he didn’t care to talk much about them now, either, he said, “Well enough, I guess.”
He glanced from her as he spoke, clearly preparing to dismiss the subject.
“Do they have names?” she asked before he could.
Rocking back in his chair, he reached for another envelope. “Dusty and Shana. Dusty’s three years older. Shana’s two younger.”
A middle child. She’d never known that before.
She tipped her head, studying his features in the buttery light of the chandelier. He looked relaxed enough. But even with his attention on another batch of pictures, she could swear she felt him tensing.
She wanted to know this man. Needed to know him. More important, she realized, she needed to understand what kept him from her.
Leaning forward, she placed her hand over the photos.
“Would you tell me what it was like, growing up on the reservation?”
His eyes met hers, steady and as unreadable to her as petroglyphs. For a moment, she thought he might evade her question, that he’d turn back to the pictures she’d just covered and change the subject. The tactic would have been so typical of the man she’d once known.
Instead, he pushed the stack aside.
“It’s like growing up in a box.”
She thought from his closed expression that he might mention the rampant unemployment and the alcohol and drug problems she remembered people talking about. At seventeen, she’d never associated him with any of that. Now she couldn’t avoid it.
He said nothing of those matters, though.
“There’s the res,” he continued. “Then, there’s what is off of it. On the res, you’re supposed to think and feel and act like everyone else. If you don’t, you’re criticized for not being in harmony with the people.” He paused, brow pinching. “Some people criticize you, anyway. The ones who say they care about you.
“I guess it’s like living anywhere else,” he finally said, checking the bitterness creeping into his tone. “You learn to adapt. Or you leave.”
Caution entered Eve’s expression. “Are you talking about the reservation, or your own home?”
The muscle in his jaw jumped. “It’s the same thing.”
For a moment, Eve said nothing. In less than a minute, he’d given her more insight to him than he had in all the time she’d known him. She could understand how the culture of a place would influence the people living in it, so she had no problem seeing how difficult it would be for him to divorce one from the other. But she was beginning to see that, while his heritage might have been the catalyst, it was his own family, or a member of it, that had instilled the unsettled need he’d felt to move beyond the bounds of the reservation.
Long ago, he’d told her he didn’t belong anywhere. Recalling that now, she couldn’t help but think that, somehow, he hadn’t been accepted even in his own home. It was no wonder he’d felt in need of escape.
“You sound as if you were searching for something when you left.”
If her insight was at all accurate, she couldn’t tell from the quiet way he watched her. “Maybe I was.”
“Did you ever find it?”
He held her eyes, his face devoid of expression. A second passed. Then, another.
Finally, his voice remote, he calmly said, “I have no idea what I’m looking for.”
It was another moment before he looked way. But in those moments, Eve had the feeling she was only beginning to appreciate the enormity of his struggle.
Wanting to help, having no idea how, she focused on the one thing she felt certain was weighing on his mind.
“Have you told your family about Molly?”
A full ten seconds passed before he answered. When he did, it was with the resignation of a man who’d already been wrestling with the question and had just made up his mind. “I’m going up tomorrow.”
Chapter Eight
In summer, the reservation where Rio grew up was a two-hour drive from Grand Springs. It could take twice as long in winter. Sometimes, if the wind blew hard enough and the snow got deep enough, the trip couldn’t be made at all. When the temperature dropped to freezing and the wind-driven snow obliterated everything but miles of low flats and barren hills, this stretch of land could be the most desolate place on earth. Now the land was rich with crops of wheat and sugar beets; the mountains beyond alive with grazing elk. But even the thought of all the summers he’d spent exploring this rugged and beautiful place couldn’t ease the tension knotting his insides.
The closer Rio got to the highway sign proclaiming entry onto tribal land, the more he wished the streaky white clouds overhead would gray up and dump about thirty inches of the icy white stuff. He could use the excuse to turn around. A person needed to be careful what he wished for, though. There were those who believed thought itself could make something happen. His mother was one of them.
Holding that thought at bay, he drove past clusters of old housing and new,
a well-tended farm and another gone fallow. The wind was blowing cool when, fifteen miles in, he crossed a narrow bridge and pulled into the cluster of modest little houses and one large mobile home. The drop in temperature was an omen of his reception, Rio was sure.
