Finally, for the first time since waking up in Hot Springs, I felt harmony. How did that happen? We had healed. All of us from different wounds.
I believe places can heal. I believe science can heal. I believe God can heal. And I believe my hands can heal. It is best to use all of the above to get maximum results.
We’d fallen into a pattern of eating dinner early, then walking up to the top of the hill to watch the sun set. Sometimes I’d walk with them; other times Bunny and I would skip ahead, then circle back to catch some of their conversation, then bolt ahead again.
They talked a lot about my mean grandmother, who was, of course, their mother. Imagine having a mean mother. I’d rather have a felon for a mother than a mean one.
I bolted forward, then crossed the creek, leaving wet footprints on the stone path as we set out on our daily walk. I walked to the top of the hill. Bunny lagged behind, herding Mother and Eleanor to the top.
Nature kept happening all around me, just like all we needed to be happy on this earth was take a deep breath and be part of it. A lizard stared at me from his perch on an exposed root, while a scorpion—his poison tail pinched like links of sausage—scurried under a rock. A quick breeze blew dust into a tiny tornado that swirled and vanished.
I stepped onto the rock ledge, then climbed my favorite live oak, which reached over the edge of the cliff. I wrapped my legs around the limb and felt the bark press into my thighs. That was a place to force myself to trust. It was God’s limb and I knew very little about it, really. The sky was so high above me and the earth so far below. Still the limb held, and I had nothing to do with it.
A huge black bird circled upward from the valley, his long wings spread wide, though he never flapped his wings. Even so, he rose. He banked the curves in ever widening circles, catching an unseen power that lifted him up. When the bird was well overhead, he broke from his circle and coasted into the distance until he was just a speck against the pale blue sky.
Mother and Eleanor sat on the ledge right beside my limb, close enough to talk.
“Aunt Eleanor,” I began. “Do you think that you can stay a nun? Go back to Mr. Gaylord Lewis and … well, undo whatever you did? And we can all live here. The three of us and Bunny and maybe even Joe Brewer, if he wants.”
Eleanor looked over at me on my low-slung branch. “We just have to be realistic, Ruby Clyde.”
Realistic! If I were a realistic person I would have landed in the orphanage back at the Okay Corral, that’s where being realistic would have gotten me. I wasn’t going to start being realistic now. And frankly, I didn’t see any reason to be reasonable.
In time, the sun set orange. The sky blued and grayed and swirled into night. I climbed out of the tree and lay back on the hard rock ledge, next to Mother, and watched as the stars appeared one by one. The constellations told a much different story than back at the crime scene. I saw the twins, side by side in the dark sky; between them twinkled a cowgirl with hat and boots, and a little pig, of course, with a corkscrew tail.