FORTY-EIGHT

They sat, as they had so many times before, in the shade house, their chairs pulled close to the outdoor fireplace, trying to catch the bits of warmth thrown off by the leaping flames.

Lola had followed Edgar back to Gaitero in her rental car. She’d wanted to return immediately to Montana, but Margaret had demanded she bring home a firsthand report on Juliana. Lola had hoped the six-hour drive from Tucson might calm her. Instead, she gave thanks for the car’s solitude as she moaned in rage and pain at the sight of the places where she’d spent her last days with Charlie.

In the shade house, she huddled in a down vest. It would have made more sense to visit indoors, but the house felt too personal, too full of memories. There, Lola had fought with Charlie, made up with him, last slept in his arms. And there Edgar had spent all the years of his marriage with Naomi. He lifted his chin toward a bedroll to one side of the fireplace. “Can’t sleep back in the house even yet,” he said. “I go in, make my meals, shower, and get the hell out of it. Can’t wait until somebody takes the damn place off my hands.”

A For Sale sign, its metallic surface pitted by wind-driven grit, had greeted Lola at the end of the driveway. She wondered again, as she had the first time she’d seen it, how many people on the reservation could afford such a home. Edgar might end up sleeping on the ground all winter long. At least, she thought, the tarantulas would be deep in their hidey-holes throughout the colder months.

A shadow bisected the window’s square of golden light. Betty Begay, moving about the kitchen, cleaning up after a simple dinner of mutton stew. She’d moved in after the bombing to help Edgar with Juliana. And her daughter, Edgar told Lola, had taken leave from her job in Salt Lake to join the cobbled-together household. “It was too much for Betty,” he said. “She still has the sheep, after all. Her daughter—Loretta’s her name—goes up and looks after them during the day, then comes down here in the afternoon when Juliana gets home from school. She stays up there some nights, though. That’s where she is now.”

“How is Juliana?” Lola chided herself for the stupidity of the question. How could she possibly be, her mother dead, her father a shell, her friend and protector Thomas in prison? The girl had emerged from the house and given Lola a polite bedtime hug before retreating without ever making eye contact. Lola noticed the key chain from Thomas’s bookbag dangling from her pocket.

“That key chain is with her twenty-four/seven,” Edgar said. “She’s like a baby with a blanket. She doesn’t know it, but Betty’s made some duplicates in case this one—God forbid—gets lost. Betty’s even scuffed them up so they don’t look new. Think about it. Juliana was worried about Thomas from the beginning. She feels guilty, even though there’s no way a nine-year-old could have foreseen how this would go. How’s Margaret?”

Shattered, Lola thought. Just as she herself was. But at least she and Margaret weren’t dealing both with loss and with the knowledge that the person they’d loved had destroyed so many other lives—not accidentally, like Thomas did, but with months of cold, deliberate planning. Lola tried, as she had so many times before, to imagine Naomi’s thought process. Couldn’t.

“Well?”

Lola hadn’t considered that Edgar’s question was anything more than rote. She dredged around for an answer. “She doesn’t talk about it. Ever.”

“Counseling?”

“You’re kidding, right?” They shared a grimace of acknowledgment at the lack of luxuries like grief counselors in the vast rural stretches of western Indian reservations.

“Seriously,” he persisted. “Great Falls isn’t that far away. There’s got to be somebody there. Under the circumstances, it’s worth the drive.”

“Seriously, we tried. It didn’t take.”

The counselor had admitted defeat after the insurance-allotted six sessions with Margaret, who responded to each question, each proffered coloring book or toy, with silence and a blank stare, showing enthusiasm only when the clock ticked past the final minute of the prescribed fifty, at which point she hurtled from her chair toward the door, flinging a “bye” over her shoulder.

“Bye,” the counselor told Lola. “That’s all she’s ever said to me.” She counted off on her fingers. “Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. I hate to think what each of those words cost. What about you?” she’d asked. “How’s it going with your own counseling?”

Lola lifted her hand. “Bye,” she said.

She herself had endured only a single session, one that she’d entered braced for an unbearable conversation about Charlie, and fled when the counselor took the discussion well beyond that. “You’re the walking definition of PTSD,” he’d said after fifteen minutes of questions. “Your husband’s death, your best friend’s death, your own history for putting yourself in danger, your time in war zones … ”

“They didn’t die.” Lola was on her feet, already edging toward the door.

“Excuse me?” The counselor rearranged his face, no doubt adjusting to the fact that his client appeared delusional as well as traumatized.

