Mira has been with us a full year now, and Stan and I love her as much as we ever could have loved a birth daughter. She has returned our love with such eagerness that I find myself wondering what kind of upbringing did this little girl have?
Mira is not cold, far from it. Indeed, she turns toward affection as a flower does to the sun. No, more like a starving person might a banquet table: eager, but with a certain degree of caution, as if uncertain what her belly would be able to hold.
I find myself wondering what kind of woman her mother was. All we know about her is her name: Colette Bogatyr. It sounds rather French. Strange. I thought just about everyone in New Mexico was either Mexican or cowboys. I guess I don’t know very much.
Does our Mira look French? Not particularly, to my eyes, but then what does French look like? All I know is that I was inordinately pleased when a woman in the grocery store told me how much we looked alike. They say that dogs come to look like their owners—or is it owners like their dogs?—in any case, might the same be true of adopted children and their parents?
Maybe because this first year has been such a wonder, I find myself thinking about Colette. Is she still alive somewhere? Will she reappear and take my little girl from me? I am haunted by the thought. Dread threads its way into my dreams.
Stan feels much the same, I am sure, but he won’t talk about it He sticks to the absolute letter of our agreement with the trustees. At first I thought he was lacking in curiosity—so many men are—but then I realized that he, too, loves Mira. He fears that if we violate the provisions set down by the trustees they will take her from us. He will do anything, even step on his own curiosity, to avoid this.
I care … but … I’m not certain I can go without knowing more. This morning I had to tell Mira I had a headache and so hadn’t slept well. The poor dear looked frightened—of me! Is she afraid I’ll be angry with her? I try so hard not to ever be, even when she is frustrating.
Sometimes I think her family must have once been very rich. Mira has a liking for fine clothing. I had to explain to her that she couldn’t have all her dresses be lace and velvet. We sat down together with the new Sears catalog and worked out compromises. It’s really rather funny. Most of the women complain that their daughters are all turning into tomboys. I have a budding lady of the manor.
Whether the family was rich or not, when Colette disappeared there wasn’t all that much left. Stan refused to sell the family home, and has paid out of money he inherited from his own father to arrange an escrow account to assure its care. The rest will be kept for Mira. That is how he shows his willingness to keep the faith with our new daughter.
And me? I feel like such a traitor. Far from wishing to faithfully abide, I want to stick my nose in. I want to learn what happened to Colette. Shall I be brutal and honest? Why not! I want to know not because I care a whit about Colette Bogatyr, but because I must assure myself that no one lives who can take darling Mira from us. It’s terrible, but I want proof that that woman is dead. DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.
I should hate myself for feeling such things, much less for committing them to paper, but I cannot. I love Mira. Stan loves Mira. I think Mira is coming to love us as well. Stan says the law would probably support our custody of Mira, given how Colette simply abandoned her. I am less certain of that. I can’t help but feel that, law or no law, if Colette reappears she will take our child from us, a child she left behind without a word.
I admit it. I want her dead. I’d dance on her grave if I could find it.
I wondered if Aunt May had forgotten how angry she had been in those early journal entries, for the one written on the anniversary of my coming to live with the Fenns was not the only one in which she expressed her fear of and hatred for my absent mother.
The emotions that washed through me as I read these entries were mixed. At first I was astonished that sweet Aunt May could hold such anger. Later, I felt protectively angry on behalf of the vanished Colette. Then, when I remembered the reality of the woman who had borne me, I felt pity for Aunt May. She had been right to fear Colette—had my mother reappeared, there is no way she would have relinquished claim to
her
daughter.
“But she didn’t come back,” I said to the empty air, hearing my voice reverberate strangely inside my truck cab. “Did you ever feel more secure, Aunt May?”
There wasn’t an answer, but somehow, just beyond the edge of hearing, I felt as if there was—and that I simply lacked the ability to hear it.
“There are a lot more journals in the metal box,” I said, my voice sounding less strange this time. “I’ll keep reading. I guess I’ll find out.”
I felt comforted, as if a silent listener had nodded approval. Then I noticed the big yellow sign at the edge of the road. I’d just crossed the border into New Mexico.
Crossing the border into New Mexico, especially from the east, isn’t much of a transformative experience. I’d followed a whim to see something of Kentucky and Tennessee as I’d traveled—air-conditioning has really taken the teeth out of summer—and so I went south until I reached 1-40. By then most of the desire to play tourist was out of my system and I headed pretty much due west.
Somewhere around Oklahoma things started looking more brown than otherwise, and I don’t have any fond memories of going through Texas, though at one point I was hungry enough that I almost did stop for that steak dinner all the billboards promise will be free—if you can finish what they put on your plate. I heard at the motel where I did stop that the restaurant puts a lot on your plate. That’s how they make good on the deal—pretty much nobody finishes.
