Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  For the first time in my life, I have decided to keep a diary. So much is happening now, so much I need to remember as it happens, not confused by time’s passage. This is where I will begin.

  We are to have a child. Is that the right way to put it? Maybe I should have written this in pencil, but now it is too late. I shall try to be more clear.

  We (Stan and I) are being given the opportunity to be foster parents to a little girl. Her name is Mira and she is nine years old. She has fair hair, and a slim, almost fragile figure. It seems that her mother has disappeared, and that no one knows anything at all about her father.

  I don’t know much of anything about the usual arrangements for foster parenting, but I think this one must be a little odd. For one thing, we will not be able to formally adopt Mira for a good while because her mother is missing, not dead. The whereabouts of her father are unknown. That isn’t the oddest part, though.

  The odd part starts with some of the conditions to which we must agree. The first pair are the strangest. We must agree to move our place of residence and change our names. Mira’s trustees have agreed to help Stan find a job in some likely place, and as he had been getting rather sick of how his current employers won’t acknowledge that he’s finished his degree, that’s fine.

  The name change is a bit odder. However, neither Stan nor I have any living family, so there isn’t anyone we will insult by doing this. Since we moved to Idaho for Stan to finish his degree work, we have fallen out of touch with some friends, and those we have made here are not terribly close. That’s a hard thing to admit, but I know it’s probably all my fault. I couldn’t handle all those women with their children and their smug pity of childless me. Stan has been too busy between work and school to really care.

  I’ve often wondered over the course of this last week or so whether Stan and I were permitted to be Mira’s foster parents precisely because we have so few ties. Why is that important? What is it about Mira that demands this? I’m afraid to ask for fear they’ll take her from us.

  There’s another condition as well. We are never to—under any circumstances at all—take Mira back to the town from which she came. It’s a small place in New Mexico, so I can’t imagine why we would do so—except to enable Mira to experience her roots. THEY—these mysterious trustees seem to demand capital letters—THEY apparently don’t want her to do this. THEY don’t even want us to go to New Mexico to pick her up. We are to meet her at the end of her journey. THEY have indicated that they would prefer that Mira never go to New Mexico at all. I wonder why? Is there more to the disappearance of Mira’s mother than we are being told?

  The other conditions seem pretty reasonable to me. We are to handle Mira’s finances, but THEY will review them. We must submit to an annual inspection of our home. I rather suspect, given how THEY are, that we will be checked out more frequently but less formally—at least for the first couple of years. It’s rather creepy when you think about it, but I don’t mind. I’m head over heels at the idea of having a little girl of my own to raise. I’m going to try and be good to her, so very good, so what do I have to be afraid of?

  Okay. I’m being honest here. I’ll write it down. I am afraid. I think Stan is, too, but we’re not talking about it. The only thing either of us will admit is that we have our chance to finally be a real family and we don’t want to blow it.

  INSIDE THE LINES

  The next few entries were pretty normal stuff. How Uncle Stan and Aunt May picked me up at the train station. How I seemed shy, but interested in my environment. What we ate at the ice cream parlor, and again at home.

  I matched Aunt May’s memories against my own and found they rang true. She really was trying to report, not to project or speculate—at least not more than was reasonable.

  I found one comment made a few days after my coming to live with them oddly interesting: “I think Mira must have lived in a home with very well-trained servants. It’s not that she’s demanding. The little dear tries very hard to be anything but—it’s like she’s afraid to be noticed. At the same time, she clearly expects to be waited on for small things, like having her clothing put out for her, or food placed on her plate. She is the oddest mixture of independence and passivity that I have ever imagined. But then what do I know about children?”

  I had to stop reading after a few entries, though. Aunt May’s meticulous accounts of my reactions to my new room and to every aspect of my new life were so full of her eager hope that we would bond that I could hardly bear it. I found myself saying to the empty air: “It’s okay, Aunt May. It works out. It really, truly does.” Then I started crying, and shut the journal lest my tears mess up the page.

  That first entry gave me almost too much to think about as I drove. I had always blindly accepted the existence of my mysterious trustees. I had wondered if the Fenns’ moving and changing their names had anything to do with me, but I hadn’t wanted to ask. Now I knew. I was reminded of those relocation programs the police and FBI have for witnesses. Was I somehow a witness to something? Or was I being protected from whoever had made my mother disappear?

  Either fit with the provision that the Fenns were under no circumstances to take me back to my hometown—and here I was in my bright red pickup truck, making a beeline to that very town. What was I heading into?

  Probably nothing. Over forty years had passed since those provisions were made. Doubtless the danger—if there had been a danger—had been more immediate. No trustee had appeared on my twenty-first birthday to renew the restrictions. I was a woman not only grown, but on what people liked to call the wrong side of fifty. Doubtless the risk had been to the vulnerable child.

