Vanishing Acts (23 page)

“Let's go see him.” She pecks her way between the people on the grass, until we are standing behind the drummers pavilion. The boy is sweating profusely and eating a PowerBar. Up close I can see that the rainbow colors of his costume are hand-sewn ribbons. Ruthann boldly picks at the boy's sleeve. “Look at these; one thread away from falling off,” she tsks. “Your mother ought to learn how to sew.” The boy looks up over his shoulder and grins. “My aunt could probably fix them,” he says, “but she's too busy being a businesswoman to pay attention to the likes of me.” He enfolds Ruthann in an embrace. “Or maybe you brought your needle and thread?”

I wonder why she hasn't mentioned that the dancer is her nephew. Ruthann holds him at arm's length. “You are turning into your father's double,” she pronounces, and this makes a smile split the boy's face. “Derek, this is Sophie and Delia, ikwaatsi.”

I shake his hand. “You were awfully good.”

Sophie bends down toward the hoop and tries to kick at it with her foot. It jumps a few inches, and Derek laughs. “Wow, look, a groupie.”

“You could do worse,” Ruthann says.

“So, how are you doing, Auntie?” he asks. “Mom said . . . she told me that you went to the Indian Health Service.”

Something shutters across Ruthann's face that is gone almost as quickly as I notice it. “Why are we talking about me? Tell me whether I should bet on you winning.”

“I don't even know if I'll place this year,” Derek replies. “I didn't have a lot of time to practice, what with everything that happened.”

Ruthann nudges his shoulder, and then points to the sky. In an otherwise perfectly clear blue day, a stunted rain cloud hovers. “I think your father's come to make sure you finish well.”

Derek looks up at the cloud. “Maybe so.”

He bends down to give Sophie a lesson on how to lift up a hoop with one's foot, while Ruthann explains that her brother-in-law, Derek's father, was one of the first casualties in the war with Iraq. In keeping with Hopi tradition, his body was to be sent back for burial by the fourth day. But the helicopter carrying his remains was shot down, and so he didn't arrive until six days after his death. The family did their best–yucca soap was used to wash his hair, his mouth was filled with food to keep him satisfied, his possessions were placed in the grave–but it was done two days too late, and they worried that he might not make it to his destination.

“We spent hours waiting,” Ruthann tells me. “And then, just before it got dark, it rained. Not all over, but on my sister's house, and on her fields, and in front of the building where my brother-in-law had gone and enlisted. That's how we knew he'd made it to the next world.”

I look up at the cloud she believes is her brother-in-law. “What about the ones who don't make it?”

“They stay lost in this world,” Ruthann says.

I hold up my palm. I try to convince myself that I feel a drop of rain.

“Ruthann,” I ask, as we drive back from the Heard, “how come you live in Mesa?”

“Because the Phoenician just isn't swanky enough for me.”

“No, really.” I glance in the rearview mirror to make sure Sophie is still sleeping. “I didn't realize you had family in the area.”

“Why does anyone move to a place like where we live?” she asks, shrugging.

“Because there's nowhere left to go.”

“Do you ever go back?”

Ruthann nods. “When I need to remember where I came from, or where I'm headed.”

Maybe I should go, I think. “You haven't asked me why I came to Arizona.”

“I figured if you wanted to tell me, you would,” Ruthann says. I keep my eyes on the highway. “My father kidnapped me when I was a baby. He told me my mother had died in a car accident, and he took me from Arizona to New Hampshire. He's in jail now, in Phoenix. I didn't know any of this until a week ago. I didn't know my mother's been alive the whole time. I didn't even know my real name.”

Ruthann looks over her shoulder, where Sophie is curled up like a mollusk against Greta's back. “How did you come to call her Sophie?”

“I... I guess I just liked it.”

“On the morning of my daughter's naming, it was up to each of her aunties to suggest a name for her. Her father was Póvolnyam, Butterfly Clan, so each of the names had something to do with that: There was Polikwaptiwa, which means Butterfly Sitting on Flower. And Tuwahóima, which means Butterflies Hatching. And Talásveniuma, Butterfly Carrying Pollen on Wings. But the one Grandmother picked was Kuwányauma, Butterfly Showing Beautiful Wings. She waited until dawn, and then took Kuwányauma and introduced her to the spirits for the first time.”

