Water Rites

by Mary Rosenblum

  “I think so.” And it still surprised her at times.

  “You want to know something weird?” Jeremy stared up at the ceiling. “Johnny Seldon paid for my treatment.”

  “Him?” Her eyes widened. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Jeremy touched his sheeted abdomen lightly. “He came to see me the first day I was here. He’s a strange man. I kind of wished you were here.” He fell silent for a moment, frowning. “He made me promise not to tell Carter. Then he said it made things even. Then he left. I’ll take it,” Jeremy said lightly. “I don’t care where it comes from.”

  He had been terrified he would end up paralyzed. She could hear echoes of that terror even now. “It’s all right now.” Nita brushed a wisp of hair back from his face. His yes were so blue — the color of the sky above the riverbed on a windless day. David’s eyes had been almost that color. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Renny’s got Rachel at the car.”

  “Renny?” He laughed. “She sure doesn’t seem like the motherly type to me.”

  “She says Rachel’s not bad for a kid. She told me she’d take her on as an apprentice as soon as she can reach the pedals on the truck.”

  “She could do worse.”

  Through the window, she could see the river. Green grass fringed the sparkling sweep of the river full of water, glowing in the sun. Trees bloomed along white sidewalks, their bare branches clouded with pink blossoms. “It was so beautiful.” She leaned forward to kiss him on the lips. “I’ll be back when I can.”

  “Nita?” Jeremy’s eyes were full of sympathy. “When I finally get out of here, I plan to head back to the Tygh Valley. To see if that kid they stoned might still be alive somewhere. He’s like us, Nita. There are others like us. I’ve heard about ’em. I think I’m going to start looking for them. If you want to come along, I’d like the company.”

  If Carter is afraid of you, he meant. Dan was. Just a little. “I might take you up on it.” Nita smiled for him. “I’ll let you know.” She left the room before he could see her tears.

  *

  “You took your time.” Renny sat in the strip of shade cast by her battered loaner. Rachel stood between her knees, wobbly and delighted. “The kid’s ready to start running,” Renny said. “She gets ticked off when it doesn’t happen. I like her attitude.” She laughed and handed the drooling Rachel up to Nita. “Let’s go, babe. Feed her in the car if you’ve got to. I’m due to hit the road.”

  “Can we make one stop?” Nita asked her as she climbed into the car’s baking interior. “Just for a couple of minutes?”

  “Where and why?”

  “Mosier.” Nita looked away from the comprehension in Renny’s eyes.

  “Sure, babe,” she said, and a trace of sadness lurked beneath her words.

  *

  It was one of those rare, windless days in the riverbed. Nita left Renny at the car with the sleeping Rachel and walked up the steep little street, past the sagging white house where Julio Moreno sold his secondhand clothes and furniture. He was out on his cluttered porch and he raised his good hand in a gesture that was almost a salute. Nita nodded and smiled, but didn’t stop.

  Dust puffed up from beneath her feet to hang in the still air. The heat stifled Nita, baking her flesh on her bones. The single tree in the tiny cemetery cast a thin shade across the dust. The newer stones were just pieces of lava or river rock; names and dates had been scrawled across them in black, or blue, or silver paint. Leaf shadows dappled the grave where Julio had buried the bones. Nita knelt in the dust beside the stone. She hadn’t been able to find any flowers this late in the year, but she laid the small bunch of greenery that she had gathered on the grave: desert parsley and wheatgrass, a sprig of yarrow. At least the leaves were green and alive, even if they were already wilting. The stone was rectangular, reddish brown, smooth enough to have been shaped by hand instead of by nature. Nita touched the surface with her forefinger, feeling the tiny grains of sand beneath her fingertip. A few feet away another rough stone marked a grave. Luis Hansen read the fading blue letters. There were no dates on the stone, just the name.

  Child? Nita wondered. Old man? She sighed and pulled the nail from her pocket. D. She scratched the letter into the surface, wavery white lines as crooked as the embroidered letters on the pack. A. David, I loved you. I still love you. V I D. You gave me space to grow up. You kept me safe. A S. I don’t think I need anyone to keep me safe any more. C H E R. She put the nail back into her pocket and laid the bunch of greens on the stone. “If you’re here, know I love you. If you walked away . . . I hope you find happiness.”

  “David Ascher,” Renny said from behind her. “You made up your mind, huh?”