  It struck me then that I was probably far older than my mother had been when she—the reality of it was still hard to accept—had died. My memories of Mother placed her somewhere in her mid-thirties, looking, except for that one time I’d seen her without her makeup, much younger. What would she make of her Mira, her mirror? I was no longer the slender, bigeyed child, but a stocky woman. Only my washed-out coloring remained the same.

  Child of a rainless year. I hadn’t thought of that for a long time, but as I sped along the highway the epithet came back to me, haunting me, so that I found my gaze scanning the horizon, looking for rain—and as I drove west and then south, finding none.

  OUTSIDE THE LINES

  Mira has been with us a full year now, and Stan and I love her as much as we ever could have loved a birth daughter. She has returned our love with such eagerness that I find myself wondering what kind of upbringing did this little girl have?

  Mira is not cold, far from it. Indeed, she turns toward affection as a flower does to the sun. No, more like a starving person might a banquet table: eager, but with a certain degree of caution, as if uncertain what her belly would be able to hold.

  I find myself wondering what kind of woman her mother was. All we know about her is her name: Colette Bogatyr. It sounds rather French. Strange. I thought just about everyone in New Mexico was either Mexican or cowboys. I guess I don’t know very much.

  Does our Mira look French? Not particularly, to my eyes, but then what does French look like? All I know is that I was inordinately pleased when a woman in the grocery store told me how much we looked alike. They say that dogs come to look like their owners—or is it owners like their dogs?—in any case, might the same be true of adopted children and their parents?

  Maybe because this first year has been such a wonder, I find myself thinking about Colette. Is she still alive somewhere? Will she reappear and take my little girl from me? I am haunted by the thought. Dread threads its way into my dreams.

  Stan feels much the same, I am sure, but he won’t talk about it He sticks to the absolute letter of our agreement with the trustees. At first I thought he was lacking in curiosity—so many men are—but then I realized that he, too, loves Mira. He fears that if we violate the provisions set down by the trustees they will take her from us. He will do anything, even step on his
own curiosity, to avoid this.

  I care … but … I’m not certain I can go without knowing more. This morning I had to tell Mira I had a headache and so hadn’t slept well. The poor dear looked frightened—of me! Is she afraid I’ll be angry with her? I try so hard not to ever be, even when she is frustrating.

  Sometimes I think her family must have once been very rich. Mira has a liking for fine clothing. I had to explain to her that she couldn’t have all her dresses be lace and velvet. We sat down together with the new Sears catalog and worked out compromises. It’s really rather funny. Most of the women complain that their daughters are all turning into tomboys. I have a budding lady of the manor.

  Whether the family was rich or not, when Colette disappeared there wasn’t all that much left. Stan refused to sell the family home, and has paid out of money he inherited from his own father to arrange an escrow account to assure its care. The rest will be kept for Mira. That is how he shows his willingness to keep the faith with our new daughter.

  And me? I feel like such a traitor. Far from wishing to faithfully abide, I want to stick my nose in. I want to learn what happened to Colette. Shall I be brutal and honest? Why not! I want to know not because I care a whit about Colette Bogatyr, but because I must assure myself that no one lives who can take darling Mira from us. It’s terrible, but I want proof that that woman is dead. DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.

  I should hate myself for feeling such things, much less for committing them to paper, but I cannot. I love Mira. Stan loves Mira. I think Mira is coming to love us as well. Stan says the law would probably support our custody of Mira, given how Colette simply abandoned her. I am less certain of that. I can’t help but feel that, law or no law, if Colette reappears she will take our child from us, a child she left behind without a word.

  I admit it. I want her dead. I’d dance on her grave if I could find it.

  INSIDE THE LINES

  I wondered if Aunt May had forgotten how angry she had been in those early journal entries, for the one written on the anniversary of my coming to live with the Fenns was not the only one in which she expressed her fear of and hatred for my absent mother.

  The emotions that washed through me as I read these entries were mixed. At first I was astonished that sweet Aunt May could hold such anger. Later, I felt protectively angry on behalf of the vanished Colette. Then, when I remembered the reality of the woman who had borne me, I felt pity for Aunt May. She had been right to fear Colette—had my mother reappeared, there is no way she would have relinquished claim to her daughter.

  “But she didn’t come back,” I said to the empty air, hearing my voice reverberate strangely inside my truck cab. “Did you ever feel more secure, Aunt May?”

  There wasn’t an answer, but somehow, just beyond the edge of hearing, I felt as if there was—and that I simply lacked the ability to hear it.

  “There are a lot more journals in the metal box,” I said, my voice sounding less strange this time. “I’ll keep reading. I guess I’ll find out.”

  I felt comforted, as if a silent listener had nodded approval. Then I noticed the big yellow sign at the edge of the road. I’d just crossed the border into New Mexico.

  Crossing the border into New Mexico, especially from the east, isn’t much of a transformative experience. I’d followed a whim to see something of Kentucky and Tennessee as I’d traveled—air-conditioning has really taken the teeth out of summer—and so I went south until I reached 1-40. By then most of the desire to play tourist was out of my system and I headed pretty much due west.

