by Margo Catts
“This is boring,” Kevin said. “They won’t have games till night.”
“Let’s try the gold panning.”
“That’s so stupid. I’ve done it like a hundred times.”
“Sarah hasn’t. Come on.”
I led the way across the street, past the front of the bandstand, stepping over cables being dragged across the ground, to a dirt lot behind the barbershop that had been cordoned off as the children’s area. They could dig for prizes in a sandbox, ride a four-car train of mine carts through a corrugated metal tunnel, and pan for flecks of gold in a sluice box with flowing water fed from a hose and sand lining the bottom. From the gold-panning area, I had a decent view of the street.
“I’m not riding that train,” Kevin said.
“Nobody’s asking you to. Let’s try the gold panning.”
A bearded man with canvas pants and a floppy hat was already helping another pair of boys, so Kevin and Sarah picked up unattended pans in the sluice, scooped some sand and water, and started swirling the pans. Sarah spilled most of hers immediately, then as I started to show her how to scoop just a little sand rather than fill the pan, I saw it: a sheriff’s car, headlights flashing, another behind, and then the van, just making the turn at the top of the street. An honorary procession. I let go of the pan and stood, arms hanging by my sides, watching them pass the burro pen and the pickup truck with the speakers, drive slowly past me, then disappear beyond the brick wall of the barbershop.
“Are you going to cry?” Sarah said, voice small.
I looked down at her. “Maybe,” I said.
“Does your stomach hurt bad?”
“No, it’s okay.”
She paused to consider that, then her own face started to fold. “Are you going to go away?”
“What? No! Of course not!” But even as the automatic response came from my lips, her question, her tears, and her history all twisted and fused together. I glanced at Kevin, standing with his hands in the water, also watching me warily. I dropped onto my knees on the ground and took hold of her arms.
“Sarah, did your mom cry sometimes?”
She nodded.
“And did that scare you?”
Another nod. I glanced at Kevin.
“When she said good-bye to you the last time, when she took you to your friends’ house before she went to go see your grandma and had her accident, was she crying?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh, honey.” At that, I really did start to cry. I pulled Sarah into my arms.
“Ma’am, is she okay? Do you need some help here?” The prospector’s shadow lay on the ground. I shook my head without looking up.
“We’re fine,” I said. The shadow withdrew.
I pulled away, still holding Sarah’s arms. I looked at Kevin to include him.
“Sarah, Kevin, I need you both to listen to me. I’m crying right now because I’m sad about somebody else who died and I’m sad about your mom, too. People die, and when you love them you cry, no matter how old you are. I think your mom cried sometimes about other things, too, and grown-ups do that. We all do. But I want to make sure you know it was never about you. Never. I know that. Do you understand?”
I made sure they both nodded.
“And it doesn’t mean someone is going to leave, either. You might see your dad cry sometimes, because he’s sad, too, but you’re not making him cry and he’s not going to leave you. You’re probably going to see me cry some more times. And that’s okay.”
I paused. Secured both of their gazes. Discovered I could say what all three of us needed to hear.
“You didn’t make your mom leave,” I said.
It felt nice, I realized, to hear how those words sounded.
*
We heard a knock at the door Friday afternoon, as I held Sarah to the task of cleaning up the doll kingdom she’d spread all over the living room before her father came home. At the sound, Sarah jumped to her feet and opened it to find a sheriff’s deputy standing on the stoop, turning his hat in a circle in his hands.
“You’re Sarah, aren’t you?” he said with a smile. She looked at him for a moment without answering, then looked back at me over her shoulder. “I’m Sheriff Bales,” he added.
Not a deputy, then.
“Sarah,” I said. “You can go out back and see what Kevin’s doing. The sheriff is here to talk to me.”
“Why?”
“I think he’s looking for Tuah.” I glanced at the sheriff. His eyebrows lifted very slightly.
“That’s right,” he said.
“Why?” Sarah asked again.
