Ed Blake and I were lying in bed in my room at the El Rancho Hotel when he volunteered the information that Santane had been living for many years in Albuquerque, only an hour and a half from the Nogalu reservation.
I sat straight up. “Jesus, Blake, why didn’t you tell me this before? How can I ever start trusting you?”
He turned on his side unperturbed, perhaps because of the sex. “You know I would have told you before if I could.” He studied me for several seconds before saying, “When the children first went missing, the FBI tried to convince Santane to come to the reservation to help Ruby, both to comfort her and to see if she could get her to remember more. Santane refused. It was hard to make sense of her reaction.”
The next evening, when I appeared without notice outside Santane’s condominium door, standing in her bland hallway, she was unhappy to see me. “I cannot help Ruby,” she said, before I could even speak. Her English remained beautifully modulated, though her British accent had lessened. Behind her I could see her into living room, sparsely furnished and serene.
I didn’t bother with preliminaries either. “Why didn’t you come to Ruby? She’s your daughter. Why didn’t you come when she first said her children had been kidnapped?”
She turned wordlessly, inviting me inside.
“Ruby has a head injury,” I said to her retreating back, as graceful and narrow as I remembered it. “She needs you. You’re her mother. There may be a trial.”
She said, without looking at me, “She murdered her children.” She pronounced the word oddly, like murther.
“But how do you know that’s what really happened?”
Santane turned to face me. She looked much the same as she had two decades ago, when I’d visited her and Royce and the infant Ruby at their cabin in Mendocino, but there was something barren in her composure now. “Either Ruby did it or she let it happen.”
“Who tied her up? Who hit her in the head?”
“Perhaps she did those things to herself.”
“You look so much the same,” I said, although every feature of her face had sharpened, deepened, as if it were not age that would destroy her but too much definition.
“I am not the same, and it was better that your brother left us. He was a very unhappy man.” This seemed an overly generous assessment of someone who had once broken her arm.
“My brother may have turned into a monster,” I said, “but he was not always so.”
“No, not always.”
We stood there considering each other. I wondered how she saw me, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, my fishing overshirt hanging unbuttoned, in sandals because of the heat. “Stay here,” she said. “I will make tea.”
Soon we were sitting in her living room drinking tea from plain white mugs with Tetley teabags. The peaceful environment, I realized, was an illusion, the result of stringency, not of ease. There were no extraneous objects, no magazines or papers, no television, and her decorations contained no human images. Her environment felt like a large, well-done hotel room. “You don’t have any pictures?”
“I have pictures.”
“Santane, did you know Ruby’s children?”
“Their fingerprints are on the chair you’re sitting in.”
My hands jumped up from the arms of the black enameled chair, a lovely replica that looked like a prop for a noir movie.
Her face still had that carved quality. “I can detect their scents in this room. For many years I thought that working with so many hair products would make me less susceptible to odors, but it has not.”
Gingerly, I lowered my arms. “I heard you own your own shop. That you’re married and successful now.”
“The Vietnamese community has been kind to me.”
I wanted to say something else, but instead I said, “What did they smell like?”
She had composed this answer: “Lucia smelled like a small white flower in Vietnam. Merry is the closest translation. Americans would find it odorless. And River smelled like running water. But sometimes he smelled like a puppy. A small, clean puppy.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
Something flickered in her eyes. “Don’t say such stupid things.”
I looked down at my hands. “I’ll try to remember that.”
She said, “Your hands are much like Ruby’s.”
I kept my head down.
“Royce is dead, Ellen,” she said.
I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “I don’t believe that anymore, and my guess is you don’t either.”
“Royce is dead, and River and Lucia are dead, and soon Ruby will be dead too. We must let them go.”
I studied her face. “How can you even talk like that?”
She breathed deeply, and for a second I felt her breath inside my chest, a white-hot locus of pain.
“What do you mean, Ruby will be dead too? They won’t execute her.”
“You don’t know Ruby,” she said.
“I want to help her if I can.”
“How American of you. Does Ruby want your help?”
“I’m not sure.”
She sighed again, her irritation now visible. “How is she handling herself?”
“She’s on suicide watch, and they won’t even let me to talk to her. They’re keeping her in a paper dress in a single cell with only a mattress and paper sheets. Video cameras monitor her all the time.”
Something unreadable crossed her face again.
“Santane, if Ruby is responsible for what happened to her children, then why didn’t she take her own life as well?”
“Because suicide is a sin.”
“And murder is not?”
“Ruby wanted to become a Catholic, and in Catholicism, one cannot be forgiven for suicide, because there is no opportunity to repent.”
“That sounds so crazy.” I placed the mug outside its saucer onto the enameled coffee table, wishing its finish would blister. “None of you are going to tell me what’s going on, are you?”
“Ellen, nothing is going on, in the sense that you mean.” Then, perhaps to distract me, she said, “All right, I will visit Ruby. But I hope you will begin to let go of my daughter and the rest of us too. Royce’s family has only been a source of danger, and of much pain.”
“I don’t think of myself as Royce’s family anymore. Royce became a horrible person, and his beliefs and actions were ghastly.”
“But you’re his sister.”
“And she’s his daughter.”
A strobe of anguish crossed her face. “Don’t you think we know that?”
Behind her, the front door opened and a man appeared in the frame. He paused and spoke sternly to her in Vietnamese. He was smaller than Santane and looked considerably older.
She answered him at some length, then turned to me and said, “My husband, Giang, is home.”
He spoke again, not acknowledging me.
“You must go,” she said.
He held the door open, his expression averted. I assumed he was angry about my presence.
“Thank you for talking with me,” I said as Santane escorted me to the door. “Will you ask Ruby to speak with me too?”
“I have no power over Ruby’s choices.”
Her husband said something harsh, and for the first time Santane looked at me as if I were not an enemy. “My husband says you should stay away from us. And if you cannot do that, please have the good sense to be afraid.”