Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  She started with “that girl who lied” and moved through “the marijuana boy” and “the dropout,” and then to “the advisor,” the one who had pushed me to go to grad school. I could tell Tuah was annoyed that the advisor’s move to Florida made it easier for me to ignore her advice. But she didn’t belabor it, moving easily enough to “the lazy girl,” a neighbor who never went to class or, as far as I could tell, got out of her bathrobe. As we talked, “lazy” started to sound a little harsh. Maybe she was just tired. For a really long time.

  “You don’t tend to pick the best friends,” Tuah said as she whacked two sticks against each other so that the dirt showered around her feet.

  At this point we’d drifted so far into the swaying rhythm of unimportant questions and rambling answers that it didn’t bother me in the slightest to agree with her. I gave a half-effort, one-sided shrug.

  “Them’s my people.”

  She stood there for a moment, the two sticks against the sides of her legs. “They don’t have to be,” she finally said.

  “Why force myself in where I don’t fit?”

  “Well, what about the piano player? He sounded like a nice young man.”

  He actually had been, which proved my point. That was precisely what made it all the worse the night he found me in Carlo’s apartment rather than my own. Carlo was a disaster, as I knew long before I noticed him watching me at the pool, but he had a dark smile and as little regard for the future as I did, which made things more comfortable. Time I spent with Carlo was time I didn’t have to spend thinking about it.

  “He broke up with me.”

  “I see,” she said, then turned toward the sticks scattered like dropped matches around the splitting stump and started kicking them into a group, herding them toward the stack. A breeze tugged at my hair and ruffled the edge of the quilt, carrying the scent of cut pine. She added the two sticks in her hands to the pile, then put her fists to her lower back and arched against them. “That Carlo you mentioned yesterday, I don’t suppose he might’ve had something to with that bruise on your face.”

  I looked down. Didn’t answer.

  “But you’re gone now.” It wasn’t a question. “You won’t see him anymore.”

  This was easier to confirm. “No. No, I won’t. Ever.”

  “That’s good.” She bent for another piece of wood and returned to stacking. Bend, clack, smack. Bend, clack, smack.

  “You’ve been picking bad friends ever since the fire,” she said without looking at me. “But it’s getting worse.”

  Against the pull of gravity, I lifted my head. “What?”

  She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Other than that piano player, I haven’t heard you talk about a decent friend in years. All these people that don’t care about you, and you don’t care about them. And then you don’t want anything to do with the good ones, like Leo. I can’t make sense of it to save myself. And this Carlo …” She shook her head, patting the top of the woodpile as if she had spoken to it rather than me. “He’s the worst one yet.”

  I felt my spine stiffen against the slats of the chair. “Are you—trying to fix me?” I was too stunned to frame out an entire sentence before I started speaking. “You think I go around looking for people to hurt me? Because of the fire? And Leo? That kid? What are you thinking?”

  She stopped and looked straight at me. “I think you’re in trouble.” She tapped the stick in her hand against her leg three or four times, then turned away, laid it on top of the pile, fitted it, moved it, then reached for another.

  She was being manipulative, I was sure. She would leave that loaded statement lying between us forever, stack wood until the bottom of the pile dissolved into the earth rather than say anything else before I asked. Asked for clarification I didn’t want to hear. I knew it. But I still couldn’t stop myself.

  “I’m normal, okay? Lots of girls make stupid mistakes with guys and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s over, and I got away, didn’t I? I left everything behind.”

  “Everything?” she said. She stepped back and eyed the front line of the stack. “You sure have been sleepy.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You’re twenty-two.” She tapped a couple of straying sticks back into place and spoke to the pile. “When Eduardo and I came up here I was expecting your aunt Benencia. Six years before your father, that would’ve been. Anyway, I couldn’t keep my eyes open, either. When you’re pregnant, the altitude really gets to you.”

  Denial, with its props and buttresses and scaffolding, collapsed as unceremoniously as the abandoned structures in the valley below me. How delusional had I been? Escape? I would never detach myself from my sins. They weren’t car parts I could remove and replace, but pieces of my identity, and now I’d dragged them here with me: the walnut-sized life buried in my gut, the ghosts of the dead that clung to me like burrs. My body sagged into place where it was, quilt drawn up to my chin, forearms against my chest, feet pulled away from the cabin’s encroaching shadow. I squeezed my lip against a quivering I couldn’t stop, then uncovered one hand to brush a strand of hair away from my face. Waited for an answer to come out of a space inside me that suddenly yawned wide and empty and dark. My resources of denial were gone. I had no argument against the truth.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I whispered. The muscles of my throat and chest and eyes contracted. Like a tired child, I started to cry.

  *

  In physics, I learned equations that define a universe in balance. What happens on one side of the equation matches and predicts what happens on the other. But these equations prove true only in systems of infinite scale. I learned at the age of ten that in the observable world, where interference is the norm and time and space create artificial boundaries, almost nothing happens in proportion. Tiny actions set off reactions that multiply exponentially, so that the final effects are far out of scale to the original trigger.

