Rust (38 page)

He has blessed Margaret every day.

For years.

R
ICO
IS
alone in the Dodge Colt Vista, heading east toward Albuquerque. The sun is setting behind him, throwing ribbons of light that turn the sand of the desert temporarily crimson. His heart is full, and he thinks what it’s full of is love, though love is an imprecise word which might not cover tremors of awe and ache and aftershock. He drives along at sixty-five miles per hour, slow for him, but it is as fast as he can make himself go, knowing that every mile separates him a little more from the middle of nowhere, which is where everything happens, or so he now thinks.

He had stood off to the side where he belonged as Vincent approached and then abruptly stopped. Margaret was standing alone, and Rico had noticed her posture—strange for such a moment—how straight and tall she was for such a small person, and the idea flashed that she was very brave, meeting her fate head on. Margaret and Vincent had faced each other from perhaps thirty feet, and Rico had felt both invisible and important, the third point in a mysterious triangle, perhaps. Magpie had moved to Margaret, her protector—like a real police dog—and kept her eyes on Vincent. In that second, paradoxically, what presented itself as an image in his mind was that windshield long ago, the one that shattered in the accident after Fernando’s death, and the way it hesitated before it fell apart; and Rico wondered exactly what was breaking now, when all he cared about was Margaret.

They began running toward each other. Vincent’s arms circled his daughter, pulling her close to him. Rico could hear his words: “Margaret, my little girl, I searched for you, I searched and searched for you, and I couldn’t find you,” and Rico was relieved to hear them, because what kind of a reunion could this be if Vincent hadn’t done at least that? Margaret did not seem to need those words, though. She had one of her own—“Daddy”—which she repeated over and over into her father’s bony chest. Rico could feel their hearts beating, pounding like Indian drums in the still air. And then tears—Margaret’s and Vincent’s and, if the whole truth be told, Rico’s too—flew through the air like comets and disappeared.

“You look just like your mother, just like Regina,” Vincent said when he peeled himself away from Margaret for a second, but, as if he couldn’t bear to look at her from even a foot away, he pulled her to him again and buried his face in her hair, which he wound around his hand. A long time passed before they stepped apart, and even then she kept a grip on his scrawny upper arm as if she were afraid he might suddenly disappear again. “Is this your husband?” Vincent had asked, when he had finally collected himself enough to acknowledge Rico.

“No, this is my friend Rico,” she answered. Her eyes, as she turned to Rico, glistened like a thousand stars, but she managed to say, “Rico, I’d like you to meet my father, Vincent.”

Rico wished, deeply wished in that moment, that he was her husband. He wanted to be the one, the man who saw her more clearly than anyone else, who stood by her and hoped and waited no matter what happened, which is what he knew very well a husband does. It takes everything a man has and more to be a good husband, and he knew that he had not earned that title with Margaret, and he never would. But a friend was an honorable thing too, an important thing. He stepped forward and shook hands with Vincent Donnery, whose green eyes had joy in them and pain too. Rico had seen eyes full of pain his whole life—Elena’s most of all, and his father’s. Rosalita’s, for the past four years. And his daughters’ as they watched him back away from them this very morning, back out of the driveway and leave. But he had never seen pain like this.

“Let’s go in the house,” Vincent said as he reached for his daughter’s hand. “Come in, come in.”

They all entered, including Magpie, who promptly stretched out on the cool dirt floor and dozed off. Vincent made tea on the old stove while Margaret and Rico settled at the table. Rico noticed that Margaret could not take her eyes off her father, even when he turned from them to reach for a jar of dried herbs, to grab a good handful which he dumped into an old porcelain teapot.

“Is this your house?” she suddenly asked, because now that she was inside again she recalled Nancy from Roadrunner saying that an old Indian lady lived in the house where the boxes were to be delivered.

“It belongs to the grandmother of an old friend. Let me make some tea, and then I’ll tell you the story. A long, long story.”

Driving home now, along I-40, which is primarily a straight line from California all the way to Nashville and therefore doesn’t take supreme concentration, Rico marvels at the idea that he never, not once from beginning to end, thought he should get up and leave, go for a walk or sit in the car or do something so the two of them could be alone together. He belonged, and he stayed right where he was. Perhaps it was the house, or the setting, so isolated in the great empty space of the desert, or maybe the idea that Indians always tell stories and there they were, in an Indian’s home on an Indian rez.

Vincent sat down and closed his hand over Margaret’s on the table. His appeared to be twice the size of hers. His fingernails were dirty, and age spots had spread like shadows across his knuckles. Rico was thinking, and he wondered if Margaret was, that the last time Vincent had covered her hand with his own she had been five years old. Five. And now she was thirty-seven. So much time had vanished.

The story began: how, as Donny suspected, Vincent and Regina had run out of money in Goa and had seen a chance for easy cash, just putting a hashish seller and buyer together. But everything went bad, and right about the time they thought they’d be returning home, back to their little girl for whom they both ached, they were arrested. He spoke about the years in prison, stopping now and then for a few seconds to sip his tea. He began to sob when he described how he had searched for Regina after his release, how he discovered she was dead, had been dead for fourteen years.

Rico watched Margaret receive this news. She barely breathed, but she placed her other hand on top of Vincent’s, creating a little stack of father-daughter hands on the table; and Rico choked up because he remembered, powerfully, exactly who he was: the father of three daughters. Husband to Rosalita.

Vincent had paused for a few seconds and then added, “I’m so sorry, Margaret. I’m so sorry.” She got up, moved behind him, leaned over, and kissed the top of his head. She smoothed his scraggly hair out of his eyes and tucked it behind his ear as if he were a little boy.