  Somewhere around Oklahoma things started looking more brown than otherwise, and I don’t have any fond memories of going through Texas, though at one point I was hungry enough that I almost did stop for that steak dinner all the billboards promise will be free—if you can finish what they put on your plate. I heard at the motel where I did stop that the restaurant puts a lot on your plate. That’s how they make good on the deal—pretty much nobody finishes.

  Even though the sign welcoming me into New Mexico was bilingual, offering “bienvenidos” as well as “welcome” to New Mexico, I didn’t see a lot that was much different from Texas, at least not at first. What I saw was empty land, some of it being used to graze cattle, some under cultivation. Now, I was a city girl, but one way or another, I’d seen a good deal of farm country, Midwestern style. New Mexico was nothing like anything I knew.

  The best way I can explain it is to tell a story I heard later on. A fellow from New Mexico goes to Kentucky, and while he’s driving along a country road he sees a cow having trouble giving birth to a calf. Having been a cowhand himself at some point in his life, he stops and goes to help the cow. His wife takes the car and eventually finds the home of the cow’s owner. The cow’s owner comes out and together they get the calf safely delivered. Afterward, when they’re cleaning up and having something to drink, the cow’s owner says, “So you’re from New Mexico. I hear that’s good cattle country. How many cows do you get to the acre?” The fellow from New Mexico looks at him with all seriousness and says, “You’ve got it all wrong, sir. It’s how many acres to the cow.”

  That’s what I was seeing around me as I drove. In some stretches, once the roads took me into higher altitudes I drove through piñon and juniper territory. I found myself thinking that the fat round trees looked like cattle spread out and grazing. Locals called these growths of piñon and juniper “forests,” but then they called anything higher than man-height a “tree,” whereas back in Ohio what we called “shrubs” routinely threatened to overwhelm the houses around which they were planted, unless the new growth was regularly pruned.

  New Mexico was a different world. When I stopped at a fast-food place and saw that green chile was offered as a condiment, and heard Spanish being spoken by the couple seated in the booth nearest mine, and realized that the dark-haired men laughing together at a table near the window were real live Indians, I felt as displaced as I ever had in Europe. More so maybe, because I was at least supposed to be in the United States—and this was the state where I had been born, and to which I thought I should feel at least some sort of connection. I didn’t, though, and that unsettled me even more than Aunt May’s journal had done.

  Depending on who you talk to, the population of the entire state of New Mexico is given as something over a million and a half—how much over depends on the source. By the standards of the East and Midwest that isn’t much, especially in a state large enough to comfortably engulf Ohio, with room to take a solid bite out of the surrounding states. The largest chunk of that population lives in Albuquerque, with Santa Fe to the north, and various cities in the south claiming honors as runners up.

  My destination was none of these urban centers. Somewhere west of Santa Rosa I took a road heading north, driving into lands that seemed—by the standards I was used to judging by—nearly unlived in. My destination was a small town that had seen its heyday in the 1880s, when the railroad had come through. Now, according to the reading I had squeezed in before my departure, it went back and forth between staggering along and economic depression.

  The town was named Las Vegas, but it couldn’t in the least be confused with its glamorous sibling in Nevada. The neon here was restricted to the occasional bar window, the glories of its architecture were definitely rooted in the past. I stopped for gasoline at a very modern gas station, confirmed my directions, and drove to the real estate office that managed my property for me.

  I’d called the afternoon before, promising that I’d be in by midday, and now here I was. The building was—as real estate offices so often are—a nicely restored older building, but the sign out front was for one of the national real estate chains. The sun beating through the truck’s windshield had made my air-conditioned cab hot enough, but when I stepped out there was a hint of freshness in the air that reminded me that Las Vegas was at over 6,400 feet altitude.

  The middle-aged woman working the front desk looked up from some papers she was sorting, and s
miled at me as I came in.

  “I think you must be Ms. Fenn,” she said. “Welcome. I am Maria Morales. How was your trip?”

  Her accent was the one I would hear a great deal of during my stay—that of the northern New Mexico Hispanic who had grown up speaking both Spanish and English. It is a distinct accent, almost impossible to describe. At the time it sounded very odd to me, and I accepted that oddness as part and parcel with the general oddness I was finding everywhere in New Mexico. Only after I had been in town a few days would I think to wonder why the accent had sounded odd. Had I really been so isolated from the town around me as to never meet any of the locals? I was beginning to think that my childhood memories—the veracity of which I had dismissed—might hold more truth than I had realized.

  “My trip went well,” I said, “but how did you know who I was?”

  Mrs. Morales smiled and gestured to the window by her desk. My truck—and its license plate—was clearly visible.

  “We don’t see many cars from Ohio,” she said, “and I have been waiting for you. Can I get you something to drink? We have iced tea, sodas, even some coffee that’s not too stale. It is unusually hot this season.”