Owen's Daughter (26 page)

He’d been using her computer and had looked at her browser history. He left a tab open, a medical site that discussed treatment options for people with MS, and when she saw what he’d found, she knew there was nothing to do but talk about it.

At first, he’d refused to look at her. Then he got angry. “Why in the hell did you not tell me about this?” he said. “How long have you known?”

“I was diagnosed the day before you called to tell me you were coming home,” she said. “I’ve barely had time to process it myself.”

“That’s wrong. Normal people would call their kids. Immediately.”

She wished she had the nerve to say,
Just as normal kids undergoing surgery for a cochlear implant would call their moms
. “Peter, don’t freak out,” she beseeched him instead. “I can’t bear it just now. Dr. Silverhorse said I’m in the earliest stages. Sometimes my feet get pins and needles, and occasionally I trip. I have to make sure I follow the diet and get enough rest. And avoid stress,” she added, hoping that was a big enough hint to get him to calm down.

“Mom,” he told her, “call Dad.”

“Whatever for?”

“Because he lives in California, and California has the best doctors. You’ll never find that in this place,” he said, sweeping his arm as if Santa Fe were as small as her house.

“I like my doctor,” Margaret replied. “He said there’s nothing else to do for now. At some point I’ll probably try some medicines, and I’ve already made an appointment for physical therapy. One thing I know for sure, in the future I will need physical help on a regular basis. A cleaning person, maybe even a gardener.”

“I can do that stuff for you.”

Maybe, she thought. “I can’t imagine that day will come anytime soon. But in the meantime, I’ve decided to quit driving. You can take my car. In fact, it might make sense, after the divorce, of course, to transfer it to your name.”

His eyes filled with tears. “Mom?”

She patted his hand. “Come on now, Peter. It’s not that bad, it’s just something we need to plan for eventually. Now go ride your horse, and when you get back, change into clothes you don’t care about so we can get the guesthouse clean and ready for you.”

Suddenly the emotion caught up with her, and she felt wrung out. “I need to lie down for a half hour.”

“That’s about how much time it will take me to run a few errands,” he said, and left in a massive hurry, taking his cup of coffee with him.

As soon as he went out the front door, Echo settled down across the doorway to the guest room/studio. “Fickle,” Margaret told the dog, who wagged her tail and would wait there all day for him to come back. Why should her son be any different at twenty-five from how he was at fifteen? Well, there were lots of good reasons, but Peter had never been the kind of son she could chart by consulting Dr. Spock. She woke up forty minutes later, surprised to discover that she’d slept. Maybe she needed to nap every day. But Peter wasn’t there when she woke up, and he still hadn’t returned.

Margaret pushed aside a couple of cardboard boxes. It was after eleven, and she’d skipped breakfast. Though her stomach growled, she didn’t go inside to make lunch because surely Peter would be back any moment. She called his cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail. Besides the wine issue, he had forgotten to feed Echo this morning, which was a rather inauspicious beginning to their agreement that he’d pitch in around the house. She sighed, and then she opened another box, sneezing at the dust. When Peter secured a job, should she make him pay rent? How much? Was it enabling if she didn’t? The casita seemed smaller than she remembered. But renting was a huge market in this part of Santa Fe.

Why hadn’t she rented it before now? Laziness? Or was she afraid she’d attract a psycho tenant? Or had she subconsciously kept it vacant for when her sister got tired of London? Nori did everything gung ho until the day she was utterly over it. Margaret could have turned the casita into her painting studio, but now that Peter was here, he’d be better off out here in the guesthouse, coming and going as he pleased, than he would in the main house with her. Should she make dinner for two every night? What if he brought a girl home to spend the night? Was she feeling huffy about the idea of him staying because she was settled into her own routine? Was that selfish, or just growing older?

Motherhood had never been easy. Motherhood never ended. One day a year celebrating mothers wasn’t enough. It should be the other way around, one day we
don’t
celebrate, 364 days we do.

