Red Lightning (11 page)

I was walking along, looking for rattlesnakes, for cactus, for dangers, when I came across something else.

That was the last moment.

Last moment.

The last moment of the Tess I knew, the last moment of my old self.

There, at my feet, was a human skull. Long black hair and a red barrette. I peered closer.
What the fuck?
I thought.
Wait, what?

I peered for a long time at the gold cap on one of her teeth. Fascia holding her ribcage together. A simple fact: a dead woman, not newly dead, but not there long, either, not yet scattered by bobcats or coyotes.

Oh, Amber, down low, by the pelvis, was an unborn infant. It was curled up, just like in the pictures. It had a huge skull and tiny little fingers and leg bones. Knees bent. Hands curled in. Just like you'd expect. Except the skull was bigger than you'd think, the rest of the bones smaller. A baby ready to be born. A baby never to be born.

It stays on in the mind, you see.

*

I curl up in a fetal position in my sleeping bag, my cocoon, and hold
my knees.
No no no don't ever tell Amber that, don't tell anyone that
.

*

I grab my head, dig my fingers into my scalp. But it comes, the
details. Tiny handbones scattered. A shoe. I paused and searched for more—
Why? Why did I do that? Why did I look?
The arc of two beautiful arm bones, and then another pile of tiny bones, which must have once made up the other hand. But my eyes drifted back to the baby's skull, right there, perfectly placed in the nest of pelvic bones, waiting for her chance to come into this universe.

What did I do? What have I done? What have I neglected to do? I didn't kill her. But someone did.

                    
(an economy, a nation, a woman wanting work,

                    
a desert,

                    
a drought, a lack of water)

I knelt down and reached my hand into the ribcage. Into the pelvis of this woman. I touched this baby's skull. Wanted to pull it up, wanted to free it from the cavity, get it out in the space between ribcage and pelvis. Even if it meant all the other bones would crumble. I did that. I pulled hard. I freed the skull. I cradled it.

At that moment, I thought of pushing my child out of my body. Screaming and yet so happy I'd soon be free of her. She slid from me, sweeping out of my body with blood and slick, slipping away from my nest of bones. I knew I'd check out of the hospital in the morning and flee this life and flee her. And there was a very brief moment when I looked at her damp, bloodslicked fuzz of hair, the back of her head, and I nearly let my heart unzip. Instead I shut it down for good until years later, when I saw this baby's skull in
its
nest of bones. There, holding it to my chestbone, my heart snapped open of its own accord, and it is killing me.

When I left that woman and that child, I was different. I went back to the truck, and I stared at Alejandra as if for the first time. As if seeing humanity for the first time. I began to mother her. It's that simple: the sorrow and beauty of it cracked me apart. The whole thing was like a burst of red lightning that streaked through my body and tore my own nest apart. I was surprised at how fragile it was built, how everything was so loosely linked.

*

I climb out of my sleeping bag with throat closing and vomit rising. I'm
not built for this. I am built for happy times, for partying and for strong men with sparks in their eyes. I am built for times other than these.

I put on an old red pair of tennis shoes that Libby offered me and pace around the yard, sweating and freezing, wiping snot from my nose, digging my fingers in between the bones of my ribcage. How do stars burn cold? How do I burn so cold? I stumble into Amber's little-girl bike. I walk it down the bumpy dirt driveway and past the cattle-guard and out onto the paved county road, where I start pedaling. My knees go up too far, my gut hurts, my head is pounding. The snot runs faster. The sweat pours. The temperature drops, and I begin to shake.

In the moonlight, I singsong:
Calm, Tess, calm. Try to calm. Stick like a bur to your body
.

The earth smells like rainmelt. Like coldwet dog nose. Like sage and yucca. Like wet cottonwood leaves. I get past the dirt driveway and onto the paved county road and ride and ride and ride. I pedal alongside the moonlit fields of NoWhere, Colorado. A dead skunk in the road, the smell sweeping with me for a good long time. A flattened snake. Cattle that look up to regard me silently in the moonlight. Fields of green winter wheat, just getting tall and growing at this odd time of year. Past dry pastureland, a lone horse standing at the V of a fence. Puddles glisten in the road from time to time, and the bike's tires slosh through. But to the side, where there is earth, the skin of the earth, the water has been absorbed, seeping into the rockbones underneath, the rockbone of the moon above.

It is all one blur, one motion, one dance, all singing. Our one big quest is simply this: Who is going to love me?

Maybe I do love the moon, the rockbones, the spine of the earth.

Perhaps I do love Alejandra and Slade and Libby and Amber.

It's possible I notice small things, such as the way Ed walks like he's hearing some kind of cakewalk music.

The way Slade pulls me into his chest, whispers kind things in my ear.

Maybe I love even Tess and will be sorry to see her go.

A sudden rise of choking fear. I can't breathe. I stop the bike and look around. I'm lost. The landscape is so big. I stand with my legs spread over the bike, steadying myself. Close my eyes. Lean over and throw up the dinner. One spasm, two, three. Gasp for sagesweet, smoky air.

I close my eyes and focus, draw a map of lines in the darkness of my brain. The direction of the mountains, the direction of Lamar, the school, the road to Libby's house, the road to the old house we grew up
in, the road to the place Baxter lived, which is where Kay will be now. I need a compass. I need my instinct. East-then-south. Heartpounder, gutwrencher. Breathe, Tess, breathe, don't go flying off into the stars.

                
IN THE BEGINNING, Tess was oblivious.

