“Goddamn you,” Ana whispers and packs a bag for Mom’s.
* * *
—
The house is silent apart from buzzing appliances and the muted drafts of Mom’s snores. She lives in the suburbs in a ranch-style home off Wadsworth Boulevard. A decade ago, she sold her bungalow on the Northside to a young attorney couple from Philadelphia. They immediately painted the yellow house gray, marking it unrecognizable to anyone from the past. Didn’t Louisa Garcia once live here? Wasn’t this block the Hispanic or Italian side of town? No one asks questions like this anymore. No one remembers and no one cares.
In the guest bedroom, Ana strips, dropping her clothes where she stands. She slides into the bed with its brass frame originally from her grandparents. Ana holds the brass for a long moment, her palms picking up a metallic scent like blood. She then moves her hands along her sweat-slicked body, neck to thighs. Years ago, in this bed, Clifton reached behind Ana’s back, tossing aside her long hair as he fumbled with bra straps. Mom was at work. The bedroom door was open. Ana was sixteen, newly in love. She folded her arms, revealing, as if suddenly, her full-moon breasts. With a hungry mouth, Clifton kissed her cusps and held her tightly in each hand.
You make me feel full, he told her more than once. I’m heavy with you.
* * *
—
“Morning.” Ana kisses Mom’s cheek as she stands before the kitchen sink, peering out the window at the brittle lawn. A crystal prism dangles, rainbowless and still.
“There’s oatmeal in the pantry.” Mom’s dark eyes search the backyard. A blue jay dives from the sky, bumping against a waterless birdbath, knocking its beak into cement before fluttering away.
“They say it’s supposed to get even hotter this week.” Ana grabs a banana and takes a seat at the table.
“Who says that?”
“The weather people. They say it’s the worst drought in four hundred years.”
Mom turns away from the window. She sits at the table with perfect posture, carrying her weight like armor, wearing a string of Bisbee turquoise, lying just so across her breasts. “All you’re having is a banana? You’ll disappear, jita. Have some eggs. I’ll fry them for you.”
Ana lets her mother cook for her. She watches as Mom removes the carton of brown eggs from the fridge, cracking them lightly into a white bowl. As she whisks, Mom’s hands curve along her thumbs, meeting wide, capable palms. Ana loves her mother’s hands, their road map lines and graceful nails.
“Why aren’t you at your apartment?” Mom looks over her shoulder. “Did you miss my cooking?”
Ana considers telling Mom the truth, that Clifton is gone again. That this time is longer than ever before. But Mom can be kinder than Ana and more perceptive. She’ll call in to work, searching the worst motels, the darkest bars, anywhere she can think of. All the places Clifton tends to hide. “I was hungry and I have no groceries. And it’s really hot, and I have no air-conditioning.”
“Or,” says Mom, “perhaps you’re stressed about some silly class. You must have inherited your memory from a white man.” She laughs, and laughs again. “Oh, that’s right. You did.”
Mom often jokes about Ana’s long-gone dad, a white guy from Texas, the one who left before she was born, the man who had said to get rid of it, if you’re smart.
Mom serves Ana a plate of fried eggs with two corn tortillas. She then reaches above the hutch where she keeps her nursing diploma and framed pictures of Ana. She pulls down a cedar box, opens it to reveal a beaded purse.
“Do you remember your great-grandfather Desiderio?”
Ana remembers a few fragments of Great-Grandpa Desi. The fuzzy way her face reflected in his glasses, his warm skin, waxy and cracked, the fragrance of his tobacco and Old Spice, the lullaby sounds of his languages, Spanish and something else. “He died when I was so little, Mom.”
“It doesn’t have to be a story-memory,” she says. “It can be a picture, a feeling.” Mom is seated sideways in her chair, her abundant form curved outward. She wears her lilac scrubs, her hair braided with a matching purple ribbon to show solidarity for one cause or another, maybe war veterans or victims of mass shootings. “This was his. It carried tobacco for ceremony.”
