“It’s awful, and I’m sorry it’s the reason I’m calling you after all these years.” I wanted to stumble directly into everything I had discovered, but I knew I had to hold back. I waited for some signal that Ray was ready to continue the conversation, but when all I heard on the other end was several moments of even breathing, I just started talking. “I went out to New Mexico and talked to Sheriff Lewis.”
“Is that right?” Ray sounded surprised.
“Yes. I didn’t know where Ethan went after he left me. The sheriff said doing a face-to-face interview was ideal, and I was curious to see where Ethan had spent his time, so I booked a stay at the Zuni Retreat. The sheriff also said, well, he said that he thought it might be a murder-suicide, and I just didn’t believe that.” I tried to say the second part carefully.
“I don’t believe that, either,” Ray said firmly.
“You talked to Sheriff Lewis, right?”
“Correct.”
“And you told him that Ethan visited you a few months before he died?”
“Correct,” Ray repeated, like I was a census taker bothering him with a boring questionnaire.
“What was that like?” I asked.
“It was all right.”
Clearly I wasn’t going to get anywhere asking open-ended, sensitive questions. “Did he tell you anything about his life there?” I pressed. “About Yoni? About why he left?”
Ray didn’t say anything for so long I thought he had hung up. Finally he said, “I told the sheriff everything I know. And honey, it’s not any of your business.”
I tried to gently cajole Ray into telling me something, anything else about what he knew. But he refused. He couldn’t get why I wanted to get involved. “I guess I understand why you went down to New Mexico,” he said after we had been chatting for a little while, “but I don’t see why you’d want to stay at the retreat.”
“Well . . .” I considered lying, because I knew it would sound nuts to him, but I figured we weren’t going to get anywhere unless he knew the whole truth. “The sheriff said that he was having trouble getting a warrant to search the Zuni property, and I thought that I could go to the retreat and find something that might be helpful to the case.”
“That ain’t right, Dana,” Ray said sternly. “It’s not your job. You shouldn’t be getting involved in this.”
“Why not?” I said, a little imperious. I had slid into my tough-gal work persona without thinking; he didn’t have the right to tell me what to do. Besides, I had spent so many years after Ethan left feeling powerless and clueless about what had happened. I finally had some agency and I wasn’t about to give it up.
“You just shouldn’t!” Ray snapped.
“Well, I also wanted to find out more about Ethan, what he was like after he left me. Can you tell me anything about that?”
I kept trying to ask the question in different ways, but Ray wouldn’t reveal more. Finally, to get me off the phone, he agreed to let me come out to Montana and talk to him in person. I am very, very good at arguing, and I felt eerily confident that I would be able to break Ray’s resolve. I could hear a little falter in his tone and just knew he wanted to tell me the truth. I don’t know if it was spending too much time in the company of the spiritual and faux-spiritual, but this trip seemed fated.
I was so wrapped up in convincing Ray to talk to me that it wasn’t until I got off the phone that I remembered I was still at work, and that I had just come back from a vacation that had been only grudgingly approved. I tallied up all the vacation days I’d saved and thought about the potential excuses I could give Phil that would force him to let me go without censure. Thinking about that conversation made my heart start to race. He was going to be so angry.
I took a deep breath. Maybe there was a way to do this without losing my job or having Phil go nuclear. I took out my employee handbook from the bottom drawer, where it had been languishing since I started at the firm seven years ago. In the back section where they had the information about maternity leave, there was one short sentence tucked under the paternity leave policy (five measly business days) that could be my savior: “Employees that have worked for the firm for five uninterrupted years are entitled to an unpaid sabbatical of six weeks.”
Unsurprisingly, no one had ever mentioned this benefit to me. I knew how big law firms like mine worked: they kept these things on the books to pretend that they catered to work/life balance but never actually spoke of them. I bet none of my workaholic peers had ever availed themselves of the sabbatical even if they knew it existed, because taking a leave meant not making partner. There was only one woman who was a partner anyway, and she famously took three weeks of maternity leave, even though we were supposedly entitled to four paid months. Word around the office was that she answered her cell phone as they were wheeling her into the OR for her C-section.
