Chato drove away from the airport, away from the fire and the death, and it was only when they had driven over twenty miles further that he remembered he never had picked up his luggage. He began laughing.
That was okay. He’d pick up some more bags. After all, he told himself as he look over at the sleeping mother and child, luggage was cheap; life wasn’t.
MI CASA
Anita Rodríguez stared out the window, but could see nothing but her reflection, almost watery in the glass. Dark hair pulled back severely, dark skin, dark eyes...dark, dark, dark...everything was so dark.
And darkness had come prematurely to the northern New Mexico mountains, blanketing everything with a wintry breath that even now puffed against the house, trying to get in.
She saw no other lights outside. How could she? The house was so far away from others that it might well have been the only one in the county.
Shivering, she turned away, the old lace curtain fluttering back into place. Anita hitched her shawl up around her shoulders, then settled on a low bench and picked up the book she had been trying to read for the past hour. She was still on page one.
Tears blurred her eyes, and swallowing rapidly, noisily, she studied the large room, almost Spartan in its simplicity. Whitewash covering the adobe brick walls, the room contained only a few pieces of furniture: the plain bench, a chair with a high leather back, an immense double-doored wooden cabinet dating from the colonial Spanish days, and a weathered table with a carved santo atop it. The floor displayed a Southwestern pattern of inlaid Mexican tiles in vivid turquoise and salmon and canary and beige. Two doors: one to the outside, one to the rest of the house. Light came from the pierced tin wall sconces, once holding candles but now electrified, and the horno, the rounded fireplace in the corner, where pinõn logs crackled as they burned. From the hallway she heard the steady ticking of a clock. The doorframes and windowsills, inside and out, were painted blue.
To guard against evil spirits, or so the tradition claimed.
But tonight nothing would keep the spirits—the remembrances—out of the house. The pungent fragrance of the burning piñón alone was enough to make her cry, without all the memories crowding her tonight.
Softly the clock chimed, and she recalled the day her father had presented it to her mother. He had saved all year for it, this tenth anniversary gift, and he was so proud of the beautiful walnut veneer grandfather clock with its silver embossing. And her mother’s eyes had welled with tears and—no.
Why had she come back?
To escape?
Hardly.
Yet that was the precise reason Jerry had urged her to return home—to get away. Her mother had finally entered a nursing home, and Anita had wept long hours since, even though she knew there had been no choice.
“It’s not really your decision any longer, hon,” Jerry had said as he comforted her in his arms. He kissed the top of her head.
Anita had nodded against his chest, knowing he was correct; that she had done the right thing. And still the guilt and unhappiness flowed through her.
She could no longer do anything for her mother who had laid so still in the bed with eyes closed, rarely responding to anyone’s voice, nearly comatose, but not quite. Monitors and machines beeped, hissed and hummed, while tubes snaked and coiled out of the woman, and after a while Anita couldn’t separate in her mind what was really part of her mother, what wasn’t. Sometimes she thought she remembered her mother having the tubes coming out of her skin years ago, back when Anita was a child, but she told herself that was nonsense. It was, wasn’t it? But the memories from before were fading, were changing, and she didn’t like it.
Anita had done what she could to make her mother’s life easier, and her brother and sister were not willing to help. In fact, they had proved quite vocal, informing her that they didn’t want the old woman living with them. Their conversations had stayed with her all too well.
“Old woman?” Anita had said, not believing she’d heard the scorn in her siblings’ voices. “That’s our mother there.”
“That’s a shell,” Raymond had said, his voice devoid of emotion. His eyes would not meet hers. “Nothing more, Nita.”
“No,” she’d whispered.
“Face it,” Anna had said, “that hasn’t been our mother since the accident. You know that—God knows, we’ve been telling you that for a year now. But you never listen to us; you never have, even when we were kids. It’s for the best, you know.”
“But—”
”No,” Raymond had said, holding up a hand. “We’ve heard all the arguments. There’s nothing new you can tell us. And face it, Nita, you’ll be better off with her in the nursing home. We all will. We can get on with our lives now.”
After that, Anita knew they were right, that it was time for the professionals to take over, time for her mother to go where she would get around-the-clock treatment. It was time. Long past time.
Time...the clock ticked away. One, two, three, four, and she found she was breathing in rhythm with the clock. She held her breath for a moment, tried to break the rhythm, then almost laughed at the absurdity.
Time...one part of her wondered if she should have kept their mother just a little longer. What if she had abandoned her parent too soon? What if it had only taken a few weeks more, a month, two or three even...Time....
No. It was the right time; and she hadn’t abandoned her mother. She hadn’t. Really.
Even though she felt as if she had.
And so, here she was, getting away to rest in her mother’s house, getting away from the situation. The irony, of course, was that it was all she could think of.
It was all her life had turned into. Waiting for her mother to live, to die, to do something other than lay there so still.
No.
She wouldn’t worry about her mother and the nursing home any longer. It had been done; the act was completed. There was no turning back.
The door and pane rattled with the force of the cold wind. The curtain trembled ever so slightly, as if something had breathed against it.
The clock ticked and ticked and ticked...ticking away her life, she thought.
She concentrated on the book, forcing herself to finish the paragraph and go on to page two. But again her mind wandered; her eyes lifted, glanced at the dark oblong window.
Something white pattered against it. She rose and glanced out, and saw snowflakes.
That was the problem with coming to this old place set in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, east of Santa Fe. Winter came so early here, painting the slopes white long before it ever reached the capital city. It was only mid-September, and yet it might as well have been the depths of winter.
She had not thought she could take the time off—after all, she was a legislative assistant and the legislature was in session right now—but somehow Jerry had arranged it. He insisted she needed the time away, and her boss had agreed, and so she had come home.
To this house.
She remembered when there had been much more here, in this room—when it had been filled with the playful shouts and gleeful laughter of three energetic children, and the cheerful calls of their mother from the kitchen for them to wash up and come to dinner right away.
She remembered when Raymond, not more than nine or ten years old, had drawn in bright red Crayola a picture of Father Martinez from the parish church on the wall; it had not been a flattering representation, but all their mother had done was chuckle and suggest that perhaps he might wish to use paper next time.
She remembered her mother sitting by the window