I’m not sure who was happier to see the delivery truck that morning, Tex or me. The sun had barely come up. The light was yellow orange, making the hills yellow orange and the trees and the shrubs yellow orange, too. It was that kind of sweet, magic morning glow you wanted to sip from a cup to start the day.
It was a dangerous thing to do, but after I opened the package, I crept outside, still wearing my nightgown, the one Thomas had given me for my last birthday. I ran and hid behind that big, old shaggy eucalyptus tree. I snapped my first image of Tamarosa—flash—a buffalo grazing poolside.
He was a very photogenic buffalo and apparently easygoing about having his picture taken. It felt good, having my camera in my hands again. How long had it been since a camera felt good? No idea. Creativity—an elusive beast anyway, seen only in the wild—had taken off a long time ago. A switch had turned off, the lights had dimmed, the curtains closed, and I only viewed things in the practical way anyone does. A tree was a tree, and rain on windows was just rain on windows, and snow was for skis, sold on pages six to eleven in the winter catalog. For a good long time, I didn’t see a buffalo as art, when as a young woman I used to see everything as art. That girl, a lost version of me, didn’t have the necessary passion and wherewithal to make a life as an artist, but she did have the simpler, daily pleasure of inspiration. Still, something wore even that down—life, kids, the practicality of pictures of backpacks and packets of freeze-dried foods. Creativity dies, sure as love does, when not handled with tenderness and respect and sometimes firmness.
I ran like hell back to the house. I was excited. I felt giddy, like a child who’d just galloped down a grassy hill. I didn’t end up mauled for the sake of art, either, and that victory of survival, the way parts of us endured after all, it called for a celebration of coffee and donuts with Nash and Shaye, who was heading inside, carrying a large pink box. You had to love a woman who loved food.
I had my hand on the screen door when I saw a large package sticking up from one of the trash cans by the side of the house. I walked back down the porch steps to investigate. The return address was protected with such a sizeable amount of tape, I was sure I could tell the personality type of the sender—proprietary and paranoid. The name was clear, though. Leonard Petit, Beverly Hills. The box was still full. The black-and-white photos—men with slicked-back hair, looking dapper, women gazing off toward the heavens, elegant actors and actresses in drawing rooms and on balconies—had now been discarded in a messy heap. Poor Leonard Petit would be destroyed if he saw this.
I let the screen door slam behind me. I heard Nash and Shaye chatting in the kitchen. I smelled coffee, that warm rise of morning joy. “Nash!” I called.
“No need to shout,” she shouted.
It all seemed so innocent, and Nash looked strangely well sitting with Shaye at that table with the checked cloth.
“I’m keeping you girls around, after all,” Nash said. She eyed that rectangle of pink cardboard as if it were a chest with a million dollars inside. “I haven’t eaten this well since we let the cook go.”
“You eat like a bird,” Shaye said, as she lifted a square of sticky tissue paper off the top of a maple bar.
“I saw that box out there in the garbage, Nash. The one you just got. The one full of old Hollywood photos.”
“Mmm-hmm?” Her mouth was full, cheeks fat as a baby’s.
“You’re throwing all that away after you ordered it? The entire thing?”
She took a swallow of coffee. “I got what I needed.”
“The whole box is in the trash?” Shaye asked.
“I can spend my hard-earned money any way I please. That’s why it’s called my hard-earned money.”
“This is the kind of thing that makes us worry,” I said.
“Stop it. You’re spoiling the morning. Eat a donut. It’ll change your outlook.”
I didn’t know what to make of any of it. She was either crazy or quite sane, which was much the way I felt about myself right then. We skipped the plates and ate off napkins, dropping bits of donut to Tex, who couldn’t believe the way his luck had turned. He sat so still to keep the goodness coming that he nearly looked taxidermied. I remembered Hugo’s own version of this determined goodness, the way he’d use his soulful eyes to his advantage. My heart cracked whenever I thought of those eyes and the way I missed them.
“Of course,” Shaye said. “That’s it! Your Jack. He was a Hollywood film star.”
Nash snorted.
“No?”
“He was a cowboy. One of our wranglers. Film star,” she scoffed. “I was just reminiscing about the golden age of Hollywood.”