                
Tess knew that women gringa drivers were less suspicious.

                
Tess was in high demand.

                
Tess supposed she knew about how humans get packed between hay bales on semi-trucks, frozen in refrigerated trucks, that people die of heat and thirst in the desert.

                
But she never saw a woman and a baby and a dream

                
cut to the bone like that.

                
How many men-in-ties

                
suddenly realize their culpability?

                
Women in dress suits?

                
Bankers? Politicians? People in board meetings and people in elevators and people screaming at kids?

                
How many ways are there to be culpable?

                
How many people brought that woman to her knees?

                
The details are stuck on Tess's tongue.

                
They'll never come out.

Chapter Nine

The bike wheels snap gravel as I turn into the driveway to Baxter's
farmhouse. I get off the bike, stagger, catch my balance, look to the stars, stunned by cold, stunned my directions were right, stunned that the house still sits, stunned that it looks like the same old whitebox-farmhouse, stunned by the way it glows in the moonlight, stunned by the light coming from one window, stunned by the familiar cricket-noise and the wisps of cool air coming from the creek.

I walk in the open door, grab a coat hanging on a hook, clasp the puff of down jacket to me. Shiver into it my bonedeep chill. It's only then that I can take in the room. Kay sits in an armchair, lamplit, and I slap a hand over my mouth to trap the noise my surprised breath will make.

Can a person change so much? Her hair is shaved close, has thinned to scalp. A sore underneath her nose, red and puffy, throbs out from her face, and her lips are drawn tight even as she sleeps. Her leg is propped up on a cushion, the sweatpants pulled up, and there is a purple bruise on her ankle surrounded by yellow skin. Three of her toes are missing, the skin pulled tight over the lumps that are left.

Behind her chair is a metal hanger from which dangles a plastic bag full of some clear liquid. To the side is a hospital bed, piled with tubes and boxes.

                
Tess is glad for this moment,

                
to see this without having to fix her face.

                
Tess formed and grew in Kay's body once.

                
The womb is the opposite of the desert.

Oh, how she used to be! Her hair that brightwhited early, ponytailed, wisps of it hanging around her face, which made her seagreen eyes flare. Beautiful when riding her horse. Or when dressed up to go out dancing. Or standing in the kitchen, cooking from time to time. But so angry, so frustrated by being alive in the world, so bitter that the world did not conform to her expectations.

When I take my eyes from her missing toes and look back at her face, I see she's opened her eyes. She regards me, hoists an eyebrow. “Don't let the bugs in.”

I glance at the bugs buzzing around the light, the big rising moon outside, and I close the screen door and then the wooden door after it. Before I turn back toward her, I breathe in. “OhKay.”

She rubs her hands on her face. “It's the middle of the night.”

I nod, yes.

“Libby said you were here. It's been ten years, Tess.”

I glance over my shoulder, at the door.

“No.” Kay lifts a hand weakly from her face into the air, then lets it drop on her lap. “Don't go. Sit down. Tess, you're shivering.” She nods to a blanket, which I grab and wrap around the coat. “You look lousy. Pale. Skinny. I see your hair is turning gray too. You saw Amber, I suppose? Your own daughter.”

“Oh-by-god.” But I keep it at a murmur, beneath my breath, so she can't hear it. I glance around, keep my eyes off her, try to place why this feeling is familiar. Oh, yes—Libby looking at me yesterday—and
a strange gurgle of déjà vu rattles over me. This is what it felt like to be Libby, seeing something that hurt the eyes.

Kay shifts in her chair, and the quiet moan from her wet throat is a purr of pain. “What's wrong with you? You dying too? You drunk? Why does it smell like smoke outside?”

I breathe in, sturdy myself. “Wildfire. There's a wildfire in the mountains.” My voice stutters from the cold, and I press my lips close.

“Smoke all the way here, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“The West is one big firepit now.” Her voice is that of someone fading, fading into sleep or death, but she tries to rouse herself. “Amber doesn't smile enough. No one notices that.” She leans back, closes her eyes. “I guess neither did you. Smile enough, that is. Neither did any of us.” Then she closes her eyes and says, “I'm so tired. Why don't you pour us a whiskey? It's hidden in the stove.” Then, “Don't just stand there, giving me your pity. I know how I look. I know what's happening. This is what death looks like. This is what death smells like. Face it.” She waves her bony hand toward the kitchen. “I hid it from Libby and Ed. Puritans. I nearly quit for a long while.”

I nod in slow motion, turn and walk into the kitchen. Mygod, it has the same old linoleum floor from the '50s, big gray flowers on a cream white background, and that mesmerizes me, the memories of my childhood self, loving those big blooms for their beauty, sitting on those flowers and talking to Baxter. One moment in particular flies into my head. I'm allowed to chalk the flowers, chalk them pink and light orange and green, with big hunks of chalk, and how I chalked my toes, too, chalked Baxter's shoes as he sat reading the paper, how he looked at me and laughed sweetly and said, “It'll wash off, kid. Don't you do this with crayons, only the chalk, and I wouldn't do it around Kay.”

I look from the gray blooms to the rest of the room, wide old
countertops and old porcelain sink. It is different, though, too, and it takes a moment to register the stacks of white-foam boxes. I peer in. Latex gloves and gauze and alcohol pads and syringes and canisters of hand-san.

“Scrub your hands.” Kay is trying to yell it, but her voice is weak and thin. “Especially your cuticles. Use the hand-san. And turn off the faucet with your elbow.”