Rico stared down at his own hands on the tabletop. He felt sucked into a black hole by Vincent’s story. So much tragedy made his heart convulse with sorrow, and he wondered if it would help Margaret to know all this. But he already knew the answer was yes. For just a second, he was swept back into the parking lot of Albuquerque High School where Rosalita had said, “I hope you feel better, knowing,” and he realized that he did. There were lost years for Rico and Rosalita, but many more than that for Vincent and Margaret.

“Everything is okay now, Daddy,” Margaret whispered, her voice as soft as morning light, and Rico knew that it was true.

Vincent continued his story, describing how he had arrived in New York and searched and searched for his little girl. “I even hired a detective and he came up with nothing. Nothing. He said he checked out every Margaret Donnery in the country.”

Margaret took a little breath and said, “Donny was worried about keeping custody when . . . when you and Mommy disappeared. So he just . . . well, we just used his last name from then on.” And then she added, in an Irish brogue, “To beat the bureaucracy.”

“You sound just like him,” Vincent said, and he laughed heartily. “It’s okay, honey. It’s all okay.”

The part of the story that tied them to the present moment was the story of Thomas Yazzie, who had died with a strong love for his grandmother, died blessing her. Thomas had given him a map, Vincent said, which he followed to this door, where he had remained for the last ten years and where he expected to die.

Alice was the only person in his world, he said.

Until today.

He was sixty-one years old now. Several of his teeth had fallen out. He had some kind of stomach trouble which he avoided by eating next to nothing. Four years ago, he said, he had started to paint again, nothing too taxing or innovative, just realistic desert landscapes. Alice had taught him how to pray for the well-being of a loved one, the Blessing Way, and he had prayed for Margaret every single day. But he had never imagined, even once, that his prayers would bring her to him. He was not a lucky person, had never been one. But now he was.

“I used to think I could control things,” Vincent said, as his story drew to a close. “My big lesson in life was learning I can’t.”

Rico wondered if Vincent expected an equally long story from Margaret. Rico would have liked to hear one too, but she was not inclined toward storytelling. “I never thought for one minute I was in control,” was what she said; and then added, “Tell me about my mother.” She only had Donny’s version to go by, and now she had the chance to hear more. To Rico, she seemed to be in a trance, which was probably a normal thing for a person in her circumstance, as she listened to Vincent’s love stories about her mother.

It was close to six-thirty when Rico’s thoughts returned to the mother of his own daughters, his mother and his granddaughter back in Albuquerque. “It’s getting late,” he reluctantly observed, which caused Margaret to turn to Vincent and ask, “Do you think I could stay here for a while?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Please. I can’t possibly let you go. And Alice wouldn’t have it any other way.”

So Rico and Vincent carried the two boxes from Pearl Paint inside, while Margaret unloaded the bag of dog food and searched around under the front seat of the car for the protein bars. She left two on the seat for Rico. A few minutes later, when Rico was ready to leave, they all stepped outside together.

“Should I come back for you?” he asked.

“How about in a week?” Margaret answered, and then she had turned to Vincent. “Would that be okay?”

“It’ll be a start,” Vincent said, “and Alice will be back in a few days, so you’ll have a chance to meet each other.”

Vincent shook Rico’s hand and, for no reason Rico could discern, said, “Thank you, thank you.” He stepped back inside while Margaret walked with Rico toward the car. At the driver’s door, they stopped and stood facing each other in the great silence.

“I don’t have the right words, Rico,” Margaret whispered, and tears filled the green of her eyes like spring rain.

“We don’t need any, Margaret,” Rico replied, his eyes brown and accepting, like fertile earth.

When she moved toward him he felt the kiss he had been waiting for, and dreaming of, about to happen at long last, and he leaned down to receive it. She pressed against him, her hand wrapping around the nape of his neck. She lifted her face to him. He closed his eyes and waited for their lips to touch.

Perhaps it was the afterglow of Vincent’s story, or the magical nature of deserts when the relentless summer sun begins its descent, but Rico felt suspended in a timeless place. In this place of altered time, he remembered the first moment he saw Margaret, when she had stood in the halo of light in the door of his shop, and he thought for one crazy second that she was the Virgin of Guadalupe. He felt, strongly, in that moment that she was his destiny, but now he understands that destiny is not singular, like a star falling through the night sky, but complex, a kaleidoscope with all the parts shifting, tearing apart fathers and daughters and husbands and wives, and shifting again to fling them back together.

He felt Margaret’s breath sweet on his skin, like light, and in that moment he admitted the truth: he loved her. He loved her like an ache that demands to be experienced, one that has to get better or worse over time. But he belonged with Rosalita, with Lucy and Ana and Maribel and Jessica. Margaret belonged here with her father, whom she never would have found without his help, and that was what Rico would choose to remember.

He had never experienced a more tender kiss, one that had so much not-said in it. They held each other, breathless, while the words they didn’t say swirled around them.

Rico goes over and over this story as he drives east, as tractor trailer trucks speed past him on the interstate. He feels as if he has survived a flood. He feels both sad and deeply grateful. Somewhere between Grants and Tohajiilee, he realizes that he, too, has a long story to tell when he sits down to dinner at home, where he belongs, surrounded by all his girls.

M
ARGARET
RESTS
in Alice Yazzie’s iron bed. It is too late to be wide-eyed in the extreme darkness, but Margaret cannot even think of sleep. There is no sound anywhere except, every now and then, the howls of a coyote pack far away. She wonders if there is a message for her in their voices, a story she needs to hear but cannot quite decipher. She knows she would never be here, in Alice Yazzie’s home with her long lost father just over the ridge in his, if, back in New York, she had not read in a travel magazine that coyotes run along the river, right in the middle of Albuquerque, and felt compelled to see this with her own eyes. But she realizes, as she muses, that she always imagined a lone coyote when the truth is they often come in packs. She listens more carefully to the coyotes’ call.