The slurp of coffee on her part was unnecessary. No senile person would be that conniving and take such pleasure from it, too.
“Which reminds me. I forgot to ask you about using your computer,” Shaye said. She had frosting on her cheek.
“Ha. I don’t think so.”
“No, seriously. My laptop is useless. I can’t sign on here, and I’ve got to answer mail. And I want to write to Eric. I’ve got some things to say to him.”
“So write a letter.”
“Come on, Nash. Me, too,” I said. “Amy sent me all these pictures, and they’re too small to see on my phone.”
“Hack in to Harris’s network. Look for Horndog.”
Shaye cringed. “Oh, that’s scary.”
“Password, Stallion.”
“Jesus. I’ll never look him in the eyes again,” I said.
“Wait,” Shaye said. “You know about networks? I don’t even know about networks.”
“What do you think, I live in the dark ages?”
“Shaye, did you eat the chocolate sprinkle?” I asked.
“I buy the chocolate sprinkle, I eat the chocolate sprinkle. Nash, come on.”
“I know what you people want. You want to snoop.”
Shaye looked at me and shrugged. I shrugged back.
“We could take you to see him,” I said.
“Who?” Nash licked maple icing from one old finger.
“Jack!” I said.
“What makes you think I want to see Jack?” she said.
“Nash, really,” Shaye said. “You’re telling us it’s some sort of coincidence you get a letter out of the blue from that guy? All that stuff in your room, it isn’t about trying to find him? And now that you have, you can get on with the reunion.”
“A reunion? I told you girls. I’m working on the family tree. To leave behind after I’m dead.”
“Family tree? You said it was about running the ranch,” I said.
“You’re trying to tell us he just writes you a letter out of nowhere?” Shaye narrowed her eyes.
“He didn’t write me a letter out of nowhere. I wrote to him first. At the last address I had. I didn’t know whether he was even alive or not. I wanted to share some news I recently got. About a person we once knew.”
“Who?” I said.
“Just a joint acquaintance. Am I on trial here?”
“Sounds like an excuse to get reacquainted, to me,” Shaye said. “I wrote Jay a letter like that once, telling him our old math teacher died, just to see if we could start things up again.”
“You did?” I asked. “Ha-ha. You loved those vests. All these years later, still thinking about that three-piece.”
Shaye ignored me. “It’ll be a road trip to see our friend Jack! We could help you, Nash, if you’d stop being so stubborn.”
“You’re fixing my fence; that’s all the help I need. You’re bringing me food. You’re keeping a nice elderly lady company.”
“Uh-huh,” Shaye said.
“Who says I’m being stubborn? Family tree, the ranch—what difference does it make? It isn’t your business.”
It didn’t escape my notice that I had said the same thing to Melissa. But this was what happened, wasn’t it? The generations just kept on and on, figuring it all out from the start, even if it had been figured out a hundred times before—swapping roles, playing the younger, playing the older, over and again as the sun went up and the sun went down.
“Secrets make you want to find out secrets,” Shaye said.
Nash didn’t even bother to look at us. I waited for another weak justification, or an outright denial. But she gave us neither.
“Too bad,” she said.
I found four new boxes of nails in a paper bag in the storage shed with a receipt from early 2004, and with the energy and determination brought on by fat, sugar, and the lingering kind words from a man I barely knew, I worked outside on that endless fence. The year 2004 seemed like yesterday. With the sun beating on the back of my tank top, I thought about what Thomas had said about the woman at work. I thought about my own body, if I could ever let another man see it. I thought about all of the things I owned, too, the drawers and cupboards full of serving trays and tiny forks for appetizers and miniature plastic corns with spikes to stick in the ends of cobs. There were candleholders that looked like turkeys, and some long-dead relative’s embroidered pillowcases; there were yellowing paperback bestsellers and datebooks from 1998. I felt the weight of it all. I wondered how many garbage bags it would take to haul it all out to the curb.
I wiped sweat from my face with the bottom of my shirt. Things could end, whether your body was in any shape for it or not. Things could end, no matter how many platters you had.