  No explanation of the persistence of mass and energy could make sense of the harm a seventy-pound girl with a magnifying glass could do on a dry, blustery day in the Los Angeles foothills. No amount of replaying it in my mind would arrest that dot of light quivering on a pile of weeds before it grew to a flame, still the winds that carried it away, divert the fire from the homes I destroyed or the family I killed, or silence my mother’s words.

  “How are we supposed to live with what she’s done?”

  They couldn’t, it turned out. My parents blamed each other. The community blamed my parents. But I knew the truth. Only I knew what had taken place in my own mind as I gathered those weeds and pointed the light at them, the fascination, the triumph, the absolute knowledge that what I was doing was wrong. And the fully conscious way I did it anyway.

  No, there was no way to atone. No forgiveness to be granted. No way to put things back in balance, and no way, now that I carried a child, to escape this world without ever doing more harm to another soul.

  There is always a moment, though, where the laws of physics do work. Where everything can be stopped. The reaction—just in that moment—is equal to the action, and smothers the first puff in a cloud of billowing magnitude so that the outsized trouble never takes form. A sliver of time, barely there at all, where if a person’s reach is just long enough, the feet quick enough, the eyes sharp enough, disaster can be averted. The ripping grocery bag. The knife at the top of a toddler’s reach. The hot spot widening to a flame. If the moment is missed, everything changes. Forever.

  For once, the reaction came at the right moment. As I sat curled in the chair seeing my past flare up and consume the future, Tuah squatted in front of me. She pried the ends of the quilt from my fingers and pulled it away from my shoulders the way someone might open a pair of cupboard doors.

  “Now, that Carlo, does he know anything about the baby?”

  I shook my head, which made me feel loose and slightly dizzy.

  “That makes things simpler. Now, there are doctors. We can find one, if you want to, rig
ht away, and talk about some options—”

  The dizziness bloomed into a flush of hysteria. “No! No! After what I did—I can’t—I can’t ever—”

  “Hush. Then you’re gonna have a baby. People do it all the time, and they live after. Don’t be saying you don’t know what to do. You did the right thing coming here. You’re not alone.” She gave my forearms a pat, then straightened and returned to the woodpile. “Get a rake,” she said over her shoulder. “I need some help clearing this away. It’s time for you to get up.”

  I did as she asked. The ground leveled itself under my feet, and I left the open quilt behind me.

  4

  My shadow fell in a sharp-edged circle on the concrete around my feet as I stood in front of the Kofford family home, a flat-fronted, one-story gray house on the frayed edge of Leadville. Whoever had originally chosen the color showed foresight: the fading that happened so quickly at this altitude was slightly less noticeable. The peeling, however, couldn’t be disguised. Grass stood in clumps around the house, kept back from the foundation by a line of bricks set into the soil. Behind the battle line, tulip leaves, curled and brown, surrounded a concrete rabbit at watch beside the porch. Other frame structures—neighboring houses, sheds, neglected barns—were scattered along this stretch of blacktop, and the wind eddied around them, whipping strands of hair across my face that I tried to brush away with one hand. Though I was here in response to a recent crisis, what I was seeing suggested these people had been a mess for a long time.

  “Don’t look so angry,” Tuah said over her shoulder, pausing as she raised her knuckles to the door.

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Then don’t look that way.”

  She rapped on the door. The house shuddered in response, quieted, then gave another rumble. A curtain twitched at a window, and then a moment later, the door swung open.

  “Tuah!” A girl with tangled blonde hair catapulted through the opening and threw her arms around Tuah’s waist. I felt a twinge of something too sudden to identify. This stranger acted as if she were more involved with my grandmother than I was. Tuah put one arm around the little girl’s shoulders and bent to speak to her.

  “Sarah, I’d like you to meet my granddaughter. This is Elena.”

  The girl half-unwrapped herself but kept her cheek pressed to Tuah’s hip. She wore a pair of pink shorts and a gray T-shirt that looked as if it belonged to her brother. I watched a frown start to form between her eyebrows as she appraised me.

  “Hi, Sarah,” I said.

  She didn’t answer but turned to look up at Tuah instead. “She’s your granddaughter?” she asked. She looked back at me, still frowning. “She’s a grown-up.”

  “That’s right.” Nothing in Tuah’s tone would suggest that she wasn’t speaking to an adult. “One day you’ll be a grown-up, too, but you’ll still be your father’s daughter, and your granny’s granddaughter. That’s what happened with Elena, too. She used to be a little girl, just your size, and then she grew up.”

  “Huh.” It was a sound from her chest, more than a word, and she let it linger only a moment before she grabbed Tuah’s hand in both of hers and started to pull her inside. “I wanna show you my somersaults.”

  I followed the two of them inside. I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this restless bird hopping from one thing to the next. Tuah had told me only that neighbors said Sarah caused trouble when she didn’t get her way. Her brother, Kevin, on the other hand, had the opposite problem, withdrawing to the point where other children were uncomfortable and would ask their parents when he was going home.