When Peter contracted meningitis, she was sure she was going to lose him. He’d lain there, comatose for weeks, and the doctors weren’t optimistic. She’d read to him, played music—which she later knew hadn’t reached him because he’d already lost his hearing. Some days she just sat there staring at him, afraid if she shut her eyes, he’d stop breathing. Nothing changed until the day she sneaked Echo I, Peter’s dog, into the room and shut the door behind her. The dog was a basket case at seeing her human. She had jumped on the bed and straddled Peter, licking his face over and over. Later that day, he’d moved his hand, and his eyelids had fluttered open. He was able to track the doctor’s penlight for a full four minutes. That was when he started his journey back to the living. Margaret had made a promise to herself: She would never forget how precious Peter was, even when he was acting out or yelling at her. Now those particular chickens had come home to roost.

She opened another box filled with coffee table art books. She wasn’t up to picking through them just now, so she pushed it aside and wiped her hands on her blue jeans. Behind the box, leaning on its side against the wall, was Aunt Ellie’s aluminum walker. It was a short-lived tool, but seeing it made Margaret’s throat close up. Should she give it away or put it aside for herself? How long would it be before she needed it?

She opened a third box. Oh, for crying out loud, it was filled with adult diapers. Surely they could be of use to someone besides her. She’d take them to the Rosemont on Galisteo, a place she wasn’t ready for and hoped she never would be. She lugged the box down the steps to the portal and set it away from the fence so Peter wouldn’t smash the gate into it when he opened it.

Tears ran down Margaret’s cheeks and she wanted to scream. Maybe age fifty was supposed to make you feel mortal. A year ago, she might have wished time would pass more quickly. Now she wanted it to slow the heck down, and for everything to stay the same, so she could catch her breath. She reminded herself that she’d had fifty good years before MS, and that was a blessing. She tried to maintain “a cheerful heart,” as Glory would say. Glory should know, with all she’d been through: losing her first husband so early, adopting those girls, the unexpected babies, health issues of her own. Glory’s husband, Joe, was in pain 24/7 from the shooting that had injured him and killed his best friend. Yet she never saw him without a smile on his face. Whenever she asked him how he was doing, his answer was, “Margaret, I’m so blessed I can’t believe it.”

Aloud, Margaret said, “In case anyone’s listening, I’m grateful Peter is here. I’m thrilled he can hear again. I hope he gets the job at his old school and finds happiness.” Then she felt silly. But while her own dreams and goals might be curtailed by the MS, her dreams for Peter would not.

Margaret ran her thumbnail down the brittle tape of box four. The gummy adhesive had dried out. What was once flexible tape had turned to brittle flakes sharp enough to cut, and naturally, she poked one of the shards below her thumbnail. Surprise, the box held more art books! In the middle of them, however, was a small gift edition of
The Virginian
by Owen Wister. Strange, because Ellie never read anything but British mysteries. Margaret tucked the small book into her jacket pocket. Underneath, wrapped in tissue paper and marked “keep,” there were so many letters she couldn’t count them. The stamps went from a penny postcard up to ten cents to forty-five cents. Some of the envelopes were that old airmail blue, the tissue-thin fold-and-seal kind. Some were plain envelopes, yellowed at the edges. She tucked the letters into her canvas shopping bag from Trader Joe’s. She’d look them over later. It seemed crass, but her first idea was that she could sell them on eBay. Artists were always looking for old-timey cursive writing for projects. Weird, how letters had become an artifact. Glory said they didn’t even teach cursive writing in school anymore.

Next she found Aunt Ellie’s old English riding boots, which evoked a memory of her aunt on a horse, jumping fences with a smile on her face. The boots were thick with dust and needed a good saddle soaping, but they were gorgeous, and Margaret and her aunt wore the same size. A mouse or two had gotten to them, she discovered when she turned the left boot upside down and out fell the telltale dryer lint and dried grass that made up a nest.

It started to rain, and Margaret sat and watched it hit the windows, thinking of her aunt working in the garden, a grin on her face, chattering to her plants, Nash the cat rubbing up against her. Why couldn’t she have lived her last years in peace, without the Alzheimer’s? It didn’t seem fair at all that the disease had robbed her of everything. Maybe a person would be better off dying in her sleep. Should Margaret get a DNR order on herself? How did those things work, exactly? How did a person know when to let go?