“You have a daughter?” I say, amazed.

“She was named for her father's clan, but she belonged to mine,” Ruthann says, and then she shrugs. “When she got initiated, she got a new name. And in school, she was called Louise by the teachers. What I'm saying is that what you're called is hardly ever who you are.”

“What does your daughter do?” I ask. “Where does she live?”

“She's been gone a long time. Louise never figured out that Hopi isn't a word to describe a person, but a destination.” Ruthann sighs. “I miss her.” I look through the windshield at the clouds, stretched across the horizon. I think about Ruthann's brother-in-law, raining on his family's fortune. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I didn't mean to get you upset.”

“I'm not upset,” she answers. “If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it out loud. But every time, the telling is a little bit different. It's new, even to me.” As I listen to Ruthann, I start to think that maybe the math is not reciprocal; maybe depriving a mother of a child is greater than depriving the child of the mother. Maybe knowing where you belong is not equal to knowing who you are.

“Have you seen your mother since you've been here?” Ruthann asks me.

“It didn't go so well,” I say after a moment.

“How come?”

I am not ready to tell her about my mother's drinking. “She's not what I expected her to be.”

Ruthann turns her head, looks out the window. “No one ever is,” she says. My favorite museum, as a child, was the New England Aquarium, and my favorite exhibit was the tide pool where you got to play God. There were sea stars, which could spit out their own stomachs and grow back limbs that were damaged. There were anemones, which might spend all their lives in one place. There were hermit crabs and limpets and algae. And there was a red button for me to push, which created a wave in the tank and spun all the sea life like the clothes inside a washing machine, before letting them settle again.

I loved being the agent of change, at the touch of a finger. I'd wait until it seemed the hermit crab had just settled, and then I would push the button again. It was amazing to think of a society where the status quo meant having no status quo at all.

There was a second exhibit at the aquarium that I liked, too. A strobe, spitting over the flow of an oversized faucet. I knew it was just an optical illusion, but I used to think that in this one corner of the world, water might be able to run backward. Ruthann puts me to work, creating her butchered dolls. One day when we are sitting around her kitchen table making Divorced Barbie–she comes with Ken's boat, Ken's car, and the deed to Ken's house–she asks, “What did you do in New Hampshire?”

I bend closer with the hot glue gun, trying to attach a button. Instead, I wind up affixing Barbie's purse to her forehead. “Greta and I found people.” Ruthann's brows lift. “Like K-nine stuff?”

“Yeah, except we worked with a whole bunch of police stations.”

“So why aren't you doing it here?”

I look up at her. Because my father is in jail. Because I am embarrassed to have done this for a living, without knowing that I was missing. “Greta isn't trained for desert work,” I say, the first excuse that comes to mind.

“So train her.”

“Ruthann,” I say, “it's just not the right time for us.”

“You don't get to decide that.”

“Oh, really. And who does?”

“The kuskuska. The ones who are lost.” She bends down over her work again. Is there a little girl, somewhere, being driven across a border right now? A man with a razor poised over his wrist? A child with one leg over the fence meant to keep him safe from the rest of the world? The desperate usually succeed because they have nothing to lose. But what if that isn't the case? If someone like me had worked in the Phoenix area twenty-eight years ago, would my father have gotten away with it?

“I suppose I could put out flyers,” I tell Ruthann. She reaches for the hot glue gun. “Good,” she says. “Because you suck at dollmaking.”

On the way to the desert, Fitz tells me remarkable stories about a heart transplant patient who woke up with a love of the French Riviera, although he'd never left Kansas in his life; of a teetotaling kidney recipient who, postsurgery, began to drink the same martini her donor favored.

“By that logic,” I argue, “then the memory of seeing you for the first time gets stored in my eyeballs.”

Fitz shrugs. “Maybe it does.”

“That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”

“I'm just telling you what I read . . .”

