Owen's Daughter

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  Staring at the Navajo rug, she realized that had she paid attention all this time, she might have recognized the work of her old friend, Navajo weaver Verbena Youngcloud. Verbena’s no-nonsense advice and friendship had sustained Margaret through difficult times. After Margaret left Blue Dog, the artist community where she’d lived until moving to Santa Fe, they’d drifted apart. Now, Margaret didn’t even know if the Navajo weaver was still alive. The rug had all of Verbena’s trademark idiosyncrasies: brown-and-beige storm clouds in each corner, the margins featuring giant water bugs. In one corner, there was a whirling log no bigger than a pinky finger. The whirling log design was a part of the Nightway chant, a Navajo ceremony. As such, it implied good luck to the Navajo but was generally mistaken for a swastika by anyone unfamiliar to the culture. Weavers had pretty much stopped including the whirling log, but Verbena Youngcloud was stubborn, and it made Margaret smile to remember her. It had to have come from Crystal Trading Post, because they always snapped up Verbena’s work. She’d ask Dr. Silverhorse where he bought it.

  Memories of her life in Blue Dog flooded her mind. Peter was twenty-five now, married, teaching at Gallaudet, a university for the deaf. But just after his fifteenth birthday, Peter had had an accident. Margaret had organized a family trip to Mexico, even though Ray wasn’t keen on it. At the time, she’d thought he didn’t want to leave L.A. because of all his pending movie deals. But he’d agreed to go for three days, so down they flew. One afternoon, she’d decided to take a walk, shop a little, and meet up with Ray and Peter for dinner. But when it started raining, she’d come back early and heard her husband on the phone, saying, “I love you with all my heart.” Since the words were not directed to her, this had come as a surprise. They’d had the fight of the century. From the adjoining room, Peter had heard them screaming at each other. Distressed, he’d run out into the rain and was gone for hours. Apparently, he’d jumped into a pool filled with stagnant water and hit his head. He’d contracted meningitis, nearly dying.

  Peter had survived but had lost his hearing. When the opportunity to attend a school for the deaf in New Mexico came up, mere months after the accident, Peter left their home in Southern California and moved in with the Hidalgos, a couple who’d raised their own deaf children. They opened their home in Santa Fe to the newly deaf teenager, allowing him to immerse himself in deaf culture while he attended Riverwall, the school for the deaf. Margaret, by then divorced from Ray, sold her waterfront house, leashed Peter’s dog, Echo I, bought a used Toyota Land Cruiser, and followed him, stopping at the town of Blue Dog a half hour outside Santa Fe, even though Peter insisted he didn’t want her anywhere near him. Peter had been furious with his mother for not being able to restore the family and for the divorce, and with the world because he had lost his hearing. He’d refused to consider cochlear implant surgery in part to punish her. But Margaret stayed. For a song, she rented an old Victorian house on the Starr ranch. Until Peter stopped blaming her for the divorce, she passed her time at her easel, painting, and taught herself American Sign Language.

  Riverwall School for the Deaf in Santa Fe had helped Peter learn to accept his new life. While he was there, he’d fallen for Bonnie Tsosie, a Navajo-Ponca girl, and had never really dated anyone else. He married her at twenty-two, way too young, in Margaret’s opinion. But there was no talking sense to him: Hearing kids never wanted to listen, but deaf kids made an art of it. For two years Peter and Bonnie had been sparring like boxers, one week in different apartments, the next in wedded bliss and contemplating having a baby. Now Bonnie was in Chicago, working for the radio show Native America Calling. It was the ultimate irony, Margaret thought, for a deaf woman to work for a radio show. Peter said it was only a temporary separation. Margaret relived her fights with Ray and couldn’t help thinking it was her fault for not setting a good example. Sometimes she wondered if society was simply evolving out of the institution of marriage.

  And Ray wasn’t her only failed relationship. Of course, there was Owen Garrett, the other man Margaret had fallen in love with. Ten years later, the memory was still tender. “I have to go face up to what I did,” he’d told her, explaining that he believed he’d killed a man in a bar fight and had been running from it ever since. That implied a prison sentence, maybe for life. He’d left behind his horse, RedBow, and for Margaret, a heart that felt as if it were filled with shrapnel. She’d forced herself to let go, but even after ten years had passed, she wondered every day if he might come back. She could have looked for him, she supposed, but the idea of finding him in prison, or with another woman, kept her from trying.