“They were murdered. And I don’t ‘put myself’ in danger. I do stories. Sometimes they’re in bad places. It’s part of the job. Would you accuse a cop of putting himself in danger? A soldier? A high-rise window washer?”

“I didn’t accuse—”

“Like hell you didn’t.” But she was already out the door. Maybe he heard “condescending prick” as she left. She didn’t really care.

She threw the topic back at Edgar now. “You? There’s got to be somebody in Phoenix.”

He ran a hand through his pompadour. He’d let it go too long without a trim and it leaned this way and that in unruly bunches, making him look diminished, vulnerable.

“What’s the point?” He turned his attention to the fire. Long pieces of silvery, twisted juniper lay near the fireplace, beside a thicker round with a hatchet sunk in it. Edgar extracted the hatchet, picked up a piece of juniper, lay it atop the round, and hacked it into manageable lengths, throwing a few on the fire. The heat released the wood’s fragrance, one that Lola would forever associate with this part of the world, the same way the scent of sagebrush meant Montana. Edgar, too, seemed to be thinking of home.

“I thought it would be warmer here in the winter. It was one of the ways I convinced myself to move down here. And it is warmer, temperature-wise. It just doesn’t feel that way. Something about all this naked rock. Back home, the snow covered up all the bareness. Made it easier, somehow.”

Lola blew on her fingers and held them toward the fire. “Why’d you come here? I mean, beyond Juliana. You could have been like every other couple who shared custody. You didn’t have to marry her.” Edgar could have returned to his home reservation. And even though he and Naomi had worked out their differences, they hadn’t wed until well after Juliana’s birth, much like Lola and Charlie themselves. If she hadn’t had Margaret, Lola thought—as she had every day, every hour since the explosion—there’d have been no reason to marry Charlie, and there’d be none of the agony that had dug its claws into her soul in the instant of his death and refused to release her.

“I married that woman because I loved her. I couldn’t imagine life without her. Why’d you stay in Montana? The way Charlie tells it, you could have gone anywhere.”

Margaret, Lola wanted to say. But Margaret’s existence had been well in the future when, thanks to Charlie’s persistence, she’d opted for life as a small-town newspaper reporter rather than stick with the Baltimore paper.

“I loved him. But I didn’t love him enough,” she said. “Look how things worked out here. When the bombings started ramping up, he had reservations about staying. But I wanted to know what was going on. I should have listened to him. Somebody else would have figured it out.”

Edgar stabbed at the fire with another stick. Sparks rose up like stars. Some landed on Lola’s jeans. She brushed at them, welcoming their pinprick stings.

Edgar dropped the stick with a clatter. “Or maybe even more people would have died. I loved Naomi enough not to say anything, and I lost her anyway.”

The fire popped. Another starburst arose, shooting larger embers their way. One landed on Lola’s knee, burning fast through fabric to bare flesh. She watched it wink out and die.

“Hey, Lola, hey! Careful!” Edgar knocked the bit of charcoal away. “You’re going to want to clean that, put some salve in it. I’ll ask Betty for some.” He started to rise from his chair.

Lola put up her hand. “Wait. What did you say?”

His forehead creased. “That you’ll need some salve.”

“Before that.” Lola could barely hear her own words over the triphammer thud in her chest. “About Naomi. You loved her enough not to say anything.”

Edgar sank back into his seat and looked everywhere but at Lola.

“You knew,” she said.

“I had an idea. She and Thomas had their heads together a lot. I thought maybe they were having an affair. And for all I know, they were. She’s capable of that, especially if it meant she could get him to do whatever she wanted. Just like she got me to work for the coal company. Because it served her purposes.”

Lola pulled the edges of blackened fabric away from the burn. A blister bubbled. “If you’d told someone. Anyone. Even if you didn’t know for sure. You could have told Charlie. You could have told me.” And Charlie would still be alive. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words aloud. Naomi would still be alive, too. But she didn’t give a damn about Naomi, beyond her fervent wish that the woman lay in an uneasy grave.

“From everything Charlie had told me about you, if I’d said something, you’d just have starting digging even harder. And even without saying anything, I was afraid she’d go after you. That day Kerns’s place blew up? You’d left the house by yourself. And you’d been talking with Kerns. I was so worried that you’d made some arrangement to interview him at his house.”

Lola remembered his look when she’d returned that day. So he’d been relieved. “That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Never mind.”

“I tried to save you. All of you. I was afraid something bad would happen—I never imagined it would be this bad—if you got mixed up in things. I tried to get you to leave.”