Not long ago, Thomas and I were in bed together. The smooth white skin of his back was under my hands and he was breathing heavy in my ear, and it was in out, in out, and he was saying slightly pornographic things in my ear, and I’d never even told him after all these years that I didn’t like it when he said slightly pornographic things in my ear. I found it distracting and even disingenuous, to be honest. Can you imagine never admitting a truth like that to the person who saw you give birth and would likely see you die? But I hadn’t. More important, the TV was on. A Swiffer commercial was playing. A woman expounded the virtues of throwaway pads and a swivel arm. His breathing quickened while dog hair under a sofa was removed with ease. Daily life had left us vulnerable; that was clear. Daily life snatched things from a couple. Mattress sales stole intrigue; shirts ruined by that damn spot of bleach grabbed desire and wrung its scrawny neck.
The word husband, the word wife—on a summer day when a ring slipped on a finger, those words shimmered with promise. But they evolved; they turned and changed and turned again, adding facets with each rotation. Sometimes, those words were contentment itself; sometimes, frustration beyond imagining. You spoke them with sarcasm and wrote them on a valentine; you relaxed in those words and were chained to those words and cherished those words. Too, the words could become an item on a list, a thing that must be done, another burdensome object that needed dusting.
Yet that was the beauty of it, wasn’t it? The whole complicated mess of two lives, side by side. Love was elusive and stubborn. It could hang in there even when you hated his guts. Passion could sometimes feel like a false compliment, but there were the other nights Thomas and I had. The honest and connected ones, which were as close to forever as you got. Neither of us should forget those.
Of course, those thoughts and that heat made the fence a grand impossibility. There was just too much of it. My muscles hurt already, and I was getting a blister where palm met fingers. I really wasn’t that great with a hammer, in spite of what Kit Covey had said. Nash would die soon, and the place would be sold, and none of my efforts would matter anyway. But a person did what a person could do against all lost causes.
Shaye sat at the desk in her room. Her laptop was in front of her, and so was a bag of chips. The window was open. She’d found an old iron fan, which sat on the nightstand and blew her hair around. My own hair was still wet from the shower. I twisted it up and took the hair clip from my teeth and secured it there.
“Look at the cord on that. It’s going to catch this place on fire.”
She looked down at her computer. “What are you talking about? It’s brand new. Come here. Wait ’til you see.”
I didn’t bother to clarify; we could misunderstand each other and that was fine. We should all—me included—be as generous with our partners as we are with other people, I thought then.
I looked over Shaye’s shoulder. The email said: Eric—. Not Hi, Eric, or Dear Eric. This meant she was being stern. I saw the numbered lines implying conditions.
She minimized the letter, and it disappeared. “Not that.”
“You wiggled your way into Horndog,” I said.
“Ick, don’t say it like that. But you’d better believe it. Check it out.”
“Make it bigger.”
“Jack,” she said.
A black-and-white image zoomed large—a bucking horse barely out of the gate, all four feet off the ground, its mane straight up in the air. The rider on its back wore a plaid shirt and a tall hat, and he leaned forward from sudden motion, held on. A small crowd sat on the adjacent gate and watched. Jack Waters of Tamarosa, riding Little Britches, Washoe County Roundup, 1950.
“Wow, 1950? That’s awful close, Sham. Nash had good taste. Look at him.”
“ ‘My brother and I were bareback forever. My father had a stable. First time Pop rode a bull, there might have been a little brown bottle involved,’ Waters said. Waters, a dude wrangler at the ranch, competed this year in barebacks, saddle broncs, bulls, roping, and bulldogging. Can you believe it?”
“What the heck is bulldogging?”
“Hey, I’d bulldog that guy.”
“It’s got to be him. The Jack,” I said.
“I spent most of the morning looking up Jack Waters and Jack Waters, Nevada, whatever I could think of. He couldn’t have had a more common name, could he? Thanks for that, buddy.”
“Now I’m definitely leaning toward not crazy.”
“Me, too. Look, we’ve got 1950, 1951. Jack Waters. And some kind of goodbye happening through the buried book.”
“Did you show her this?”
“Why, so she could lie to my face? She’s been in her room all day.”
“All day?”
“Stop with the tone.” It’s what our mother used to say. “She lives alone, Cal. She’s by herself every day.”
“She might need lunch, at least. She’s sick, remember?”
“She could hibernate for the winter, with all those donuts she ate. Jesus, Cal, you’re bossy. I’m not the little kid you can boss around anymore! Check on her yourself. Stop being such a control freak.”