His response was mercifully smooth. “I think we found something that might be hers.”
“Oh.” Sarah’s interest dwindled visibly. She looked back up at me. “Can I go outside now?”
“You bet.”
She sprinted away, disappearing down the hallway before I might have a chance to change my mind about her cleanup chore, then confirming she’d left with a bang of the door.
“So you knew,” he said when she was gone.
I hesitated, then nodded. “I thought so,” I said. “You want to come in?”
“Thank you.”
I swept a handful of Lincoln Logs onto the floor and sat in the beige chair while he took the matching sofa, leaning forward onto his knees, still turning the hat in his hands.
“I was just at your grandmother’s house. Do you know where she is?” he asked.
“Hat Creek.”
“Have you said anything to her?”
I looked down and shook my head. “I was waiting for you to be sure,” I said. Then I looked back up. “Are you?”
“Enough. The medical examiner says the remains are the right age, female. Did the best we could with old records.” Another circuit of the hat. “You saw everything, then,” he said. He rolled his lips together. “In the cave, I mean. So you know what—was there.”
It was sure, then. Bone of my bone, the girl in the cave as much as the baby in my belly. I tried to swallow, but the muscles of my throat stuck. I nodded.
“We need to talk to her. Then talk to anybody we can find who was around back then. No matter how old, it’s still a murder.”
Spoken aloud, the word took on form and substance. It was real and would change Tuah forever. What words would I use to tell her? How does one confirm the worst fear in a woman’s life? Yes, your lost child has long been dead. Not only that, but she died terrified and suffering. And I can’t sit beside you as you hear the news, absorbing the blow with you, but instead I’ll sit across from you, delivering it. Hadn’t she suffered enough?
“I know this must be real hard,” he said. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Stock words. How often must he have said them over the years? The same acknowledgment of small losses and great ones, made exactly the same way to the young, the old, the fearful, the happy, the virtuous, the evil. Sorrow was no respecter of persons. Tuah would suffer. Everyone suffers. It wasn’t a question of who deserved it.
I looked down. It was my duty to tell her. And yet, as I asked the sheriff to give me time to get to Hat Creek before him in the morning, I realized something else. I wouldn’t have wanted to do anything else. This was my family. This was my home.
*
As I shut the door behind the sheriff I looked at the clock on the mantel. Two hours until I could expect Paul. Hours beyond that I would spend in the empty Leadville house, wishing I could be in Hat Creek instead. For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to be alone. I looked at the kitchen, where I had left off cutting carrots and cucumbers when the sheriff came. I straightened the hem of my shirt and walked down the hall to the back door.
“Kevin! Sarah!”
Sarah, squatted over something in the grass, looked up at me, and a moment later Kevin appeared from behind the barn with a ball in his hand.
“Come inside. I want help with dinner.”
“Isn’t Daddy coming home today?” Sarah said
.
“Yup.”
She popped to her feet. “You’re staying?”
Her innocent question, wrapped in so much hope and joy, struck me in a far larger way than she intended. My answer was a revelation, and I hesitated for a moment before I said it, confirming to myself that it was real.
“Yup.”
I lowered my standards for Sarah’s cleanup chore. With Kevin deputized at the stove browning chunks of beef, and Sarah soon at the sink tearing lettuce for salad, I made stroganoff for four. Paul seemed more pleased than surprised when he came home to the smell of onions and butter and I asked whether it would be all right if I just stayed.
We chatted and laughed around the table, the children slurping noodles and trying to outdo each other in making our mundane activities of the week into exaggerated stories. Poppy’s puppies could run—no, drive—no, fly now. Elena’s car almost ran out of gas—no, it did run out and had to be towed—no, it burst into flames! Paul in turn told them about the fantastical places he’d been and things he’d seen during the week. The idea that Waco was wacko would stick for a while, I could tell.
