A long time ago, Anasazi people lived here, growing the three sisters: beans, corn, and squash. They collected their water from the rivers and plucked piñon nuts from trees by the thousands. Life was good for the People. They prospered. But there came a day when enemies arrived, and surrounded the Anasazi. Having no understanding of war, and no weapons, the People prayed to the gods for safety. And they prayed so intensely that the gods pushed Shiprock up out of the earth, and the women and children, the old men, too, were safe on top of the seven-thousand-foot tall mountain. Ah-sheh-heh’! Thank you! The enemies, seeing they’d angered the gods, fled.
But once a war has begun, there is no going back to peace.
Life on the mountain returned to normal. Every day the young men of the tribe climbed down a rocky path to tend crops and fetch water. One day, aieee! Ne-ol, a storm came. Lightning struck the dry piñon trees below. One cannot eat fruit from a lightning-struck tree without getting sick. The lightning caught a tree on fire. The fire spread to the crops, aieee! And lightning struck again, destroying the path the men climbed up and down every day. The men were down below, watching as lightning sheared off the hoodoo, trapping the women, children, and elders atop the peak. Ah-ho-tai, they said. This is how it is. There was no time to be sad. Be-ke-a-ti, the men talked it over. Only a shaman is allowed to touch rock struck by lightning. The men, ta-bilh, began the arduous process of creating another path. Cutting rock takes time, so long that those ones, the women, children, and elders waiting atop, starved to death. The People were heartbroken. They forbade anyone to climb the mountain for fear of disturbing the ch’iid.i, ghosts.
All Skye had to do was catch sight of Shiprock and the story went right through her heart. Maybe it’s a fable. Maybe like all of Duncan’s stories he was speaking figuratively, but she feels a kinship with the Anasazi on the morning she’s leaving Cottonwoods for the larger world. For months her known path has been cut off deliberately, but if she stays here, she’s locking herself away from everything. Isn’t that a kind of starvation?
A month ago, March, with snow still on the ground, Duncan told her, “It’s time. Go out into the world now.”
Skye shook her head, no. She was sure he was wrong.
“You have to try someday,” Duncan said.
Today might not be the best day, either, but she has to try.
Since dawn, she’s stood in the shade of the porch waiting on her ride, arranged three weeks ago via text messages and e-mails. Rocky Elliot, her soon-to-be ex-husband, also the father of her daughter, Gracie, isn’t due until ten a.m., but she can’t go back inside Cottonwoods because what if she decides she can’t leave after all? So she’s waiting here on the portal, which is what folks call patios here. She’s slathered on sunscreen and is wearing her Ed Hardy hoodie with the Love Kills tattoo design on the front that doesn’t seem funny anymore. Yesterday in her last group, Duncan said, “Skye, this is the beginning of the story that you get to write.”
“Yeah, right,” she said. “Once upon a time there was this twenty-two-year-old alcoholic, pill-popping mother who turned into a sober, princess-perfect mother and lived the greatest life ever without alcohol or drugs. Then, one day, relief arrived like a bus that got her through the roughest day: six OxyContin and a greyhound, vodka and grapefruit juice on the rocks.”
Duncan, the dark skin over his Indian cheekbones, the white teeth in the wide, generous mouth, smiled. “A story can start in the ugliest place on earth. Where it goes from there is up to you.”
The world is a sharp-edged place filled with temptation. Without drinking or pills, there’s nothing between her tender skin and the world.
Skye was delivered to Cottonwoods with a blood alcohol level of 0.29, which is a hair from unconscious. At the time it felt like the only way she could cross that boundary from the world she knew to what had to be. Today she’s walking out purely under the power of her plain self, with the help of her so-called Higher Power. She will not drink. She will not take so much as an aspirin.
So One Day at a Time says.
Skye had this idea that rehab would restore her to the girl she was at seventeen, but that person was vamanos, gone, as out of reach as Shiprock. After the morning hike one day, she started walking toward Shiprock, just to see the mountain closer up, but the path was like running in a dream. No number of steps seemed to close the distance between that mountain and her. Once upon a time, she was Sara Kay Sampson, the smartest girl in the class. While the rest of the kids went to parties, got drunk, and hooked up, Skye took the long view—veterinary school—and earned all A’s, maintaining perfect attendance. Other than riding horses, she didn’t mingle or make friends. There would be plenty of time for partying after college.
