The Replacement Child (10 page)

He pulled into his parents’ circular driveway, which was closed in by a white picket fence to keep out loose cattle. The cottonwood and aspen trees were ringed with stones and a brick path led up to the New House. The land sloped slowly down to the Galisteo River.

He turned off the car’s ignition and sat for a second, staring at the house. He would have to have the flat roof tarred again in the fall, and the portal that ran run around the house needed a new coat of white paint. Maybe he would repaint the house at the same time. The beige paint was starting to fade in places. The house itself was still solid. It had been built in the 1920s with a good foundation. He got out of the car and went up the front steps, the same as he had thousands of times as a kid coming home from school. His mother was in the kitchen. He smelled the posole she was cooking and heard the clank of her spoon against the inside of the pot.

“Hi, Mom,” he said with a kiss on her cheek.

“Hi,
hito,”
she said, barely turning away from the stove. She looked older to him than she had yesterday, her gray hair pulled back and getting thinner. She put a steaming bowl of posole, a plate of tortillas, and a glass of milk in front of him as he sat at the kitchen table.

Gil took a bite of posole, the steaming hominy, pork, and
onions almost burning his mouth. He took a bite of a tortilla to cool his mouth and a sip of milk.

He looked around the kitchen. He had painted the top half of the walls last year, and the paint still looked good where it met the pattern of black and blue Mexican tiles starting about halfway down. You could tell that the tiles weren’t real only if you touched them. During the Depression, his grandmother had spent three months painting those tiles on the walls. His family had been fairly well off during the Depression but still hadn’t been able to afford real tiles. He had touched up a little of her work where it had become faded.

Gil studied a picture on the kitchen wall above the tile. It was a photo of his parents, taken before they had even started dating. His mother had been voted the 1966 Santa Fe Fiesta Queen. The same year, his father had been elected to play Don Diego de Vargas, the man who had reconquered Santa Fe after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. Together they had gone to schools and retirement homes to talk about the history of Santa Fe while dressed in the costumes of La Reina and the conquistador general. During the fiesta every August, they reenacted de Vargas’s conquering of Santa Fe.

They also had posed for a formal picture together. It had been a black-and-white photo, but the photographer had colored in by hand the red rose in his mother’s black hair and the yellow of his dad’s conquistador shirt. The photographer had said to them, “You look like you are posing for your wedding photo.” That’s how it had started. Six months later, the photographer was taking pictures at their wedding.

His mother ladled another spoonful of posole into his bowl without asking him if he wanted more, then started doing the dishes.

“Mom, come sit down. I’ll help you with those later,” he said, pulling out the chair next to him for her.

“When I’m done washing the dishes, then I’ll sit down.” But
she was never done. Next she would sweep the floor. Then start on the cookies for Therese’s school bake sale next week. That was the way it had been since he was a kid. She never rested.

“Did you check your blood sugar today?” he asked. She didn’t answer. “Mom, you have to check it every day so the doctor can keep track of it.” She still said nothing. She thought it wasn’t proper to talk about medical conditions, especially her diabetes.

Gil sighed and ate another spoonful of posole.

“Mom, do you know a woman from town named Maxine Baca? I think her maiden name was Gonzales.” His mom and Mrs. Baca were about the same age and he thought they might have gone to school together.

His mom didn’t answer for a few seconds, then said, “I don’t think so. Is she part of your work?” She always tried to bring his job into the conversation as some sort of penance because she disapproved of it, even though she would never have said so.

“Yeah, she lost her daughter today,” he said as he pulled off a piece of tortilla.

“I’ll add her name to my prayer list,” she said. Gil’s father was at the top of her prayer list and his mother’s parents were second and third. Her grandparents were fourth and fifth. Gil and Elena were next. It was strange how his mother prayed for the dead before praying for the living. When Gil and Elena were kids, they used to fight about which one of them was first on the list of the live people.

“
Hito,
” his mother was saying, “I need a new candle for your father. I want to get one so I can get it blessed by Father Jerome at the cathedral.” His mother didn’t drive, so his aunts took her to the grocery store, the hairdresser, and once a week to the cathedral in Santa Fe for prayers.