Ana lifts the old-fashioned purse from the table, surprised by its weightiness.
“You know,” Mom says, “Clifton once told me this purse depicts the emergence, the place where our people crawled out of the earth. It’s down south, near the San Juan Mountains.”
Ana examines the purse. It has four mountains in white, blue, yellow, and black. She rubs her fingers over the center. A row of beads loosens.
“You come from this land, jita. Remembering that might help with your little history class.”
* * *
—
“Ghost sickness,” says Brown, “is a culture-bound syndrome of the Navajo and other southwestern tribes.” She speaks with pink gum in her tight mouth. “Taken out of its cultural context, the illness doesn’t exist.”
Ana takes notes in blue ink, only occasionally drifting to the notebook’s margin to draw spirals and little eyeballs with long lashes. Imaginary illness, she writes, comes after abrupt/violent death of loved one. Marked by loss of appetite, sense of fear, xtrme cases, hallucinations.
“If one were to go to the doctor today with these symptoms, you’d have what’s known as anxiety or depression. Modern medicine handles it without all-night dances and prayer ceremonies,” says Brown sarcastically.
Colleen raises her hand. “Will this be on the final?”
Brown scratches her left eyebrow, smearing her pen’s ink across her cheek. “No, Colleen,” she says, “but as extra credit, I often ask a question related to Native Americans.”
Ana scribbles down the words extra credit. She keeps her pen moving, as if memory were dependent upon constant motion. The study guide on her desk reads more like a contract than a learning supplement. What happened at Sand Creek? What land did Juan de Ulibarrí claim for Spain? What caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680? Ana knows these things. She swears it. With the revolt, the Spanish burned the masks, the prayer sticks, the beaded purses. There is something about every man in the pueblos having his right foot sawed off. There is an image of wet blood dripping from meat and bone into dry sand. There are prayer songs lost forever in the gutted throats of the massacred. Ana raises her hand, surprising even herself.
“Yes,” Brown says, searching her class list. “Erica, you have a question?”
“Ana. I’m Ana Garcia.”
Brown apologizes. She asks Ana to continue.
“The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, wasn’t there a drought then, too?”
Brown is silent as she looks downward, rotating her watchband. “Ana, it’d be wise to follow along. I’m essentially giving you the answers, and right now we’re discussing the Land Act of 1820.”
Ana murmurs an apology. She tips her gaze toward her lap.
For the remainder of class, Brown lectures, answers appropriate questions, and shakes her head, no, not quite, when a front-row student compares the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde to the grandeur of Notre Dame.
* * *
—
Ana sits before the television on her hardwood floor, her history textbook open between her sticky legs. On the news, there is talk of brush fires and an elderly man found dead on his sofa. Heat exhaustion, the newspeople say. No one noticed he hadn’t left the place in days, but the stench, the neighbor woman complained, was awfully ripe, like the smell of a deer crushing against her headlights four years earlier. Ana nervously bites the insides of her cheeks until she tastes blood. She attempts to study while the room turns from day to night. The walls glow violet. The floor disengages into gray. Ana paces in the dark, calling Clifton repeatedly, losing track of time. An empty feeling grows inside her until she decides to turn it off.
The bathwater steams, blurring the mirror above the sink. Ana wipes through the distortion. She has carried candles from her bedroom, one vanilla and the other of St. Michael, placing them at the corners of the tub. The water is rose-colored beneath pink-tiled walls. All summer Ana has avoided baths and their heat, but tonight she eases into the tub, submerging her face as long as her lungs can stand. Beneath the water, Ana hears far-off dings and ticks. She hears the scraping of sand, the pull of soil. From above, she imagines she is small, her dark hair widening in inky tendrils.