  She’d told me all this yesterday, when she must have concluded I was never going to ask on my own. While we shelled peas, she said that Carrie, their mother, had been on her way to visit her own mother in Minturn on an icy February night when her car missed a curve, went through a guardrail, and landed on its top on the rocks far below. It wasn’t found until the next day.

  Paul, her husband, was a truck driver and part-time mechanic. Tuah had first gotten to know him over the engine of her own truck. His road trips often kept him away for four or five days at a time, which was impossible work for a single father of young children—Kevin was eleven, and Sarah, five. Carrie’s mother had come to stay for a while after the funeral, but she drank too much to be trusted with the children. No other family lived nearby. Paul had stayed home as long as he could, trying to take care of the children and the home while finding full-time work as a mechanic, but nothing was available and the ends wouldn’t meet no matter how hard he stretched. Carrie had worked as a hairstylist and the family had always needed both incomes, so they certainly couldn’t last long on less than one, and he began to worry he’d stop getting calls if he didn’t start taking trucking jobs again soon.

  Neighbors and families from school rallied and took turns having the children as long-term guests. It soon became clear, though, that neither the children nor the caregivers could go on this way indefinitely. As word got out that Tuah had found help, a breath of relief passed through family kitchens and school corridors. My summer help would buy Paul more time to find a way to start earning a decent living from home.

  I closed the door behind me, then had to blink and wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. To the brown, to be more accurate. Beige pinch-pleated drapes covered the windows, screening out most of the sunlight; earthy shag carpet covered the floor. I could see a sliver of the kitchen from where I stood inside the door, with a chocolate stove, a tan-and-gold vinyl floor, walnut-stained cupboards, and at the window, a linen panel embroidered with chickens. A tweed sofa the color of toast had its back to me, its cushions lined up, runway-style, across the floor.

  “Watch this!” Sarah perched on the sofa back, her bare feet where the cushions used to be, her hair splaying out from a snarl at the back of her head. Without waiting for a response she tipped forward, caught the edge of the sofa with her hands, then executed a loose, beetle-like somersault across the cushions. At its end, she twisted on her bottom to face us, eyes sparkling. The tangle’s source was evident.

  “That was amazing,” Tuah said. “Did you work that out by yourself?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “That was really good,” I added. She gave no sign she’d heard.

  “Where’s your brother?” Tuah asked.

  Sarah shrugged. “Watch me again,” she ordered, pushing herself off the cushion.

  Tuah ignored her. “Kevin?” she called, turning toward the hallway that ran away from us, presumably toward bedrooms.

  “Watch me!”

  “I’m watching,” I said.

  “Kevin?” Tuah disappeared into the hallway.

  “Watch me!”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll watch you.”

  Sarah glowered at me from her seat atop the sofa back, and I imagined an internal wrestle with whether to raise her demand level upon Tuah. After a moment, options and consequences considered, wisdom prevailed. She folded her arms.

  “Why are you at my house?”

  “I’m going to stay with you sometimes when your dad goes on trips.” God, what was I saying? Trips? Really? For days on end? I glanced at the window, covered, and the door, closed, and in that moment wanted nothing more than to fling them both open and flee.

  “Is he going on a trip today?”

  “No, not today. We thought it would be nice for me to meet you first. He’s going on a trip tomorrow.”

  “Who are your kids?”

  “I don’t have any kids.”

  She rubbed the corner of her eye with one knuckle, pushing some hair away from her forehead. “What dinners do you make?”

  I groped through my mind to find something I could remember fixing for myself. “What do you like?” I said when my search produced nothing but toast and canned soup.

  “Samwiches.”

  “Do you like peanut butter sandwiches?”

  She pushed up her bottom lip and shook her head.


  “Bologna?”

  Another shake.

  “What kind do you like?”

  “My mom’s samwiches.”

  She twisted back around to face the somersault lane.

  “Watch me,” she ordered.

  “Okay.” I came around the sofa and sat on the arm. Now, at least, I had something to say. It would be what I wished someone had said to me when I was twice her age but felt just as bereft, my mother gone without explanation, staring at a plate of eggs my father had made, dark yellow and folded and nothing like the creamy mounds I was used to.

  “Will you teach me how to make your mom’s sandwiches?”

  Sarah tumbled across the cushions and turned around to look at me, head tilted as she pushed her hair away again with the backs of her hands.

  “I’m not hungry right now,” she said after a moment. She got up and pushed the end cushion back against the one before it. I heard a door close, then Tuah’s voice, thank God.

  “Elena, come meet Kevin,” she said.

  A boy who reminded me of the ranch sons at Harvey’s Milkshakes entered the room from the hallway, Tuah behind him with one hand on his shoulder as if propelling him forward.

  “Hi, Kevin,” I said, rising from the sofa.

  He stuck one hand out, elbow straight. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. He wore a smudged white T-shirt, dark jeans, cowboy boots, and held a hat in his other hand. Wavy, light brown hair was crushed to his forehead in the front and on top, but stuck out defiantly at the back. He gave off a sharp, grassy smell. I took the offered hand.