The last paragraph surprised her. She had not realized that was her plan until she typed it out, but as she sent the email, it felt right. More right than anything had felt in a long time.
Felix was out on the balcony, watching the plaza, and she joined him, scratching his ears. The wedding had moved to a reception, perhaps. Across the way, one of the shops had strings of white Christmas lights around the windows. Music rose into the quiet night, gliding guitar and a woman’s smoky voice, swirling out into the warm air and drawing Tessa down
to the plaza. She looped her camera around her neck and leashed Felix for the sake of politeness.
Felix snuffled around the base of the ancient, spreading tree, while Tessa simply let the place fill her up—the juxtaposition of a whole store devoted to gourmet salt a few doors down from a forties-style drugstore, complete with soda fountain and rubber tomahawks, across from a hotel where movie stars sipped aperitifs and made big deals right next to a plaza where Comanches had stolen seven women and an old hippie-commune-turned-major-organic-farm sold fresh produce.
What an intriguing place.
Tessa unleashed Felix and let him explore the daily dog blog around the legs of park benches and bushes while she experimented with low-light shots of the neon in the drugstore window and signs. She shot the square of light visible over the pass-out bar at Vita’s café and turned toward the blaze of the movie theater sign:
CHIEF
. The letters were white, with neon blinking in tubes of pale pink and green and blue. She could hear the buzz of it clearly in the night, along with crickets and faint music. Lovers wandered by, and tourists, and people on their way to dinner. Felix explored. Tessa disappeared into the camera.
Maybe it was the meditative state or the visit to the river the other day, or finally just being here long enough, but all at once the door to her memory opened, and, instead of seeing the jumble of puzzle pieces scattered in a pile, she saw whole scenes. Again she saw the angry blond woman hurrying them across the square, and now she saw who made the other part of “them”: another girl, with long hair pulled back in a braid, crying because she was in trouble. They were both in trouble, she and Rhiannon.
Rhiannon.
Feeling airless, Tessa sank down on a bench, keeping her eyes on the gently radiating blinking sign. Felix came over and sat heavily on her foot. Absently, Tessa stroked his head in thanks, letting the memories pour through her.
For years she’d remembered a pink tricycle. Now she saw it was decorated for a contest in the plaza. Tessa rode it dressed in a red and white bathing suit and red cowboy boots, her dog trotting on a leash beside her. Brenna.
Tessa looked down. Felix looked just like Brenna.
Do you remember now?
“I think I might.”
Nearby was another trike, this one blue and decorated with tissue-paper roses. They had looked and looked for blue tissues and finally found some, and they wrapped them with green pipe cleaners.
Uneasily, Tessa let the blips reel out. Little things. Other children, a group of them playing jacks in a tower room with windows all around. Cold, shivering as it snowed outside and an adult lit a fire.
Whirling by like one of the snowflakes was Tessa’s father, his hair very long and dark down his back. He was doing magic tricks with a circle of children around his feet, and Tessa was laughing as he pulled a coin out of her toe. It made her ribs ache somehow. Even then, he’d been the greatest dad around.
The angry woman, hurrying them. Again.
The fire and running, squeezing Rhi’s hand, the whole forest burning, filling the air with smoke, running and running, holding hands, and then a blank, and water filling her mouth, a scream and a cry, and surfacing, crying: “Rhiannon!”
Enough. Tessa leapt to her feet, gasping for breath as if she were drowning right now, this very minute, in the darkness of the plaza. Her heart was racing, pounding so loudly she
couldn’t hear over it at all, and her vision fizzed at the edges, as if she would faint. She felt like she might throw up, fall down, die of terror.
Some reasonable part of her brain said,
Panic attack
.
Tessa felt Felix’s cold nose against her palm, a focal point that helped her come back into her body, out of her head. She told herself it was only in her mind, that she could breathe, even if she didn’t do it until she fell over and had the wind knocked out of her. Thinking of Felix’s worry if she actually fainted made it possible for Tessa to take a slow, long breath in, let it go. Ragged at first, then more smoothly.
Good God.
Shaking in reaction, she decided maybe a margarita was in order. It was not her drink of choice, but only an idiot drank shots of tequila at her age. Bending over, she kissed Felix. “Good dog. Thank you.” Felix licked her nose.