The rain that had started five minutes ago stopped. There was no evidence of wind, but the single-pane window in the casita began rattling. “Go towards the light, Dolores,” Margaret muttered. It struck her—what would Peter make of the resident ghost? She’d been remarkably quiet for a couple of days, no doubt bothering Glory and Joe. But when she saw an opportunity to “noodge,” as Glory’s mother termed it, she took it. What did it mean? That Margaret should spend ten thousand dollars on replacing windows? Was Margaret messing about in Dolores’s territory? Were there more artifacts to uncover, like the
retablo
devotional painting Glory and Joe had unearthed when they built their addition?

Minutes ticked by, and Margaret kept at it, removing the few things she wanted to keep. In addition to the book and letters she’d found, there was a perfect Lalique vase shaped like a trumpet flower and some turquoise jewelry marked “mine #8.” It was “dead pawn,” which meant the pieces had been pawned but never redeemed. The turquoise was that stunning sky blue you found in really old pieces. In a shiny black box with French words written on it—
pour la femme qui sait ce que les hommes apprécient
—she found a pair of unworn seamed black stockings, so old that they were popular again. By lunchtime, Echo had given up her watch for Peter and come out to the casita. She nudged Margaret in the knee, which meant
Walk me
.

“All right,” Margaret said. She gathered up the letters, the boots, and a book on Chagall. She took care going up the back steps, and once indoors, she washed her hands and face, taped a Band-Aid over the paper cut she’d forgotten about, and strapped on Echo’s harness. The dog was in the throes of what Peter referred to as “chopper tail,” wagging so hard that it kind of broke Margaret’s heart. By now Echo probably thought seeing Peter was a dream. It was a good time to walk—the lunch hour for most people. After two in the afternoon, the traffic would pick up, and as people left work for the day, it would only get worse.

“Just a short one today,” she warned Echo as she opened the front door. Before they could take a single step, she saw her Land Cruiser pulling into the carport. The driver’s-side door opened and Peter emerged. Then came an old black truck with one of those split-screen windshields from the 1930s or 1940s—very Santa Fe. A pretty blond girl Margaret didn’t recognize got out, and it wasn’t until the passenger-side door of the truck opened that she realized this was no neighborhood entrepreneur selling firewood or asking for work. Either she was hallucinating or the man walking toward her carrying an armful of peach-colored roses was Owen Garrett. Her hand went instinctively to her pocket, touching the book. Echo jerked the lead from her hand, rushing toward Peter, and Margaret tried to stabilize herself by placing her right foot forward, forgetting the loose brick on the middle step. She fell, breaking the fall with her left hand.

The next thing she knew, three human faces and one dog’s peered in closely. Too closely: It was making her claustrophobic.

“Mom, are you okay?” Peter babbled. “Should I call an ambulance?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she responded. “I’m perfectly fine. Physically. Though I’m worried I’m hallucinating.” She looked directly at Owen. “Where did you come from?”

“Help her up,” Owen said in a voice she’d recognize anywhere, taking hold of her right hand. “Better get some ice on that wrist.”

Margaret stared in wonder, her lips parted a little. The blond girl brought her a small plastic bag filled with ice for her arm, but honestly, Margaret felt no pain as she sat on the ground. She had heard Owen’s voice, so it wasn’t a vision—it was real. She focused on him as he smiled down at her, his craggy face just as she’d known it ten years ago, although there was an addition to his scar in the form of a black eye. She reached out to touch it but was distracted by the scent of the roses in his arms, which was overwhelming and dreamlike—she couldn’t take in air quickly enough.

“Help me inside,” she told Owen.

While she leaned on him, he led her to the old Rawnsley sofa she’d found in a consignment shop and reupholstered herself in a San Miguel Pendleton blanket. She’d lugged it from Blue Dog to Eldorado, and now to Santa Fe proper. Ten years ago, she and Owen had sat on this very piece of furniture, talking and kissing, and now Margaret had to pat herself to make sure she was in one piece, that all this was real.