Come In and Cover Me (27 page)

He hummed, some lyric on the edges of his thoughts. The tune was there, barely, and he felt like he could tease the words into focus. A girl and a car. Summer. Something about a girl and a car and summer.

“Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge,”
he sang softly.

And, amazingly, Ren picked it up, her hand in his.
“Drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain.”

He paused, keeping hold of her hand, so she turned back. She had a pretty voice.

“Springsteen,” she said. “Scott used to sing it all the time.”

“I don't know what made me think of it,” he said. “I don't even know the name of the song.”

“‘Jungleland,'” she supplied. They started moving again.

“Oh.” He dodged a catclaw. “Who's Scott?”

She had been scrambling up a patch of gravel, bracing one foot against a rock, but she stopped. She was frozen with one foot and one hand touching the ground, like a sprinter just leaping off the starting block.

“Who's Scott?” he asked again.

For a moment, she actually did not know the answer to the question. Her mind was filled only with panic, with the desperate need to undo her own words. She didn't know how she could have gotten so lax, so unguarded, that Scott's name would fall out of her mouth. But there was no choice, no way to back up. She spoke around the panic.

“My brother.”

She started climbing again. He did not.

“You said you didn't have any siblings.”

She was still heading up, and she found that it was easier to speak if she focused on her feet. She would continue to let the words fall out, and she would stay as far away from them as possible. “I don't,” she said. “Not now. He died when I was twelve. In a car wreck. He was seventeen.”

“You had a brother who died?”

She would not slow down. “He died when I was twelve. I don't talk about him much.”

He was not behind her anymore, so she did look at him, briefly. More words, he needed more words. “It wasn't a lie,” she said. “I just don't talk about him.”

Mercifully, he did not say more. She was allowed to stop talking. Which was good, because she was having trouble breathing. She swallowed again and again, trying to clear her throat.

Those few details that she had blurted out to him—the fact that Scott had existed, the fact that he had died, the way that he had died—had taken everything she had. She had thought the words would choke her, but they hadn't, and she had handed her brother over to Silas. It felt like she had run a long way—exhausting, depleting, but with a trace of adrenaline.

Now he was silent, surely realizing how much it had cost her. He knew her, and he was the only one who ever had. She looked back at him, grateful, but the look on his face puzzled her. He looked hurt, which she assumed must be because of the bump on his head.

He did not say anything else, because he couldn't think of what to say. She had a brother—someone she had played with and eaten breakfast with, someone who surely tormented her and called her insulting names. A brother. A brother who had died in a terrible sudden way that surely made her cry even if she never cried. She had never mentioned him.

Silas had told her dozens of stories about Alex. He had told her dozens of stories about everyone and everything—he loved her, and he wanted her to know him, because how could she love him back if she didn't know him? And how could he love her properly if he didn't hand over all these things? When she listened to his memories, she became a part of them. She stood there next to him when he was mesmerized by his first puppy, stoned in his undergrad dorm, half dead from dehydration in Peru. Each story pulled her deeper into his head, and he wanted her there.

His head throbbed. He hadn't known about her brother. He hadn't known until the last twenty-four hours that she thought a dead woman's hair had tickled his nose in his sleep. He had not known her spirits were so tangible. When he considered these ghost stories of hers intellectually, blocking out his attachment to her, they defied belief. He did not want to hear more of them. The woman who told them was a stranger.

And the omission of a dead brother was malicious. She had told Silas that she loved him. But if she loved him, and if she also loved Scott (which she must have, because you had to love your brother even if you hated him), then she would have shared Scott with Silas. She would have trusted him. It would have been proof of her own feelings.

Her silence seemed to be proof of something else, but he didn't know what. He thought it must somehow reflect on him.

nine

The emergence theme involves the passage between layers or worlds through an opening or portal; the Mimbres symbolized the portal by the kill hole in mortuary bowls . . . [as well as] by the slab-lined rectangular hearth and the hatchway into the house.

—From “Architecture and Symbolism in Transitional Pueblo Development in the Mimbres Valley, SW New Mexico” by Harry J. Shafer,
Journal of Field
Archaeology,
Spring 1995

Ren did not like the feel of the air at the site. In the two days since Silas had knocked himself unconscious, a pair of Silas's socks had vanished, along with Ren's bug spray. They both showed up in the backseat of the truck, which was odd but understandable—their backpacks might have been unfastened. Then the keys to the truck, which they both knew had been zipped in the side pocket of Silas's backpack, dropped off the face of the earth for nearly twenty-four hours. Just as the sun was going down on their third day at the site, Silas found them in the pocket of a sweatshirt he didn't remember wearing. He'd misplaced his watch last night and still hadn't found it.

Now, on the third full day at the site, things were not merely disappearing—they were breaking. The sole had come off her right boot as she was making her way down to the creek. The blade of the pickax had come loose from its handle, sailing over Silas's shoulder and into the mesquite below. It decapitated several blades of grama grass before it lodged in the dirt. Not an hour later, when he flipped open his pocketknife, the catch had misfired and the blade sliced a gill across his thumb. He said he was always accident-prone, and that was true.