  “Yes, I have.” Nita stood up and took Rachel from the trucker’s arms. An ending and a beginning. She would ask Dan where her father was buried. Julio had disappeared from his porch and the little town looked deserted as people waited out the afternoon heat. Water was running in the soaker hoses again — for now. When it got cooler, men, women, and children would go out to work the fields until it got too dark to see, shaping their lives to fit the harsh rhythms of sun and water. This is what matters, Nita thought. We can look at Jeremy’s green visions and hope for that future, but right now, this is what has to matter.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Nita said.

  “I had nothing better to do.” Renny slid into the front seat, reaching for Rachel who yawned and blinked. “You know, when we made our little bargain, I thought you were sleeping with Danny. I could tell you weren’t real thrilled with the idea of crawling into my bed and I figured I could wing two birds with one stone.”

  “I still owe you,” Nita said. “You took Rachel in the riverbed, too.”

  “She’ll make a good trucker, that kid. I was serious about taking her on.” Renny handed Rachel to Nita and pulled her door closed. “We’re even, babe. You make me think about things.” She reached inside her denim shirt and pulled out a brown envelope. “This is for you.”

  Nita opened the envelope, removed the folded sheets. It was a hardcopy of a land title, in her name. “Your farm?”

  “Jesse’s farm, not mine.” Renny pulled onto the hold highway. “It was never mine. You can give it to Dan if you want. Or you can keep it and cut your own deals.” She shrugged, looking sideways at Nita. “Lydia told me a weird thing. She said you can hear what people think. Is there anything in that, babe?”

  “I hear a little bit,” Nita said softly.

  “Too bad you didn’t come along earlier.” Renny turned her attention back to the road, but not before Nita caught the glint of tears in her eyes. They were climbing up over the crest now, the engine growling with protest. Up ahead the promontory where Jeremy had called up a long-ago spring jutted out over the riverbed. Different, she thought. That’s all we are.

  “Could you let me off here?” she asked suddenly.

  “I can’t wait, and it’s a long walk to town. You sure, babe?”

  “I’ve got my water bottle. I’ll walk back when it gets cooler.”

  Renny pulled the car into the crumbling circular drive. People might have come here just to look down on the riverbed — no, the river — in the old days. Nita looked at the dry rocky gash, remembering shimmering water and the soft tints of green life that Jeremy had showed her. Yes, it would have been worth coming up here just to look.

  “See you next trip,” Renny said. “Take care of yourself.”

  Regretful? “I will.” Nita leaned down for Rachel. “You take care of yourself, too. Can you let Lydia help?”

  “We tried that once. Hell, who knows.” She gave Nita a crooked grin. “We might give it another shot sometime.” She pulled the door closed.

  The engine roared and the car leaped forward, down to The Dalles where Renny would pick up her rig and head eastward: toward Boise, the next plaza, and the next deal. Always looking at the road ahead, never back. Holding carefully to Rachel, Nita climbed the tangled ruin of old fence and walked out o
nto the promontory. No pool lay here today, just dust and stones and a view of the riverbed. For a moment, Nita regretted her decision to com here. Veins of rock marched across the far side of the Gorge, streaked brown and gray, carrying her eye farther and farther east, to where the walls of the Gorge and the rocky bed of the river blurred into opalescent haze. Nita spread Rachel’s quilt in the strip of shade cast by a crumbling stone wall and sat with her back against the relative cool of the stone.

  “This is our world.” Nita propped her daughter against her raised knees as the sun crawled slowly across the dry dome of the sky. “There’s beauty in it, if you look for it. We’d better look for it, because that’s all we’re going to get.”

  Rachel cooed and drooled, reaching for Nita’s hair.

  The sun was dipping toward the horizon and she was drowsing in the heat when the sound of a car cut through the quiet. Nita looked over her shoulder as the engine throbbed and died. A Corps pickup had parked by the ruined fence. She knew who it was before he had even opened the door — she would probably have recognized him in the middle of Portland.

  Carter stepped gingerly across the rusty wire and walked toward her, a little hesitant. “I went looking for you . . . to offer you a ride to see Jeremy. Renny said you went today, that she left you here.”

  “He’s getting some feeling back in his legs, Carter.”

  “Really?” His relief flooded the air. “That’s great. They weren’t offering a lot of hope.” He sat down beside her on the quilt, close enough that their bodies touched, arm against arm, leg against leg. “I . . . need to tell you.” He kept his eyes on the riverbed. “Johnny offered to pay for stem cell treatments for Jeremy. If I’d lose that proof. Nita . . . I couldn’t do it. It . . . would have hurt too many people to let him off.”