  She’d thrown herself into her painting, then, and actually had a show in the Blue Dog Art Gallery, which also doubled as the hardware store. Moving to Santa Fe was another story, a series of doors shut in her face. When Margaret first moved to the city, she’d applied to join the Downtown Artists’ League, which allowed an artist to set up shop a couple of times a year in a parking lot two blocks from the Plaza that generated decent foot traffic. They’d asked her to submit a portfolio. She’d welcomed the chance to update her résumé, listing the places she’d shown and which of her pieces were in private collections. She’d turned in a dozen slides, one large acrylic of cattle, and three oils that were her best work, the paintings she’d done in Blue Dog. The artists were told to pick up their portfolios and wait for a confirmation letter that they’d been accepted. The envelope had arrived two days later, and Margaret had torn it open excitedly. But there in one short paragraph the word sorry popped out at her, and she had to sit down and look out the window at the scrubby piñon trees and wind blowing over the Eldorado prairie. She knew she wasn’t Fritz Scholder or Donna Howell-Sickles, but she was a fairly decent painter. Not as good as some, but surely good enough to sell watercolors in a parking lot.

  That Santa Fe was a good place for artists was the first of many of the city’s myths to be shattered for her. Forget even trying the galleries along Canyon Road. The prices they charged were crazy inflated. The downtown galleries carried original works worth up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, not Margaret’s kind of art.

  Everywhere she went, artists seemed to be hurtling over one another for space. Even the walls of the coffeehouse she went to for a change of pace were covered with art for sale. Most of it was high quality. If no one was going to buy your paintings, then why bother painting?

  She’d stopped painting anything ambitious. Instead, she did small watercolors of cacti, horses, Santa Fe window boxes, weather-bleached doors, and gates. Of course she painted the remarkable skies, too, filled with clouds that sometimes lined up like freight trains overhead, but only in watercolor or acrylic. Oil was too expensive to waste on this kind of art. She ran giclée prints off a color printer, selling them for twenty-five dollars each online and in bulk to a few gift shops. She had steady customers, and soon she couldn’t keep up with the printing, so she hired an outside printer to do the work for her and limited her editions to fifty. It was shocking how decent a living she could make after she took her heart out of the act. Just the sight of one of Verbena’s weavings shamed her, because Verbena had obviously continued caring about art instead of ways to make money. This rug, with its vegetable-dyed, tobacco-brown yarn, was a masterpiece.

  How could she not have noticed it before?

  Occasionally Margaret wondered if her general sense of disappointment in life had something to do with not painting seriously, but maybe that was just part of growing old. Some days, she felt like Nash the cat, out of sorts with everything. Margaret had bought him sardines, catnip toys, a stick with a feather on a fishing line string. He ignored it all. She tried to give him affection, but he did not care for petting and ignored the cat bed she bought, preferring to sleep in the bathroom sink. How could he despise her?

  Depression was one thing, but fear of Alzheimer’s was quite another. She mentally reviewed her symptoms: crushing fatigue, intermittent grasping for words, numbness in her hands and feet. She fell dow
n at least once a week. Undoubtedly the onset of Alzheimer’s. Dr. Silverhorse would break the news gently and then tell her to get her affairs in order. Already she had a lawyer lined up to create a family trust.

  “Margaret?” Amy the nurse called her from her reverie, and she followed the sunny young Latina to the exam room. “You looked pretty deep in thought,” Amy said as she had Margaret weigh herself—still 120, after all these years—and took her blood pressure: 130/80, borderline high normal, as usual. “Everything all right?”

  “Oh, just planning my errands for the day,” Margaret answered. “How are you?”

  “Busy,” she said. “My youngest girl starts middle school next year. I’m taking some classes at night. Got to keep my hours up, you know? You look good, Margaret. We missed seeing you after your auntie passed.”

  Margaret saw the tears well up in the nurse’s eyes. There was an entire culture around death in Santa Fe, from anniversary obituaries to Day of the Dead artwork and, of course, the roadside descansos decorated with artificial flowers and Christmas ornaments, where someone had died from a car accident. “I miss her, too,” Margaret said. “Wasn’t I lucky to have her all those years?”