“Okay, Mom. I’ll get Susan to pick one up for you.” His mother would light the candle every night as she said her rosary in front of the family shrine in the living room.

“You know,
hito,
I think one of your cousins married a Baca,” she said as she scrubbed a heavy cast-iron pan. By “cousin” she probably meant a third or fourth cousin. He didn’t ask more about it. The relative was probably only distantly related.

“Come to think of it,” his mom said as she dried a cup, “the woman your dad almost married was a Baca.” Gill looked up quickly. His mother didn’t notice and continued, “Oh, that’s right, she was a C’de Baca.”

“Dad was engaged before you?”

“Hmmm, but it didn’t work out.”

“Why?”

“The Judge wouldn’t let them get married. He didn’t like her family.”

The Judge. First District Court Judge Gilbert Nazario Estevan Montoya. Gil’s grandfather. When his mother said The Judge didn’t like the woman’s family, it probably meant that they weren’t Castilian enough for him. Her family was probably part Mexican. The Judge disapproved of anyone who was not from Spanish nobility.

Gil finished the last of his posole and put his dish next to the sink. His mother picked it up and started washing it, saying, “Oh,
hito,
don’t forget to get the statue of St. Joseph that Susan needed.”

He hadn’t forgotten. “Where is it?”

“Over in the Old House in The Judge’s rooms.”

Gil watched his mother for a few more seconds as she rinsed his dinner plate, then he put his coat on and went across the driveway, following a small dirt path in the darkness to the Old House. As kids, he and Elena had used the ruined part of the Old House as a fort against his invading cousins. One room had been the armory and Gil had constructed a complex system of walls and moats. He’d drawn maps of the minefields and rigged booby traps out of boxes and rabbit holes. Eventually all the cousins had defected and ended up inside the fort with Gil and Elena, protecting it from invisible attacking Indians.

The Judge’s rooms were in the only part of the Old House still standing. The house had actually been built as both a house and a fort. At one point, a relative had built a circular watch-tower on the east corner.

His grandfather’s rooms were in the west corner over by the family chapel. Ironically, The Judge’s rooms were in what had been the Navajo slave quarters. The slaves had been mostly captives from the Indian invasions or bought in Santa Fe on the auction block on the Plaza. According to local custom, the slaves had become part of the Montoya family, with the Navajo sons getting pieces of land and the daughters getting dowries when they married. So, somewhere in Gil’s distant past he was probably part Navajo or some other type of Indian. The Judge always left that out of their family tree.

Gil stepped through a small doorway and flipped a switch. He looked around the living room for the statue. The room itself was still clean; his mother dusted it every week. The walls were plastered in white and had a few pictures of The Judge with various political bosses. There was one with a governor. Another with President Eisenhower. There was an old carved crucifix over the smooth kiva fireplace, with bright blood painted on Jesus’ face and legs. Gil stepped through another doorway. The Judge’s old law books covered the walls in the room. On one low table was a collection of saints. Gil walked over to it and picked up the one of St. Joseph. It was about a foot high, made of alabaster. St. Joseph was carrying Baby Jesus and had a lily on the top of his staff. St. Joseph and the Baby Jesus both had very pale skin. But someone had painted dripping blood on Baby Jesus’ hands, feet, and head, in the tradition of the Spanish colonial santos.

Gil carefully carried St. Joseph back to the New House. His mother was kneeling in front of the family shrine, clicking off the beads on her rosary. He leaned down to kiss her cheek, saying, “Good night, Mom.” She didn’t answer him and he left, going back down the creaking wooden stairs.

By the time he got home, Susan and the girls were already in bed. He put the statue of St. Joseph on the kitchen counter and went to bed himself.

L
ucy was attempting to unlock the front door of her apartment in the dark. She had forgotten to leave her porch light on. It took her three tries before she managed to connect the key with the lock. She clicked
PLAY
on her answering machine, then went around her house turning on lights.

“Lucy, you really need to change the message on your answering machine to ‘We’re not at home’ instead of ‘I’m not at home.’ Make it seem like there’s a man around….” Her mother made it sound like Santa Fe robbers called first before stopping by. The next message was a hang-up.