Even though the sign welcoming me into New Mexico was bilingual, offering
“bienvenidos”
as well as “welcome” to New Mexico, I didn’t see a lot that was much different from Texas, at least not at first. What I saw was empty land, some of it being used to graze cattle, some under cultivation. Now, I was a city girl, but one way or another, I’d seen a good deal of farm country, Midwestern style. New Mexico was nothing like anything I knew.
The best way I can explain it is to tell a story I heard later on. A fellow from New Mexico goes to Kentucky, and while he’s driving along a country road he sees a cow having trouble giving birth to a calf. Having been a cowhand himself at some point in his life, he stops and goes to help the cow. His wife takes the car and eventually finds the home of the cow’s owner. The cow’s owner comes out and together they get the calf safely delivered. Afterward, when they’re cleaning up and having something to drink, the cow’s owner says, “So you’re from New Mexico. I hear that’s good cattle country. How many cows do you get to the acre?” The fellow from New Mexico looks at him with all seriousness and says, “You’ve got it all wrong, sir. It’s how many acres to the cow.”
That’s what I was seeing around me as I drove. In some stretches, once the roads took me into higher altitudes I drove through piñon and juniper territory. I found myself thinking that the fat round trees looked like cattle spread out and grazing. Locals called these growths of piñon and juniper “forests,” but then they called anything higher than man-height a “tree,” whereas back in Ohio what we called “shrubs” routinely threatened to overwhelm the houses around which they were planted, unless the new growth was regularly pruned.
New Mexico was a different world. When I stopped at a fast-food place and saw that green chile was offered as a condiment, and heard Spanish being spoken by the couple seated in the booth nearest mine, and realized that the dark-haired men laughing together at a table near the window were real live Indians, I felt as displaced as I ever had in Europe. More so maybe, because I was at least supposed to be in the United States—and this was the state where I had been born, and to which I thought I should feel at least some sort of connection. I didn’t, though, and that unsettled me even more than Aunt May’s journal had done.
Depending on who you talk to, the population of the entire state of New Mexico is given as something over a million and a half—how much over depends on the source. By the standards of the East and Midwest that isn’t much, especially in a state large enough to comfortably engulf Ohio, with room to take a solid bite out of the surrounding states. The largest chunk of that population lives in Albuquerque, with Santa Fe to the north, and various cities in the south claiming honors as runners up.
My destination was none of these urban centers. Somewhere west of Santa Rosa I took a road heading north, driving into lands that seemed—by the standards I was used to judging by—nearly unlived in. My destination was a small town that had seen its heyday in the 1880s, when the railroad had come through. Now, according to the reading I had squeezed in before my departure, it went back and forth between staggering along and economic depression.
The town was named Las Vegas, but it couldn’t in the least be confused with its glamorous sibling in Nevada. The neon here was restricted to the occasional bar window, the glories of its architecture were definitely rooted in the past. I stopped for gasoline at a very modern gas station, confirmed my directions, and drove to the real estate office that managed my property for me.
I’d called the afternoon before, promising that I’d be in by midday, and now here I was. The building was—as real estate offices so often are—a nicely restored older building, but the sign out front was for one of the national real estate chains. The sun beating through the truck’s windshield had made my air-conditioned cab hot enough, but when I stepped out there was a hint of freshness in the air that reminded me that Las Vegas was at over 6,400 feet altitude.
The middle-aged woman working the front desk looked up from some papers she was sorting, and smiled at me as I came in.
“I think you must be Ms. Fenn,” she said. “Welcome. I am Maria Morales. How was your trip?”
Her accent was the one I would hear a great deal of during my stay—that of the northern New Mexico Hispanic who had grown up speaking both Spanish and English. It is a distinct accent, almost impossible to describe. At the time it sounded very odd to me, and I accepted that oddness as part and parcel with the general oddness I was finding everywhere in New Mexico. Only after I had been in town a few days would I think to wonder why the accent had sounded odd. Had I really been so isolated from the town around me as to never meet any of the locals? I was beginning to think that my childhood memories—the veracity of which I had dismissed—might hold more truth than I had realized.
“My trip went well,” I said, “but how did you know who I was?”
Mrs. Morales smiled and gestured to the window by her desk. My truck—and its license plate—was clearly visible.
“We don’t see many cars from Ohio,” she said, “and I have been waiting for you. Can I get you something to drink? We have iced tea, sodas, even some coffee that’s not too stale. It is unusually hot this season.”
“Iced tea,” I said. “Unsweetened.”
She chuckled. “You have come through the South, I think. Here in northern New Mexico the iced tea will always be left for you to sweeten.”
“That’s a relief,” I said, sharing her laughter. “Sweetened tea tastes like some peculiar species of flat soda.”
“To me, too,” she agreed.
I noticed a discreet sign indicating a rest room and motioned toward it. “If I might?”
