Reason To Believe (32 page)

"When I see Dad helping with the ceremonies and stuff, it's like he really wants to get into it, but he's holding back. Why do you think he does that?"

It was a child-woman's question about the man who lived inside her hero, asked of a woman who had lost touch with the hero who lived inside her man.

"I think it's called an approach-avoidance conflict."

Anna sighed. "Which means?"

"I think he believes more deeply than he's willing to admit. But he's afraid of commitments."

"Why?"

"I don't know." But she'd thought about it. Lately she'd thought about it a lot. "He hardly ever talks about his mother, but you know she deserted him when he was a little boy. I don't think he wants to admit how much that hurt him. Maybe it has something to do with that."

Anna took a moment to mull the theory over. "Why would that keep him from becoming the pipe bearer?"

"He always says that all he ever wanted to be was a cowboy." More than once Clara had told him that the claim sounded like a cop-out. In truth, he was that and more, but now she wondered whether he'd ever realized it. For her part, she couldn't remember whether she'd ever told him. "And a father, of course, a good one. He'll always be your father, Anna. He'll never—"

"I know that. I know he loves me." Tentatively Anna touched her mother's hand. "I know he loves you, too."

"In his way, I guess he does," Clara admitted with a shallow sigh.

"God, you
know
he does. You should see the way he looks at you sometimes when you're not looking."

Good try, Clara almost said, but she caught herself in time and asked instead, "How does he look at me when I'm not looking?"

"Like you're the ultimate grand prize."

"Really?" She chuckled. "Only when I'm not looking, huh?"

"I can just
imagine
how he must look at you when
I'm
not looking. Probably like you're the grand prize in a
Playboy
magazine sweepstakes, huh? But I'm not about to take that kind of imagining too far."

"Anna..."

"But there's one thing I wonder about sometimes, and today, when I was thinking a lot about children—I was thinking about other kids I know and the kids you're always reminding me about who are starving in Africa, and I was thinking, yeah, they really are, and I need to pray for them and stuff—but I kept coming back to this question I have about..."

She wound down to an abrupt halt and teetered there for a moment, as though she were trying to decide whether she wanted to take the plunge off the high dive. Then, quickly, "How come you only had one kid?"

Clara swallowed audibly.

"And don't give me that old line about how I filled your lives and you were just so blessed. I really wanna know. How come?"

"I lost one," Clara said quietly, her voice gone unexpectedly hoarse.

"Lost?"

In the dark she nodded once. "A baby. I had a miscarriage."

"How?"

"I had a bad fall. Slipped on the ice. Remember? I was in the hospital overnight."

"Oh, yeah," Anna recalled. "You said you hurt your back."

"I did. I hurt my back, too. But I was..." Her voice drifted. Pins and needles invaded her throat. "I was less than four months along. We thought we'd tell you we were having a baby about the time it started to show so you wouldn't have so long to wait. And then we..." Didn't think we should tell you. Didn't want you to be sad. Didn't want to think or talk or be sad ourselves, and so we avoided...
avoided approaching...

"I kinda thought something bad had happened, but I wasn't sure what." Anna turned on her side and pillowed her head on her arm. "You guys both seemed sad, and then after that... different."

"It was a sad time, but maybe it was for the best in a way."

"What way?"

"Not that I didn't want the baby, or that it wouldn't've been..." Liar.
Liar.
"... welcome. It's just that..."

Just that it wasn't the right time? Just that Clara Pipestone's schedule has always been inviolate?

"Did it hurt? I mean, what's it like? Are there pains, like with having a baby?"

"Not as bad, but yes, there are contractions. And blood. And grief."
And guilt. Admit it. It won't kill you to admit it.

"And because you carry the baby in your body..." Clara proceeded slowly, softly, treading lightly, speaking carefully. "Because it was growing within you, you feel responsible. You think, maybe I was being careless."
Yes, that's right.
"Maybe... maybe I should have worn different shoes. I shouldn't have been carrying those books, I shouldn't have been working late, and I should have watched my step, every single step."

It was good to get the words out. They sounded a little foolish, uttered aloud, but it was good to have them out, even though somewhere deep inside her they'd left a tender, quivering little hollow behind them. It was a place that needed filling, but she told herself not to rush this time. Let it be what it was for a while. A sadness. And it was okay to let it be.

"It wasn't your fault, Mom."

It took Clara a moment to find her voice. "How do you know?"

"Because I know how you are. You worry about everything." Within the now warm cocoon, daughter's hand touched mother's again. "Accidents can happen to anyone. Anytime, anywhere. That's just the way life is."

"That's true. When did you become so wise?"

Both at once they pressed their smiles against the darkness.

Then Clara said, "It would be nice to have another child. A brother or sister for you."