“You mean—?” Lola thought of the cruel remarks about her marrying an Indian man, the insinuation that she’d never really be part of the family. The surliness, the glares.

He nodded. “Sorry.”

“Sorry my ass. At least Thomas owned it.” And would spend years of his life in prison. “You’re still walking around free. You probably could have been prosecuted as an accessory.”

“Free.” His tone invested the word with the certainty that he felt anything but. “There was Juliana to think of. The last thing she needed was a dead mother and a father in prison. Besides, prison or not, I’m trapped here.”

“You could bring Juliana to Montana,” Lola said. “She’s half Blackfeet, after all. Or close enough.”

“Not nearly close enough.”

Lola remembered that like so many Indian people, Charlie and Edgar had enough white ancestors to dilute the crucial blood quantum that dictated tribal enrollment. They qualified, as had their children—just—but Juliana was more Navajo than anything, and besides, except for the few short months the girl had spent with Charlie as a toddler, she’d lived her whole life on the Navajo Nation. “I can’t disrupt her life any more than it already has been,” Edgar said.

An immense weariness settled upon Lola, pressing her back into the chair, defeating her impulse to scream at him, to point out the obvious—that he was still sleeping in his own bed, or at least a bedroll on his own property, and still able to go where he wanted, spew any old kind of bullshit that came into his mind, while still collecting his hefty paycheck.

Against all odds, the mine had revived. China had been the unlikely savior, its burgeoning middle class creating a voracious demand for coal. Conrad Coal would have to dig deeper for the last of the reserves beneath the mesa, but the astronomical prices being paid by the Chinese would make the cost worthwhile. The reservation’s residents would keep their jobs. The mine would continue to suck the land dry, spew choking particulates into the air. Naomi’s work—and Charlie’s death, along with those of the elder and the truck driver—had been for naught.

Lola said as much.

“He saved me.” Edgar’s words came in a whisper. “You too.”

Lola’s throat loosened. Her words shot free. “Wish he hadn’t. In both cases.”

“But Juliana. Margaret.”

There it was. Lola went to bed each night wishing she’d somehow die in her sleep, woke every morning pissed off that she hadn’t. And every morning, after that first split-second of grief and resentment, she remembered Margaret. So she couldn’t die. Couldn’t kill herself, although she’d catalogued all the various opportunities lying so temptingly around the house—knives, ropes, Charlie’s backup gun, untouched in its usual spot atop the refrigerator.

She thought of the house, the weathered boards and uneven front porch that belied the solidity of its structure, its imperviousness to the worst weather that Montana could throw at it. Charlie had insulated its walls and attic to bursting, had installed double-paned windows, had put his time and money into how things worked rather than how they looked. Same with the outbuildings and fences. There wasn’t much he could do with the scrubby acres that surrounded it, but they were no better or worse than the rest of the nearby land. People ran cattle and the occasional band of sheep, and the money Charlie made from leasing his land to surrounding ranches supplemented his sheriff’s salary, as it now would bolster Lola’s considerably more slender earnings from the Daily Express.

The place was hers now—he’d taken care of that, writing a will the day after they’d married—and the fact that it was off the reservation kept it free of tribal entanglements. Margaret would continue to get the benefits due her as an enrolled member of the tribe. Charlie was, in his way, still taking care of them. He’d accounted for everything, Lola thought, except for the anguish that had left her this strange husk of herself.

“You’re right,” she said now to Edgar. “You stay here and take care of yourself. It’s what you do best.”

Edgar sucked in a breath. A rectangle of light fell across him, crushing whatever he was about to say. Juliana stood in the open door and gave Lola an excuse to turn her back on Edgar.

“I have something for Margaret.” The girl held out her hand.

Lola cupped a palm beneath it. The key chain dropped into it, the two-inch square of wool soft and warm against her skin.

“But, Juliana.” Wasn’t giving away your most precious possessions some sort of danger sign? Lola might have disapproved of psychiatry when applied to herself, but she knew enough to be worried about Juliana.

“She needs it.” The girl didn’t smile, not exactly, but her expression softened. “Besides, I know that Shimá has made more for me.”

Lola folded her hand around it and said, as much to herself as to Juliana and Edgar, “I need to get home and take care of my daughter.”

And of Bub and Spot and even the chickens, a web of mandatory nurturing both burden and salvation.

Charlie may have met his death in Arizona, but he was buried in Montana within sight of Ninahstako, his beloved Chief Mountain, as requested, and there his spirit would surround her. She got in the car and pointed it north, sending her own battered spirit toward his.

the end