But still, she did not like sharp blades flying through the air. The ground under her seemed suspect. It was as if everything was coming loose around her, as if nothing was anchored. She or Silas could topple off the cliff at any moment. And as keys and watches blinked in and out of existence, as Ren felt the last of her careful barricades disintegrating, Lynay was becoming more and more concrete.

On the night they arrived and set up camp, the girl had been lingering around their campfire, holding a basket of bright yellow star-shaped flowers. She made no noise as she walked, and she'd been inching toward Silas. Ren had noticed her several times around the edge of camp, always with flowers.

She watched the muscles in Silas's forearms as he dug, shirtsleeves rolled just below his elbows, and she liked the pale strip of skin where his watch had been. She remembered nipping the tan lines there once and tasting dirt. She shifted her gaze to his face—he was overly focused on digging. She could not make him understand that she never mentioned Scott, that she had not said his name to anyone alive in the last nineteen years. She could not say it. She had learned not to say it. She had learned to defend against the past, because it would swallow you whole if you let it.

It made no sense to her why he would presume that her speaking—or not speaking—of Scott had anything to do with him. He didn't know anything about Scott, didn't know anything about the years before and after his death. He had a brother of his own, and he had parents who never forgot about his existence, even if his father seemed to be a bit of an asshole. He was judging her as if his personal experience gave him any idea of her own. He did not know enough to have an opinion.

But she had hurt him. The guilt was, so far, trumping her sense of righteous indignation. And underneath the guilt was a fear that she was wrong, not just about this but wrong on some fundamental level. Maybe the ghosts were a punishment. Maybe the threat to Silas was some retribution against her. Maybe the ghosts wanted something she wasn't giving them, and if she could interpret the signs right, she could save him.

Despite her wandering thoughts, she and Silas were working quite efficiently. Perhaps they should try not talking more often. She could see frustration in the lines of his body and the set of his face, but if anything, he was digging faster, moving more dirt.

The placement of the rooms made it difficult. She and Silas were perched precariously on the side of the cliff, with very little room to maneuver. It wasn't a steep drop—the worst that could happen was that they would slide a few feet and skin their elbows or knees—but the incline made climbing in and out of the pit difficult. She couldn't relax into the site.

They'd found three rooms, and at the base of a wall in the first room they'd found what was left of two infant burials and an older child's burial. The bones had been scattered, which was common with the bones of children, so easily disrupted or carted away by predators. If there had ever been pottery with the burials, it had been stolen or destroyed over the course of centuries. These were thousand-year-old babies, nameless and unknowable. She and Silas covered them and moved on to the next room.

The dirt was dry and clumped, and her hands were rubbed raw from breaking it down. She banged one stubborn clump against the side of the screen, and a layer of dirt fell away. She brushed her thumb over the remaining rock. Babies. She hated finding them, although on a site of any size you were bound to find plenty of infants. It was more common to find juvenile burials than adult burials. Early death was a trend in most nonindustrial societies, and the prehistoric Southwest was no different. Infants, toddlers, children, teenagers barely out of childhood—they were more vulnerable. The thought of tiny fragile bones made Ren screen more carefully.

They discovered the cluster of bodies late on their third day.

“Human bone,” said Silas, and the words brought Ren to his side immediately.

The skeletons lay, en masse, against one wall. An adult, probably female, pieces of a bowl lying around her skull and spine. There was another adult, probably male, buried a foot away from her, slightly lower in the dirt. Both skeletons showed signs of arthritis and vitamin D deficiency—the male's humerus bone was curved like a bow. They had not been young when they died. The end of the man's femur was nearly touching the woman's tibia.

Slightly farther out from the wall lay another adult—most likely male—and two babies, one perhaps a toddler.

Silas had uncovered those three almost simultaneously—the toe bone of the man, the rib of the toddler, the skull of the infant. A piece of pottery lay next to the head of the adult, and a bowl broken into two pieces lay over the toddler's face. A turquoise stone, no bigger than Ren's thumbnail, rested among the toddler's ribs.

“The family plot,” Silas spoke into the quiet air.

For a long time, they looked at the bones. Ren put her hand on the baby's skull, just resting it there. There was the usual sadness of finding bodies, but there was much more than that. She felt a recognition, a flash of familiarity. Not as if she'd seen this before, but as if she'd been expecting to see it.

“Yes,” she said, and the anticipation spread through her bloodstream.

Ren reached for her camera, but the lens cap was jammed. She worked a nail under the edge of the cap, and the nail broke off below the quick. The lens cap still didn't budge. So Silas went back to the tent for his camera while Ren whisked and scooped and tidied the floor of the hole, cleaning up the outline of the skeletons. She bided her time and focused on the aesthetics of the photos, and only when they had snapped every angle did she reach for a sherd. She wanted to savor this. She wanted to appreciate every detail, every tense muscle and scrape of a tool.

She started with the bowl lying in pieces around the adult female next to the wall. Something had disrupted the burial—maybe a later occupant had dug into the grave—and she could tell immediately that at least one section of the bowl was missing. She spat on the largest of the pieces and wiped away as much dirt as she could. She couldn't tell what the design had been, but it was abstract and geometric. It was solid artistry, almost textbook.

