Rust (39 page)

Did they summon her here to New Mexico, she wonders. Because there are only three possible explanations for why she has come, and that is what Margaret is thinking about as she lies in Alice Yazzie’s bed in the cool night—cool enough now for Margaret to unfold the Navajo blanket that Alice herself has woven, and draw it up until it covers her heart. If not the coyotes, she reasons, then her father’s blessings, which he learned from Alice and threw into the sky every morning at dawn. Option number three has to do with the nature of randomness—perhaps understanding that everything is random, or perhaps that nothing is. Margaret isn’t sure which.

Over and over, she re-experiences the moment when she saw her father’s name on the shipping label of the box from Pearl Paint. It knocked her to her knees, and yet, in some small way, she expected it, though not perhaps in that precise moment. She understands now, looking back, that she reserved a little hope that she would see her parents again and buried it deep inside her. When she saw her father’s name, she felt yes, finally, and she knew hope had always been there.

He had come over the ridge, blinded in the glare of the sun, until he was almost upon her, and then he had abruptly stopped and whispered, “Regina?” Margaret wonders if he thought he was dying in that moment, and that his great love, dead for thirty years, stood ready to greet him. He had looked so old and beaten, so vulnerable. She remembered a father as big as the world, a father whose arms could sweep her up to the sky.

“I searched for you,” he had said into her ear. “I searched and searched for you and I couldn’t find you.” Remembering that, Margaret begins to think about what she has searched for, and the answer is not much—not love, not money, not fame. Not really her parents, either. But then Margaret remembers her paintings, and she knows she has searched and searched for something there. Perhaps it was belief. Perhaps the will to go on.

She imagines the three years Vincent spent in New York, looking for her. Had they missed each other by seconds? Had he followed a whim and ridden the A-train to the end of the line at Rockaway Beach when, a few blocks away, Margaret was walking Magpie in that same direction? They would never know. And Vincent could not have expected or even hoped, as he approached Alice Yazzie’s door, the autumn light dimming and the shadows of the rocks disappearing into darkness, that she was the person who would save him.

Margaret wonders if it is Rico who has saved her.

True, she did not arrive at the doorway of Garcia’s Automotive half-dead. She did not appear in his doorway with a hand-drawn map and a story to tell a grandmother filled with sadness. She had just wanted to learn to weld. But now, in Alice’s iron bed, she entertains the notion that perhaps there was something beyond metal that she was destined to forge through heat and fire. She wonders if it was something basic: connection.

In her mind, she watches her days with Rico flicker by like an old-fashioned home movie. She can even imagine narrating it: here’s the moment where I first saw Rico. He held the torch above his head as he worked, and I saw sparks flying onto the concrete floor of the garage. I could see the heat in him, the way he took one thing and radically changed it into another.

Here is the moment he showed up at my house later that evening. He felt my desire strongly and thought it was for him, the welding lessons just a subterfuge.

And here is how his face froze and then contorted with shame when I set him straight.

On through the images she could go, certain now that each moment, each conversation, each secret they exchanged, and each step they took toward each other, was another scrap welded into a mystery that would both solidify and unravel the instant Vincent appeared over the ridge in the sharp glare of the afternoon sun.

She does not allow herself to linger on their one kiss, on the way her hand so naturally wound itself around his neck and pulled him to her. She will not admit that even now, hours later, she still feels the aftershock of his lips on hers. She knows she will never experience his lips again, but she will, once in a while, perhaps allow herself to recall the current, the way it arced between them, a memory that will last forever.

Forever is a long time, and Margaret feels better contemplating it while on her feet under the night sky, so she slips from Alice’s bed. She wears a nightgown that Vincent has found for her in Alice’s tiny chest of drawers, and she pulls on her sneakers because her father has warned her against the ants, spiders, and snakes. She opens the door and steps out. She notices a shimmering edge against the big rock by the driveway, a crescent that reiterates the shape of the waxing moon, and she moves toward it.

It is her self-portrait, her arms raised like streaks of dark lightning in the night, and her unblinking eyes warm on Margaret. Each small square of metal, each patch, shimmers like a mystery. Margaret squats down for a better look. She reaches out, her fingers tracing the edges of the rust that ride the metal. It seems to have splintered into a thousand parts, and she raises her head to look at the sky searching for the source of light.

She sees a billion stars, star paths leading everywhere, and it suddenly occurs to her that perhaps each one has a story to tell. Perhaps each person’s story gathers force, collects details like particles of dust, and assembles a meaning. She scans the sky all the way to the horizon. Which one is her mother’s, she wonders. Which one is Donny’s? Which one is Vincent’s, and Rico’s, and Fernando’s, and Thomas Yazzie’s?

Which one is hers?

She imagines the stories swirling together, wrapping themselves around each other as they tumble silently to earth.

“Tell me,” Margaret whispers into the night. She raises her arms up, like her self-portrait, to receive them.

She listens carefully.