The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  “Then do it now,” I demand. “Pretend I’m some client.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “Yes, there is,” I say. “I hurt. I hurt all the time.” Tears pierce the back of my throat. “You’ve got to have some magic that makes things disappear. Some potion or spell or cord I can tie around my wrist that’ll make me forget how you drank . . . and how you cheated on my father.”

  She steps back, as if she’s been slapped.

  “What could you give me,” I ask, my voice shaking, “to make me forget . . . that you forgot about me?”

  My mother hesitates for a moment, and then walks stiffly to her shelves. She pulls down three containers and a glass mixing bowl. She opens the seals. I smell nutmeg, summertime, a distillation of hope.

  But she does not mix me a poultice or make a roux for me to swallow. She doesn’t wrap my wrists with green silk or tell me to blow out three squat candles. Instead, she comes hesitantly around her workbench. She folds me into her arms, even as I try to break free. She refuses to let go, the whole time that I cry.

  * * *

  It seems as if we have been driving forever. Ruthann and I take turns during the night, while Sophie and Greta sleep in the backseat. We head north on Interstate 17, passing places with names like Bloody Basin Road and Horsethief Basin, Jackass Acres, Little Squaw Creek. We pass the skeletons of saguaros, inside which birds have made their homes; and the smashed amber glass from beer bottles, which line the side of the road like glitter.

  Gradually, the cacti vanish, and deciduous trees begin to pepper the foothills. The altitude makes the temperature drop, to a point where the air is so cool I have to roll up the window. Walls of striated red rock rise in the distance, set on fire by the rising sun.

  I’m not running away, not really. I just sort of invited myself to accompany Ruthann on a trip to visit her family on Second Mesa. She wasn’t too keen on the idea, but I pulled out all the stops: I told her that I thought it was important for Sophie to learn about the world; I told her that I wanted to see more in Arizona than the jail system; I told her that I needed to talk to someone, and that I wanted it to be her.

  As we drive, I tell Ruthann about Fitz’s story for the Gazette. I tell her about the scorpion sting, and what I remembered about Victor, and what Eric already knew. I don’t tell her about my mother. Right now, I want to keep that moment to myself, a silver dollar tucked into the hem of my mind to take out in an emergency.

  “So you really begged to come to Second Mesa because you’re angry at Eric,” Ruthann says.

  “I didn’t beg,” I say, and she just raises a brow. “Well, maybe just a little.”

  Ruthann is quiet for a few seconds. “Let’s say Eric had told you that your mother had been having an affair when he first found out. Would it have kept your parents from splitting up? No. Would it have kept your father from running away with you? No. Would it have meant that your father wouldn’t have been arrested? Nope. Far as I can tell, the only purpose served by telling you would be to get you even more upset, kind of like you are now.”

  “Eric knows how hard this is for me,” I say. “It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle and going crazy because I can’t find the last piece, and then realizing that Eric’s had it stashed in his back pocket.”

  “Maybe he’s got a reason for not wanting you to finish that puzzle,” Ruthann says. “I’m not saying what Eric did was right. I’m just saying it might not be wrong, either.”

  We drive on in silence to Flagstaff, and then veer right onto a different road. I follow Ruthann’s directions to a turnoff for Walnut Canyon. We park in a lot next to a ranger’s truck, but the gates aren’t open yet. “Come on,” Ruthann says. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  “We have to wait,” I point out.

  But Ruthann just gets out of the car and reaches into the backseat for Sophie. “No we don’t,” she says. “This is where I’m from.”

  We climb over the gates and hike down a trail into a canyon that opens up like a seam between the scarlet rocks. Prickly pear and pinyons grow along the track like markers. The path winds tightly, a sheer four-hundred-foot drop on one side and a wall of rock on the other. Ruthann moves quickly, stepping over the narrowest of passes and crawling around spires and through crevices. The deeper we get, the more remote it seems to be. “Do you know where you’re going?” I ask.

