In fact, Hallie and I weren’t forty percent of anything-we were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.
“You tell that daddy of yours I need a pill to get rid of my wrinkles,” Lydia said loudly.
I made an effort to collect myself. “Okay.”
I should have said, “You don’t need any such thing,” or something like that, but I didn’t think fast enough. I wasn’t managing this first day all that well. I had a lump in my throat and longed to get back to my cottage and draw the blinds. Grace was a memory minefield; just going into the Baptist Grocery with Emelina had charged me with emotions and a hopelessness I couldn’t name. I’d finished my shopping in a few minutes, and while I waited for Emelina to provision her troops for the week I stood looking helplessly at the cans of vegetables and soup that all carried some secret mission. The grocery shelves seemed to have been stocked for the people of Grace with the care of a family fallout shelter. I was an outsider to this nurturing. When the cashier asked, “Do you need anything else?” I almost cried. I wanted to say, “I need everything you have.”
It was past midnight but a cold moon blazed in the window and I couldn’t sleep. I lay on my back in the little painted bed in Emelina’s cottage. I hated sleeping alone. As little as there was between Carlo and me, I’d adjusted to his breathing. All my life I’d shared a bed with somebody: first Hallie. Then in my first years at college I discovered an army of lovers who offered degrees of temporary insanity and short-term salvation. Then Carlo, who’d turned out to be more of the same. But companionable, still. Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.
I’d finally reached that point of electric sleeplessness where I had to get up. I tucked my nightgown into my jeans and found my shoes out in the kitchen. I closed the door quietly and took a path that led away from the house, not down past other houses but straight out to the north, through Emelina’s plum orchard and a grove of twisted, dead-looking apples. Every so often, peacocks called to each other across the valley. They had different cries: the shrill laugh, a guttural clucking-a whole animal language. Like roosters and children, on a full-moon night they would never settle down completely.
I wanted to find the road that led up the canyon to Doc Homer’s. I wasn’t ready to go there yet, but I had to make sure I knew the way. I couldn’t ask Emelina for directions to my own childhood home; I didn’t want her to know how badly dislocated I was. I’d always had trouble recalling certain specifics of childhood, but didn’t realize until now that I couldn’t even recognize them at point-blank range. The things I’d done with Hallie were clear, because we remembered so much for each other, I suppose, but why did I not know Mrs. Campbell in the grocery? Or Lydia Galvez, who rode our school bus and claimed to have loaned me her handkerchief after Simon Bolivar Jones chucked me on the head with his Etch-a-Sketch, on a dare. In fact, I felt like the victim of a head injury. I hoped that if I struck out now on faith I would feel my way to Doc Homer’s, the way a water witcher closes her eyes and follows her dowsing rod to find a spring. But I didn’t know. I could have lost the homing instinct completely.
I was on a road that looked promising, anyway. I could hear the river. (Why does sound travel farther at night?) I had my mother’s death on my mind. One of my few plain childhood memories was of that day. I was not quite three, Hallie was newborn, and I’m told I couldn’t possibly remember it because I wasn’t there. The picture I have in my mind is nonetheless clear: two men in white pants handling the stretcher like a fragile, important package. The helicopter blade beating, sending out currents of air across the alfalfa field behind the hospital. This was up above the canyon, in the days when they grew crops up there. The flattened-down alfalfa plants showed their silvery undersides in patterns that looked like waves. The field became the ocean I’d seen in storybooks, here in the middle of the desert, like some miracle.
Then the rotor slowed and stopped, setting the people in the crowd to murmuring: What? Why? And then the door opened and the long white bundle of my mother came out again, carried differently now, no longer an urgent matter.
According to generally agreed-upon history, Hallie and I were home with a babysitter. This is my problem-I clearly remember things I haven’t seen, sometimes things that never happened. And draw a blank on the things I’ve lived through. I told Doc Homer many times that I’d seen the helicopter, and I also once insisted, to the point of tears, that I remembered being on the ship with the nine Gracela sisters and their peacocks. For that one he forced me to sit in my room and read the Encyclopædia Britannica. Novels were banned for a month; he said I needed to clear my mind of fictions. I made it to Volume 19, driven mostly by spite, but I still remembered that trip with the Gracelas. They were worried about whether the peacocks were getting enough air down in the hold of the ship.
I would concede now that all these things were fabrications based on stories I’d heard. Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin. It was a fact that our mother had been terrified of flying. This part of our family history was well known in Grace. In her entire life she never left the ground. When her health deteriorated because of a failed kidney and a National Guard helicopter bore down from the sky to take her to Tucson, she’d explained to the men that she wasn’t going to fly. When they ignored her, she just died before the helicopter could lift itself up out of the alfalfa. The big bird hovered for a minute, and went away hungry.
It wasn’t her aversion to flight that was impressive; people in Grace didn’t travel much by car, let alone by air. I think the moral of the tale, based on the way people told it, was the unsuspected force of my mother’s will. “Who else would have married Doc Homer?” they seemed to be saying. And also, I suppose, “Who could have borne those unconforming girls?” People never said this directly, but when we were willful they would tell us, without faiclass="underline" “You didn’t suck that out of your thumb.”
It made sense to me. I had no visual memory of a mother, and could not recall any events that included her, outside of the helicopter trip she declined to take. But I could remember a sense of her that was strong and ferociously loving. Almost a violence of love. It was the one thing I’d had, I suppose, that Hallie never knew. As the two of us grew up quietly in the dispassionate shadow of Doc Homer’s care and feeding, I tried to preserve that motherly love as best I could, and pass it on. But I couldn’t get it right. I was so young.
And somehow Hallie thrived anyway-the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that tap into an invisible vein of nurture and bear radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living. In Grace, in the old days, when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the semilla besada-the seed that got kissed. Sometimes you’d run across one that people had come to, and returned to, in hopes of a blessing. The branches would be festooned like a Christmas tree of family tokens: a baby sock, a pair of broken reading glasses, the window envelope of a pension check.
Hallie and I had a favorite besada in the old Domingos orchard, and one cold day on the way home from school we tucked wisps of our hair into its bark. Secretly. We’d hidden in the schoolyard to snip the ends off our braids and tie them up together with a pink thread unraveled from my coat button. If Doc Homer found out, he would construct some punishment to cure us of superstition. We agreed with him in principle-we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.