“Only other control freaks accuse you of being a control freak.”
Shaye was still hunched forward, looking at that picture, when I started down the hall. Nash’s door was closed. “Jack Waters was hot,” Shaye yelled.
Well, that should have brought Nash out. I tapped on the door with my fingertips. “Nash? You hungry? Can I get you something to eat?”
No answer.
“Nash?” I knocked harder.
Silence.
My chest constricted; my heart squeezed like a fist. I rattled the doorknob. Locked.
“Shaye!” I yelled.
I heard Shaye’s desk chair knock over. She was there, fast. “She’s not answering. Something’s wrong.”
Shaye’s eyes were wide. “Oh, God, Cal. This is it. This is why we came when we did.”
“This isn’t why we came when we did. You know why we came when we did.” We had come for our own selfish reasons. This wasn’t the time for ridiculous metaphysical justifications, much as I loved them myself.
I jiggled the knob some more and shoved. “I think there’s something against the door.”
“Oh, my God, Cal. Shit! Holy shit! She probably…”
A terrible thing happened then. I shouldn’t even admit it, but Shaye started to giggle nervously, and so did I. We were slightly hysterical. Her breath smelled like Fritos. Tex was underfoot, seeing what all the excitement was about. “Stop it! Jeez, Shaye. Help me push.”
“One, two, three…” We threw ourselves against that door. Nothing.
“It’s too big to be a body,” Shaye said.
This sobered us up. She was right. I thought so, anyway. I had no real idea what deadweight felt like. “Try again.” We shoved. There was a scratching sound, wood against wood, and the feeling of something giving. I peered through the small crack we’d made.
“Oh, my God!”
“What?”
“I cannot believe this!”
“What? Let me see.”
“She’s not in there.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.”
What followed was something too humiliating to recount. It involved Shaye and me running out of the house and trying to climb up into the open window as Tex barked his head off inside. There were a couple of crates nearby, and Shaye had the bright idea to make a platform, and then I attempted that boosting maneuver with the fingers of both hands entwined—nothing I could maintain once I held Shaye’s weight. She stopped being pissed sometime after we got up off the ground and then we fetched a spiderweb-laden ladder we found in the barn. I got stuck halfway in the window with my butt hanging out, and Shaye struggled to push me the rest of the way. There was some shrieking involved and some pain. We were exhausted and our hair askew by the time we both flopped into Nash’s room.
“We’ve got to find that letter,” Shaye said. She’d turned into Nancy Drew all of a sudden.
“I doubt she’s taken off to meet him on their anniversary at the Empire State Building, Shaye. Oh, man, look at this.” I had a red railroad-track scrape across my stomach.
“Stop being a baby and help me.”
It didn’t even hit us at first. A full minute went by before Shaye said, “Oh, hell,” and the cleanliness of the room struck us both. There must have been a lot more than a box of photos shoved down into those trash cans. Nash’s room was tidy, and all that was left of the mess were a few innocent stacks of books.
“When did she do this?” Shaye asked.
“When you ignored her all day, thinking she was lying around sick in bed.”
We ransacked the place anyway, a pair of inept burglars. “Nothing,” I said. “No note, no letter, no anything.” Shaye stuck her hand under Nash’s mattress and felt around. I was on my knees, feeling up her desk, hoping for a secret drawer, when I saw something.
“Wait. Come here.”
Shaye knelt beside me. The photo was taped to the underside of the desktop. We craned to look. It was a black-and-white movie still, an image of a woman and a man at the front desk of a hotel, a bellman standing nearby. I plucked the edge of the tape with my finger to see if anything was written on the back. No. I pressed the tape in place again.
“Neither of those guys looks anything like Jack,” Shaye said. “This blows our whole story to hell.”
We sat on the floor, defeated. “Maybe Harris knew what he was talking about. We’re trying too hard to make sense out of…pieces. Pieces of senility.”
Shaye had a twig in her hair, and her chin sported a bar-code scratch. “I hate to admit it. I think you’re right. She’s lost it. She could be anywhere.”