  “What a good way to look at it. Go ahead and have a seat. Dr. S will be right with you.”

  Amy left the exam room door ajar. Margaret opened her purse to find her Moleskine, a small, plain paper notebook she used to sketch in. She’d written a list of questions:

  Depending on my results, should Peter be tested?

  How long will I be competent to make my own decisions?

  Will I know when it’s bad, or will it happen so gradually I don’t notice?

  Power of attorney—is Peter mature enough to handle that?

  Should I sell the Eldorado house or put it in Peter’s name? What if he and Bonnie split up? Would he be forced to sell and have to give her 50 percent of the profits?

  Will he take Echo II? If not, could I ask Glory? I’m awful. She has four dogs already. But she really likes Echo.

  Suddenly the ridiculousness of the list made her want to throw the notebook in the trash.

  All weekend long she’d sat out on the portal wrapped in her shawl, watching spring arrive in Santa Fe. The forsythia bushes reminded her of drag queens, flaunting their Day-Glo yellow petals. The lilac bushes that perfumed the air on Ave de Colibri were heavy with buds, practically groaning with the urge to bloom. Her neighbor Glory’s wisteria was greening up, and soon purple flowers would follow. Once the nights warmed up, the solar fountain would turn itself on, and birds would start throwing their predawn raves. And there she’d sat, fifty-year-old Margaret Yearwood, beholden to nobody, loved by nobody except her sister, and facing what? Thirty years of assisted living? Losing parts of herself day by day, the way her aunt did? Becoming the kind of burden to Peter that she swore she’d never be? No wonder Aunt Ellie had become combative. Should she move to Oregon, a state that allowed people to legally end their lives? What would happen to her life insurance policy if she did? Could she cash it in before then? Nash the cat would be all right. He was such an efficient mouser, someone would be glad to give him a home. But who would take care of Echo II? As if the spotty red mutt with the dachshund ears, supermodel-long legs, and heart of the softest gold could hear her thoughts, she had nuzzled Margaret’s knee with her wet nose, and Margaret had smiled. She’d never realized how important a dog could be until Ellie died. Echo was the first sentient being she spoke to every day and the last one before sleeping.

  Dr. Silverhorse knocked and then entered the exam room. “Boker tov, Margaret,” he said in his distracted monotone, scanning her file. “I hope you’re having a nice morning. Just as I suspected, you’re negative for the Apo E. Your blood tests, hmm, I suspect the low vitamin D level is the result of sunscreen, and the giant red blood cells noted are due to a B vitamin deficiency. Take B complex, vitamin D, and of course, calcium. Get the supplements at Trader Joe’s. They have the best prices . . .”

  “I don’t have Alzheimer’s?” Margaret blurted out, feeling the adrenaline flood her veins.

  Dr. Silverhorse paused. “Just as I told you, no Alzheimer’s. However, there is—”

  The relief made her so giddy that she babbled right over him again. “Oh, thank God. I’ve been sick with waiting. I know you told me there wasn’t anything to worry about, but I read all this stuff on the Internet, and thank goodness. I suppose you think I’m crazy, but I had to know. I think I’m going to have an ice-cream sundae for lunch, it’s all such a relief.”

  He looked up at her, peering over the top of his glasses. “Tzipiyah. We haven’t discussed the MRI yet.”

  And then Margaret knew. It was her own fault, forcing the issue of dementia—her constant worrying had never done her one bit of good. “Oh,” she said, that single syllable, a great big zero. This was bad. The breath went out of her. What had he found? A brain tumor?

  “Have you ever heard of Dawson’s fingers?” he asked.

  She forced a grin. “Is that some kind of pastry?”

  Dr. Silverhorse sat on the stool and tossed her chart on the counter. “Margaret,” he said, and took her chilly hands into his warm ones.

  Twenty minutes later she left his office with a dozen pamphlets, computer printouts, the phone number for a support group, and the name of a therapist who knew all there was to know about multiple sclerosis.

  Even bad news contained a glint of silver lining. Now Margaret was entitled to have whatever she wanted for dinner. When your entrée was ice cream or an almond croissant, dessert was the moon. For all that everyone griped about sugar, Margaret took the long view. Life was difficult. Sweetness played a vital function. And now, she was supposed to give it up? Dr. Silverhorse said lots of people lived a normal life span with MS. They raised families, climbed mountains, did TED talks, painted masterpieces. Her mind reeled with information. It was actually a kind of relief to finally know, and hey, it wasn’t Alzheimer’s. But a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis made the next twenty or thirty years seem like a very short time.