As she sat down over her margarita in the courtyard of the hotel, she realized one thing that was off-kilter: Her memories were not those of a four-year-old. The tissue-paper flowers. The trikes, the dog. Not four. More like five or six, like Vince’s daughter Jade’s age.
And it was beginning to seem as if she’d had a sister. Which meant that Sam had lied to her.
Why?
Natalie sometimes liked sleeping at Grandma’s house, even if she didn’t like to eat there. It was nice to be close to town, and there were four bedrooms with clean, shiny floors you could slide on in your socks, and pretty views of the mountains, and Grandma’s big family room where they watched movies together. Natalie had a room of her own here, too, and an altar
that Grandma let her set up, even though she said something like religion was the drug of the masses, which Natalie didn’t get until she realized Grandma didn’t mean Mass but big groups of people.
They had eaten at the diner so late today that Natalie didn’t need anything else, so tonight she skipped the sodium-free organic soup Grandma opened. She took Pedro and went into her room and started to pray the rosary, just like her mother taught her:
“Hail Mary, full of face, the Lord is with thee …”
Pedro slid down beside her, resting his back against her. She loved him best of all the animals she had ever met. Distracted, she stretched out on the floor beside him and scratched the place on his chest that he loved so much, right below his collar. His eyes were exactly the same color as the afternoon sky, and sometimes, it seemed you could see into another world in there. His pointed ears seemed to always have something to say, twitching, leaning, or, like now, going soft so that the tips flopped over like an envelope.
He also had the softest fur in the universe, like a pillow, and she scooted closer to put her face on his side, breathing in the dusty dog smell of him. She wished there was perfume like dogs. She would put it in her bed so she could pretend pillows were dogs.
The idea made her giggle. Dog perfume! Pedro turned and delicately licked her face, right across the eye. It felt nice. She slid down flat on the floor and he gently, thoroughly washed her face.
Jade came barging into her room without knocking, but for once Natalie didn’t care. “Hey, Nat, wanna come watch movies with us? Grandma said we can pick whatever we want and make some popcorn and she’ll even watch with us!”
“Yay!” Natalie jumped up and generously asked her sister, “Which one do you want?”
“I don’t care. What do you want?”
“You don’t want
Cinderella?”
Jade liked the part about getting a dress made from flowers.
“No, you can pick.”
“Even
The Sound of Music?”
Natalie loved the singing children. “Only up to the part where they sing ‘So Long, Farewell.’”
“Okay.”
For once it seemed like everything would be just nice. Disaster didn’t strike until it was almost time for bed. In between, all four of them—Grandma, Natalie, Jade, and Hannah—piled onto Grandma’s big corner couch with all its fancy places to put drinks. They made bowls of popcorn, and Grandma let them have some Sleepytime tea without any sugar. Sasha sat by the couch, all alert, and waited with happy, bright eyes for them to throw her kernels of popcorn.
“That dog lives for popcorn,” Grandma said.
“She lives for food,” Natalie said.
“Just like you,” Hannah said. If Jade had said it, Nat would have got mad, but Hannah was only telling the truth.
“At least I like
good
food,” Natalie said. “Sasha eats cat poop!”
They all cracked up at that. They sang along with the songs from the movie—even Hannah, who didn’t really know the words, and Natalie was so, so glad that the lady at 100 Breakfasts had stopped her from stealing the salt shaker, because if she had it in her drawer or her pocket tonight, it would be like a great big giant noise roaring over everything until she got used to it. Instead, she got to just lie here on the couch and sing along with her sisters and eat popcorn.
Just before the song when all the children sing good night for the guests at the party, Pedro whined to get outside and do his business. Grandma got up to let him out and came back to sing the last song, then used the remote to click off the TV. “That’s it, girls. Time to brush your teeth and get to bed. I’ll come hear prayers in a few minutes.”
Outside, Pedro yelped, really loud. Nat felt it right in her gut and ran to the door. Grandma grabbed her from behind and hauled her away. “Stay right here. You don’t know what kind of animal he might be tangling with.”
