Walk in Beauty (20 page)

He smoked and gazed at it all. How could he ever have thought this place hostile to him? It felt as welcoming now as a mother’s arms, like the happiness of the grandmothers who had greeted him, touching his face and laughing and teasing him. He remembered some of them. That was really something. He liked it.

From where he sat, he could see people drifting in and out of the hogan, more staying now as the night grew thicker. Children particularly gathered there, and he saw Giselle with another little girl ducking to look inside, curious but reluctant. The other child tugged Giselle’s hand, but she hung back. Luke saw from her posture she wanted to go in, but wasn’t sure about it.

Again he saw Jessie in his daughter, in that edge of wariness. It plucked at him and he jumped down from the rock, crushing his cigarette beneath his boot heel. With Jessie it was too late—he couldn’t protect her and keep her safe and teach her to trust. The damage done to her by her mother was too great to overcome.

But it wasn’t too late for Giselle. He strode across the brush to her side and took her hand, speaking in Navajo. “Let’s go in. There will be stories tonight.”

Still she hung back. “What about my mother?”

He inclined his head and glanced toward the house. “We can see if she wants to come, if you like.”

“Okay.”

Together they went inside the house. Some of the grandmothers sat at the kitchen table, not talking, sharing a plate of brownies as they watched TV on a small black-and-white set on the counter.

Jessie was curled up in a corner of the living room couch, her stockinged feet tucked beneath her. She was reading the paperback novel from his glove box. For an instant, he was struck with a strong sense of her beauty, as impossible to catch as the elusive mist in the mountains.

“Hey,” he said. “We’re going out to the hogan. Do you want to come with us?”

She took a long breath and let it out on a yawn. “I don’t think so. I’m tired tonight—maybe I’ll just stay here and read.”

He nodded and cleared his throat, aware of the women on the other side of the room. “We’ll be sleeping in the truck. In a little while, I’ll get that together.”

Giselle frowned. “I want to sleep with the kids, in there.” She lifted her chin toward a bedroom at the back of the house. “Nikki said I could if it was okay with you.”

“Sure.” He spoke without thinking, then looked to Jessie for confirmation. Her gaze was lowered, showing nothing.

Suddenly she looked up and her topaz eyes were ablaze with emotion she didn’t try to hide. “Maybe I’ll just camp in here on the floor with everyone else.”

Luke lifted his chin, thinking of the youth who had made comments about her. Nothing could happen in a roomful of people, and the youth was obviously full of a swaggering bluster of the kind that was more noise than action, but he didn’t want even a ripple of discomfort while they were here. “It would be better for us to be in the truck. We’ll talk about it later.”

Without waiting for her answer, he turned on his heel and took Giselle outside.

Together, he and his daughter entered the hogan and took a place at the edge of the gathered number. Mary Yazzie made room for him, smiling at Giselle as they sat down together, Giselle in front of him, leaning against his chest.

The man talking told a story of the Holy People to his grandchildren, who sat nearby his feet, their faces washed orange by the fire. Luke felt everything flow away from him as he sat there. This, too, he knew, someplace deep inside of him. The smell of the fire and the earthen walls of the hogan and the flickering light, all enhanced with the sound of a voice telling an ancient story.

Giselle listened, rapt. Against his chin, her thick hair was cool and smelled of the outdoors. Her long, slim hands rested on his knees and a single strand of beads circled the brown wrist. He touched it; she looked up and gave him a smile, then went back to listening.

At the sudden deep wonder of her presence, Luke wanted to hug her very tightly. He resisted, smiling a little to himself. She was everything he had dreamed a child would be. Everything he’d hoped, and just as precious as he had imagined. Without children, a man was rootless.

Awash with gratitude, he whispered to Giselle that he would be back and went to find Jessie. Just once he had to tell her how he felt, how glad he was. All the rest—well, all the rest could be worked through or not. This thing, though, this gift of his child, was powerful beyond expression. Luke wanted her to know that.

* * *

Jessie was bone weary. The long night coupled with the day’s driving had left her almost breathlessly tired. All she wanted was to find a corner to sleep in.