On her application essay to Stanford, she listed all her hard-earned accomplishments: 4.5 GPA. Captain of the debate team. Add in her 13.8-second barrel race win in girls twelve and under, Miss Colorado Rodeo Queen, junior counselor at YWCA horse camp. They couldn’t say no. They said yes.
Right before her seventeenth birthday, she met Rocky.
Pre-Rocky, Sara loved only her leopard Appaloosa gelding, Lightning, the spotted horse she had trained from a colt. Maybe Lightning was her first addiction, when her dad left. The intoxicating smell of horse sweat, learning to trick ride—moves like spin-the-horn and the hippodrome—breaking records fearlessly. She couldn’t get enough of the thrill. As a child her heart was big enough to hold only two men, her gelding and her dad. For a while after Dad bailed, the horse filled the void. Then Mama began marrying whatever man could keep her in style. The first one was the nicest, Klaus Krieger. He loved how smart Sara was and gave her a hundred-dollar bill for every A she brought home. He was stunned at his luck marrying Mama. When he died it hurt so much that Sara took one of the painkillers Lightning needed when he came up lame, just to see if it might erase the heartache. She was amazed at how well bute canceled the pain. Funny jokes became fall-down hilarious. Getting bucked off was nothing. Sara figured that was the moment she turned into a substance abuser, when that numbing blur became the goal.
After that she started drinking six-packs with Francisco, the barn manager. One day she passed clean out and woke up in an empty stall. Whether or not Francisco took advantage was a fuzzy area she tried not to think about. Instead she took two of Mama’s Vicodin and drank a half bottle of sparkling wine, fell asleep in the bathtub, and woke up in cold water, the room dark, nobody home. It was never just aspirin for a headache; she’d send in the bazookas.
At the rodeo where she was elected queen, Rocky showed up, blond and tall and dressed in chaps studded with Swarovski crystals. He was a champion bull rider who everyone said had ridden Dillinger to get his Professional Bull Riders ring of honor. People said he could ride a Maytag washing machine on the spin cycle. He was an Oklahoma boy, passing through Denver on his way to the next rodeo.
Sara was stunned by his flash and charmed by his sweet talk. Between two trailers, she threw herself at him.
“How old are you?” he asked between kisses.
“Seventeen,” she said, lying by a couple of months.
He pushed her away. “Y’all’re too young for me right now,” he said, “but you won’t be in a year,” and winked. “You wait for me, and I’ll see you then,” he said, and tipped his hat.
That gave her enough material for a year’s worth of dreams.
Stepdad Klaus Krieger had left Mama a wealthy widow. She drank hard for a couple of years and went on spending sprees. Skye lost track of how many times she dragged her boozy, weeping mother to bed. “Pour me another tequila, Sheila,” replaced “Mother.”
Then Mama married husband number three, Howard Young, that real estate baron. He bought Sara a canopy bed she was too old for and insisted on adopting her. They went to court and everything, declaring her father had abandoned her. Mama insisted she’d tried to find him, but Skye had always wondered if she’d tried her hardest. Four years later, after making a record number of bad real es
tate loans, old Howie hightailed it to Texas to lie low for a while. On a plane to Arizona, Mama read an article in the Delta Skymiles magazine on this plastic surgeon voted number one in the entire Southwest. First came the lipo. Then the face lift. Then the fat suctioned out of her knees and injected into the backs of her hands, a sign that her mother had truly gone off the deep end. When Sara told her that she’d been accepted to Stanford early admittance, her reply was, “Oh, honey, no. California sun is the worst! You’ll end up with more spots on your face than a Toll House cookie.”
