“What would she want you to do?”
“She would be crying for a person in a damn ambulance that she didn’t even know. Not me.”
I saw lightning erupt in the dark clouds behind the Catalina Mountains. It was an impossible time of year for a lightning storm. I’d seen photographs of lightning frozen in its terrible splendor, ripping like a knife down the curtains of the sky. They say that to take those pictures you just open your camera on a dark night, in a storm, and if you’re lucky you get a wonderful picture. You have no control.
“Hallie isn’t dead,” I said. “This is a dream.” I laid my head back against the headrest and cried with my knucklebones against my mouth. Tears ran down to my collarbone and soaked my shirt and still I didn’t wake up.
25 Flight
Getting on the bus was the easiest thing in the world. I only took what I could carry. Emelina would send my trunk to Telluride.
I noticed the junkyard again on the way out of town. They should have had a sign there: Welcome to Grace. Farewell to Grace. Dead grass poked up through the rusted husks of big old cars that hunched on the ground like elephants, the great dying beasts of the African plain. It was early June, soon after the end of school. The land was matchstick-dry and I felt the same way, just that brittle, as if no amount of rain could saturate my outer layers and touch my core. I was a hard seed beyond germination. I would do fine in Telluride. Carlo had lined up a job for me as a model in a summer fine-arts school. I would sit still for solid hours while people tried for my skin tones.
Uda Dell and Mrs. Quintana, Doc’s assistant for twenty-one years, were going to take shifts with Doc Homer. His office was closed for good, and everybody now drove over to New Mexico to be healed. There were no thunderclaps when it happened; all this time we’d thought he was indispensable. Uda and Mrs. Quintana revered him. I couldn’t picture them feeding him, buttoning up his shirt, but I knew they would do those things. Somehow reverence can fashion itself into kindness, in a way that love sometimes can’t. When I went up there to tell him goodbye, he was eating a soft-boiled egg and said he couldn’t tarry, he was in a hurry to get to the hospital.
I bobbed along with the motion of the Greyhound bus, leaning with the curves. When I relaxed enough I could feel like a small chunk of rock in outer space, perceiving no gravitational pull from any direction: not from where I was going, nor where I had been. Not Carlo, not Loyd, not Doc Homer. Not Hallie, who did not exist.
“Where do you think people go when they die?” Loyd asked, the day before I left. He was on his way out to take a westbound into Tucson; the next day he would fetch home the Amtrak. We stood in my front door, unwilling to go in or out, like awkward beginners trying to end a date. Except it wasn’t a beginners’s conversation.
“Nowhere,” I said. “I think when people die they’re just dead.”
“Not heaven?”
I looked up at the sky. It looked quite empty. “No.”
“The Pueblo story is that everybody started out underground. People and animals, everything. And then the badger dug a hole and let everybody out. They climbed out the hole and from then on they lived on top of the ground. When they die they go back under.”
I thought of the kivas, the ladders, and the thousand mud walls of Santa Rosalia. I could hear the dry rattle of the corn dancers’ shell bells: the exact sound of locusts rising up from the grass. I understood that Loyd was one of the most blessed people I knew.
“I always try to think of it that way,” he said, after a minute. “He had a big adventure up here, and then went home.”
Leander, he would mean. My spleen started to ache when I thought of Hallie fertilizing the tropics. Thinking about how much she loved stupid banana trees and orchids. I said, “I have this idea that if I don’t stay here and cry for Hallie, then there’s no family to absorb the loss. Nobody that remembers.”
“And that’s what you want? For Hallie to be forgotten?”
I couldn’t have said what I meant. “No. I just don’t want to be the one that’s left behind to hurt this much. I want to be gone already. If you’re dead when somebody stabs you, you don’t feel it.”
“Leaving won’t make you dead. You’ll just be alive in a different place.”
“This place has Hallie in it. When I lived here, I was half her and half me.”
“Going away won’t change how you feel.”
“I won’t know that till I’m gone, will I?”
He picked up my hand and examined it as if it were a foreign object, which was just how it looked to me. He was wearing a green corduroy shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and I felt I could look at that shirt for as long as Loyd might choose to stand in my door. There were all those small ridges, the greenness, the nap of the cloth. If I kept my focus minute enough I could remain in the world, knowledgeable and serene.
“Anyway you’re wrong,” he said. “There’s family here to absorb the loss.”
“Doc Homer, Loyd, he’s…I don’t think he understands she’s gone.”
“I wasn’t talking about Doc Homer.”
I shifted my field of vision to include the lower part of Loyd’s face and the blunt dark ends of his hair. A whole person seemed an impossible thing to take in all at once. How had I lived so long and presumed so much?
“I’m sorry about everything, Loyd.”
“Listen, I know how this is. You don’t think you’ll live past it. And you don’t, really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.”
“Why should I look forward to that?”
He turned my hand over. “I can’t answer that.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Loyd.”
“I’m sorry too.”
“Well. You’ve got to go to work.” I avoided his eyes.
Loyd took my face in one hand and put the other hand on the small of my back and he kissed me for a long time. His mouth felt cool as green corduroy, a simple thing I could understand. We began the kiss standing up, and when we finished we were sitting on the step.
“You have to go,” I said again. That was the last thing, my last words for Loyd.
When he and Jack were gone I stood for a long time looking out at the rambling jungle of the courtyard. A hummingbird, possibly the same one that had inspired Nicholas to learn to walk, was hovering at the red funnels of the trumpet vine climbing my wall. I watched the bird move stiffly up and down over an invisible path, pausing, then moving left, then up again and back, covering the vertical plane with such purpose it might have been following a map.
I felt Emelina’s presence. She stood in her kitchen door, shading her eyes, watching me. I waved, but she didn’t wave back. Her face was drawn tight with mute, unarmed rage; it must have been the worst thing she was capable of aiming at a friend. She didn’t know my tricks, that you could just buckle up your tough old heart and hit the road. My course must have been as indecipherable to her as the hummingbird’s. We are all just here, Emelina, I wanted to say. Following our maps, surviving as we know how.
The kitchen door closed quietly and I understood that it was her kindest goodbye. The sun was strangely bright on the whitewashed wall and the hummingbird hung in the air, frozen inside its moment. A photograph of the present tense.
All morning on my last day people came pecking softly at my door like mice. A legion of mice bearing gifts. It was mostly women from the Stitch and Bitch. No one else was as succinct as Emelina. They wanted to know what I would be doing, where I would live. I mentioned the art school, but wasn’t specific.
“We sure do love you, hon,” said Uda Dell. “I packed you a lunch. There’s yellow banana peppers in there from the garden. They’re not as big as some years but they’ve got a right smart bite. Stay another year,” she added.