  “Sure. My worst nightmare used to be getting lost in here with a bunch of pahanas.” Turning, she flashes a smile. “The Donner party ate the Indians first, you know.”

  We descend into the canyon, the gap between our path and the facing mass of rock growing narrower and narrower, until we have somehow crossed onto the other side. Sophie is the one who spots it first. “Ruthann,” she says, “there’s a hole in this mountain.”

  “Not a hole, Siwa,” she says. “A home.”

  As we get closer I can see it: Carved into the limestone are hundreds of small rooms, stacked on top of one another like natural apartment buildings. The walkway spirals around the mountain, until we reach the mouth of one of the cliff dwellings.

  Sophie and Greta, delighted by this carved cave, run from the cedar tree twisted into the mouth of the doorway to the back of the hollowed room. The rear wall is charred; the space smells of brittle heat and fierce wind. “Who lived here?” I ask.

  “My ancestors . . . the hisatsinom. They came here when Sunset Crater erupted in 1065, and covered their pit houses and the farms in the meadows.”

  Sophie chases Greta around a small square of rocks that must have been a fire pit. It is easy to imagine a family huddled around that, telling stories into the night, knowing that dozens of other families were doing the same thing in the small spaces surrounding them. There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.

  I turn to her. “Why did they leave?”

  “No one can stay in one place forever. Even the ones who don’t budge, well, the world changes around them. Some people think there might have been a drought here. The Hopi say the hisatsinom were fulfilling a prophecy—to wander for hundreds of years before returning to the spirit world again.”

  Across the way, on the trail we’ve come in on, the day’s first tourists crawl like fire ants. “Did you ever think that maybe you’ve got it upside down?” Ruthann says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if the whole kidnapping experience isn’t the story of Delia?” she asks. “What if disappearing wasn’t the most cataclysmic event of your life?”

  “What else would be?”

  Ruthann lifts her face to the sun. “Coming back,” she says.

  * * *

  The Hopi reservation is a tiny bubble inside the much larger Navajo reservation, spread across three long-fingered mesas that rise 6,500 feet above sea level. From a distance, they look like the stacked teeth of a giant; closer, like batter being poured.

  Almost twelve thousand Hopi live in small clusters of villages, and one of those, Sipaulovi, sits on Second Mesa. We park at a landing and hike up a hill, over shards of pottery and bones—an old habit, Ruthann tells me, from when families would bury food in the ash of their housing foundations to keep from going hungry. We reach a small, dusty plaza at the crest of the mesa, a square surrounded by one-story houses. There aren’t any adults outside when we arrive, but a trio of little children, not much older than Sophie, dart in and out of the shade between the buildings, appearing and disappearing like ghosts. Two dogs chase each other’s tails. On the roof of one building is an eagle, with brightly painted wooden toys and bowls at its feet.

  Through the windows of the houses I can hear music—recorded native chants, cartoons, commercial jingles. There is electricity at Sipaulovi, but not at some of the other villages; Ruthann says that at Old Oraibi, for example, the elders felt that if they took something from the pahanas, the pahanas would demand something in return. Running water is a new thing, she says, dating back to the
1980s. Before that, you had to carry water in a bucket from a natural spring at the top of the mesa. Sometimes when it rains, there are still fish in the puddles.

  Ruthann corrals me, slipping her arm through mine. “Come on,” she says, “my sister’s waiting.”

  Wilma is the mother of Derek, the boy we watched doing the Hoop Dance a few weeks earlier. I follow Ruthann to one house on the edge of the plaza, a small stone building with one facing window. She opens the door without knocking, releasing the rich smell of stew and cornmeal. “Wilma,” she says, “is that noqkwivi burning?”

  Wilma is younger than I expected—maybe five or six years older than me. She is in the process of trying to brush a little girl’s hair, in spite of the fact that the little girl refuses to sit still. When she sees Ruthann, a smile splits her face. “What would a skinny old lady like you know about cooking?” she says.

