I drove underneath the archway with the Tamarosa sign. The fenced pasture came into view with the white farmhouse beyond, and I got that strange, nearly out-of-body sensation one gets when traveling long distances, when you step out of a plane or a car and you are smacked with startling heat or nighttime or palm trees, when only a few hours before there were cool temperatures and daylight. In front of me was a ranch in horrible disrepair, and it seemed shocking. The disrepair, yes, but more the fact that I had somehow brought myself there. Things can change so quickly, and at your own doing, too.
The night before, I’d gotten a room at a Marriott Hotel in Bend, Oregon, and so I had slept off quite a lot of the anger that had gotten me that far. Anger has grand plans that sometimes look foolish later. It occurred to me that I should turn around and head straight home. I should get the full story at least. Then again, the fact that I had finally stopped driving in Bend, Oregon, was perhaps a sign. A change, a turn in the road, being driven round the: It seemed important. So did the three cars piled up in a gruesome accident I tried not to glance at but did. And the fact that every station had cut out once I entered the desert, all except for a radio show with a molasses-voiced marriage guru, Dr. Yabba Yabba Love. The first rule of marital success: Don’t marry crazy and don’t be crazy.
Other important bits of information (though how to read them was another question) were the seven missed calls and various messages from Thomas, who, after seeing all the mess and maps on the floor, had at first worried I’d been abducted, apparently by a kidnapper with a bad sense of direction. Was he really confused as to why I’d left? Did he truly think some harm had befallen me? It seemed to indicate some sort of innocence on his part. One message later, though, he apparently had found the business card, exposed and yet half furled, as if Mary Evans herself was trying to cover her nakedness with her two hands. His questioning, worried voice had turned incensed. I don’t know what you think, but you’ve got it wrong. This is how you react? You just take off? What has gotten into you? Oh, the power of the delete. It felt fabulous. I wished I could go around deleting like crazy. I’d delete suspicious spots on X-rays and malls at Christmas, car troubles and tragic events in history, the world’s and my own. Try Mary Evans, I texted him, and then I shut off my phone. The last thing I wanted was to have an actual conversation with Thomas. Talking to him would mean having the facts, and having the facts meant you had to do something about them.
I looked around at where I’d ended up. My first thought was that I’d clearly traded one mess for another, perhaps an even larger one. Not just because of the size of the place and its obvious decrepit condition, but because of how the ranch had mattered over time. My own marriage had twenty-two years’ worth of history, but this place had been here for decades, even before my grandparents swapped cattle for divorcées in the late 1930s to make a more lucrative living. Nash herself had lived here her whole life long, and my family maintained some kind of ongoing but mixed loyalty to the place, claiming its unusual, romantic history as ours (it was good dinner-party fodder) but not wanting to face the actual burden of its aging. And then, too, there was the stuff beyond human history, before society women and Hollywood starlets came to establish residency for a quickie divorce when a divorce was a difficult thing to get, before the time, even, when the place had been a true working ranch. The land itself—it had existed for billions of years, transforming era by era as shallow seas lifted and tectonic plates crashed and volcanoes erupted. My mother had a fossil on her coffee table that she’d found there as a child.
The sun had risen on Tamarosa for much longer than on the twenty-two years of my marriage, and now look. It was a significant and monumental mess. I could see the encroaching weeds as I drove up, and the ragged, tumbled fences. A buffalo wandered in the distance. As I reached the house, I saw that the old riding ring had fallen. The house itself, a once-bright white and expansive two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch, was dim and sagging. The pastures were mowed, at least, probably by old Harris riding that husky, prehistoric tractor, which I saw parked near a tilting mailbox. But the short grass was an odd mess, with strange, deep grooves of dirt and mad gouges. I didn’t know what to make of them. They brought to mind crop circles and ancient rituals, some desert mystery I couldn’t comprehend.
I couldn’t see the pool from where I was, or the barn and the stables, so God knew what state they were in. This was all beyond me. My expertise was along the lines of fixing vacuum cleaners and repainting bedrooms. I lived in the suburbs, first off. I could unclog a toilet with the best of them, but I had just seen a buffalo, an actual huge and woolly buffalo, whose head hung low and who looked capable of bad moods. How do you repair that much damage, damage that has been slowly accumulating for years due to neglect and the passage of time itself? I hadn’t even laid eyes on Nash yet. I was afraid what time had done to her.
