by Sarah Bird
“Rae-rae.” She held her arms open to me and said my name as if it were a benediction that only she could offer. “You came! I knew you’d come! Oh, Rae, my Rae.” Every sob and blubber outraged me. She lunged forward and draped herself on me. “Rae, I am so sorry. I fucked up. I am so sorry. I want to spend the rest of our lives making it up to you. Rae, I miss you so much. Nothing in my life is—”
“You’re dripping on me.” My voice was frozen acid, cold and caustic enough to momentarily dry her up.
She detached herself. “Rae, please, you’re all I have. We’re all each other has. It was you that I loved. You’re the one I wanted. I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”
Though I’d sworn I wouldn’t, wouldn’t ever speak to her again, the words flew out of my mouth. “ ‘Mistake’? A ‘mistake’ is using the wrong fork at dinner. Stealing your best friend’s lover goes way beyond ‘mistake.’ ”
“Rae. Please.” Didi grabbed my arm and made me look at her. Beneath the makeup, she was destroyed. It had started long ago, but not being around her for more than a year forced me to really see Didi. Her teeth were decalcifying, turning the twilight gray that only decades of bulimia can bring on. I tried to focus on her teeth, but my gaze was drawn to her omnivorous eyes. “I am killing myself, I’m so eaten up with guilt at what I’ve done. Literally, I want to die. I’m sorry, Rae, I will do anything to show you how sorry I am.”
“You think confession redeems everything. You think you can get up onstage and parade your destroyed life and the lives around you that you destroyed and be granted absolution on account of your ‘honesty.’ Fuck honesty, bitch. Try being a decent human being.”
“Rae, we have to talk.”
“Not in this lifetime. Could you, please, just get out of my life.”
“Rae, it’s our life. You have to know that. Rae, I never wanted him.”
Him. Suddenly, I wasn’t angry, wasn’t hurt, wasn’t jealous, I was just tired. Tired because that ridiculous three-letter pronoun had only one antecedent in my life. Tired because it still had the power to bleed me white, to make me stop and listen.
“It was you I wanted, Rae. It’s always been you, my pale angel twin.”
“Jesus, Didi, save the dark, tortured sexuality horseshit for your fans. I watched you invent that crap.”
“Okay, okay, Rae.” Stunned to hear me, her doormat, talking back, Didi cooed in a hostage negotiator voice. It pleased me that she recognized what an unstable compound, what a vial of nitroglycerin, I had become. For once, I was the high-strung one who had to be catered to.
“Just, just, do me a favor. Do one thing for me?” She waited to see if I would blow. I allowed her to continue. “Come to where I’m staying. You know the place on the golf course? Come tonight. I’ve got an early flight to D.C. tomorrow, big deal at the Kennedy Center with Joaquín Cortes and that whole—”
I squinted in irritation, astonished at the limitless depths of her narcissism, even now dropping names, expecting me to cheer her success. “I don’t care,” I said, amazed that I was telling the truth. My new, imperious manner worked miracles.
“You’re right. You’re right. Just come, okay? Please? You saved me, Rae. From the very first, from that day in the doctor’s office, you were what pulled me through. I... I’m lost without you.” A sob as theatrical as her statement caught in her throat and I shook my head in disgust. The handmaiden didn’t live here anymore.
She switched off the dramatics and added dryly, “I know you don’t owe me anything anymore, but—”
“ ‘Anymore’? Didi, I never owed you anything.”
“You have a right to feel that way.”
“I have to leave.”
“No!” She clawed at my sleeve as I opened the door of the truck. “You have to come, Rae, please. We have to talk. Please, oh God, please. I can’t do this without you.”
“Do what?” I let a homicidal level of irritation curdle my voice.
“Any of this. Rae, I’m not kidding. If you don’t come tonight—” She stopped abruptly. When she next spoke, her voice was utterly scrubbed of emotion and she stated plain as if she were explaining gravity, “You have to come tonight.”
I jerked my arm out of her grasp. “You will never tell me what I have to do again.”