“What about the guy in the 1900s who had a steel pike driven through his brain by accident?” I challenge. “He woke up speaking Kyrgyzstani–”

“Well, I highly doubt that,” Fitz interrupts, “since Kyrgyzstan wasn't a country until five years ago.”

“You're missing the point,” I say. “What if memories get stored in the brain, and they aren't even necessarily ones we've had? What if we're hardwired with a whole iceberg of experiences, and our minds use only a tip of them?”

“That's a pretty cool thought. . . that you and I would have the same memories, just because it's how we're made.”

“You and I do have the same memories,” I point out.

“Yeah, but my seeing-Eric-naked recollection has a whole different causal effect on my system,” Fitz laughs.

“Maybe I'm not really remembering that stupid lemon tree. Maybe everyone has a lemon stuck in their mind.”

“Yes,” Fitz agrees. “Mine, however, is a seventy-eight Pacer.”

“Very funny–”

“It wasn't, if you were the guy driving it. God, do you remember the time it broke down on the way to the senior prom?”

“I remember the oil on your date's dress. What was her name? Early . . . ?”

“Casey Bosworth. And she wasn't my date by the time we got there.” I pull off the road, into a vista of pebbles and red earth, and then hand Fitz a bottle of water and a roll of toilet paper. “You remember the drill, right?” He will lay a trail for Greta and me to follow, just like he's done for years in New Hampshire. But because this terrain is unfamiliar to me, Fitz will leave bits of toilet paper on trees and cacti as he goes, to let me know that Greta is on the right trail. He gets out of the car and leans down into the window. “I don't think we covered coyote protection in the training manual.”

“I wouldn't worry about the coyotes,” I say sweetly. “I'd be far more panicked about the snakes.”

“Funny,” Fitz replies, and he starts walking, a massive redhead who is going to be a hectic shade of sunburned pink in no time at all. “If Greta screws up, drive south. I'll be hanging out with the border patrol drinking tequila.”

“Greta won't screw up. Hey, Fitz,” I call out, and wait until he turns, shading his eyes. “I actually wasn't kidding about the snakes.” As I drive off, I watch Fitz in the rearview mirror, staring down nervously at his feet. It makes me laugh out loud. Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people. According to the Hopi, sometimes we no longer fit the world we've been given. In the beginning, there was only darkness and Taiowa the sun spirit. He created the First World and filled it with creatures that lived in a cave deep in the earth. But they fought among themselves, so he sent Spider Grandmother down to prepare them for a change.

As Spider Grandmother led the creatures into the Second World, Taiowa changed them. They were no longer insects, but animals with far, and webbed fingers, and tails. They were happy to have the space to roam free, but they didn't understand life any better than before.

Taiowa sent Spider Grandmother back to lead the way into the Third World. By now, the animals had transformed into people. They made villages, and planted corn. But it was cold in the Third World, and mostly dark. Spider Grandmother taught them to weave blankets to keep warm; she told the women to make clay pots to store water and food. But in the cold, the pots couldn't be baked. The corn wouldn't grow.

One day a hummingbird came to the people in the fields. He had been sent by Masauwu, Ruler of the Upper World, and Caretaker of the Place of the Dead. He brought with him fire, and he taught the people its secret.

With this new discovery, the people could harden their pots and warm their fields and cook their food. For a while, they lived in peace. But sorcerers emerged, with medicine to hurt those they didn't like. Men gambled, instead of farming. Women grew wild, forgetting their babies, so that the fathers had to care for the children. People began to brag that there was no god, that they had created themselves. Spider Grandmother returned. She told the people that those of good heart would leave this place, and the evil ones, behind. They did not know where to go, but they had heard footsteps overhead in the sky. So the chiefs and the medicine men took clay and shaped a swallow out of it, wrapped it in a bride's robe, and sang it to life. The swallow flew toward the opening in the sky, but he was not strong enough to make it through. The medicine men decided to make a stronger bird, and they sang forth a dove. It flew through the opening and returned, saying, “On the other side, there is a land that spreads in all directions. But there is nothing alive up there.” Still, the chiefs and the medicine men had heard footsteps. They fashioned a catbird this time, and asked him to ask the One Who Made the Footsteps for permission to enter his land.