That’s when she sees Clifton. He is driving the narrow mountain pass between Silverton and Ouray, the Million Dollar Highway, a road once thought impossible to build, the cliffs too steep, the land forsaken. It’s deep into the night. The pavement is bone dry as Clifton tilts left then right along the corkscrew path. He is going very fast in a Ford pickup, a cyclops with one headlight. The truck hugs several bends in the road. A black bear, dopey and confused, emerges from the shadowed tree line. Clifton swerves, the drop into the gulch unmeasurable in real time. Thousands of feet the tiny pickup plunges. Thousands of feet Clifton tumbles into the canyon below, into the beginning world of darkness. The pickup resembles a falling star as it sinks into the earth.
In a violent rush, Ana forces herself up from beneath the water’s wall. Her left hand is tilted over the tub’s brim, her wrist and fingers leaking onto the white and black checkered floor. She gasps, the sound of her lungs echoing throughout the candlelit bathroom. For several moments, her tender chest swells with damp air. She begins to cry.
Ana knows—as certain as she is alive— that Clifton is dead. She allows this sense to search wider, a feeling so vast it could move above cities, across prairies, along granite rocks, plunging headlong into the cool ground. With her left foot, Ana knocks loose the rubber plug, leaning back as the water flows forward.
“I’m scared,” she says later, calling Mom. “I think Clifton’s gone.”
* * *
—
“I don’t want to see anything,” says Brown. “Only the test and your pencils. No cellphones. No extra paper.” She writes the exam’s start and end times on the green chalkboard. She has advised students to return their completed tests, facedown, on her podium by forty-five after. Brown walks the aisles in modest clog sandals, laying finals, one by one, across each desk. “I wish you the best of luck, and I hope your studying pays off.” Brown strolls toward the back windows. Ana glances outside one last time at the dead grass, the expanse of birch trees. There is a sound like falling ice as dusty blinds cover the classroom windows.
The test is what Ana expects—multiple choice for hundreds of questions. A, B, C, or D. Nothing more. Nothing less. The cast of characters is lengthy and time is vacant. What year was the Homestead Act? Which religious group settled the West to avoid persecution? Who became known as Boy General? Ana watches the backs of her classmates’ heads, dreams of their answers, their clarity of thought. She finds herself tapping her pencil over letters, guessing far too many times. She shakes her legs. She ties and unties her hair, sweeps fallen strands from her desk onto the carpeted floor. Soon students rise from their seats, turning their tests in to Brown with triumphant looks. Ana remains. She continues to guess. Colleen rises from her chair, heading to the front of the classroom, her blond head held high as a warhorse’s. She whispers a thank-you to Brown and exits the classroom, once and for all.
When Ana tallies the number of answers she is certain are correct, the outcome isn’t good. A dismal fifteen or twenty, another failing grade. And just when Ana throws her head down in a type of shame, she flips to the last page. Extra credit.
For a full letter grade increase, in detail, describe the origin myth of the Navajo people.
* * *
—
Clifton once held Ana’s hair high above her neck. Front to back they stood in the chilly light of their apartment bathroom, one week after moving in. Ana loved being with Clifton in their apartment. She loved him holding her body to his in that small white space.
“Calm down, baby,” he said. Ana couldn’t stop crying, tears and snot streaming down her face in shiny pathways. With her eyes scrunched and her mouth twisted tight, Clifton laughed. All this, he told her, over a tick. “Where did you feel it, again?”
“Right there. Where your hand is.” Ana forced Clifton’s left hand to the back of her right ear. She held him there, frantic and moaning. That morning had been good. They’d hiked Eldorado Canyon, awake with the first light of dawn. The aspen trees had turned, their golden leaves shimmering. Air felt virtuous to breathe, running through them as thrilling as their pulse, generating its own warmth, its own beat. They laughed and chased one another through narrow granite squeezes, running their palms along cold wet rocks. They eventually slipped into the empty cavity of an old Forest Service shed, where they made love quickly and halfway clothed.
“See it!” There, Clifton explained, tucked into the soft scoop behind Ana’s right earlobe was the tick. “This little bastard thinks he’s gonna suck my woman? Disrespectful as hell.”