Didi stood in the red glow of my back-up lights, a smeared palette of red and black. Someone from the entourage ran up holding out a poncho and wrapped the little diva in it. It was clear from the acolyte’s frantic gestures toward the theater that Didi’s adoring public clamored for her. Didi remained immobile, the poncho draped over her like the Madonna playing out a pietà moment. Rain trickled down her sorrowing face, her arms held out in front as if the crucified Christ had just been removed from them.
The acolyte led Didi back to the theater. I was certain that a froth of whispers was already whipping through the auditorium, each worshipful fan concocting another morsel to add to the cocktail of the most intoxicating performance any of them had ever consumed. The myth of their drenched idol, the sodden, suffering Madonna, would grow. The wire services might pick up whatever item the local reviewer wrote about Didi’s dramatic disappearance. In the end, she would probably get some national ink out of it.
Didi had won again.
My windshield was spangled with cottonwood leaves blown across it by the rainstorm. Each tender green leaf was a heart pressing against the glass. I flipped on the wipers. The blades shoved the leaves aside, then beat them to a chartreuse pulp.
Chapter Forty
I don’t know how long I sat drinking on the West Mesa. Long enough to watch several carloads of teens get drunk, throw up, and leave me alone with the end of an extremely bad night. Long enough to wish I could claw out every single chip Didi had embedded in my brain. Long enough to realize that the peach daiquiris in a can that I was pouring down my throat as fast as I could tasted like hair conditioner and weren’t fuzzing the hideous evening out. They were bringing it into sharper focus. The memory I most wanted to derail, yet returned to obsessively, was her saying If you don’t come tonight—
“If I don’t come tonight what, bitch?” I whispered to the black velvet painting outside my windshield. I didn’t have to see the petroglyphs to know they were there, all those mysterious squiggles Didi and I had squatted among as she pledged to always have my back. “You’ll kill yourself?” It was a comfort to spit out the words caroming inside my brain. To inject as much mocking scorn as I could into them. Didi would never kill herself. That would be one performance she absolutely wouldn’t miss. That certainty was met with a crushing in my chest as a hard reality squeezed into me: If Didi kills herself, she will own you for the rest of your life. I could not allow that to happen. The one thing I absolutely had to do was to root Didi out of my life once and for all.
I headed back into town. Even the bars had closed by the time I drove down Central going east, going back in time, back to the university. Of course, Didi was staying at the Sculpture Garden, where all the visiting luminaries were lodged. I assumed that Didi, the star of that night, was even occupying the same bungalow as Guitos had. I parked and made my way through the grounds. The sculptures, charming during the day, were menacing at night. In the dark, the giant grasshoppers became ravenous predators from the Age of the Dinosaurs, the nail clippers weapons of destruction. The stone angels guarding the guest cottage were not the beneficent protectors they had been in daylight. They were stern, winged creatures on missions of revenge and atonement.
I stood for a moment beneath their rigid gaze and searched the bungalow on the other side of the gate. Not a single light was on. She was asleep. I was about to turn and leave when a small bubble of aggrieved righteousness burst inside of me. Why the hell was I skulking around, worried about disturbing Didi’s precious sleep? How many nights of sleep had she cost me? More than she could, more than she would ever pay, but at least I could claim a few hours of slumber from her. Buoyed up, I unlatched the gate, stepped up to the door, and pou
nded heavily on it. When there was no answer, I pounded louder. I didn’t care, I hoped I would rouse Didi from whatever substance-abused slumber or compromising sexual snarl she might have been entangled in. I pounded again, hard enough to rattle the curtained window at the door. I suppose I knew the door would be unlocked. That was so typically Didi, the unlocked door, the compromise waiting to be made.
The smell of leather that greeted me when Guitos occupied this bungalow had been replaced by the fragrance of candles and old roses. But there was another odor, deeply female, an estrous funk that forced an intimacy upon me I did not want. It was Didi’s smell and I recoiled from it. I no longer wanted to wake her, engage her. In her own megalomaniacal way, by manipulating me into coming to her, Didi had won again. A laptop featuring Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait as the screen saver provided what dim light there was. The panther bracelet gleamed in its glow. The bracelet was on my wrist before I had time to understand that the score between us would never be even. It didn’t matter—an atavistic urge to take something, anything from her drove me to steal it. If I hadn’t taken the bracelet, though, I wouldn’t have moved into position to see her, a sliver of her anyway, through the bedroom door opened just a crack.