“Of course. I will get the tea. Then I will pull the paperwork for your house.”
After using the ladies’ room, I followed Mrs. Morales into a side room furnished with a round table, and set about with square-bodied chairs that looked hand-carved. A few pieces of handmade Indian pottery were set in niches on one wall. Framed, limited-edition prints of sunset-tinted mountainscapes hung on the wall. I took my seat, reveling in this break from office superstore furnishings—especially after spending so many nights in the sort of generic motel rooms that had been within my budget.
I hoped the taste shown in the decorating boded well for the care given to my house. As it happens, I was right in this, but I was also seeing what I would learn was a fairly common aspect of New Mexican culture. In even the most pedestrian middle-class homes, you’ll often find a taste for art or fine handmade goods. It may not be good taste, but at least it reflects something other than the taste of the buyer for the local home-furnishings warehouse.
“Now,” Mrs. Morales said, “here are the records of our custodianship of Phineas House.”
I blinked. I hadn’t known the house had a name. In Uncle Stan’s files, it had simply been referred to by its address.
Suddenly, the stack of file folders reminded me all too acutely of Uncle Stan’s methodical records. I was overwhelmed by grief and confusion, as if my twenty-one-year-old self stood side by side with this me of thirty years later. I covered my disorientation by taking a swallow of my iced tea. It wasn’t bad, and the caffeine in it seemed to go directly into my tired brain.
By the time we finished reviewing the paperwork, I felt a whole lot better. In contrast, Mrs. Morales seemed increasingly edgy. I wondered at this. Certainly, based on these records, neither she nor her company had anything to worry about. Maintenance had been done systematically, and the house hadn’t suffered anything like the vandalism one would expect for a property so long vacant.
“Would you like me to take you over to the house?” Mrs. Morales asked. “The town may have changed a bit since your last visit.”
“I’m sure it has,” I said. “I haven’t been here since I was nine. I’d appreciate a local guide.”
“Let me call Domingo Navidad, first,” she said. “He’s the caretaker. He can lend you a hand with things.”
“You mean like getting the power and water turned on?” I asked. “I figured I’d just make a few phone calls from my motel.”
“I mean like getting the shutters down and the door open,” Mrs. Morales said, phone already to her ear, her expression the glazed one people acquire when they’re listening to two things at once. “Even in this dry climate wood can get stubborn.”
I nodded. Apparently, Mr. Navidad answered the call, for Mrs. Morales began chattering in a fluid, easy Spanish that was nothing like what I’d learned in school.
“Domingo says he can meet us in an hour or so,” Mrs. Morales said. “Would you like to go to lunch first?”
I nodded, though I felt ridiculously impatient at the delay. After all these years, what did another hour mean? Was it that I sensed Mrs. Morales was deliberately stalling, reluctant to go over to the house without Mr. Navidad?
I decided I was being ridiculous. “Lunch sounds wonderful. Can you recommend a motel where I can stay until I move into the house? Someplace not too expensive, but not a roach motel, either.”
Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Morales knew a hotel perfect for my needs. Moreover, she fished out a handful of discount coupons for the hotel, then insisted on buying me lunch at a nice if unpretentious place that served both mainstream American and New Mexican food.
“After all,” she said, the warmth in her smile free from her earlier tension, “you have been a client for over forty years. We can at least give you lunch.”
“I suppose I have been,” I agreed. “Okay.”
I was prepared to be daring at lunch—after all, this was my first real New Mexican meal—but Mrs. Morales advised me that it was best to order chile on the side until I adjusted to the heat.
“Chile?” I asked. “That’s different from what we’d call chile in Ohio, isn’t it?”
“I think there you would be talking about chile con carne,” Mrs. Morales said. “Here chile is a hot-pepper sauce—different wherever you go, so it’s not easy to say how spicy it will be.”
“Like salsa,” I said.
She smiled, but shook her head. “If you are thinking of what you can get in the grocery store … well … yes and no. Most salsas, like you would put on chips, also have in them tomatoes and onions and other things. What we call chile is usually just the peppers, cooked with maybe a bit of pork for flavoring, red or green according to the ripeness of the peppers.”
“Which is hotter?” I asked.
She gave an eloquent shrug. “It depends on the year and the peppers. If you order ‘Christmas’ you can try both. Let me do this for you.”
I agreed, and was glad for her suggestion. I hadn’t considered myself the stereotypical Midwesterner. Both travel and the art world had expanded my horizons far beyond the norm, but when the food arrived I was glad to be able to spoon on just enough chile to suit my taste.
Mrs. Morales seemed eager to tell me anything and everything about Las Vegas.
“You are a teacher?” she said. “You will like it here, then. In addition to the grammar and high schools, we have several institutes of higher learning right here in Las Vegas. There is Highlands University, the Luna Vocational Technical Institute, and a campus of the United World College.”