Afterward we took the children out for ice cream, where we ran into the high school principal. He introduced himself with a slightly sticky handshake and said a little bird had told him a certain Miss Alvarez might be the solution to his science teacher problem. I glanced at Sarah and Kevin, solemly licking their ice cream at a picnic table, at the mountains that stepped up toward Hat Creek, and said it was something I was actually thinking about. At the medical clinic we passed on the way home, I noted the phone number on the sign and quickly memorized the last four digits, all anyone needed up here.
Back at the house it was time for the children to get ready for bed, then stories, and then for Sarah to show her father how she could go to sleep by herself now. We said we’d sit in the living room and wait until she was asleep.
“Kevin,” I heard Paul say at his son’s door, while I switched on the night-light for Sarah. “It sounds like you were a big help this week. I appreciate that.”
I couldn’t hear Kevin’s answer, but I pictured him lifting his chin, even as his head lay on the pillow, and felt a squeeze in my throat. I blew a kiss to Sarah.
Paul and I sat across from each other, chair and sofa, lights low, while evening settled around us like a cat around its tail. I looked down at my shirt, bloused over my midriff, hoping that Paul just thought I’d been making too many cookies, but also realizing it would be fine whenever he knew it wasn’t. Birds in the bush outside the living room window rustled and groused as it got dark, and voices from a neighbor’s porch faded away with the slap of a screen door. From time to time Sarah would call out, “I’m still in my bed!” but eventually that stopped as well.
“So you’re going up in the morning?” Paul asked as conversation about daily life at the cabin wound down. A distant chime of laughter from a neighbor’s TV drifted through the window. His arms rested on the chair arms, and a bottle of beer hung by its lip between his fingers.
“Yeah.” I glanced at the clock on the mantel I had succeeded in forgetting since the afternoon. “I should get going.”
“Well,” he said as he pushed himself to his feet. “Thanks again for dinner.”
Had I really felt uncomfortable here before? In the instant it took to wonder I realized I felt more connected here than to any home I’d lived in growing up. The home of a stranger and children I still didn’t believe I fully understood. What made the difference?
“No—thanks for letting me stay. I probably would’ve had crackers or something if I’d just gone back to Tuah’s house.” I picked up my bag and hitched it onto my shoulder. He took the two steps necessary to open the door.
“I, ah, should let you know,” he said. “Alan House stopped by last weekend. He brought by a check.”
“What?”
“The men on the rescue team. If it’s not just a problem in the mine, if it’s a person, it turns out they”—he looked down, cleared his throat a little—“they never take their pay. So they put it all together and handed it over to me. For the kids, you know. It’s a big help. I’ve got a few more hauling contracts, but I stopped by the mine on my way into town. I’ll be able to start working there in another month or so. Mechanic’s shop. So we’re gonna be okay.”
“That’s great. That’s fantastic.”
“I just—” He pressed his lips into a thin line. “Here’s the thing. You’ve been like family. Better. I don’t know how we would’ve made it without you. I can’t ever thank you enough. And now …” He looked through the open door into the dark, then back again at me. “Look, I want you here as long as you can be. Hell, I hope you take that teacher job, stay in Leadville, get married, raise a nice family, be my kids’ aunt for the rest of their lives. But only if that’s what you want. I don’t want you thinking you’re stuck here. That’s all. Whatever you do, I need you to know we’re gonna be okay.”
We faced each other across the void created by the open door.
“Thanks,” I whispered. “It’s been—” I didn’t have a word. And I couldn’t have spoken it if I had. So I ducked my head and stepped out into the dark.
The door closed behind me. I tipped my head back and looked up at the ceiling of stars, visible to me here as they never had been in Los Angeles. The Milky Way washed overhead like grains poured from Zeus’s jar, blessings or curses streaming from heaven to earth. Or I could see instead something true and much less frightening: countless stars and galaxies, suns with their own planets and moons, bodies and systems incomprehensibly large, bits of matter invisibly small, stars expanding and stars collapsing, dense and interconnected, all of them pushing and pulling against each other with their specific masses and gravities in infinite complexity, across a vastness of time beyond my comprehension. A universe in perfect balance.
