Lie Still

11

The uneasiness began with the moms, like I guess it usually does. A tiny flame of gossip, texted and tweeted and Facebooked, all of it leaked from Mike’s office. The blood on the pillow. The damning Bible verse. No family stepping forward.

It was a churning, collective small-town kind of worrying unfamiliar to me, an ex-New Yorker who knew exactly seven people by name in my last apartment building. In New York City, there were 99,000 calls to 911 a day. People disappeared into the ether all the time. No one bonded about it.

Three PTA officers had hounded Mike’s office yesterday until he agreed to place an extra cop at the elementary school during recess and for end-of-the-day pickup. Their concerns weren’t specifically about Caroline Warwick but about the idea that this could happen here, to someone rich and ensconced behind a fortress wall.

“ ‘Paranoia is knowing all the facts.’ ” I said this nonsensically to Mike, on the third morning that Caroline was missing. “Woody Allen.” I was making myself a breakfast of cut-up bananas with sugar and milk, one of my mom’s old tricks.

“Not helping,” Mike said. “Facts aren’t even part of the equation yet. One of those PTA moms bordered on maniacal. She mentioned the Lindbergh baby. First Baptist wants to hold a vigil. I want to hold off hysteria.” He grimly dumped his coffee in the sink and kissed the top of my head. “What you are eating is disgusting.”

As soon as he closed the door, my smile receded. In seconds, I was punching Maria Valdez into a White Pages search on my laptop, which returned 113 listings for either M. Valdez or Maria Valdez within a sixty-mile radius. I took a guess and focused on the M. Valdez who lived closest, in the nearby town of Boon Hill, which was mostly Hispanic. A random decision on my part, because odds were that Maria Valdez was living in a house under a first name that belonged to a father or husband or boyfriend with one of twenty-five initials other than M. But this was the plan I’d made last night.

Mike had brought up Boon Hill in a recent conversation because he was amazed that it was mostly minority and poor with almost nonexistent crime stats. About four hundred people, mostly low-income Hispanics, some illegal, some not. Primarily good people, working hard. Scrubbing toilets, pounding nails in roofs that reflected 200-degree heat, making sub-par wages. No one seemed to mind, Mike said. The Clairmont elite cast their gaze the other way, to the far, far left, when it came to immigration papers for people who snuggled with their children and made their lives immeasurably better. For people they loved. The Hispanics hunkered down, hoping that they wouldn’t get booted back, that Washington and Texas politicians would remain hopelessly mired. It seemed a very good bet for Boon Hill residents.

Clear directions to Boon Hill did not exist in Google or on the Texas map in the glove compartment, which meant I couldn’t plug in the most accurate coordinates for Hugh. I snapped him off after he directed me to drive straight into a barbwire fence and rolled into British freak mode when I ignored him. Bloody hell! You’ve missed it! Mum, turn around!

“Bugger off, Hugh,” I responded, in my best Cockney.

I bumped along on the two-lane country road, feeling lost even though I was traveling in a perfectly straight line. The leafy trees on either side formed a drooping canopy over the road. Eerily isolating. Maybe this drive wasn’t such a good idea. There hadn’t been a single living thing in the last ten minutes except for the crow with nice aim who dropped a splotchy white present onto my windshield.

For the next five miles, I felt increasingly unsettled. The sun was shining but something was off. Every few minutes or so, I checked my rearview mirror. I had answered two hang-up calls this morning after Mike left for work. I was trying to convince myself that they were a glitch between a telemarketing company’s computer dialing and our house’s frayed wiring.

I woke up this morning with Maria on my mind. I figured Maria would have a pretty good handle on whether it was Caroline Warwick’s habit to send out obscure threats to prospective club members. Maybe Maria herself had delivered this special present to my door as part of her duties. I hoped, prayed, that Caroline was at the root of this, because the alternative-that it was all somehow connected to Pierce Martin-was far scarier. I could handle a depressed rich old lady with an overly obsessive interest in my life. Maybe Caroline had voluntarily booked herself into a comfy psych ward for a couple of weeks. Maybe Gretchen had put her there and just wasn’t saying.

I almost missed the sign. Weeds were growing halfway up the pole: BOON HILL, POP. 212, obviously a few years behind the census. No hill in sight.

When a colorful row of wood houses suddenly appeared on either side of the road, I pulled over with relief. Civilization. I almost ran into a small sign planted in the sloping lawn of a boxy house with peeling sky-blue paint. QUILTS AND ROCKS! SE VENDE! BARATO!!! Maybe not quite civilization. My high school Spanish translated: FOR SALE! CHEAP!!!

My eyes traveled past the litter of rusty tools and a huge pile of limestone rocks to the west side of the home. Wildly colorful, Mexican-inspired quilts fluttered on the clothesline like free-spirit Picassos. This house seemed as good a place as any to knock first.