The cries of “Uncle!” made him smile despite himself. After his initial three-year absence, he’d come home because his grandfather had taken ill. After that, he’d made it back three or four times a year, though he never stayed more than a day. The little ones remembered him, though. And he always remembered them—along with the other small children who showed up with his cherub-faced little nieces.
He was thinking how Molly would fit right in with this animated crowd of laughing, dark-haired children when a toddler on a Big Wheel came tearing across the patches of grass poking through the hard-packed dirt. Rio didn’t recognize the little boy, someone his mother was baby-sitting probably, but like the rest of the kids, he got a piece of the red licorice Rio doled out to the lot.
“Something is wrong.”
His mother’s voice came from behind him. Maria Redtree stood in the door of the long, gray-and-white trailer, wiping her hands on her apron, her dark eyes trained on her son. Her hair, drawn back in a single thick braid was still black as coal, though Rio could see hints of silver threading through it as he moved closer. Her body was rounding, but the years were settling well on her. Her bronze skin was smooth, with only a trace of the wrinkles she should have had, considering the grief he seemed to have given her.
“Why is something wrong?” he asked, breathing in the scents of fry bread and wild herbs when he hugged her.
She stepped back, shooing a brown puppy from behind her long tiered skirt. “Because you never come without calling first. And never in the middle of the week.”
The omission had been deliberate. So was the timing. Midweek, his brother and sister would be working. Dusty at the tribal government office. His sister at the reservation clinic.
He asked after them both, and about his uncles, and when Fawn, who tended the children with her mother-in-law while the others worked, walked in with her youngest on her hip, he asked after her family, too. A person didn’t just pop up and open Pandora’s box without first attending to amenities. Though his mother wore her concern like a shield, something she always did when he was around, she wouldn’t have allowed it to be any other way.
Fawn was feeding the children, the five that belonged to the family and the two that didn’t, when his mother decided they could talk best outside.
“You know the Offerings Lodge was held here last week,” she said as they walked out toward the road. “Your brother made the prayer sacrifice.”
There was as much censure as pride in the statements. Tribes from everywhere attended the weeklong event, the sacred occasion a source of strength and fulfillment for the people. It was a time, too, when everyone tried to focus on unity and avoid conflict of any kind. She might as well have said that Rio had failed her yet again by not having been there himself.
“He is to be congratulated,” Rio replied, refusing to rise to her bait. “Dusty’s a good man. Mother, I came to ask you something,” he continued, needing badly to get this over with.
Curious, she forgot to castigate. “Yes?”
“About six years ago, a woman…a girl,” he corrected himself, because that’s what she’d been at the time, “called here looking for me. I know I’d mentioned her to you, because she and I had gone to school together. Her name was Eve.”
“Six years is a long time.”
“Not for your memory.”
She gave him a smile, but there was enough hesitation behind it for Rio to know that her memory was, indeed, as unfailing as the sunrise.
For a moment, she said nothing more. Her five feet five inches drawn perfectly erect, she simply stared straight ahead as they walked, oblivious to the ever-present wind blowing dust across the road and rattling the scrub oak lining it. “She was the girl Shana teased you about after she found you looking at her picture. You were unhappy over her. I remember.”
“You didn’t give me the message.”
The flatness in his tone spoke volumes. Rio was obviously aware now that the call had been made. Knowing that, he would also be aware of what was said. Maria was quick to figure that out, and just as quick to defend herself.
“I was a mother protecting her son. When you are a parent yourself, you will understand.”
Rio felt his gut knot. What he wanted to do was tell her that he had long grown past needing protection by that point. He wanted to tell her, too, that making it sound as if she’d saved him because the girl had hurt him was a rather unique spin on telling someone to back off because she was the wrong race. But anger would serve no useful purpose. Especially now, when he needed calm to prevail.
“I am a parent. I have a daughter,” he said, stopping her in her tracks. “That was what Eve had called here to tell me.”
He could see the questions forming as she stared up at him. The accusation. The disappointment. He could see denial, too, and maybe a hint of guilt, though he knew he’d go a long way before she’d ever admit to that one. Finally, they all formed a single question. “Where is the child?”