It turned out Sara wouldn’t need the sun block. She graduated high school at the top of her class, with a baby bump under her graduation robe courtesy of Rocky Elliot, the pro rodeo bull rider from Weatherford, Oklahoma, who remembered her on his next pass through Denver. He was a tall, blond farm boy equipped with nothing but muscle in his cranium. One minute Sara was in love with a star, drinking cinnamon schnapps, dancing the two-step in whatever town the rodeo was in that month. The next she was on her knees puking her guts up into the toilet in a motel so cheap, she saw daylight through the floorboards.
Stanford was out the window. A child was growing inside her! She saw what she wanted to see—that Disney fairy tale of marrying an all-American, bona fide cowboy. Rocky promised her the kind of life she’d always dreamed of—a family all her own where the parents stayed married.
They did the deed in Vegas, a western-themed affair that cost six hundred and fifty dollars. Rocky talked her into pawning the diamond tennis bracelet poor old dead Klaus had given her for her thirteenth birthday. At the chapel, they were given the choice of a cowboy minister or a crazy miner minister. They opted for the crazy miner. Rocky’s mom, Rita, chain-smoked the entire time, jingling her plastic cup full of quarters, eager to get back to the slots. Sara’s mom was on her honeymoon with the plastic surgeon, husband number four.
When Sara gave birth to a daughter, she was determined her little girl would in no way end up like her. Gracie would go to the best preschool, attend church every Sunday wearing a straw hat with a yellow ribbon and, on her feet, white patent-leather shoes. She’d play only with high-class kids, and she’d take ballet lessons and learn to ride English. Skye still wanted that for her. But not long after Gracie was born, Rocky started disappearing for weeks at a time. When he was home, he’d drink sunup to sundown, take pills, or worse. After their marriage was over and Sara had the car accident, she’d called her mother and left a message: “Mama, I’m in trouble here, and I could use a hand. Rocky might get custody, but we both know he can’t manage it. If you take Gracie, I could do inpatient rehab. It’s either that or jail. Please, Mama. I’ll never ask you for anything again, I promise.”
Mama didn’t reply.
Getting sober meant she had to leave Gracie with someone. But nobody else would step up. Which meant anytime there was a rodeo, Rocky would leave Gracie with his mother, Rita, a compulsively gambling, boxed-wine-drinking, cafeteria Christian who could spend twelve hours straight in the casinos and smoked two packs a day. Her views on child raising? Kool-Aid built bones as well as cow’s milk. It was acceptable to feed Gracie Trix cereal three times a day because she liked it. And television, that great mother’s little helper, never hurt a flea, let alone a nearly-four-year-old taken from her mother.
So much could happen in nine months.
“Little Gee,” as Skye called her, was tomboy tough, talked early, and nothing held her back except for asthma. Rita promised she’d remember to refill Gracie’s inhaler prescription, and Rocky said he’d get home every weekend so she wouldn’t forget him.
So she left her little blond pumpkin there in Albuquerque at the Trailer Ranch. Grace Eleanor Elliot, who smiled like an angel and dressed up her plastic horses, brushing their tails until the hair fell out.
Any second now Rocky would pull up in his Ford 350 dually. Built Ford Tough rodeo sponsors gave him a new ride every couple of years. Even if he was wearing those cigarette leg Wranglers, another shiny belt buckle, and his Old Gringo Rockrazz boots, Skye was determined she wouldn’t sleep with him again. If she did, the divorce would take even longer. Plus, she’d be back to drinking and using within twenty-four hours.
You are not that person anymore, she told herself.
After a week at Cottonwoods, all this starting over gave her an idea, and she changed her name from Sara to Skye. Sara Kay sounded like the name of a twelve-year-old who pitched fits in order to get whatever she wanted. Skye was wide open. The new name marked her rebirth. Even Duncan approved.
That first week, she wondered how a woman of twenty-two could feel so worn out. One lesson she learned at Cottonwoods is that the truth is a trailer you drag behind you wherever you go. In every meeting they made you tell your story, out loud and over and over: Hello, my name is Skye, and I am an alcoholic and an addict. I am someone not even a three-year-old can count on to fix her Cheerios every morning. Shame was a powerful motivator. Gracie deserved better. Skye wanted her back permanently, and the only way was to get and stay sober.