  The house is full of other women, too, wearing a rainbow of colorful housecoats. Many of them look like Wilma and Ruthann—sisters, aunts, I suppose. Hanging on the white walls are carved katsina dolls, like the ones that Ruthann told me about weeks ago. In the corner of the room is a television, crowned by a doily and a vase of tissue paper flowers.

  “You almost missed it,” Wilma says, shaking her head.

  “You know me better than that,” Ruthann answers. “I told you I’d be back before the katsinas left.”

  From here the conversation slides into the streaming flow of Hopi that I can’t follow. I wait for Ruthann to introduce me, but she doesn’t, and even stranger, no one seems to think this is odd.

  The little girl who is having her hair brushed is finally freed from her chair, and walks up to Sophie. She speaks in perfect English. “Want to draw?”

  Sophie slowly peels herself away from me and nods, following the girl into the kitchen, where a cup of broken crayons sits in the center. They begin to draw on brown paper, squares cut from grocery bags. I sit down next to an old woman weaving a flat plate from yucca leaves. When I smile at her, she grunts.

  The house is the strangest combination of past and present. There are stone bowls with blue corn being hand-ground into meal. There are prayer feathers, like the ones tied to Ruthann’s paloverde tree and the ones left in Walnut Canyon. But there are also linoleum floors, Styrofoam cups, and plastic tablecloths. There’s a Rubbermaid laundry basket and a teenage girl painting her toenails scarlet. There are two worlds rubbing right up against each other, and not a single person in this room seems to have trouble straddling them.

  Ruthann and Wilma are having an argument; I know this only because of the tone and volume of their words, and the way Ruthann throws up her hands and backs away from her sister. Suddenly there is a trilling cry—the low hoot of an owl, something I recognize from walking in the woods in New Hampshire. Immediately, the women begin to whisper and peer out the windows. Wilma says something that I would swear is Hopi for I told you so.

  “Come on,” Ruthann says to me. “I’ll show you around.”

  Sophie seems happy coloring; so I follow Ruthann outside to the plaza again. “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “There’s a ceremony tomorrow, Niman. It means the Home Dance. It’s the last one, before all the katsinas go back to the spirit world.”

  “I meant with Wilma. I guess I shouldn’t have come, after all.”

  “She’s not angry because you’re here,” Ruthann says. “It’s the owl. No one likes to hear them; it’s bad luck.” We have walked down a narrow footpath that leads away from the plaza, and are standing in front of a small home made of cinder block. A tongue of smoke licks its way out the chimney. Ruthann shields her eyes and stares up at it. “This is where I used to live when I was married.”

  I think about my own wedding ceremony, fallen by the wayside in the wake of my father’s trial. “I wonder if Eric and I will ever get around to that.”

  “The Hopi way takes years. You do the church thing, to get that out of the way, and you find a place to live, but it takes years for your groom’s uncles to weave your tuvola, your bridal robes. Wilma had already had Derek by the time her Hopi wedding came. He was three years old, and walked with his mother during the ceremony.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “A lot of work. You have to pay the groom’s family back for the robes, with plaques that you weave and food you prepare.” Ruthann grins. “Four days before my wedding, I went to live with my mother-in-law. I fasted, but I had to cook for her and her family—a test, you know, to see if you’re worthy of her son, even though I’d been married to him by law for three years already. There’s a tradition that the groom’s paternal aunts come over and throw mud at the groom’s maternal aunts, while each side complains about the bride and the groom, but it’s all a big joke, like those crazy bachelor parties pahanas have. And then, on the day of, I put on one of the white robes Eldin’s uncles had made me. It was beautiful—there were tassels hanging down, each one smaller than the next, like the canes I would use as I got older, getting closer and closer to the earth until my forehead touched it.”

  “What’s the second robe for?”

  “You wear it the day you die. You stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon, spread out the robe, step onto it, and rise into the sky as a cloud.” Ruthann looks down at her left hand, on which she still wears a gold band. “You pahanas have all these rehearsals for your wedding day . . . to us, the wedding day is the rehearsal for the rest of our lives.”

  “When did Eldin die?” I ask.