Instead, she held the book stubbornly in her hands, trying to read. Once she dozed off and drifted for a time on the quiet sounds around her, the television in the other room with canned laughter, the snorting comment of one of the grandmothers over the behavior of the characters and the murmuring agreement of the others.

In this room rolled a soft conversation in Navajo about horses and, she thought, rodeo. It was hard to be sure. Sometimes she understood more when she was not trying too hard. Sometimes even a whole sentence would be clear in a strange way, not as if she were taking the time to translate each word into English, but as if she heard it in context in the original. Something silly usually, like, “the horse with gray spots ran fast.”

Outside, a wind began to blow in gusts, rattling the windows. This sound, too, was incorporated to her drifting doze, until one particularly violent blast slammed hard into the house and startled her. She sat up, blinking, hearing the surprised laughter of one of the middle-aged women sitting on the other side of the room.

It struck her that she was by herself once again, in a way she hadn’t been for a long time, alone in a place she didn’t know, with few people she knew at all.

She blamed Daniel. Daniel had set her up with a man she had never wanted to see again, bullied her into taking this meeting, and left her alone to deal with everything he’d dredged up.

And she knew he’d done it all on purpose. He didn’t like her to be afraid. From the beginning of their friendship, he had pushed her in little ways, all the time. He dragged her to galleries with her portfolio and made sure she followed up on the calls. He taught Giselle to speak Navajo from the time she was a baby girl, then sometimes refused to speak English at all because he thought Jessie should learn to speak the language, too.

He brought her to the reservation for the early meetings with the weavers, pushed her to talk to gallery owners, and finally insisted she take on the Colorado Springs galleries, knowing she had reasons she didn’t want to go.

Some days she could cheerfully kill Daniel Lynch.

The truth was, most of what he’d done, Jessie had needed, and when her humor was a little lighter, she was able to laugh at it. But he wasn’t always right, even if he thought so. He didn’t really understand the stakes between Luke and Jessie. It bothered her that he’d known of Luke all these years and never let on, then thrust her into a situation where she’d meet him again. She didn’t understand what had made him do all that.

And for all of it, she wished he were here. She felt lonely. She felt like an outsider, even with Luke and Giselle close by. Giselle was wrapped up in the wonder of all the children. And Luke—well, she knew she couldn’t let her guard down with him. It was just too dangerous.

Deeply thirsty, Jessie headed for the kitchen. The old women around the table peeled the skin from roasted chilies as they watched TV Only one of them even glanced up as she came into the room. Feeling self-conscious, Jessie took a glass from the cupboard and poured some water. She drank it, then retreated to the doorway to watch the grandmothers at their task.

If Daniel had been here, he would have been outside now, talking with Mary’s son, or listening to the stories the elders told in the hogan, or joining in the conversation about horses in the other room. Daniel didn’t know what it was like to be the odd man out all the time. He simply couldn’t grasp the idea of having no place to go home. His home was here, forever, no matter how far he strayed. For Jessie, there was no place like that. She was eternally the outsider.

It had been a protective habit, at first. As a child, there had been secrets she was desperate to keep hidden. She couldn’t have friends over because she never knew what her mother might do. Once, her mother had shown up at a parent-teacher conference in fourth grade, drunk and much too loud, her lipstick smeared uncertainly over her mouth. Jessie had wanted to die of embarrassment, and isolated herself even more firmly the next day against the careful sympathy of the teachers and the snickers of the other children.

Only Luke had seemed to understand her isolation. Their shared loss of mothers, coupled with that sense of being set apart from the rest of society, had drawn them together more powerfully than anything else.

When Luke had wanted to return to the reservation upon the death of his father, Jessie had been deeply jealous of the link he had to the land, to a place he could call his own, a place that was home. It shamed her now to realize that she’d wanted him to remain as isolated as she, home only with her, as she was home only with him.

She hadn’t realized the price she would pay for that. The price he would pay.

Suddenly she felt a presence behind her, and Luke’s long fingers fell on her shoulders. She turned, yearning once more for the feeling of wholeness she had known with him—only with him.

“I came in to see how you were doing,” he said quietly, squeezing her shoulder.