Nights were the hardest time at Cottonwoods, and not just because there was no Ambien allowed. As she lay there sober, in the dark, lights out, all her mistakes reared up to haunt her. If it hadn’t been for “Tesuque,” the Hollywood director who paid for rehab, Gracie could have ended up standing at a gravestone reading the short version of her mother’s life:
Sara Kay Elliot
died age twenty-two
former rodeo queen, alcoholic,
popper of pills
But that wasn’t the worst of it. This was: A mother who chose getting high over her child.
The day Tesuque had his chauffeur drop her off, she’d been high for days, partly because of losing Gracie. The other part was, why not go out loaded? She knew what it cost to go to rehab, to stay long enough for it to work. It was more than she could possibly earn in two years if she didn’t spend a dime, whereas drinking was cheaper. “Tesuque” was a regular at her restaurant, the Guadalupe BBQ. He always made sure to sit in her area, and he always ordered a black and brown—bourbon and blackberry syrup—that he left untouched. After a while, she started drinking it for him. Why let all that alcohol go to waste? What with customers buying her shots, some nights she’d have five or six drinks at work. One night, when her shift ended, Tesuque was waiting for her. He stood out on Guadalupe Street and told her, “You’re too smart to be working as a waitress, and you’re ruining your good looks with alcohol. Go to rehab.”
“Even if I did have a problem, which I don’t,” she said, “I can’t afford it.”
To which he said, “What if I can? Would you go then?”
“Look. You could buy me a solid gold grand freaking piano and I still wouldn’t sleep with you,” she said, and turned to walk away.
But he caught her arm. “I’ve seen this disease chew up folks and spit them out unrecognizable. I lost my career and two wives before I stopped.”
“Then why do you order a black and brown every night?”
“To prove to myself I can let it sit there. But I’ve noticed you can’t.”
She wanted to laugh it off, walk away, a dozen different things. But she stood there and listened.
“It’s too late for me to make repairs, but not for you. With my income, I can afford to be generous. And I think you’re worth the investment.”
“There’s no way I can pay you back without winning the lottery.”
“What if I said I don’t want to be paid back?”
Skye laughed. “When a man says something like that, he either wants sex or he’s a control freak who wants you to wear a dog collar.”
“I’m betting your life has been filled with men who let you down.”
“So what if it has?”
“So I’ve seen you with your little girl. You don’t want to lose her, do you?”
“I happen to be a great mother.”
“I’m sure you are,” he said. “I’m a great father. I love my kids with all my heart. But d
rinking took them away from me, and eventually, I guarantee, that will happen to you. It’s already started, hasn’t it?”
How did he know she was scheduled for court in a couple of days? Everybody else in New Mexico could rack up the DWIs, but the judge she was assigned was reportedly hard-core.
“Listen to me, Sara. Not all of us men are bad guys. You have to learn to trust one sometime so you can recognize the others of our species. I’m harmless. So you might as well start with me, or I guarantee you’ll end up with nothing.”
The truth was, she couldn’t see Rocky springing for a grave marker. She’d spent three months in rehab before she understood that Rocky, in addition to his addiction, was probably brain-damaged from falling off bulls. He always was kind of ADHD. He couldn’t do anything that took longer than a minute. While that was good for riding rodeo bulls, it was hell on birth control. The whole nine months of pregnancy, Skye lived in a state of equal parts terror and nausea. There was no drinking because she couldn’t keep anything down. Once Gracie arrived, it was hard to imagine life without those pink cheeks and big eyes, but somehow the using sneaked back in.
And then Tesuque offered her a way out.
It’s high noon. The temperature is a solid, airless 80 degrees. And it will get hotter. Here comes Nola, her psycho roommate, with a bologna sandwich and a cup of vanilla pudding. Skye hated Nola the second they met. She wasn’t there for alcohol or drug addiction—no, her weakness was laxative pills and her larger issue was eating, or the lack of it. Her simpering vegetarian diet was about twenty-five calories daily—couldn’t she just start eating normally? She could throw the laxatives in the same trash can as Skye’s OxyContin pills and avoid the mirror. But Nola had been hospitalized twice since Skye had been at Cottonwoods, while Skye had only her one slip with the vanilla Jack Daniel’s.
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