I took out a yellow highlighter, marked the paper, and left my office to go talk to Phil.
Phil thought I was, quote, “out of my fucking mind” when I announced that I was taking the six-week sabbatical, which I had earned. As I suspected, he’d never heard anything about the sabbatical before, and his mouth hung open as I pointed out the passage in our employee handbook. He was, for a moment, at a loss for words, reduced to a very controlled head shake. When he regained his voice, he sputtered, “You will never make partner this way, ever. And you were so close.” I shrugged. A month ago, making partner was one of my top-five reasons for dragging my carcass out of bed every day. But now, it seemed irrelevant. “I need this time,” I told him, “and I’ll worry about making partner later.” I knew, as I spoke to Phil, that making this choice not only ruined my chances for a partnership but also put my current job in jeopardy. And I was a little surprised to discover that I didn’t care.
I was able to get a flight to Bozeman the next day. As I made the arrangements, I felt more secure in my hasty plan. I packed clothing for the massive weather changes that happen in late spring in Montana: rain gear, a big puffy jacket, long underwear, shorts, and T-shirts. I packed Ethan’s book, my legal pad outline, a tape recorder, and several pens.
I wasn’t just getting physically ready. I was also getting emotionally ready. As much as I had convinced myself that I had moved on from Ethan’s departure years ago, I was starting to realize I hadn’t. I was still living in the apartment we used to share. I wasn’t dating. I hadn’t even made any new friends. I simply bludgeoned myself with work and called it a life. Ethan’s death, no matter how searing, had woken me up. And my experience at the retreat had nudged something else awake, too. I wasn’t yet sure what that was.
Ray was waiting for me at the empty airport. He looked exactly like he had the last time I saw him—he was possibly even wearing the same shirt, though I think all plaid shirts look the same. This was a point of contention between Ethan and me during better times. He maintained that there were many, many different kinds of plaid. “This shirt has a tartan print, and this one is a tattersall,” he’d say, faux-serious, picking up two blue shirts that looked identical. I smiled at the memory.
“Hi, Dana, good to see you,” Ray said. I searched his face for evidence of grief but found none. Then again, his face was always drawn and slightly dour, with crow’s-feet that extended downward. It occurred to me for the first time that perhaps he’d been grieving since Rosemary died.
“Hi, Ray, thanks for letting me come.”
Ray took my suitcase wordlessly. I used to be put off by his old-fashioned cowboy chivalry, which I saw as an affront to modern feminism, but now I appreciated it. We drove the seventy-five minutes back to his remote log cabin mostly in silence. I looked out the window at the mountains. The immensity of the landscape was a relief, the opposite of New York’s claustrophobic streets and buildings.
Halfway home Ray turned on the radio. I remembered from my last visit to Montana that for large stretches of driving the only stations you can get are Christian radio and NPR, reflecting the divided culture of the stat
e. Ray turned the dial to a Christian station that also played old country music, and filled the silent car with Gene Autry’s sweet voice.
It was dinnertime when we drove up the dirt road to Ray’s cabin. He brought my suitcase into the living room and went into the kitchen.
“Do you need help with dinner?” I asked as I watched Ray take out a cutting board and a sharp knife.
“No, honey. You’ve had a long trip. You should take a load off.”
“You won’t even let me set the table or something?” I asked.
Ray shook his head. “Nope. Get outta here.”
I went out onto the back deck wrapped in a blanket I found lying on a couch. The sun was already hidden behind the mountains, and I shivered listening to the rustling leaves that surrounded me. I could smell the savory scent of whatever Ray was cooking. We always stayed with Ethan’s aunt Mary when we’d come out to Montana for holidays. She had a big house, and she loved to decorate and cook and fuss over us. She liked fussing over Ray, especially. She didn’t know what else to do about Ray’s grief, so she stuffed him with food and took him to church.