I got out of the car and was hit with heat. Immediately, my clothes were heavy and I needed my hair up in a ponytail. I was tired, and this all seemed immense, and, clearly, I hadn’t thought it through. I was worried what other disasters might be waiting. It looked like the kind of place where you’d find someone dead, with flies buzzing around the corpse, weeks gone by, their absence unnoticed by anyone. It was a place of sour milk and open cans of Chef Boyardee, or so I thought.
My unease about dead bodies wasn’t entirely brought on by fallen fences and long hours in hot, flat landscapes—I had repeatedly tried to call Nash’s home phone (Nash with a cell? Ha!) to warn her of my imminent arrival, with no luck. I had also tried to call Harris, who had a place a good mile down the road, but he didn’t answer, either. The ringing phones left a lot to the imagination, and I was worried about both Nash and Harris. My mother wasn’t the only one who thought the two of them had been lovers, but Nash had always been maddeningly tight-lipped about her private life. Harris—he’d been fit enough to get on a horse those years ago when we visited; now that old cowboy was also likely frail and vulnerable, certainly no match for overgrown pastures and large, entitled mammals.
I was fond of Harris. He’d been Nash’s right-hand man from way back when Shaye and I were kids, when divorces had become easy to get and the ranch was back to being just a ranch, and we swam in the pool and pretended that one of the empty cabins was our little house. Shaye wanted to be Laura, so I was Almanzo. She cradled babies and made molasses candy, while I chopped a lot of wood. Harris gave me a pair of steel wedges and a splitting maul I couldn’t lift, trying to even out my end of the deal.
I unstuck my sweaty shirt from my back. I carried a bag of fruit that I had bought at a stand on the way. I always brought a gift for the hostess; who knew where I got that. Maybe from a magazine, some well-intentioned Redbook; certainly not from my own mother, who’d just as soon skip the party entirely if it meant kissing someone’s ass with a box of chocolates.
I opened the screen door and knocked. No answer. I looked out over the property, and I could see the pool then, drained and now filled with a few inches of orange-red desert dirt that had blown inside. There may have been some trash in there, too; I saw a small lump of something that resembled an old boot. The heat felt capable of melting me to that spot on the porch, and I had to use the bathroom, and I wouldn’t have minded taking another bend entirely back in Bend. The Marriott, with its cool, bland lobby and toilet paper folded into a triangle, sounded like heaven.
“Nash?” I called. “It’s Callie! Your niece Callie!”
A small black dog popped his head out the dog door.
“Hi, Tex,” I said. I’d seen pictures of him. He jumped through the small swinging panel, gave a little bark. Then he sniffed my pant legs and stared at me, as if I were a questionable parcel the UPS man had dropped. “Tell me she’s not dead in there.”
She was not dead. Not at all. I heard the bustle and footsteps that meant someone was coming, and then there she was, still surprisingly tall (though not as tall) with broad shoulders (though not as broad). She had the deep wrinkles and permanent tan of a rancher and a head of glorious gray hair, pulled back into a barely contained ponytail. She was still beautiful.
“Callie! I thought you were that man from the bureau,” she said. The bureau? If she was having delusions about the FBI, I was in trouble.
“It’s just me, Nash.”
We hugged, and then she let me go to have a good look. “This is you? It’s the voice I know, but you’ve changed some since you came last.”
“Don’t I know,” I said.
“What are you doing here? This is a surprise.”
Now that my arrival seemed to be good news, the dog began jumping around on his hind legs, hopping up on our knees. Nash scooped him up and tucked him under one arm. “Tex, enough,” she said. “He loves visitors. Except that bureau man. He hears his truck and goes crazy.”
I decided to let the bureau comment pass, at least for now. There’d be plenty of time later to assess, to use my mother’s word. “Well, sure,” I said. “Dogs have their own opinions about people.” I didn’t even want to look at Tex. I didn’t pet his velvety little head. His canine self reminded me of Hugo, even though Hugo had been large and sturdy. I didn’t want to befriend another animal, let alone love him, knowing what his loss would do to you.