She flung Natalie away, practically throwing her, and flipped on the porch light so she could see. Natalie ran to the window to peer out, putting her hands to the glass to block the inside light. Her heart was pounding.
“No coyotes, no coyotes, no coyotes,” she chanted. One of the boys at school last year said coyotes could sing your dog out to play, tricking them, and then they would tear out their throats.
But there was Pedro, racing for the door, making a weird, high yelping noise. He streaked up to the porch and Grandma opened the door. He barreled in, then came right over to Natalie, making a deep, sad whine that made her know he was hurting.
“Oh, no!” she cried, grabbing him by the ruff so she could look at him. “He’s got long stickers all over his face! And one is right by his eye!”
Grandma swore and knelt down beside him. “Porcupine.” She looked at her watch. “Get my phone, Jade. He’s probably going to have to go to the vet.” She sucked air over her teeth, touching the one by his eye. “That’s really close.”
Natalie blinked back tears. Pedro was crying, waiting for
them to do something, and it made her heart feel like somebody was holding it in a tight fist. “Why can’t we just pull them out with tweezers?”
“Because there’s a little hook on the other side of the quill, and we don’t want to break it off.” She rubbed Natalie’s knee. “He’s going to be fine, honey, don’t worry.”
Natalie leaned in and kissed him on the neck, where it wouldn’t hurt him. “You hear that, Pedro baby? You are going to be okay.”
Jade rushed the phone over and Grandma called the vet, who promised to meet them at the office in ten minutes. She also tried to call Daddy, but he must have been high in the mountains, because he didn’t answer. Grandma left a message.
“Get your shoes, girls, and a blanket. We have to take Pedro to the doctor.”
Natalie was the oldest, so she got to help, sitting by Pedro. The big dog whined all the way to the vet, which wasn’t very far, but it seemed long because of the scariness. She leaned her head against him, rubbing his throat and his side, trying to make him feel better. He kept shaking his head and sneezing, making a sound like a horse, and finally Natalie started to sing the songs from
The Sound of Music
. Jade joined in, nodding, putting her hands on his other side, and he seemed to feel a little better at least.
The vet let everybody come in while she looked at Pedro, and then she took him away to get an X ray, though Grandma said she didn’t really know why.
When the vet came back, she had a strange look on her face. “We’ve been seeing this dog since you got him, haven’t we?”
“Yes. What’s wrong?”Grandma asked.
She shook her head, rubbing her hands along Pedro’s back, down his legs. “His pelvis was obviously shattered at some
point. But I—I don’t know how he could walk after being damaged that way.”
“No, he’s fine.”
“He is,” she said. “There might be something wrong with the machine, but I’d like you to bring him back and take some more pictures with my assistant, if you don’t mind.”
“Is he okay?” Natalie asked.
The vet knelt down. “Yes. He’s great. He’s going to be your crazy dog for the next ten years if you take good care of him. Keep him away from porcupines.”
“And skunks,” Jade said, petting his tail. “My friend’s cat got sprayed by a skunk, and it was
bad”.’
“I’m sure it was.” She shook Grandma’s hand. “Bring him in to me, if you will. No charge.”
In her small room, Annie took a nap after work and awakened just before full dark. She puttered around her apartment, tidying things up for the morning, making herself some supper. Her legs were tired, not used to the long days in the kitchen yet, but it seemed like a good thing to make some kind of food for herself. Feeding herself the things she liked, the way she fed other people what they liked, as Vita put it. It made her happy. She wasn’t a good cook, not yet anyway, but it was easy enough to make peanut butter crackers and chicken noodle soup, which was something that made her feel happy and content. As the soup heated, she made five saltine-and-peanut-butter sandwiches, then set the table using a place mat and new cloth napkin she’d bought on sale for four dollars at the ritzy kitchen store on the plaza. A lot of money, but not if you had to buy only one, and since there was only her, she didn’t have to worry about anyone else. One of the counselors at prison used
to tell the girls that: “Try to worry about just yourself. What do you want? What would make
you
happy?” Not some man, which was why most of them were in jail, anyway, for trying to please some man. Most of them were so used to doing for everybody else they didn’t even know where to start. They practiced imagining how to spend ten dollars on themselves—what would they buy?