So I was shocked that Ray knew how to cook something that smelled so good. Ethan always made it sound like he had lived like a feral child after Rosemary died.
“Dinner,” Ray called. Inside, the table was set simply but elegantly, with place mats and decent silverware. Ray even had a handmade ceramic vase filled with dried flowers as a centerpiece. There was a plump chicken breast on my plate, with a wild rice salad next to it. I took a bite and was pleasantly surprised. “Wow, Ray, this is delicious! Where did you learn to cook like this?”
“My friend Linda taught me some things,” Ray said, shifting awkwardly in his seat.
“Is Linda your girlfriend?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
“You could say that,” Ray said even more uncomfortably.
Seeing how ill at ease Ray was made it hard to figure out what to say next. We ate without speaking for a while. I could hear both of us chewing and swallowing. I drank the water that was set out for me and almost choked on it. I was sputtering and wiping my mouth when Ray finally broke the quiet.
“I know you want to hear more about Ethan, but there’s not much to say.” He looked so sad, I wanted to break through the discomfort between us, but I didn’t know how.
“Can you tell me what little there is to say?” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out how Ethan became . . . whatever this thing is he became.”
Ray looked down at his lap. Realizing that my straightforward questioning was putting him off, I tried a softer tactic. It was manipulative to tear at Ray’s heartstrings, but I didn’t care. “I haven’t been the same since he left, Ray. And getting whatever scraps of Ethan I can at this point will really help me move on. I know you know what this is like, when a spouse is gone.”
Ray pushed his rice around on his plate and didn’t say anything. But I could tell he was taking me seriously. I tried to concentrate on my dinner to give him time to think, but I could barely get down a few bites.
“Let me sleep on it,” he said at last. He got up from the table and dumped the rest of his dinner in the garbage. Then he washed the plate and put it on a pristine dish rack. “The bed’s made for you in Ethan’s room. I hope it’s comfy.” With that he walked to the back of the cabin. He was in good shape, but the way he shuffled across the floor made him seem like an old, broken man. A moment later I could hear his bedroom door shutting and locking.
Though it was early evening, I suddenly felt exhausted from the travel. After washing my own plate and adding it to the dish rack next to Ray’s, I opened the door to Ethan’s room slowly, as if a bogeyman might leap out at me. Instead I saw a cat that had presumably been asleep on Ethan’s twin bed and was rustled awake by the door. She looked at me, pissed off, and scurried out of the room as soon as I turned on the light.
Ethan’s room was a cultural tomb, permanently fixed in the nineties when he left for college. Posters of the Pixies and Nirvana were hung on the walls, Kurt Cobain vamping in women’s cat’s-eye sunglasses. The desk was strewn with ancient totems—bobblehead dolls of Minnesota Vikings and a collage of different photos cut from Spin magazine. A dun-colored plaid flannel bedspread that I remembered from previous visits still covered the bed. At first glance, the only evidence that Ethan had been there recently was a small dream catcher tacked above the bed.
I started snooping through Ethan’s things. It felt like an intimate privacy violation—a teenager’s bedroom is so sacrosanct. I had to keep reminding myself that this teenager didn’t exist anymore, and that it was necessary prying. His shelves contained all his old books: guides to the indigenous species of Yellowstone, hiking trails of Glacier, and manly fiction of the Hemingway variety. I searched the titles for anything New Age or yogic, anything he could have left when he was last here, but the closest I came was a decaying paperback of Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs from 1972. When I opened it up part of the cover came off in my hand. Ethan’s mother had written her name on the title page. It was the seventies, after all—everyone, even my straitlaced, skeptical mother, had a copy of Sun Signs.
I turned to Ethan’s desk. One drawer contained all his high school mementos: writing awards, National Merit Scholarship recognition, and a track and field participation certificate. Another contained his college diploma, still in its puffy frame, and a friendship bracelet I had made for him in a regressive spurt of boredom one summer. I picked up the bracelet and touched its frayed tassels. I felt tears start to collect in the corners of my eyes.