And me in my place within it.
*
I drove up to Hat Creek as the morning sun lay across the road, counting the landmarks off as I went—the gnarled ponderosa growing alone out of a rubble heap, the taut wire fences of the Bar Triple C Ranch, the knob near the intersection with the dirt road that had always made me think of an ambush spot from an old Western. The trip rolled along as a series of images now so deeply imprinted that I knew them before I saw them. The final one was of Tuah, standing in the center of the garden, one hand holding a hoe and the other shading her face, watching my car roll toward her.
“Well, this is a surprise. We weren’t expecting you so early,” she said as I opened the door and stood. My father appeared on the porch with a dishtowel over his shoulder. Mac, lying on the porch with his forepaws drooped over the edge, raised his head to look at me and thumped his tail a couple of times against the boards.
“Hey, Dad,” I said.
“Is everything okay with the Koffords?” she asked.
“Yeah.” They continued to stand looking at me, waiting for the explanation. Mac rolled onto his side with a long sigh. “I need to talk to you. Both. Can we sit down for a minute?”
Tuah cocked her head a little to one side, then smiled and pushed off against her hoe. “Roberto, grab another chair.”
We formed a little arc on the porch, my grandmother upright in a kitchen chair, I in an uncomfortable rocking chair we rarely used, my father in the deep porch chair his father had made. He looked uneasy. He didn’t like situations in which he didn’t already know what was going to happen. Tuah, on the other hand, sat relaxed and pleased, and all of a sudden I realized what she must be thinking—that I had come to the side of reason and decided to tell my father about the baby.
There was no way to ease into this.
“Tuah,” I said. “On my ride last time with Leo, we went someplace I’d never been before. Neither of us had. You know meadow at the end of the elk trail?”
Tuah nodded. “Yes, of course.”
“By Washington Rock?” my father asked.
I really had been blind. I shifted i
n my chair. “That’s right.”
“That’s a pretty spot,” my father said.
“Yes, very,” my grandmother said.
I steadied myself with a deep breath. “We went past there,” I said. “We followed a little creek a few miles past it to another meadow. We were going to have a picnic and do some exploring—”
“My,” Tuah said. “You went a long way.”
My father squirmed in his chair. It looked as if it didn’t fit him.
“We found—a cave and … there was—a body.”
The sentence hung like an egg thrown against a wall, where it clung for a moment before it started to slip and fall.
“A—body? A human body?” my father said. Tuah sat frozen in her chair.
“Yes.” I looked at Tuah. “I thought it might be Benencia.”
She stared back at me, still motionless. Blinked. Blinked again. I tried to read in her face what she was feeling. When she spoke, her voice was papery and pinched.
“That’s—that’s not possible. That’s too far. And it’s been too long. There couldn’t be a body.”
“It was—” I couldn’t bring myself to say skeleton. “Bones.”
Tuah gripped the edge of her chair, and her gaze now focused somewhere in the space between us. “That’s too far. That can’t be her. It’s too far; she couldn’t have gone that far.” She turned to my father. “Did you go that way? To the meadow?”
I looked at my father for the first time. He looked stricken, pale. I didn’t understand what was going on between them. “I don’t know,” he said. “You know I don’t know.”
Tuah turned back to me. “What makes you think it was her? It could’ve been anyone. Miners, hikers, so many people …”
I forced myself to breathe. “It was—there was fabric. Like you said she was wearing—calico with flowers.”
She sat still for a moment, then shoved the chair back, hard against the porch boards, and went into the cabin. My father stared woodenly ahead and wouldn’t look at me. I heard Tuah’s steps in the cabin, walking away, then getting stronger again as she came back. She stood in the door opening, now holding the quilt from the guest bed, the one I’d been using and had been here for as long as I could remember. She shoved it into my lap, pointing to a square caged by surrounding triangle teeth. Blue calico with pink flowers.