“I’m all right,” she replied, and now that he was here with her, she meant it. Where loneliness had been a moment before, there was relief and a hunger as vast as the canyons filling the desert. She stared at him and thought his face seemed to reflect the very land to which he’d been born...

Just like Daniel. Both of them belonged here. She didn’t. She didn’t belong anywhere, not even with Luke. She wasn’t whole like they were. She was rootless and cowardly and afraid to take chances, to be vulnerable enough to belong anywhere.

Through all the pushing Daniel had done, and through the week in Colorado Springs, Jessie had tried to be brave, to do what was required without whining or crying that she was afraid. All at once she saw herself as the fourth grader with her defenses shattered by the gentleness of teachers. She saw herself, too, much later, pulling to the side of the road to release the agonizing sorrow she felt driving away from Colorado Springs—and Luke—with a child in her belly.

If you never let people in, they could never hurt you. If they didn’t know you, they couldn’t wound you, couldn’t reach you.

Luke, after all these years, knew far, far too much.

“What is it, Jessie?” he asked, reaching for her.

Unable to speak, she whirled, grabbed her coat from the couch and bolted out the front door. The wind slammed into her, and Jessie welcomed the ferocity of it—the roaring drowned her thoughts. She tumbled into it, running face first into the violence that so reflected the tumult in her mind. Overhead, thick clouds obscured the stars, as her past overshadowed her present.

Icy snowflakes pelted her cheeks and ears, and still she ran. Ran away from Luke and memories of her mother, ran from the isolation that had dogged her all of her life and seemed as real as any witch or beast that roamed this land.

She heard Luke behind her, his voice a thin cry in the noise of the wind. In panic, she ran harder, stumbling once on a rock and righting herself before she fell.

Abruptly he overtook her, grabbing her shoulders and spinning her around. “You can’t run this time, Jessie!” he cried above the noise of the wind.

With a violent gesture, Jessie flung his hands from her shoulders. “Leave me alone!”

Fury crossed his face. “I can’t believe you lie to yourself this way.”

“It’s my life and my lie.”

“No, it isn’t. Not anymore. The minute I walked into that gallery, it wasn’t all you anymore.”

She stepped backward, breath coming hard, ready to run again at the first chance. He wouldn’t follow her twice.

He grabbed her. “Stop it, Jessie!” He dragged her into his arms, the wind whipping her hair into a wild animal all around them. “I’ve been trying to respect your limits,” he said, and his hands formed an unbreakable vise on her arms, “trying to do what’s best for you, but I’m not going to let you lie to yourself.”

Jessie saw the kiss coming and tried to duck, but he caught her face in his hand. His lips claimed hers and he was kissing her—kissing her mouth and chin and nose, her cheekbones and eyes and forehead, kissing her and kissing her and kissing her until Jessie couldn’t breathe for the fierce gentleness of it.

“Tell me this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be,” he said raggedly, pushing her hair from her face. “Tell me this isn’t the way it always was between us.” His mouth touched hers again, and Jessie grabbed his shirtfront, drinking in the taste of him, the feel of his mouth, the smell of his skin, the hard lines of his body.

As if he felt her weakening, his touch gentled and there was now only the sound of the wind and Luke’s arms close around her, his strong, lean body pressed against the length of hers and the taste of his beloved mouth on hers.

Tears flowed from her at the tenderness in him. His honest heart was so open to loving her even when he saw all her flaws, all her warts and insecurities.

She kissed him, tasting the salt of her tears, drinking him in as if enough would fill her. When he lifted his head and smoothed down the windblown mass of her hair, she looked at him, wishing she could love him back the same way, that she could forget the lessons of her childhood. As if in cooperation, the wind suddenly died for a moment.

“It’s not over,” he said into the quiet.

With a cry, Jessie wrenched herself from him. “It has to be, Luke.” Tears tightened her throat. “I’m not strong enough. Not strong enough to face down the past or face up to the future. I can’t.”

“Jessie—” He swore violently and kicked a good-size rock in his frustration. Jessie watched it tumble over and over until it came to a halt a few feet away.