“Come in, Callie. I must say, this is somewhat of a shock.”
“I tried to call.” I handed her the bag. “Peaches.”
She opened the top and gave a long sniff. “Mmm. Summer.”
By that time, we were inside the house. We’d walked through the large front room that I remembered, the one with the red and yellow plaid couches and pine-covered walls, with the grand piano in the corner. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed. I followed Nash to the kitchen and dining room, where large wide windows looked out onto the endless acres of ranchland and the Sierra Nevada Mountains beyond. The same long tables were there, with benches on either side, and so were the high shelves displaying horseshoes and miniature cowgirls done in porcelain.
I tried to find the crisis. There were no open cans or molding dishes of cat food. The kitchen was neat, and the plank wood floors covered with carpets were clean. The house smelled a little musty, maybe, but not more than was due. I calculated repairs—fences, that pool, a few phone calls, easily within my abilities. And Nash looked well, if maybe a bit thin in the face. If I looked that good at eighty, I’d be counting my blessings.
Nash set Tex down and took a pitcher of tea out of the refrigerator. Right there, tea in the refrigerator—how much could be wrong? She reached for two glasses, ones that I all at once recalled. They were decorated with strawberries and pink-white flowers, and I no doubt drank out of them when I was eight and eighteen and twenty-eight. She poured us both a drink, and then she looked at me hard.
“Have you run away from home, Callie?”
It must have been something in my eyes, something likely familiar to her, after all the women who’d passed through those doors. But I couldn’t admit it. I wasn’t sure exactly what I had done.
“Mom called. She asked me to come check in. She was worried about you.”
“Worried about me?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Baloney. Maybe worried about herself having to worry about me.” Nash reached for a Mason jar of dog treats. Her hand had a slight tremor, which made the contents chime against the glass. She gave Tex a biscuit, and he crunched vigorously.
“Harris phoned her.”
“He did?”
“He did.”
“How dare he! You know, I pay that man.”
“He was concerned, Nash. Concerned enough that I brought my suitcase.” People who bring hostess gifts and visit the sick in hospitals and who ride in to save the day are experts at disguising our own needs behind efficiency and help. You get plenty out of being the giver, beyond being the giver. Thomas may have been better at this game than I was, but we both played it, which was another one of our problems.
“I can’t believe those two! The nerve.” But I could see something in her eyes. I wasn’t the only one hiding something. “Maybe the place isn’t as shipshape as it used to be. I don’t pretend I can keep cattle or even horses anymore. But everything is fine here. I’m fine.”
“Do you mind if I stay for a day or two anyway?” Or a week or six? “It’s been so long. We can catch up, at least.”
“Thomas will miss you,” she said. She cocked one eyebrow.
I didn’t answer.
“Ah, well.” She nodded. “I see. Stay as long as you like. I wasn’t prepared for guests, mind you, so don’t give those spies a bad report card on account of that. I haven’t had visitors in a long while.” I couldn’t tell if she was glad about this or not. “You can stay in Taj. That was always the favorite.”
I retrieved my bag from the car. Tex followed like an incompetent but well-meaning valet. Upstairs and down the hall, I found TAJ MAHAL right next to CASTAWAY—the doors still had the signs on them, with log-shaped letters burned into wood. It was hot in there, and the dust in the curtains made me sneeze when I reached past them to open the windows, but who could blame Nash for not tending to each room? Once the kids hit high school, I barely wanted to cook anymore. Taj was tidy enough, with its large pine bed and quilt spread. I could see why it was a favorite—the view was immense, one that would please any choosy tourist.
I put on a tank top, washed my face in the bathroom across the hall, and then I turned my phone on again to check for messages. Thomas or no Thomas, my daughter was traveling in a foreign country, and I might have to hop on a plane to rescue her from some terrible jail or tropical disease or heartbreak or whatever else might befall her away from the safety of home. I was still trying to hold on to the idea that my children needed me.