I slipped out of the car, sidestepped a broken tractor seat and an old-fashioned hand pump, and delicately maneuvered up crumbling concrete steps to a small porch. I peered through the patched screen door, but could only make out the dark shapes of a couch and a chair. Every shade was drawn to shut out the sun. Somewhere in a back room, an industrial floor fan roared like an airplane taking off.

Just as I was about to knock, the chair moved. Or rather, a shadow rose out of the shadows. I found myself eye to eye with a fiftyish Mexican man on the other side of the screen. He wore a guarded expression and a faded red-and-blue-checked work shirt. A silver crucifix hung around his neck. Catholic. One of my people.

“I was about to knock,” I said quickly. I offered him a practiced smile, which he ignored. His gaze traveled from my sweaty face to my belly to the old pink Skechers on my feet. I hadn’t taken much care with my appearance this morning, throwing on maternity jeans with a kangaroo pouch that the website promised would expand with me up to forty more pounds. This seemed possible, even probable, at the rate I was eating iced animal crackers out of the bag. I’d also pulled one of Mike’s faded old T-shirts over my head, emblazoned with the New York Fire Department logo.

Definitely pregnant, possibly lost, certainly harmless. That’s what I read in his face when he stepped out on the porch and let the door slam behind him.

“Do you know Maria Valdez?” I asked. “Por favor. I’m looking for her. Por Maria. Me llama Emily.” I pointed to myself unnecessarily. The man was silent for so long I considered turning around and trudging back to my car.

“I speak English,” he said, finally. “I’m Rafael.”

“Good. Great.” I felt myself blushing. Awkward. “I need a babysitter.” I patted my belly. Lying again.

“There.” He pointed across the road to several small boxy houses.

“Really? The pink house? The yellow?” I couldn’t believe this was going to be so easy.

“Yellow.”

“Gracias, sir.” And then, impulsively: “Cuanto? For a quilt?”

“You want to look?” He asked it almost shyly. A paying customer. There couldn’t be many of us meandering by.

“Yes. Please.”

He stepped off the concrete porch, avoiding the stairs entirely. “Cuidado,” he told me, offering a hand down.

Six masterpieces hung by common wooden clothespins, one every few inches, like a row of sparrows on a telephone line. I stopped at the first quilt, stunned, and moved slowly down the row, my fingers running lightly over the intricate quilting.

Each block was powerfully original and yet clearly born from the same artist’s hands. Bold colors and clever, whimsical designs alive with frogs, flowers, turtles, fish, and birds. At a distance, the patches flowed together like a glorious mural; up close, it was hard not to fixate on the complex geometry of the stitching. I could look at these quilts a hundred times, a thousand times, and see something different.

I wanted to buy them all. A quilt under glass at the Smithsonian Craft Show last spring wasn’t even close to this level of artistry. Price tag on that one: $10,000. But it seemed greedy, almost offensive, to strip all this beauty off the line.

“Incredible.” I waved my arm to encompass all of them. “Your wife?”

“No, no. My wife died last year. Breast cancer. Me. My work. Always, my work.”

He bent over and violently ripped a large milkweed out of the ground.

“I’m so sorry.” I turned back to the quilts immediately, because that’s what I’d want someone to do for me.

“The sewing passes my time. I sell the quilts every Saturday at the flea market.” He shrugged. “But those people do not want to pay. They want everything for one dollar, two dollar. I make more on my old bottles and rocks.”

I think about how my connections in the art world could change the life of this grizzled man. But maybe he didn’t want change. Maybe he wanted to be permanently fixed to this land, near things his wife had touched in life, where her spirit had settled.

I chose one, the smallest, which was strewn with a flock of colorful birds that I’d never seen in nature. For the baby’s room. Maybe it would inspire me to abandon superstition and set it up. I’d sold off one piece of superstition already: the brand-new crib we’d bought three years and several miscarriages ago.

“I’ll take this one. How much?”

“One hundred.” I could tell by his expression that he was up for bargaining. He turned away to free the quilt from the clothespins. Brown, wrinkled hands folded the quilt. His nails were as clean and well manicured as a surgeon’s.

I opened my purse and pulled out a $20, my only cash aside from the emergency $100 bill in the back flap of my wallet that I had always carried to appease would-be muggers in the city. I tugged it out and gave Rafael that, too. I knew that it wasn’t nearly enough, but his warm smile said that it was plenty.

“It is lucky,” he said. “You pick well.”

“What do you mean?”

“For your son to sleep under birds. Mucho suerte.”

A burst of euphoria coursed through my ragged nerves. How did he know I was having a boy? That the quilt was for my son? The cross around his neck glinted in the sun. The heat spread through my veins like warm tequila. The air smelled like dirt and honeysuckle. I had just been blessed by a misplaced priest with a chipped front tooth.

“Muchas gracias.” I held out my arms, thinking I’d sleep under this quilt every night until the baby was born. But Rafael wasn’t ready to hand it over.

“There.” He pointed to a tiny black cross stitched to the bottom edge of the quilt. “That is my signature. Dios es infinidad.” Infinity. God is forever.