Silas's shadow fell across her hand, and she could feel him looking at her, maybe for the first time all day.

“This is a traditional southern slip,” she said. “Everything about the sherd is typically southern, typically Mimbres. And the brushwork doesn't seem right to be Lynay's.” At the moment, she didn't care how he felt about her referring to ghosts by name.

“But there's something similar about it,” she continued, “something in the alternating thickness and thinness of the lines, how some of these curves flare out at the end of a stroke. I don't know. Maybe this artist and Lynay had a teacher in common. Or maybe it's only the style of this community.”

She reached for another sherd, this one not as big as her hand.

“Ren,” said Silas.

She looked up. Silas was kneeling, brushing around the head and shoulders of the adult buried with the two children.

“Another bowl,” he said.

During the first assessment of the remains and throughout the photos, it had been impossible to tell how much of a bowl remained with this burial. Only the one piece had turned up on top of the skull. But Silas had seen another edge of pottery, and he'd brushed away dirt until he had uncovered the C-shaped lip of a bowl.

As Ren scooted to his side, he worked one gloved finger under the lip of the bowl, and it popped free, as if it were glad to escape. It was nearly three-quarters of a bowl, and even with a layer of dirt, the curve of the vessel was vivid with images. She and Silas looked at each other, eyes wide. It was an owl-and-parrot design in the shape of a star—owl next to parrot next to owl next to parrot, joining in the center of the bowl with a knot of talons. The talons were intertwined, indistinguishable, impossible to tell which claw belonged to which bird. She knew it was Lynay's hand that had painted it.

“This is hers,” Ren whispered. She breathed out, letting her shoulders sag. All of this, every second of the last three months, had been about finding this bowl or others like it. Finding another link to her artist. And now she was holding that link in her hands, feeling the coolness of the clay and the dryness of the dirt. She had thought the art would lead her to the artist. In this case, though, it seemed to have been the other way around.

The bowls had connected her to Silas, too. He was leaning in close to the skeleton, his forehead over the forehead of the skull.

“Young guy,” Silas said. “The basilar suture isn't totally closed, and that should happen sometime between seventeen and twenty years old.” He rocked back on the balls of his feet. “No sign of osteoarthritis. Not much wear on the molar.”

“She could have known him,” she said. “He could have been family or friend.”

He frowned. “Or just someone who happened to have one of her bowls passed on to him.”

She did not feel like the push and pull of an intellectual argument. She wanted to feel this, not think it. She was tired of thinking. She moved to the bowl over the head of the toddler, briefly touching the turquoise stone before she lifted the ceramic pieces away from the bones. It was a simple bowl with an unending circle. A single, gently curving line spiraled down to the center of the bowl, where the line thinned until Ren could not see its ending point.

“This one's also hers,” she said.

“You're sure,” said Silas. He was not asking.

“It has the polished slip,” she said. “Two bowls of hers, buried together, with a young adult male and two babies. A family.”

“A potential family unit without a mother and wife, you mean.”

She leaned in closer to him, her knees starting to ache from crouching. “That actually is exactly what I mean,” she said.

He refused to continue her train of thought, though he nodded. He stood, taking off his gloves and boosting himself up to the edge of the pit. His feet dangled. She stood as well.

“Let's say I go along with you, for the sake of argument, and say that these people are part of the artist's family,” he said. “They could be any members of her family. This guy could be a father or a brother or a cousin.”

“If it were her father and he died that young, she wouldn't have been able to paint a bowl,” Ren said. “It must be a contemporary—brother, husband, cousin, brother-in-law—could be any of the above. But why a parrot on his burial bowl?”

“The woman liked parrots,” he said.

She shrugged that off, returning to what interested her more. “Back to your point—this is a family missing a wife and mother.”

“Was that my point or your point?”

“Her family,” she said. “This is her family. Her husband. Her babies.”

“That's a huge leap,” he said, climbing out of the hole altogether.

“The man and the babies are so close together,” she said, following him. “The same level exactly, and grouped a little apart from the older man and older woman. The adult male and the babies must have died around the same time.”

“What about other burials on the site?” he asked. “Did your other excavation turn up any signs of mass deaths—epidemics or violence? Malnutrition? An odd number of juvenile deaths?”

“Not at all. There were actually fewer juvenile remains than we would have expected. Whatever killed these people, I don't think it was on a mass scale.”

“So maybe the artist had a brother and a couple of nieces,” he said. “And they all ate the same bad meat and died. And she provided bowls for their burial. Or maybe she did that for her next-door neighbors. The bonds of this community could have been as strong as family bonds. You can't identify these bodies based on her bowls.”

“Listen to me—this makes sense,” she said. She drummed her fingers on her thighs, unable to keep still. “Assume that if Lynay was this man's partner, his wife, that she was around his age—not much older, at least. So she was still young when she lost them all. Late teens, early twenties? And her whole family is gone. Maybe that's her mother and father against the wall over there. So she's got no one. What better time to leave, to pull up and try another beginning?”