Ana bent forward. “Stop laughing. Get it off me. They cause Lyme.”
“Grab your hair while I get a match.”
She reached up with both hands, taking her hair from Clifton as he rummaged through the drawers, revealing a yellow pack of liquor store matches. He lit one and burned the needle. Clifton went toward Ana with the red tip.
“You have to stand still,” he said. “If not, I’ll miss the head.”
Ana’s legs trembled. She asked what happens then.
“Nothing good. They can regrow a body inside you, in your heart.” Clifton laughed. “Sorry, babe.”
Ana hyperventilated, shaking so much that removal was impossible.
Clifton pleaded with her to calm down. He said it’d be quick. He told her to listen. “How about a story?”
Ana said flatly, “A story? What?”
“You can pay attention to something else.” Clifton kissed Ana’s shoulder, slick with fear. “Okay—so that buddy of mine Taylor and I were at McNard’s dive on Federal when this dude came in selling stolen TVs—”
“A bar story?” Ana did laugh, but only a little.
“Well, excuse me. What do you want? A thriller? Oh, a ghost story.”
“No,” said Ana. “Tell me something nice.”
Clifton was quiet for some time and Ana knew he had stories, some from Mom, some from his own life, some he couldn’t quite shake. He said at last, wonderful and low, “How about a Diné story, the beginning of it all.”
“Go on,” said Ana, her legs slowing to a shudder.
“You have to pay attention. The story has twists. Only in the end is there love.”
And so Clifton told Ana the story of First Man and First Woman, how they were born of stardust and earth, scrambled out of the underground land of darkness and traveled through many worlds, leaving behind the blackness of their beginnings for a life of sunlight and air. Clifton removed the tick while Ana, soundless and peaceful, listened in such a way that she knew she’d remember every word for all her life.
“And that,” he said when they were finished, “is our story of everything.”
For my mama and papa, creators of artists
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To begin, I thank my ancestors who started their work as artists and storytellers generations before I was born. This book may have taken a decade to write, but its path was set in motion by the undying spirit of my people who have resided in the Southwest since the beginning of this time. Our stories are not forgotten.
To my exceedingly brilliant editor, Nicole Counts. Thank you for trusting my vision, for ushering my work into the world, and for changing my life. To everyone at One World—Chris Jackson, Victory Matsui, and Cecil Flores. What a gift of chance that my work ended up at this groundbreaking imprint.
Thank you for the books you’re bringing to our world.
To my agent, my friend, Julia Masnik. My deepest gratitude to you for taking me on, pushing my abilities, protecting my work, and guiding me on this journey. Here’s to our first book together.
Thank you to the residencies that gave me space and nourishment: MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and Hedgebrook. And to my MFA program at the University of Wyoming, where I was given two years to develop a thesis that would later become S&C. To the writers who encouraged me and kept me from giving up—Ann Beattie, Junot Diaz, Alyson Hagy, Mat Johnson, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Beth Loffreda, Daniel Menaker, Stephen-Paul Martin, Brad Watson, and Joy Williams. And thank you to Michael and Kathy Blades for helping me and my writing when I needed it most.
To my community in Denver—What up, Mile High City! Lighthouse Writers, the Chicana/o Studies Department at MSUD, and the whole West Side Books crew, especially Lois Harvey, my second mother, this one adorned in books.
To my friends who have become family. Ivelisse Rodriguez, thank you for your work and for our many years as writing sisters. I am grateful to Sebastian Doherty, who made life as a writer seem possible. Thank you to Trent Segura for his genius research and exquisite taste. Thank you to Lauren Treihaft, Jamie McKinney, and Joey Rubin, who read drafts of these stories and offered their guidance. And thank you to Lauren Clabaugh, who housed me in Tucson while I wrote the first draft of “Sisters” one blazing summer.
Sabrina & Corina Page 19