South of Elfrida (19 page)

Sephara said, “I couldn't tell you about my son. I was ashamed.” She introduced her three-year-old, Jorge. Jorge had a mop of black hair. He had fine bones and was the colour of frothy Mexican chocolate. He had a space between his teeth, laughing lips, and the light-hearted attitude of a pixie.

Maria cited issues with tenants in Yuma as her excuse to Iosif for her three-day weekends. She went back and forth to Albuquerque. Over lunch at a McDonald's, Maria learned that Sephara's mother had become ill with breast cancer and died when Sephara was fifteen, and that her father, disapproving of her tattoos and her lifestyle, left her when he moved to Los Angeles to marry again. Staying in an abandoned building with friends her age, she quit school, worked as a waitress. Later she went back to night school to finish her degree and, instead, became pregnant.

During another visit, Maria learned that the father of Jorge was probably Mexican, from a good family that wouldn't acknowledge a child out of wedlock. Then Sephara lowered her head and confessed that she did not know for sure.

On her third visit, Maria rented a car, and she and Sephara and Jorge drove to the suburbs to a big grocery store with fresh vegetables and good-quality meat. Coming out of the store, pushing the cart loaded with good food, Maria glanced in the grocery store window. “Stop, look,” she said to them. “Take my hand.” Maria, Sephara, and Jorge lined up and examined themselves. They looked related. The child had Maria's unruly, curly hair. He had his grandfather's eyes.

Sephara needed radiation treatments. Maria flew them back with her to Tucson and put them up in her mother's house, with some trepidation. A young woman who had lived on her own in squalor might turn her mother's beautiful home into a mess, but Sephara was respectful and kept it clean and shiny. She was a good cook. The house was close enough to the university, where she went for radiation treatments. Hodgkin's lymphoma was treatable and her prognosis was good. Maria arranged for Jorge to begin preschool in the neighbourhood.

She bided her time. On the anniversary of her mother's passing, in Iosif's big house with the view of the Catalina Mountains, she said to her husband, “I expect a miracle today.” She was hosting a remembrance for her mother at Mission San Xavier del Bac, and many volunteers, as well as Theresa Sanchez's friends, would be in attendance. Sephara and a friend of Maria's would be there also, with Jorge, to introduce the child to his grandfather. Maria felt very hopeful, because on her side she had two saints—her mother and Saint Francis—against one man, his soul imperilled by deception.

At the mission standing in line at the saint's image, Maria asked that Iosif be with her. “Please,” she said. “For me.” When it was their turn to touch the carved wooden image, Maria placed Iosif's soft hand on the heart of the saint. “Why didn't you contact your daughter?”

“I never had a daughter. It is a great sorrow.”

Maria's smile faltered. The third lie. They moved quickly out of the line and moved without touching each other from the church. Outside the sky was the lilac blue of the Sonoran desert on a winter afternoon. Against it, Iosif's forehead looked sunburned.

“Please. She was wayward,” he said. “Nothing more,” he said.

Maria's love took flight at his words.

She tilted her neck to gaze at the ornate wooden doors of the church and its two white domes, and the doves flying overhead. She turned again and noted a pilgrim climbing the hill to a shrine. Near the top she saw a palm tree, and behind it, in the glittering rays of the sun, she saw her mother.

Maria turned her body again, this time toward the parking lot. She spotted Jorge waving from the back window of the car. Sephara, in the passenger seat, waited for Maria's signal.

Maria stared at the lids of her husband's downcast eyes. She lowered herself to catch his gaze, tilted her head to search for the light, saw darkness.

His soul was lost, unrepentant; she had nothing more to say to him. She stepped back and walked way, leaving him standing where he was. If his eyes turned to follow her, she did not feel them on her back. Within her mother's radiance, she strode toward Sephara and the little Jorge, laughing with joy to see her, the two a testament to her mother's belief that without a doubt,
sin duda
, miracles live.

The day started with Barb forgetting to connect the sway bar between the Explorer and the travel trailer. Along the way, she would be arrested and then released from a holding cell.

Barb had set off early, leaving a woodsy little campsite by a river near a train track. The train roared by all night and shook the camper. She couldn't wait to get out of there. On the highway north of Coeur d'Alene, as the road descended, the travel trailer began to dance and Barb muttered, “Damn lot of wind out there.” Other drivers slowed and changed lanes. Seeing them falling back and scattering away reminded her of the missing sway bar. “Good Christ!” Barb hollered. “Are you a fucking idiot?”

Apparently she was. Through the rear-view, Barb saw the travel trailer wobbling from one wheel to the other. Were she to slam on the brakes, it would torque off the hitch. Painfully slowly, she applied the brakes until the trailer was under control. The shoulder was narrow where she managed to pull off the highway, a flimsy guardrail between her and the abyss on one side and speeding traffic on the other. Drivers honked. “Piss off!” Barb yelled.

That evening she would be in a stranger's house, in the kitchen of a defunct pig farm in northern Idaho, sipping Jack Daniel's and taking bites of Alice Cavender's homemade, hot-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies. Barb would choose to stop at Cavender's Pigs and
RV
Storage (just in time for Alice, as it turned out) only because her ten-year-old grandson, Rodney, collected ceramic pigs. Cavender's Pigs had seemed like a destiny, as she was out wandering Idaho roads looking for a place to store her camper instead of home by the fire in British Columbia. Because, well, because earlier she had been arrested at the border.

“Wait.”

Barb was heading back to the Explorer after using the border station washroom. Snow fluttered around the Canadian customs officer, a kid with a blaze of red on his cheeks, standing between her and the Explorer.