“Eve has her.”
Rio watched his mother turn away from him, her censure deliberate.
“I knew no good would come of you leaving here to go to that college. You should have stayed, worked with Willy Little Dog. Your uncle would have counseled you, taught you to farm.”
It never failed. No matter what he did, everything boiled down to this one lousy argument. He was trying to talk to her about his daughter and she wanted to point out where he’d gone astray. “I wasn’t interested in farming. I’ve told you that. Dusty’s the one who understood agriculture.”
“Because he was in touch with the earth and the sky,” she pointed out, addressing the spirituality she obviously felt her younger son lacked. “He knows himself. He knows the importance of continuing what we have. Your mind is too curious, too unfocused. You should have stayed and found yourself. But no.” Shaking her head, she held her arms wide, the beads on the small amulet bag around her neck catching the glint of the sun. “You go, and you abandon everything. Now you have a child who belongs neither here nor there.”
“There” was the white man’s world, the place Maria Redtree had never trusted. It had taken her husband and, like some men are drawn to the sea, it had lured a son. To this day, Rio knew she believed that Joe Redtree would still be with her if he hadn’t had to leave the res to find work.
Rio stepped back, hating the feelings churning inside him. Everything didn’t have to be black-and-white, but his mother couldn’t seem to see anything any other way. His aunts and uncles weren’t like that. Neither was his sister. But that didn’t matter to Rio just now. It hadn’t been forgiveness or understanding for himself he’d sought from his mother. He hadn’t deserved or expected either. All he’d wanted was acceptance for his child.
She didn’t need to say another word for him to know she couldn’t offer that. And a child, any child, deserved nothing less than to be unconditionally accepted for itself. God knew he never had been. Not by her.
“She belongs where she is,” he said, finality in his voice. “This isn’t a place I would want her, anyway.”
“You are just like your father.”
“So you keep telling me.”
Rio turned on his heel, fists clenched and dust puffing around his boots with each step he took.
You are just like your father. She’d pushed him away with those words for more than fifteen years, using them like a weapon and making even whatever good traits he’d inherited from the man sound like something to be ashamed of. Every time he heard them, he cursed the man whose features he bore and whose insatiable curiosity he claimed, and he cursed himself for letting his mother get to him. But, even through his own anger, he realized that this time, there had been more pain than resentment in her accusation.
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br /> The knowledge slowed his steps, his thoughts racing as he slowly turned around.
She stood where he’d left her, still and immovable as a mountain.
She had always blamed the white man’s world for stealing her husband, and wanted nothing to do with it because of that. But Rio had heard the talk when he was a child that the reason Joe Redtree had abandoned his family was because he’d been a dreamer who’d never been able to handle the responsibility of a wife and children.
His father had been irresponsible, all right. But Rio suddenly had the feeling that there was more to his father’s defection than what he’d heard—and far more to his mother’s intolerance.
“Did he leave you for another woman?”
He saw her suck in a breath, her hand clutching her stomach as if she’d been struck.
She shook her head, turning away.
“I will not speak of this.”
“He did, didn’t he? A white woman.”
She said nothing, but her shoulders went rigid.
“Does anyone else know this?”
Silence.
“Was she pregnant?”
She denied nothing. But her pride allowed no admissions, either.
“These are not questions for a son to ask his mother.”
“They are when I’m being held accountable for my father’s sins. Is it because I look like him? Is that why you’ve always pushed me away?”
She wouldn’t answer. Maybe it was because she couldn’t. Maybe it was because she didn’t know how. But after thirty seconds of suffering her silence, Rio gave up and turned away himself. Not until he reached his SUV did he look back to where she remained by the road, her hand clutching the bag around her neck and her face tipped to the sky.
He hated leaving this way. Not speaking. Yet he always did.
Revving the engine, he headed across the hardpack for the bridge, his knuckles white on the wheel.
His mother’s house was a mile behind him before he felt the sting in his fingers and started to relax his grip. Yet it wasn’t the distance he was putting between them that helped relaxed his hold. It was the realization that, for the first time in his life, he understood why it was so impossible for his mother to trust anything that had to do with “there”—and how hurt she must have been when she’d realized why her husband had abandoned her.
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