Lucy turned the television on. It was almost one
A.M.
It had been a hard, long night at work. A copy-desk editor decided that he hated the lead of the Melissa Baca story for no particular reason—”it just sounds funny” was his only excuse. Lucy had to track down Tommy Martinez, and the two of them tried to rewrite the lead. In the end, the copy editor decided that the original lead was better. Sometimes, Lucy hated copy editors.

Lucy kicked off her shoes and changed into her sweats. She flipped channels without really noticing. The vacuum was calling her name. Her carpet was so dirty it crunched. But she was sure that the neighbors wouldn’t appreciate the noise at this time of night. Her apartment was the typical Santa Fe layout—kiva fireplace, rough-hewn vigas lining the ceiling.

Lucy was used to living in rented houses. None of the commitment of buying a house. You could just pack up and leave when you wanted. Lucy had gotten really good at getting out of long leases. After Lucy’s dad left them when she was eight, she and her mom and her brothers had moved to L.A., then to Atlanta, and finally to Florida. They settled in Tampa but still
moved from house to house for years, depending on where her mom was working as a nurse. Lucy always kept half of her stuff in boxes to avoid the hassle of unpacking and repacking all the time. When she moved to Santa Fe, Del persuaded her to unpack all the boxes. They bought a bottle of wine, ate pizza, and burned the empty boxes in the fireplace. A symbol of commitment, he called it. Or had she called it that?

After Del moved out with all his stuff, she had to figure out how to eat using only spoons since she didn’t own any forks. She also had no dresser, so she just piled her clothes on the floor. It was when Del came over one day two months later and said, “By the way, the coffeemaker is mine,” that she finally decided that it was time to get some new stuff. She took a trip to Kmart and picked up forks, a coffeemaker, and a weird picture of a horse, which she hung in the bathroom. It was definitely bathroom art.

She liked to think of her decorating style as eclectic, but interior designers would probably have called it mishmash. The multicolored wooden fish from the Bahamas clashed with the Georgia O’Keeffe print on the wall next to it. Her beige furniture had been bought as a group from Goodwill for a hundred dollars.

In her bedroom were five chairs that used to match a wooden table long since tossed out. The chairs were pushed up against the wall, making her bedroom look like a waiting room. She sighed. That image was accurate. Men waiting to get into her bed, followed quickly by her waiting for them to get out.

In the corner of the living room was the chest, painted yellow and red, she’d gotten with Del more than four years ago. She had been a cops reporter and he had been a photographer, both just starting out at an Orlando paper. They had graduated from the University of Florida but somehow never met. They didn’t have a first date. They went to her house after a work party and he never left. Within a week they had bought
the painted chest together; it replaced her orange crates as their new coffee table.

The chest was awful, really. Gaudy without having any character. Del loved it, she hated it. When they moved to Santa Fe last year, they sold all their furniture, except the chest.

He was supposed to come by a half-dozen times in the past few months to get it, but never did. It was always, “I’ll get it when I move to a bigger place.”

It was now pushed into a corner and covered with a lace cloth, only a tiny part of the red-and-yellow paint visible. She put pictures of her mom and her brothers on it to chase away the Del demons. She had no pictures of her father left. Those had gone into the trash years ago. She wondered if he was still living in New York. Her mother refused to say that Dad had abandoned them; it was always, “He needed to find himself.” Like he was in India on a spiritual quest instead of in New York getting remarried.

Lucy walked over to the chest and pulled off the pictures and lace cloth. The photos she put with the others on the mantel. The lace cloth went, unfolded, into a drawer in the kitchen. The yellow-and-red chest she pushed out onto the back porch. Maybe some passing teenager would steal it. Maybe it would finally snow and ruin the paint. She could only hope.

Lucy turned off all the lights and fell asleep on the couch, with
Three’s Company
as her background noise and night-light.

W
hen Gil walked into the kitchen just after waking up at six thirty, Susan silently handed him the
Capital Tribune.
He read the first three paragraphs of the Melissa Baca article before he saw the word
drugs.
He left the house without taking a shower or saying good morning to the girls, who were still sleeping.