  “In the middle of a drought, in 1989.” Ruthann shakes her head. “I think the spirits picked him on purpose, someone larger than life, because they knew he’d be able to bring us rain. On the night he came back, I stood outside this very house,” she says. “I tilted back my head and I opened my mouth and I tried to swallow as much of him as I could.”

  I stare at the smoke, curling out of the chimney of the house. “Do you know who lives here now?” I ask.

  “Not us,” she says, and she turns and starts walking slowly up the path.

  * * *

  Greta and I sit at the edge of Second Mesa as the sun goes down. Dear Mami, I write on the back of a grocery bag.

  Do you know that when you are in elementary school, every teacher celebrates Mother’s Day? And because they all felt bad for me, I didn’t have to make the bath salts or the woven paper basket or the card.

  Do you know that the first time I went to buy a bra, I waited in the lingerie department until I saw a woman walk in with a little girl, and I asked her to help me?

  Do you know that when I was ten, I tried to be Catholic, so I could light a candle to you that you’d see from Heaven?

  Do you know that I used to wish I’d die, so I could meet you?

  I glance up, staring out at the pancake landscape in the distance. For someone who can’t remember very much, there seems to be a lot I can’t forget.

  I know you’re sorry, I write. I just don’t know if that’s good enough.

  When I put down the pencil, it rolls over the edge of the cliff. Even in this utter quiet, I can hear my mother apologizing for her actions; I can hear my father justifying his. You would think it would be simpler, having them both in close proximity, but instead it makes it easier for them to tear me apart. They are both pleading for my vote; so loud that I can hardly make up my own mind.

  Again.

  I love my father, and I know that he was right to take me. But I am a mother, and I can’t imagine having my child stolen away. The problem is that this isn’t a case of either/or.

  My mother and father are both right.

  And at the same time, they were both wrong.

  When Ruthann walks up behind me, I nearly jump out of my skin. “You scared me,” I say.

  She looks tired, and lowers herself slowly to the ground. “I used to come here a lot,” she says. “When I needed to think.”

  I draw up my knees. “What are you thinking about now?”

  “What it feels like to come ho
me,” Ruthann says, turning to the San Francisco peaks in the distance. “I’m glad you bullied me into bringing you.”

  I grin. “Thanks. I think.”

  She shields her eyes against the red glare of the sunset. “What are you thinking about?” she asks.

  I stand up and tear the paper into pieces. “The same thing,” I say, and together we watch the wind take them away.

  * * *

  Before dawn the next morning, the plaza is already crowded with people. Some sit on metal folding chairs, others crouch on the roofs of the houses. Ruthann follows Wilma to a spot at the edge of the square, under the overhang of a building. There is no sun yet, but this dance will go on all day; and by then, it will be scorching.

  Sophie is quiet. Perched on my hip, she rubs her eyes. She looks at the golden eagle still tethered to one roof, which beats its wings every few minutes, and sometimes cries.

  When the sun is a fist on the horizon, the katsinas arrive in a single file, up from the kivas where they have been preparing. They carry armloads of gifts, which they pile in the plaza. Because it didn’t rain last night, they have not been allowed to drink this morning, and they will not, no matter how hot it gets.

  There are almost fifty of them—Hoote katsinas, I am told—all dressed alike. They wear white skirts with red sashes, and loincloths with different patterns. Their arms are decorated with cuffs, their chests are bare. On their left ankles are bells; on the right, rattles. They hold rattles in their right hands, and juniper—womapi—in the left. A necklace with a shell hangs down between each set of shoulder blades; a foxtail swishes between every pair of legs. Their bodies are covered with red ochre paint and a dusting of cornmeal, but the most imposing part of their costumes are the masks—a crown of feathers spiking up from the back of an enormous black wooden head, dog’s snout, bared teeth, bug-eyes.

  Sophie buries her face in my neck, as they begin to chant. The song is deep, guttural, building to a crescendo. The katsinas turn to the beat of the music in pairs as an old man weaves between them, sprinkling cornmeal and urging them to dance harder.