In another drawer I found outtakes of our wedding photos, which I couldn’t bear to look at. Underneath those was a slender book with a red and gold illustration of an unfamiliar deity on the cover. The title, in gold lettering, was Aztec Cosmology: An Exploration of the Ancient Rituals. I grabbed the book and opened it. It had a LIVINGSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY stamp on the inner flap, and a date that would have corresponded with Ethan’s visit. I thumbed through its crisp pages—apparently the denizens of southern Montana did not have much interest in Aztec religion, as the book felt new. I found a bookmark left in a chapter about the butterfly goddess, Itzpapalotl. I skimmed a page and it read like one of Yoni’s goofy parables—the goddess with her sharp obsidian wings and her despotic leadership over a mystical world filled with birds. I put it aside and kept pawing around.
Finally I found a drawer with Ethan’s childhood relics. I picked up a ceramic plaque with Ethan’s handprint, his name, and the date—October 6, 1983—on it. He would have been five then, and I figured his name was written in his mother’s fine cursive hand. Ethan had told me that Rosemary was very creative. She was always doing art projects with Ethan and Travis that involved pieces of fabric picked up at the Bozeman Craftacular scrap bin and lots of pipe cleaners.
At the bottom of the drawer I found a familiar-looking dark-blue necklace with an asterisk on it. It had a surprisingly hefty feel, like a paperweight that had been repurposed. I rubbed the asterisk with my thumb, as if feeling the etching would reveal something to me. Had I seen this before when Ethan and I had visited Ray together? Was it one of the trinkets sold at Montana flea markets? Had the Grateful Dead followers in my dorm at college worn it?
Oh, right, I remembered where I had seen it: on Lo, at the retreat. Maybe it was something they gave all the staffers at Zuni, and Ethan had brought it with him when he visited Ray a few months ago. I put everything back in the drawers except the necklace, which I placed on a side table next to the bed.
I lay down on Ethan’s narrow bed and pulled his flannel cover up around my ears. There was no top sheet: typical of a house full of motherless men. Encased in warmth and dark, surrounded by the absolute silence of the country, I felt like I was in a sarcophagus. I didn’t feel like I was dead, no, not exactly. I felt like I was preparing for my afterlife.
My dream that night took place in an M. C. Escher version of Ethan’s room. When I entered his closet, there was a staircase
descending down and down and down into a pile of moth-eaten flannels. I was searching for something underneath the flannel, and I threw the plaid this way and that until I pulled out that blue necklace. I brought it up to my face to examine it closely, and it exploded. The explosion woke me up with a start.
I sat up in bed and looked over at the necklace, which was still in one piece. That was when I remembered where else I had seen that blue asterisk. On Rosemary. She was wearing it in that photograph of her with baby Ethan in her tummy that he kept at our apartment, the one I couldn’t bear to throw away. I felt dizzy, like I was back in the dream, back on that twisty staircase. I lay back down on the pillows.
I heard Ray banging around in the kitchen. I was lightheaded when I got up, and I felt like I was floating down the hallway, like my body was still observing dream logic and any minute the floor might give way. I went to find Ray with the necklace in my hand.
When I entered the kitchen, Ray’s back was to me. He was making coffee, pouring the water into the well. I watched him put the carafe back in its place before turning around to look at me. His eye went to the necklace in my hand, and he sighed. He turned back around and pushed the On button on the coffeemaker. Then he walked over to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and said, “Take a seat. We should talk.”
Ray
I told the sheriff about all this already. About Rosemary’s involvement.
Why didn’t I tell you? Because it was none of your goddamn business. You’re not solving the crime. You’re not putting anyone in jail. I promised Rosemary a long time ago that we’d put her past behind us.
But since you already know what you know, I guess I’ll start at San Francisco. That’s where I met Rosie. After my second tour in Vietnam was over, I told my CO I would re-up, but only if I could get stationed in California. I grew up in King City, a sleepy, dusty farm town a ways outside San Francisco. My dad had passed while I was in high school, and my mom wasn’t in the best health, so I wanted to be closer to her.
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