I was sitting at Dad’s house in the Springs, my heart beating like an animal’s.
Dad was content, sleepy-eyed, watching The Jeffersons, a show I vaguely remembered from childhood reruns. I was back from Sunday service: driving in from Denver to drink Bud and shoot empty cans off the side of a mountain with Debby and her crew in Idaho Springs. I knew what I wanted to do here, alone, in my father’s place.
I watched him, his eyes closing, my heart hammering, his eyes fluttering open again. Something on the television made him smile. Finally, his eyes shut.
The pictures of my mother, of my father’s family sat above—my father’s family had been in Idaho Springs for generations, and they were watching me almost expectantly from their ancient frames in the walls. My father’s people had been miners. Now they worked at the Walmart.
I peered into the drawer, where I’d placed it again after hanging with Squeaker, and slid it open all the way. I rifled through thread, scissors, school pictures of me as a child, blond, when I was very, very young, my eyes black and haunted. My fingers brushed a whole collection of safety pins.
Where was it?
I thought briefly about what Daddy did while I was gone. Did he ever get up, besides to use the bathroom? Left to his own devices, he would function, but not quite. And some days were more lucid than others. I had memories of days, here and there—as a child mainly, where we would have conversations, though they were limited. That hadn’t happened in a good, long time, however.
I kept sifting. More safety pins. A receipt that fell apart in my hands. Old photos of uncles and aunties that I hadn’t seen in years. I paused over those, looking at them closely before turning them loose. A dark hairpin—I supposed that had been my mother’s, though I couldn’t be sure. I must have really shoved it in there.
I stopped, finally finding what I was looking for.
The bracelet.
I hesitated. I knew what would happen the minute I touched it. Shit, it was happening now even when I wasn’t.
The metal seemed almost to grow hot, fuse to my fingers this time, but before I could scream, I was gone—
I was my mother, her long, brown fingers on my neck, her neck. She was yelling at her father in the doorway of a small apartment, telling him that she was going to a friend’s house to study whether he liked it or not.
She was lying. He knew it.
He came around the corner, his large, hooded brown eyes filled with anger, suspicion. My mother’s body, my body, tensed at his approach. They argued fiercely. He was telling her she better not be going where he thought she was going, that there was only trouble there, that he was worried about her. Cecilia was asking him if he didn’t have any pride in being Indian and his eyes were filling with black, and I felt the fear in her gut, visceral. He grabbed for her hand, and she darted, quick, like a hawk, and ran down the steps as he followed, fast, but she was faster, all the way down to her beat-up car, pulling out, moving down the road, parking in front of a place I recognized, the Indian Center.
Inside, lines of metal chairs had been set out, and in the front, there was a man with long, dark hair in two braids lecturing, his back to a flag with a Lakota in a headdress. He was talking about the American Indian Movement. Cecilia sat, and I listened with her ears, the air around me filled with promise, energy. He spoke of how it had been illegal to practice our spirituality until 1978, and Cecilia’s heart filled first with rage, then a deep, wide sadness, her eyes focusing on something on the wall. An Apache war club. I wanted to process that but the wave of grief my mother felt was so visceral as she wept that I wept with her, with my mother, a woman whose face I had never seen except from the two-dimensional space of a photo. It was so hard to hate her, so fucking hard.
I went to open my eyes, but I had left.
I was back on my father’s couch, and though I didn’t cry anymore, I curled into a ball until the sickness subsided, trying desperately to take in what had happened to me.
My eyes flashed open. The war club—auntie had said it would protect me from the monster. I shook my head. It sounded absurd. I thought about what Squeaker had said in the trailer, and a story came to mind. One that she’d told me years ago. A story of a warrior who had won a battle with a monster. He’d won it with a war club that had been made with sacred intention, in the most secret of ways. Her face had been obscured by smoke when she’d told me that my ancestor Geronimo had held it. I’d scoffed and said, but Auntie, those guys used shotguns. She’d looked at me between puffs, her eyes black, and said, they only looked like guns, daughter.