She was inviting me, she said, to her birthday party. And that, of course, was a big part of the problem.
You see, my mother didn’t have birthdays. She’d never had birthdays.
I don’t mean she was concerned about her youth or appearance or wished to lie about her age – in fact, she looked more youthful each year.
But the strange truth was, she didn’t want anyone outside our family even to know when her birthday was.
This secrecy, combined with a few other idiosyncrasies – like the fact that she’d been in hermetic retreat up on top of this mountain for the past ten years – ever since…the thing we never spoke about – all went far to explain why there were those who may have perceived my mother, Catherine Velis, as a pretty eccentric duck.
The other part of my current problem was that I hadn’t been able to contact my mother for an explanation of her sudden revelation. She’d answered neither her phone nor the messages I’d left for her here at the lodge. The alternate number she’d given me was clearly not right – it was missing some final digits.
With my first true inkling that something was really wrong, I took a few days off work, bought a ticket, caught the last flight into Cortez, Colorado, in a tizzy, and rented the last four-wheel-drive vehicle in the airport lot.
Now, I left the engine running as I sat here for a moment, letting my eyes graze over the breathtaking panoramic view. I hadn’t been home in more than four years. And each time I saw it afresh, it smacked the wind out of me.
I got out of the Rover in knee-deep snow and let the engine run.
From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus, which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain, one of the four sacred mountains created by ‘First Man’ and ‘First Woman.’
Together with Sisnaajinii (white mountain, or Mount Blanca) in the east, Tsoodzil (blue mountain, or Mount Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid (yellow mountain, or San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah – ‘Home of the Diné,’ as the Navajo call themselves.
And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: ‘Four Corners,’ the only place in the United States where four states – Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona – come together at right angles to form a cross.
Long before anyone ever thought to draw dotted lines on a map, this land was sacred to everyone who ever walked across it. If my mother was going to have her first-ever birthday party in the nearly twenty-two years I had known her, I could understand why she wanted to have it here. Regardless of how many years she had lived abroad or away, like all the women in our family she was part of this land.
For some reason, I knew that this connection with the land was somehow important. I knew that was why she had left a message so strange to bring me to this spot.
And I knew something else, even if no one else did. I knew why she’d insisted I come here today. For today – April fourth – actually was my mother, Cat Velis’s, birthday.
I yanked my keys from the ignition, grabbed my hastily packed duffel bag from the passenger seat, and plowed my way through the snow to our hundred-year-old front doors. These huge doors – two massive slabs of heart pine ten feet high, cut from ancient trees – were carved in bas-relief with two animals that seemed to be coming right at you. On the left, a golden eagle soared straight at your face. And from the right door burst an angry, upright female bear.
Despite the weathering of these carvings, they were fairly realistic-looking – with glass eyes and real talons and claws. The early twentieth century had loved clever inventions, and this one was a doozy: If you pulled the bear’s paw, her jaw dropped open to reveal very real and frightening teeth. If you had the nerve to stick your hand into her mouth, you could twist the old-fashioned door chime, to alert those within.
I did both, and waited. But even after a few moments, there was no response. Someone must have been inside – the chimney was active. And I knew from practice that stoking that fire pit took hours of tending and a Herculean effort to haul the wood. But with our hearth, which was capable of receiving a log of fifty caliper inches, a fire could have been laid days ago and still be burning.
My situation suddenly dawned upon me: Having flown and driven a few thousand miles, I was standing in the snow on top of a mountain, trying to get access to my own house, desperate to know if anyone was inside. But I didn’t have a key.
My alternative – wading through acres of deep snow to peep through a window – seemed a poor idea. What would I do if I got wetter than I already was and still couldn’t get inside? What if I got inside and no one was there? There were no car tracks, ski tracks – not even deer tracks – anywhere near the house.
So I did the only intelligent thing I could think of: I yanked my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Mother’s number, right here at the lodge. I was relieved when her message machine picked up after six rings, thinking she might have left some clue as to her whereabouts. But when her recorded voice came on, my heart sank:
‘I can be reached at…’ and she rattled off the same number she’d left on my D.C. phone – still missing the very last digits! I stood before the door, wet and cold, and fuming with confusion and frustration. Where did one go from here?
And then I remembered the game.
My favorite uncle, Slava, was famed throughout the world as the noted technocrat and author, Ladislaus Nim. He’d been my best friend in my childhood, and though I hadn’t seen him in years, I felt he still was. Slava hated telephones. He vowed he would never have one in his house. Telephones, no – but Uncle Slava loved puzzles. He’d written several books on the topic. Through my childhood, if anyone received a message from Slava with a phone number where you could reach him, they always knew it wasn’t real – it must be some kind of encrypted message. That was his delight.
It seemed unlikely, though, that my mother would use such a technique to communicate with me. For one thing, she wasn’t even good at deciphering such messages herself, and she couldn’t invent a puzzle if her life depended upon it.
More unlikely still was the idea that Slava had created a message for her. As far as I knew, she hadn’t talked to my uncle in years, not since…the thing we never spoke about.
Yet I was sure, somehow, that this was a message.
I jumped back up into the Land Rover and switched on the engine. Decrypting puzzles to locate my mother sure beat all hell out of the alternatives: breaking into an abandoned house, or flying back to D.C. and never learning where she’d gone.
I phoned her machine again: I jotted down the phone number she’d left there, for all the world to hear. If she was in real trouble of some kind and trying to contact only me, I prayed that I would decipher it first.
‘I can be reached at 615-263-94…’ my mother’s recorded voice said.
My hand was shaking as I wrote out the numbers on a pad.
I’d been provided eight numbers, rather than the ten numbers required to make a long-distance call. But as with Uncle Slava’s puzzles, I suspected this had nothing to do with phones. Here was a ten-digit code, of which the final two numbers were missing. Those two numbers themselves were my hidden message.
It took about ten minutes to figure it out – much longer than when I was running neck and neck with my crazy but wonderful uncle. If you divided the string of numbers into twos (hint: we were missing the last two digits), then you ended up with: 61–52–63–94.
If you reversed those numbers, as I quickly saw, you ended up with each two-digit