She was crumpled on the bed. In the dim glow of a small bedside lamp her face was bluish at the lips, pale as the sheets. Her body was floppy, boneless when I shook her. The creak of the bedsprings thundered in my head when I sat beside her. The sound subsided as I listened for breathing and heard only my own fractured gasps. Did I hesitate one second, two, three? It doesn’t matter, I hesitated. For that speck of time, I willed her dead.
Then I pinched her nostrils, sealed her mouth shut with my own, and breathed. Two breaths and fifteen pumps a couple of inches below the nipples. I pressed the heels of my hands on her chest. The bed sagged beneath the pressure. I listened for breathing and wanted to hear it. I put my lips on hers and pushed air into her lungs. Tilted my ear to her face and felt for the dew of her respiration. Nothing came. Each breath I forced into her was a pact I didn’t want to make. Every molecule of oxygen expelled a different accusation, a different memory.
I pressed my lips against Didi’s and puffed air into her mouth again. They warmed beneath my own. A weak, hiccuping sigh formed either in her chest or in my imagination, my heart was thudding too loudly to tell.
“Didi, it’s me, Rae,” I whispered. “Breathe, okay?”
She didn’t respond. Her chest didn’t rise. It didn’t move until, with my whole will, I breathed life into her mouth. I wanted her to live. Only then did her chest stutter, the muscles flinching and rippling. Her bluish lips brightened to a sickly mauve. She coughed, vomited, coughed. Breathed. I grabbed the phone, punched in 911, yelled between breaths. Didi inhaled. Didi exhaled. Minutes later, bullets of light strafed the room. A couple of EMT guys pushed me aside. While one of them worked on her, the other tucked his head to one side and spoke into the microphone on his shoulder. In answer to staticky questions about “substances,” he picked empty bottles off the floor and read the labels out loud.
Shortly thereafter, a policeman barged in and asked me some questions. It took me a while to realize that he was trying to decide whether or not to arrest me. Whether or not I was a dealer or a murderer. He took my name and number and told me to make myself available. One of the techs brought in a gurney. They lifted Didi onto it, then slid her into the ambulance smooth as a loaf of bread going into the oven.
It was light by the time I walked back to the truck. Inside, I reached for the gear shift and the panther bracelet slid down my wrist onto my hand. The bracelet was all wrong on me. The panthers looked as if they were snaking around a fat, white radish, instead of the slender, tea-colored wrist they belonged on. I had believed I could hack Didi out of my life like an overgrowth of kudzu. Yet I now felt the twist of the vines twining about me more strongly than ever. They curled around my lungs and squeezed out the oxygen like a python suffocating its prey.
I touched the panthers on the bracelet, woven together until they were one animal, claw flowing into shoulder, tail into haunch, mouths breathing the same breath. I had the thought then that, maybe, the only thing keeping me upright all those years had been the vines.
Chapter Forty-one
I stood at the door of her room and discovered Didi’s mother lying, asleep, in the bed. For a split second, Didi looked exactly like Mrs. Steinberg after Mr. Steinberg had died, pale, slack, a person haunting a body rather than inhabiting it. Probably exactly how Didi would look when she was old. If she lived to become old.
She was a mess. Her cheek and pillowcase were streaked black from the charcoal slurry they’d pumped into her stomach. Her right eye flamed red where a blood vessel had burst when she was throwing up. Her nose was greasy, ringed in the K-Y Jelly used to thread a tube into her stomach.
Behind me in the hall, a family passed by talking loudly enough that they woke Didi. Her lids fluttered up, then she worked to bring me into focus. “Rae.” She exhaled my name on an exhalation so long she might have been holding it for all the months since she’d seen me last.
I lifted one hand in a How, paleface greeting but didn’t step one foot closer.
“Rae.” Her voice was a whispery wreck, so soft that I had no choice but to move forward. She shrugged and gestured at herself, the tubes coming out of her nose, her veins. The preemptive strike. It was what she always did, whenever she’d let me down, whenever she didn’t do something she’d said she would. She’d always start by neutralizing any complaint I might have by detailing all her current dramas and misfortunes. This time she mimed the strike simply by presenting her pitiful condition. “You saved my life.”
