Land of Echoes

46

Julieta was halfway to Window Rock when her cell phone rang. She almost drove the truck off the road as she grabbed it and flipped it open. It was Joseph.

"Where are you?" she shouted. "I've been trying to reach you since last night!"

"I'm at home. I was here. I just had a lot to think about."

"I've been so worried! Are you all right?"

He seemed to consider that. "I was hoping you could come up to my place."

"I'm on my way to your place now!"

"See you shortly, then," he said. And he hung up.

Joseph lived in one of the flat-roofed, sandstone-block houses on the hill in the center of Window Rock. He opened his front door before she reached it. He looked bone tired, but he struck her as handsome and fine as he stood there in T-shirt, khakis, bare feet. When she came up the steps, he put his arms around her and she leaned against him. She wanted to bury herself in him, hold him forever, but the hug he gave her was guarded and brief.

He led her into his living room. As always, she liked the feeling of his place, the mix of tastes. The house was small, just a one-story, two-bedroom shoe box, but well built and charmingly decorated. This living-dining room ran from one end to the other, so windows gave light at both ends, one set offering sweeping vistas to the south and the other shorter views uphill to the red pillars and cliffs of the Chuska bluffs. Over the years, Joseph had bartered his services for the splendid Navajo rugs and other artworks that decorated the place, but he had also hung his walls with framed prints of Miro and Chagall. His bookcase was filled with photo collections, medical texts, biographies, and a collection of comic books, and was topped with a collection of cards and gifts that grateful patients had given him. The Formica dining table and chairs looked as if they were left over from his med school days, but he had invested in a nice calfskin couch and oak coffee table.

The rooms were spotless and fresh, as always, but today there was something different. It took Julieta a moment to realize it was the flowers: a big vase of mixed blooms on the table, another on one of the stereo speakers. Through the door, she saw a cloud of carnations in a clay pot on the kitchen counter.

She caressed the petals of a rose and looked a question at Joseph.

"Well," Joseph said. "I wanted it to be pretty here. When you came. Not much in the way of fresh flowers in Window Rock, but I found these in the cooler down at Basha's."

They stood there for an awkward moment. He looked exhausted and wary, yet somehow at peace with himself. Like a man who had made some decision and had resigned himself to the consequences.

"Thank you for coming. Can I get you something? Coffee, or-"

"Joseph, what's going on? Why are you talking to me like this? I'm not some stranger."

He tossed his shoulders uncomfortably. "Let's sit down."

She let him lead her to the couch. She sat on the edge of it as Joseph took the big chair across the coffee table from her. She waited for him to do whatever it was he intended to.

"I didn't answer your calls because I needed time to think. Before I talked to you. Didn't want to talk to you until I'd figured something out. Figured out a starting place."

"For what? You're scaring me!"

He looked fiercely at her for a moment before springing out of his chair and crossing the room to one of the windows. He leaned against the window frame with one hand and massaged his face with the other. Against the light from the window, he made a trim silhouette, thin at the waist, strong at the shoulder. The muscles in his jaw rippled and rayed from tension.

"Julieta. You see the door to my bedroom?"

She glanced over. A short hallway, the narrow door of a closet, then the door to his room. From this angle she could just see the corner of his bed, covered in a patchwork quilt, and the bookshelf beyond. Another vase of flowers stood on the bookshelf.

"There's a man who lies in that bed every night. And he thinks about you. He wants you to be in there with him. But that's never happened. For a lot of reasons, that's never happened. And that's a big mistake."

Julieta felt heat spread through her: embarrassment, alarm, longing. This was something they'd forbidden of themselves. Why? The taboo had begun, unnoticed, in the months after Peter, and solidified in the time after giving up the baby and the scary period of the divorce. Then for a while they had both been scared of love, of consequences, of mistakes. Later, the taboo had been reinforced by her occasional lovers and his, the distance and tact and accommodation required. Living around it, not looking straight at it, was so habitual that it seemed impossible to face it now. What could she say? There's a bed like that down at Oak Springs School, too. True, but such a contrivance. He deserved better.