  She drove home, leashed Echo, and walked down Old Santa Fe Trail to Kaune’s Market. Echo sniffed every tree, mailbox, and boulder, left pee mail, and of course accepted all compliments and attention that came her way. Echo II had descended from Peter’s first dog, whom Margaret had called “the doggie ambassador” because she could convert cat lovers in mere seconds. Echo II had inherited her mother’s finest quality. Echo II was one of the litter that came from the three-legged, blue-spotted dog that belonged to Owen Garrett of the broken-heart episode. Despite the passage of years, the sight of those cattle dogs still filled Margaret with a bittersweet melancholy. John Lennon had once said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” and wasn’t that true? “I promise I’ll never leave you,” Margaret told the dog, hoping that no matter what condition she found herself in down the road, she’d find a way to care for Echo.

  Kaune’s, first opened in 1896, had managed to hang on despite Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. Margaret tied Echo’s leash to a post on the store’s portal, a three-foot-wide sidewalk that contained leash hitches and a water bowl. She told Echo to “wait” as she had dozens of times before, and the dog sat quietly, minding. The specialty market was spendy for Margaret’s budget, but today was an exception. She bought green chile enchiladas, cherry clafoutis, a pint of vanilla-bean ice cream, and a tin of the imported Dutch cocoa her aunt had loved. How selfish am I, she asked herself, and ordered a small tuna filet for Nash. For Echo, a nice chewy bone with some beef still on it. With every step she scrutinized her gait. Was that left foot a little slow on the uptake?

  “You can smell spring in the air today,” the clerk said as he wrapped the tuna.

  “You sure can,” Margaret agreed, keeping her worries out of her voice. “I wonder if it’s time to start seedlings?”

  “Indoors, sure. But wait until Memorial Day weekend to plant,” the clerk answered. “Old Man Winter hasn’t let g
o all the way yet. Do you have fruit trees?”

  Though she did not, Margaret nodded and listened to his advice. She paid for her sack of groceries and walked back outside to fetch Echo, who wagged her tail excitedly, because she was just that happy an animal. Margaret peeked in the window of the gift shop next door. For Bonnie’s last birthday, she’d bought her daughter-in-law a pair of Victorian glass trumpet flower earrings there but never received a thank-you note or an e-mail. Perhaps the stormy nature of Peter and Bonnie’s relationship was responsible. Margaret gave Echo a neck scratch, and the dog groaned her appreciation.

  A crack of thunder overhead seemed to split the sky in two. Gray clouds moved in, and a chill seemed to rise from the parking lot. Echo hated thunder and began to tremble. Margaret took off her scarf and tied it tightly across Echo’s middle to make her feel secure. Her neighbor Glory had told her the dog needed one of those antianxiety dog jackets. She’d order one today, but for now, this halfway measure would have to do. They hurried the short walk home, hoping to beat the rain.

  In the recesses of the Canyon Road yards, patches of white snow still lay obstinately in shade. Soon the empty window boxes would be ready for flowers. The timeless portrait of Santa Fe was white snow against red adobe, the trim color on the houses ranging from that dusty indigo “Santa Fe blue” to turquoise and white and all colors in between. The butcher at Kaune’s was right, it would snow again, maybe today. Aunt Ellie had referred to April snow as “a poor man’s fertilizer” and pronounced it good for her garden. It must have been true, considering how her plants thrived. But Margaret was looking forward to having the snow gone. Somehow, MS would be easier to accept in the sunshine.

  When she made it to Colibri Road, she saw her neighbor Glory Vigil sitting on the front step of her house. Her adopted granddaughter, Aspen, was marching up and down the street, singing. Next to Glory, in a bouncy seat, her five-month-old daughter, Sparrow, was bundled up tight in a pink snowsuit. Margaret babysat both girls often. When Aspen’s mom, Casey, needed a break, or Glory had to work late, Margaret said yes, because she remembered how exhausting parenthood could be. Sometimes she told Glory she wanted to keep both girls overnight so that Glory and Joe could get a good night’s sleep, finish a conversation, or see a movie.