We shoved the dresser away from the door. It took both of us to budge it; how Nash got it there, I’ll never know. We checked the trash cans and found them empty, save for a pile of ashes. She’d burned the lot of it, right under our noses. We called Harris, who wasn’t answering his phone. We argued over whether to call our mother.
“What good would that do?” I said. “She’s in California. She’s terrible in a crisis. I don’t want to take care of her while I take care of this.”
“You’re being mean. We should at least let her know what’s going on.”
“Fine,” I said, which conveniently rehashed every argument we’d ever had on the subject without saying more.
Shaye took off to search the grounds for Nash. The minute she got back, I’d call the police. I stayed by the phone, because someone always stays by the phone in the movies. I nervous-ate my way through the rest of the bag of chips. I thought about fleeing all our family dysfunction and taking the next flight out to Aruba. Being kidnapped by Mexican drug lords sounded kind of nice. Tex had settled into his hairy dog bed, apparently trusting there’d be a good outcome.
I couldn’t just wait there. Of course, it’s when you stop waiting for the phone to ring that it always rings. I was down the porch steps when I heard it inside. I practically broke my neck trying to get to it in time. I lunged for the receiver and panted my hello.
“Is this Nash McBride’s niece?”
“Yes.”
Here it was. The phone call. She’d been found on the freeway, maybe. Hit by a semitruck, or who knows what else. My stomach felt sick with dread and with that deep sense of failure that constantly nips at the heels of responsible people.
“My name is Deke Donaldson, and I’m with J. J.’s Autos?”
“J. J.’s Autos?”
“Your aunt is here.”
“Thank God! Is she all right?”
“She’s just fine.”
“Did you find her wandering nearby? Oh, I’m so glad she’s safe, I cannot tell you.”
“Well, she was wandering in the showroom for quite some time. She liked the Benz with the heated and cooled front seats and the adjustable air bladders for customized back support, but she settled for the Ford Fusion Plus Hybrid with the sunroof.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your aunt just bought a car. Problem is, she has no way to get it home.”
“What? Is she there? Put her on the phone!”
“She’s waving her hand at me. Wait. No…She says she’s too busy. She says she can’t talk right now. Perhaps you can come and get her?”
He sounded a little desperate.
“We’ll be right there.”
The poor man actually breathed a sigh of relief.
I called Shaye. “Found her,” I said.
“Oh, thank God!” Her voice wobbled, near tears. “Is she okay?”
“She bought a car.”
“She bought a car? Are you kidding me? She went to buy a car without telling us? How’d she get there? Do you know where I am right now? I just left the dude wrangler’s cabin! There was a squirrel corpse in there! The whole bony skeleton was laid out like it was freaking Halloween!”
“Get a move on,” I said.
“You cleaned out your whole room. You burned stuff. What’s that about?”
“I don’t keep what I no longer need.”
“Well, if you wanted to go into town, you should’ve just asked. You didn’t have to sneak out.”
“I can’t find how to put this seat back,” Nash said. She hunted around down by her feet, near the brand-new floor mats.
“Why did you buy a car? We told you. If you want to go somewhere, even if you want to see Jack again, we could just take you!”
“Jack, nothing. I don’t care about Jack. Listen to these speakers,” she said. She turned the dial, blasting some hip-hop song from the CD still in the player of the showroom model.
“How did you expect to get this home when you don’t drive?”
“I thought that nice boy might give me a little refresher. I used to drive, but it was a long, long time ago.”
“Well, now we’re going to have to go back again to get my car. And Shaye may never forgive you. Poor thing. Look at her.”
That tractor could go maybe fifteen miles an hour. Shaye looked miserable as she puttered along, pulled as far to the side of the road as possible.
I rolled down my window. “How you doing?”
“You don’t have to ask me every five minutes!” Shaye shouted. “I told you, go on ahead!”
It was wrong, I knew it, and I would have to pay for it, but I couldn’t resist. “How’re the crops looking?”
“Shut up, Cal. I mean it. Shut the hell up.”
“Look on the bright side. Your magnetic personality did bring you a new hobby.”
She shook her head, glared at me. “Damn you!” she yelled from the high black tractor seat. Still, there was the tiniest lift at the corner of her mouth, the barest hint of a smile. It was a good one, and she knew it.
“Wait ’til you see the voice-activated communications system,” Nash said.