Before she could find the right words, Joseph turned back. He came across the room to her and sat on the edge of the coffee table. He took her hands and held them as he looked into her eyes. His eyes were deep brown, rimmed with dark lashes, unhesitant and unyielding.

"So what I figured out was, that's the starting place. That's the first thing I had to tell you-I wasn't going to pretend anything different, ever again." He paused to let that sink in: Wherever they were going, there was no going back to where they'd been. "The second thing was, I need to ask you for a promise. There are things I want you to promise me you'll do today. You have to promise you will do all of them, not just some, no matter what. I need to talk to you, we need to go for a drive, then we need to come back here and figure something out. After, you can do whatever you need to. Can you promise?"

It can't be happy, she was thinking, and it can't be easy. Or he wouldn't do it like this. The thought scared her to death. There was so much to fear right now. But then she thought: It must be necessary, or he wouldn't do it like this. This must be the only way through.

"Okay," she said.

"You're sure."

She mouthed the word soundlessly, cleared her throat, and tried again: "Yes."

He held her hands so hard they hurt, still looking into her eyes. Then he got up and pulled her with him. To the door, out to his truck.

Not talking, they headed east on 264 and then north on 666. The mountains loomed on their left, the flat, empty basin of the Chuska Valley yawned to the right. Late-afternoon sunlight washed the land, a chilly white light in the dry air.

Still Joseph didn't talk. In the silence, Julieta's fear grew. She took his hand and held it there on his thigh, making him steer with one hand, too scared to ask him to explain.

This was the way they'd have to go to get to the Keedays' place, but Joseph wasn't saying anything and at last she couldn't stand it any longer.

"Are you going to tell me where we're going?"

"Julieta, all these years, I didn't know where your baby went. I wasn't the one who found a home for him. My uncle did. He's the one who knew the family who wanted a child. But he made the same deal I made with you, and he'd never tell me. Sometimes I asked him, and he wouldn't. Even when you were… when it was so hard for you not to know. That's why I couldn't tell you anything about Tommy. I didn't know."

"Your uncle Joe Billie?"

"Yes. I know what you're thinking, he's an alcoholic and not to be trusted. But he's more complex than that. He did a wise and compassionate thing back then, for both of us. I believed him when he said he found a good home for your child. And he's helped us a great deal with the Keedays. He's helped me in other ways, too."

She wanted to ask him whether Tommy was her baby, or, if not, whether he knew where her child was now. But there was no point. Joseph had a plan. In her confusion and exhaustion, she found some comfort in knowing he had thought this through. Despite her rising sense of alarm, she felt a desire to surrender to it, to Joseph. She couldn't fight any of this. There was release in relinquishing the fight.

"Okay," she said.

He looked only minutely relieved. Whatever else he had to say, it was hard for him. Without thinking about it, she took her hand back and braced it against the dashboard as if expecting a collision.

"Back when you were pregnant," he began, "I did something that has been a big problem for me. We made a lot of mistakes, both of us, but this was one of the worst for me."

She waited.

"Peter called me. He wanted to know where you were, you weren't answering the phone at the old house."

"What?"

"He said he wanted to come back, he had already broken up with his girlfriend in San Diego, all he wanted was you. But I didn't give him your number. I told him he was no good for you, you were better off without him. He didn't show up. Not long after, you decided to give up the baby."

Julieta heard it, but it didn't connect for a little while. When it did, she crushed herself up against the door, as far as she could get from him, choking on rage. "How dare you! How could you have done that?"

Joseph didn't flinch. "Because you were falling apart. And because I loved you. I thought I'd be better for you than he would be. I didn't trust him to love you."

She stuttered with indignation as ten thoughts clamored for expression. "How could… Jesus Christ, Joseph, what… everything I was doing was controlled by men, first Garrett and then Peter, and all you could do was control me some more? What you did determined my whole goddamned life! You're just as bad as they were!"

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.