  She touched his arm, awed by the echo of what that choice had cost him.

  “I’m sorry. That I haven’t come by.” He kept his gaze on the riverbed, frowning, shy inside, unsure. “I ended up in the infirmary for a couple of days.” He grimaced. “I . . . vanished the evidence that the hacker gave me. I don’t know who actually did the shooting around here, or killed Candy Wilmer. Probably the people who were working for Delgado. If Durer catches them, they might implicate Johnny, but so far they seem to have disappeared.” Carter drew a slow breath. “I’m going to let it go at that. Dan’s pissed at me for not giving Johnny to the media, and he has reason to be, but he’s going along with it. I . . . owed a debt to Johnny.”

  “I know.” She leaned against him. “Johnny paid for Jeremy’s treatment. That’s why he’s getting better.”

  “What?”

  “He told Jeremy it was a gift from him. And that you’re even. You are, Carter. You repaid that debt a long time ago and he knew it.”

  “Do you know that?” His voice quivered, just a hair.

  “I know that.” She looked down at her daughter and stroked a wisp of dark hair back from her face, hurting with his hurt.

  “I’m going to stay on here,” he said slowly. “With the Corps or without it. People need to stand in the middle around here. They need to stick their necks out — like Dan.” He looked at her at last. “I . . . didn’t come looking for you right away,” he said. “It wasn’t just that the doctor stuck me in the infirmary. It was . . . because I had to know how I felt about you . . . about what you are.”

  Nita waited, her heart pounding suddenly, wanting to cover her ears or get up and run.

  “I’m always going to feel a little guilty for letting Johnny off, and you’re going to know that. And a lot of other things. And sometimes it’s going to drive me nuts. And sometimes . . . it’s going to be wonderful.” He drew a slow breath, his eyes as dark as the rocks beneath the dust. “I’m not afraid of what you are, Nita. Was that what happened with David? Was he afraid?”

  “Yes.” And he wasn’t afraid. Nita took his face between her palms and kissed him, and he put his arms around her, pulling her against him. The kiss went on a long time.

  Rachel’s delighted crowing finally broke them apart. “Child, you are going to get educated young,” Nita said breathlessly.

  “It’s going to be tough around here.” Carter put his arm around her. “A lot of people have already gotten foreclosure notices from the Federal Credit Bureau. It’s going to take some time to untangle those illegal permits and get the new fields off-line. Even pulling some water from the Great Lakes, we still may have to make some cuts to keep Mexico’s share secure.”

  “No good answers, huh?” Nita looked into his eyes. “Maybe all we can do is choose the best of bad choices. Sending Johnny to jail wouldn’t have saved those people in the riverbed.”

  “I guess not. Dan said the same thing. He’s not too pissed.” Carter shrugged, but an edge of bitterness in him had eased. “I guess we’ll do the best we can.” He pulled her lightly against him and kissed her again.

  Nita closed her eyes, breathing his scent, tasting him, remembering, anticipating.

  Rachel fussed.

  “She’s hungry.” Nita sighed. “See what happens when you get involved with nursing women?”

  “I see,” Carter said soberly, and then he laughed.

  It was a happy sound: she couldn’t remember ever hearing him laugh like that. He stretched out on the quilt in lengthening afternoon shadows and Nita pillowed her head on his shoulder, careful of his injured ribs. Tucked between them, Rachel nursed contentedly.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mary Rosenblum first published in Asimov’s Magazine in 1990 with “For A Price,” one of her Clarion West stories. (She attended that boot camp for writers in 1988.) Since that first publication, she has published more than 60 short stories in SF, mystery, and mainstream fiction, as well as eight novels. Her SF stories have been published in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, SciFiction, and Analog, among others. She won the Compton Crook award for Best First Novel, The Asimov’s Readers Award, and has been a Hugo Award finalist. She has been on the short list for a lot of awards but she doesn’t keep track. She publishes in mystery as Mary Freeman, and also teaches writing. She works as a “literary midwife” supporting writers.

  When she is not writing, she practices a sustainable lifestyle on her country acreage, growing all her fruits and vegetables and keeping sheep. She also trains dogs in tracking, herding, and obedience work. You can find out more about her at: www.maryrosenblum.com