There was only one message, though. It wasn’t from Thomas or Amy. Surprisingly, it was Melissa who’d called. She was using her bossy-eldest voice, which could make me mad when directed at me, and she was saying something about Thomas and me and Mary Evans. Thomas had used her to relay his side of the story, and the wrongness of this barely registered before I heard what she said next.
“Mary Evans, PhD, Mother. He said you thought he was having an affair! For God’s sake! Dad? She’s a therapist. He’s been seeing her for about six months….”
I sat down on that quilt-covered bed. It wasn’t what I had expected, not at all. I felt the slight lift of relief before the anger rolled in. Six months? How many lies and lies and lies does it take to cover weekly appointments for six months?
I held my phone in my hand and stared out over all that ranchland, which looked less wrecked than exhausted. I watched a woodpecker bam-bam-bam his beak into a beam of rotting wood. All those small lies, the late nights at work, the lengthy errands, maybe even those long runs in the hideous silky shorts…The fact that he couldn’t tell me this basic truth, it felt oddly worse than my original, mistaken conclusion. It felt like the final verdict on the state of our marriage, the kind of vast desert distance that was impassable. Passion, legs entwined with legs, hot mouths and bare desire, found love—it was tangible, even understandable. I could grab hold of that and either choke it to death or let it go on its foolish, temporary way. But unhappiness—an unhappiness deep enough to hide—it seemed like such a larger, untamable enemy.
The Mary Evans of my imaginings was gone. The shimmer of her, the desert mirage, went up in a poof. Why I also felt a small, odd sense of loss over that, why some strange emptiness took her place, I didn’t yet ask myself.
Well, I didn’t have time, for one. Right then, I heard a tremendous clatter down the hall, a sliding crash. Nash had fallen, I was sure of it. She wasn’t as sturdy as she looked. I leaped to my feet. Dear God, she’d probably broken a hip or something. After all that time living alone without incident, the very second I arrived, she had a catastrophe. It was proof how another person’s capable presence could turn you incompetent. I hurried to Nash’s room, only to find her just fine and upright, looking guilty.
“Shit,” she said.
Shit was right, because clearly this was the reason (one of the reasons) for Harris’s worried call. Yes, the reason was scattered and splayed out in front of me. What had fallen, what I bent to help Nash with, though she waved me away, were a chair and a stack of books that had been on it. This might have been innocent, except that it was only one small part of the disturbed chaos and bizarre accumulation of paper in that room. There were stacks of it. Stacks and more towering stacks, along with piles of large, fat envelopes and stuffed file folders. I’d been wrong about Nash and senility: She must have lost her mind; this was proof. Her bed was in there somewhere, and in there somewhere, too, was a ringing phone. A cellphone! I heard a jazz riff, but Nash made no move to answer it. Nothing was what it seemed. I felt a sick dread.
“Nash, my God,” I said. “What is going on here?”
“What are you talking about?” she said.
“What is all this stuff?”
My eyes caught a label on the end of a box, and then I saw the number everywhere. A folder, a letter, a newspaper: 1951, 1951, 1951.
She folded her arms, and her eyes blazed. That’s when I also noticed a nearly empty glass of beer and an open box of crackers. Nash followed my glance and tried to shove the box into a trash can overflowing with paper. “Last night’s snack,” she snapped. But then her head tilted, as if there was a sudden noise. “Do you hear that?”
Voices, probably. I was so far over my head that I was sinking fast.
“Yes,” she said, and her face lit. She grabbed my arm, hurried me downstairs to those large windows in the dining room. Waves of heat came off the desert like ripples of water, and it was quiet except for an awwwk! of a falcon overhead.
But then I also heard it. A sound like thunder; that deep bass roll off in the distance. And then—same as thunder, too—the boom was suddenly right there in Nash’s very own pasture, a roar of hooves and huffing and wildness; there were manes flying and thick haunches with muscles clenched in forward motion, a blur of brown and satin black. I could not hear or see or feel anything else, not the ringing phone, not the car coming down the drive, not the horrible heaviness in my stomach, not even a sense of inevitability about these horses and my future. There was only this: motion and power and thrill and fear.
“My God,” I said.
Nash’s fingers gripped my arm.
“They’re back,” she said.