Only after I willed you dead. “Don’t talk, okay? Save your voice.”
“I have to talk. Rae, I did a horrible thing. I wasn’t as good a friend as I should have been, but I wasn’t as bad as you think.” She shook her head, then chastised herself. “Cut the bullshit. Cut the bullshit. Here’s the truth: I didn’t take Tomás from you because you never really had him. Neither of us ever had him. No one will ever have him because Tomás does not have himself.” Didi echoed the exact words Guitos had spoken to me.
“Rae, he’s waiting for you. Up north. He wants you, he needs you to come and see his village. That’s the only way you’ll understand.” Her eyelids drooped, then popped back open. She lifted a hand with an IV taped to the back of it. “Look, I’m zoning out here. I don’t know what they’re putting in my soup, but I gotta make this short. Go. Just go to him. Anyone in town can tell you where his cabin is.” Her eyes rolled up and she laughed. “I told you. Told you I’d get him for you and I did.” She was drifting off again. “I got him for you. Go get him. The name of the village is...”
Her eyes closed and I considered leaving, simply walking out while I still had a choice because I knew, once she told me the name, the choice would be gone. I hoped she was asleep. Her eyes and mouth twitched as if she were struggling to open them. She didn’t open her eyes, but the name sighed as if of its own accord: “La Viuda.”
Chapter Forty-two
The first map I picked up didn’t even have La Viuda marked on it. I found the tiny village on a hiker’s map, wobbly with topographical markings. Desire, identify my own heart’s true desire and let it guide me, that was what my moment of duende had taught me. Desire? Tomás? Yes, I wanted him. I shouldn’t, but I did. It was late afternoon by the time I finished teaching my beginners class and set out. I roared north on I-25, bypassed Santa Fe, then just outside of Pojoaque, I turned off onto the back road to Chimayo.
In the space of one curve, long enough for the big trucks on the highway to disappear from view, I was sucked back four centuries into a time when not only the heart but the body of New Mexico belonged to Spain. Last night’s storm had torn through the fertile valley, leaving limbs from elephant-barked cottonwoods and droopy Navajo willows lining the winding road. A usually placid stream raged alongside the road churning with battered
cattails, uprooted tamarisks, and, washed in by the downpour far to the north, the blackened stumps of trees burned in the forest fires. The smell of those fires, doused by the heavy rains, hung over the valley like incense.
The road bent north away from the stream and evidence of the fires. An adobe estate with a coyote fence of lashed-together cedar saplings presided over acres of apple and plum trees. Yellow, oblong mailboxes with NEW MEXICAN printed on them stood guard beside each gate. The names on the mailboxes, on campaign posters lashed to trees, became biblical, portentous, medievally Spanish: Balthazar Reyes, Cristo Oveido, Fidelina Chavez, Nazario Mascarena, Euphonia C de Baca.
In Rio Chiquito, a spindly old Hispano woman, her hair tucked into a shower cap, sprayed a trickle of water from a garden hose onto a leggy geranium planted in a lard can. Behind the frail woman, an airbrushed head of Christ floating amid a galactic swirl of stars and planets decorated one entire outer wall of her small house. A broken-down wringer washing machine leaked a trail of rust against the bottom of the epic mural.
The road climbed out of the lush orchards and adobe estates of the Espanola Valley and onto a piñon-freckled stretch of mesa, pink and gold in the late afternoon sunlight. A solitary windmill sliced the ceaseless currents that had eroded rock columns into lines of dancing cobras. Far overhead, the path of a circling hawk slashed the white contrail of a jet in a sky newly cleaned of smoke.
Truchas, Las Trampas, Peñasco, the villages hugging the hairpin turns I slewed around, splashing through puddles left by last night’s rain, I could have been transplanted from the Spanish Sierra Nevadas. If I stuck my arm out the window, I could touch the adobe houses I flew past. Beside each one stood a silver tank of butane, several cords of wood seasoning in ragged piles, and a beehive-shaped horno oven with a round opening at its front like a mouth frozen in a wail.