He bobbed his head as if he'd expected that. But he didn't look guilty or ashamed. Julieta realized she was looking at a man who'd exhausted his remorse and come out the other side into purpose.
"I thought you deserved a man who showed you some respect, Julieta. Okay? And a little goddamned staying power!" He shot her a hard look, clearly willing to hurt her if he had to to get his point across. "There are sins of commission, and there are sins of omission. I did that with Peter. But the way I really sinned was what I didn't do. I didn't follow up on it. I didn't come to you in six months or a year or two years and say, 'Julieta, I love you. I want to be with you. Marry me. Have my baby.' That's what I didn't do. You want me to feel bad, that's the one that hurts me now."
He was saying all the taboo things, the forbidden things, and yet it was not shocking. They'd both known it, always known it, it had always been there and a source of secret strength and joy. But he had turned Peter away! If she'd known for sure that Peter was coming back, she'd never have given up the baby!
Or would she have?
Julieta's mind was racing. She could see herself back then: seven, eight months pregnant and gaining almost no weight, sacrificing the fat on her limbs to grow her baby. The gray winter seemed endless. She was scared to death by Garrett and Nick Stephanovic and in a rage against them, still in love with Peter and hating him savagely. If Peter had come back, one of two things would have happened. She'd have hit him and scratched him and told him to get out, get lost, how dare he leave her and immediately shack up with some Apache slut and then think he could walk back into her life! Or she'd have forgiven him utterly and embraced him and she'd've had the baby and she'd have gotten nothing from the divorce and Peter would have left her because that's who he was, he was a rolling stone and not constituted to stick with a job to pay the bills or wake up at three a.m. to change diapers. And her parents would never have forgiven her for any of it and she'd have turned into another single mother with a half-breed baby, batting around the trailer parks of Gallup.
Still, she couldn't forgive Joseph. She raised her shaking hands to wipe the tears away.
"What else, Joseph? Is that it?" She made her voice hard. "Am I done with my promise yet?"
"No." He had turned gentle again, and that really frightened her. "No, Julieta. I'm sorry. That was the easy part."
It was just another cemetery by the side of the highway, a square of ground separated from the road by a hundred yards of bare earth and rabbitbrush. A little one, lost in the vast sweep of desert, maybe forty graves surrounded by a wire fence with litter caught in the mesh. Some graves were flat earth marked by rectangular headstones, some were knee-high ridges of gravel topped by plastic flowers, bowls of glass beads, photos in plastic frames. A few were surmounted by little wooden crosses; this one was. The photo leaning against the base of the cross had the neutral-colored, motley background of a school portrait. A happy-looking, thin-faced boy often or eleven. Black-rimmed glasses and longish hair. Sort of a Navajo Harry Potter.
A little plaque had been laid on the mound. Julieta's eyes flitted at it and darted away. Robert Linn Dodge. That had been his name. Her eyes fled again and came back long enough to see that the birth date was right. And that he'd died almost three years ago.
"A congenital heart defect," Joseph said. "My uncle told me. He got the best care, but it… it didn't take."
It was the first time he'd spoken since they'd arrived. Julieta had known immediately what they were there for. They were north of Naschitti when she'd felt the truck slowing. She'd looked up to see the cemetery and had known it all instantly.
It was getting late, the sun was low above the Chuska ridge, the headstones and even the low grave mounds cast pools of shadow. The eastern horizons were impossibly distant and looked chilly. What a big empty sky. What big open country. Why is the earth where our dead are buried so different? The people in the cars going by don't know anything about this.
Julieta touched the heat-clouded plastic over the boy's face. She could see herself there: the eyes, she decided, the nose. Peter, too? She couldn't remember Peter. He wasn't anybody anymore. She took her hand away. Here was the truth about her baby. And about Tommy.
And yet when she thought about Tommy, she still felt that belly-deep pull, the sense of recognition. A faraway thought occurred to her: that this terrible fact created another possibility, that Cree Black should know about this, and soon. Or maybe that was just her clinging to her craziness.
Whoever the parents were, they had loved this child: The grave was heaped with colorful trinkets that included sun-faded Power Rangers action figures, plastic statues of Jesus, cat's-eye marbles, cheap jewelry, seashells. Not all were dulled by dust and the bleaching sun; some had been placed recently. They still missed him. He had a such a happy face, despite his illness. He'd been raised in a good home.
I have absolutely no right to grieve, Julieta thought. It is theirs entirely. How dare I.
There were the other graves, faded rainbow mounds with stripes of evening shadow along their sides. There was Joseph, standing some distance away. There was that big empty sky. There was his truck, pulled over near the pavement. There was the highway, a station wagon passing slowly, the family inside turning their faces away from the two strangers in the cemetery.
After a while it was time to go.
She went to Joseph, stood in front of him, looking at him, letting him see her face naked with all the feelings. She slapped him once, so hard it smacked like a gunshot, and yet he barely flinched, not even enough to lose eye contact. She panted until she'd caught her breath, glad that part was over. Then she took his face between her hands, stood on tiptoe, and kissed the red blotch on his cheek. She held her lips there tenderly and long, as if it would draw all the hurt out of him. He put his hands on her shoulders, steadying her.
Afterward, she just leaned her forehead against his chest. It didn't feel right, exactly, but really there was no one else. There never had been.
47
There was a glow in the distance: dangerous like a forest fire in the dark, something malevolent that could rush toward you and surround you and consume you. And there was an irritating insect that buzzed a harsh little song as it drilled into Cree's thigh.
Startled, she brushed and slapped at the bug and half sat up before realizing where she was and what was happening. She was lying in one of the sleeping bags under the roof of the sheep shed. The fire was a tumble of embers. The sunlight was gone but for a dull, colorless brightness in the west, washing the dark landscape in a faint light that turned every feature a monochromatic blue-gray. The silence in all directions was the sound of pure loneliness.
Right. Sheep camp. She had taken a nap. Ellen had lain down, too, but now was gone. With Tommy sleeping and Raymond and Dan taking their shift, Cree had opted to try to rest. She'd drifted off wondering how to tell Julieta about Tommy, her thoughts spinning in slow circles, going nowhere.
The glowing dangerous thing was the battle between Tommy and his invader, always there, an emanation of psychic discord looming just out of view, sixty feet away. And the insect on her thigh was Edgar's cell phone in her pants pocket, ringing and vibrating. Ellen had told her that here on the higher ground, reception wasn't too bad.
She opened it quickly and tugged out the antenna, her heart thudding in her chest.
It was Julieta.
"I was going to call you," Cree told her. "Where are you?"
"I'm at Joseph's house. In Window Rock. I called Dr. Mayfield to get your number." Julieta's voice sounded subdued, deliberate. "How are things up there?"