“Why didn't you claim the trailer?” he asked.

“What?”

“The trailer,” he said.

“You just waved me through.”

“The licence plate.”

Barb had parked so the plate was visible from the station, hadn't given it a thought. The plate shouted
ARIZONA
. She squinted to give the impression she was trying to see better and marvelled over it as though she had never laid eyes on it before, then swiveled her gaze back to the officer. “Wow, who knew? The trailer isn't mine, technically.”

The uniformed young man with his curly blond hair looked like an older version of Rodney. For his birthday, she had brought Rodney a set of porcelain salt-and-pepper shakers on her visit to the family in Flagstaff, Arizona. She said the collection would be worth money someday. Louis, Rodney's fourteen-year-old brother, had scoffed. “Hey, little bro, there's more money in music than pigs.” Louis's original plot (when he was about seven) was to take over the world and get everyone's money, but that plan had evolved to becoming a world-famous
DJ
, preferably at a club, so he could have a fan base.

Barb opened her mouth to tell this amusing little story to the officer, but the young man's gaze remained intense. He was like a hunting dog at point. Come to think of it, he would not be interested in the story. She said, “The trailer is my brother's. His tow vehicle gave up the ghost. I'm doing him a favour.” The blots of colour on the young officer's cheeks became brighter. He didn't step aside or wish her a good day. She played with versions of a theme, creating a friable groundwork, searching for the answer that would let her slip through the cracks. “My brother's going to fly to Spokane, rent a car.”

Hearing herself talking and him not budging or answering, Barb realized that bad news was on the way. She wanted to change her mind, turn around, skip the border crossing, and announce she'd forgotten to visit a friend in Idaho. And leave. But like a lot of things in life, there was no turning back. He held out his hand. “Keys, ma'am.” She dug the keys out of her jeans pocket and placed them in his palm. He unlocked the car door and gestured for her to open the glove compartment.

She riffled through papers until she found the Arizona registration from the glove box, knowing exactly what it said—the name of the owner, the name of the lienholder. It looked like her brother owned the camper, but it was actually hers, as lienholder; the registration was waffly at best. The plan she and her brother had hatched had to do with vehicles purchased in the States that the provincial government would impose taxes on when the vehicle was brought into Canada.

“Come with me.”

People camping a night here, a week there, don't care about accuracy or truth; it was possible, just possible that lately Barb had fallen out of reality and into lying. She made up things about herself and her life. Why not? No one asked questions. In the end, all conversations among travellers on the road came down to God's will, unpredictable weather, and the vagaries of their adult children.

At the candy machine outside the double doors of the customs building, she stopped. “Do you mind? I'm starving.” She traded the officer two
US
dollars for a toonie, and he murmured that she had lost a bit on the transaction. His honesty made her think she might be all right. Or would she? Some comeuppance felt at hand, for all her rash behaviours, her easy lies. At the counter she gnawed hunks of the Snickers bar while he asked more questions about ownership, and busily filled out forms.

“My brother wants to come up to fish,” Barb said. More lies, a stuck record.

She felt the excitement of the listening staff.

Ten bottles of good California wine, unclaimed, concealed in the camper, were about to go down the drain, the most expensive pee stop in her history.

A female officer in tight pants and boots appeared at her side. “Come with me.”

She trundled along a corridor, with Barb following. The officer opened a cell, ushered her in.

“My, they're taking wine seriously these days.”

The cell door clicked shut, locked. There was one high window, a cedar bough visible through it. Along the wall opposite was a narrow counter with a phone on it. The floor was concrete. Barb sat on the slats that made a narrow bench and began to shake as though she was freezing.

Outside, car doors opened and closed, trucks lumbered by.

Hadn't she herself driven slowly, gratefully, past some poor bastard in the midst of a car search, his stuff all over the ground while he stood by looking ashamed or angry or guilty—oh, everyone is guilty of something. Barb sat on that slat bench and imagined the gratified, relieved glances of her fellow citizens, safely through the border and on their way home, and she wondered, as well, if her neighbours would recognize the car and know who it was being held, suddenly a criminal.

Eager for a search, half the station would be out there, pawing through her things—gloved hands unscrewing jars of cream, handling the silverware, rummaging through her underwear, eyes reading scraps of writing, noses sniffing cooking herbs. It was a travesty to imagine her little life—her bed sheets, clothing, laundry, shampoos, towels, pots, and pans—spread on the ground for everyone crossing the border to see. Everything exposed.

She could conjure a story, a realistic but simple story about the Smith & Wesson they were going to find: she bought the pistol at a gun show, or a relative loaned it to her, or a man, a friend, gave it to her. Those were possibilities about the gun's provenance. She was a woman travelling alone. Any American would encourage her to carry self-protection, and, in fact, had. But a disturbing thought tickled the surface. What they believed, or didn't believe, didn't count. Wouldn't count. Facts complicated things—the truth mattered less than the fact the gun had crossed a line in the soil.

“Do you need to use the washroom?”

“What?” Barb pulled her jacket from her face, sat up. Blinked at the overhead light.

“It's been two hours,” the female officer said.

In the washroom the officer said, “I'm sorry about the mirrors.” Barb drank some water and peed, and her bottom—she could see it too—her own little old baggy butt was observed through mirrors. They did have mirrors in jail washrooms; Barb made a note to tell the boys.

A little later, the officer said, “You have a lot of things in the trailer, but the good news for you is that the gun was stuffed in your T-shirt basket by the bed instead of up front in the cab, within reach.”

The door locked. Barb looked at the cedar bough, snow making little piles, building, falling through. She said, “Gun? What gun?”