Before I left, he said, “Sure, it’s OK, take a few pictures with your phone.” I shot the quilts from every angle. It wouldn’t hurt to email them to a few people. Spirits have been known to travel.

After I tucked my purchase into the backseat, I stood on the tidy, well-swept porch of the yellow house across the street. The very pretty Mexican girl who answered the door clutched an SAT study guide under her arm. Maria wasn’t home, she said. A toddler clung to her legs, hiding her head under the older girl’s skirt.

I told this young woman the same lie I’d told Rafael, only slightly more elaborate. That I was looking for a babysitter. That Maria was recommended to me. That I would pay very well. I overdramatically wiped sweat off my brow. I asked for a drink. She opened the screen door somewhat reluctantly and let me into a tiny cave of a living room. The rumble of an aging window air conditioner blended with the sizzle of something frying in the kitchen. Whatever it was made my mouth water.

“I’m Rosie,” she said. “Maria is my sister. This is Violet. My daughter.” Rosie couldn’t be more than seventeen. Violet, no more than two. Rosie took the child with her into the kitchen while I flopped down on a small couch covered by a cheap fleece blanket that instantly made my legs sweat, perspiration working through my jeans. There were two small end tables, one with a tiled image of the Virgin Mary. Three straight-back dining room chairs. A heavy wrought-iron cross that looked like it might bring down the wall where it was hanging. Maria needed her job.

There was suddenly a little person crawling into my lap. Violet had returned, alone. She snuggled around my belly and began playing with the silver charm bracelet I rarely took off. Her fingers were soft and sticky and she smelled wonderful, like a human cinnamon bun.

I heard an exchange of voices in the kitchen and the sound of an ice tray being cracked. I took in a deep breath of little girl.

“Violet.” Rosie stood over us with my glass of water, served in a plastic Winnie-the-Pooh glass. “Get down. Stop playing with her jewelry.”

“Pooh,” Violet said.

“No, it’s OK,” I interposed. “Leave her. This was my mother’s. I used to play with it when I was little. It reminds me.” I gulped the water gratefully.

“My mother says Maria will not be back soon.” Rosie planted herself on the edge of the couch. She wanted this to be a short conversation. “Maria works very hard. The woman she works for is not… very nice. Maybe Maria will take your job. Please write down your name and number.” She handed me a pencil and a piece of notebook paper stuck in her SAT book. I wrote my name and number carefully, thanked her, and gently lifted Violet from my lap to her arms.

As I walked back to the station wagon, I hovered inside the shade of a giant live oak, where it was at least ten degrees cooler. I was glad I’d come, even if I found out nothing. I wanted to carry the peace of this lovely road for a long time.

I wriggled my awkward body into the Volvo, thinking about showing Mike our new quilt. As I switched on the ignition, a rusted pickup rumbled past. That’s when I saw the cigar box on my passenger seat.

A box that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago.

My belly knocked sharply against the wheel, my breath seizing, my gut telling me to get the hell out of the car, but I sat paralyzed, unable to move or take my eyes off of it. Even in panic mode, my artist self appreciated the aesthetics of the cedar box and the evocative label glued to the top.

On it, a large-boned blond woman was set against pitch-black, draped in a swirling blue dress and a snaking purple scarf. She had a rakish patch over one eye, a bundle of tobacco leaves dripping from one hand and in the other a cigar raised jauntily over her head. Empowering, right down to the bare feet with red toenail polish. She was left-handed, I thought distractedly, like me.

Black Patch Cigar Co.

I’d never heard of it-but then, I’d never puffed on a cigar.

I didn’t move. I held my breath and listened for ticking sounds, although Mike had taught me that bombs don’t always tick. His voice in my head screamed for me to get out even as I reached over and lifted the lid with a fingertip, touching nothing else. A single cigar was tucked inside, wrapped tightly in cellophane, dressed up with a bow made out of cheap pink curling ribbon. No note. A congratulations for the baby? Or a threat?

I didn’t think Rafael had done this. The pink was wrong, wrong, wrong. Color would be important to an artist like Rafael. He wouldn’t break in to my car, even though I left it unlocked.

I thrust open the door and ran to the wayback. I locked the doors with my remote before peering through the rear window. I saw nothing but the six-pack of water that Mike insisted I carry for emergencies.

I shot a 360-glance around me. Not a soul. Everyone was hiding out from the heat. The air was perfectly still, waiting.

My fingers fumbled to hit speed-dial 1. Mike’s voice said he wasn’t available at the moment, but would return my call as soon as possible.

“Your concerns are important to me,” he said politely. “If this is an emergency, please dial 911.”

I got back in the car, yanked it into gear, and spun out, kicking up gravel and a choking cloud of dust. I reminded myself to tell Mike that no one wanted to be instructed to dial 911. People weren’t idiots.

Ten miles down the road, it belatedly occurred to me to glance into the backseat.

My lucky quilt was still there, folded in a neat square.