"You're not too old, are you? I mean, you're gettin' there, I know, but you've got a few more good years left, haven't you?"

"I hope so." Clara considered the question seriously. "No, I don't think thirty-seven is too old."

"Well, even if you got to work on it right now, you'd be thirty-eight. So what I think you oughta do is patch it up with Dad and get goin' on it."

"Anna..."

"Here it comes," the girl quipped, as yet well versed in few areas, but she could echo her mother's standard monologues perfectly.
"An-naa.
Your father and I are no longer
getting it going,
or getting it on, as it were."

The impression was impeccable, true to Clara's inflection and character, if not her exact wording. There was nothing she could do but laugh through the pain.

Encouraging Anna to go on.

"So you mustn't think the stork might still be dropping a little Pipestone bundle on our doorstep, Anna. You mustn't get your hopes up. You mustn't—" during the pause Anna's humorous tone vanished "—hope."

"Do I sound like that?"

"Sometimes."

"What a Scrooge, huh?"

"Sometimes." Anna's voice was all hers now, as were her hopes and fears. "I've seen the way you look at Dad, too. And I know there's something you're not telling me. Like you didn't wanna tell me about the baby."

"There are some things between Dad and me that are private." Clara chose her words carefully, remembering that Anna had many friends, but only one mother. "It's not a matter of keeping something from you. It's a matter of... of issues that really don't have anything to do with you or with anyone else."

That wasn't quite true, but close enough.

"You mean the kind of stuff they talk about on 'Geraldo'? Stuff that's nobody else's business but everybody wants to talk about?"

"It's nothing I would want to..." The ice was getting thin here. "It's nothing
to
talk about, really. Our marriage simply isn't... viable."

"Come on, Mom. It's me, Anna. Not
viable,
for God's sake. I've seen you looking at all those old pictures in the albums." Her voice thickened. "And I've seen you cry sometimes when you look at them, which makes me get all choked up, too."

"Oh, sweetheart..."

Anna took a deep breath. "Some things Dad used to do really bothered me. Like when he'd get drunk and act stupid."

"He didn't do that very often, and he wasn't—"

"He wasn't mean, I know. But he'd take off, and I knew you were worried, so I was worried. I thought he might not come back. Or when he did, you'd argue. I remember finding him on the couch once and thinking there was something wrong 'cause I couldn't wake him up." There was a long pause. Then, in a voice that was a hush within a hush, "And there was this one time that I saw him on the news."

"On the news?"

"On TV. You never heard about it?"

Had to be a sports item, but Clara couldn't recall anything from his rodeo days. "What was he on the news for?"

"It was when he went to treatment, or right before. It was something about drunks getting picked up off the streets and people getting arrested for DUI, and they showed the cops making the arrests. Most of the people getting picked up happened to be Indians, of course. You'd think nobody else ever gets drunk around here." Anna paused. "One of them was Dad."

Clara was dumbfounded. "On television?"

"Yeah, it was pretty embarrassing."

"Does he know you saw it?"

"Yeah. I told him when I went to that counseling session with him for his treatment program."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Maybe for the same reason you didn't tell me about the baby."

Ah, yes, Clara thought. Protection.

"I never asked you because I was just hoping you hadn't seen it," Anna explained. "And I hoped no one would tell you. I couldn't imagine anyone coming up to you and saying, 'I saw your husband get arrested on the news,' but you never know. Did you know they print that stuff in the newspaper?"

"I never read that section." Feeling downright stupid, Clara sighed. "Another reason why the wife was the last to know."

"Yeah, well, some people read it. Then they ask their kids, 'Hey, don't you know somebody named Pipestone? Wonder if she's related to this guy who got charged with DUI.' "

"Oh, no."

"So there's no point in trying to keep secrets from kids. They find out."

"The hard way," Clara said, imagining what Anna must have seen, what she must have heard, what she had to have suffered in silence. "Just out of curiosity, Anna, whom were you trying to protect? Dad or me?"

"You were mad enough at him already."

"So—"

"But the thing is, now he's quit. He hasn't had a drink in two years. I think that's really good. Don't you?"

"Yes, I do."

"They oughta put something like
that
in the news once. Think anybody'd be interested?"

"We are," Clara said quietly. And saying it took her one step closer to believing in Ben's sobriety. That it was real and honest and, yes, good.

"Yeah." Ann rested her head on her mother's shoulder. "I'm sorry about the baby, Mom. Tomorrow I think I'm gonna pray some more for the children, and maybe for parents who've lost children. That must be hard. I don't know if I'd want to be a mother." She sighed. A deep, world-weary, thirteen-year-old sigh. "I don't even know if I wanna be a woman. God. All the stuff you gotta worry about."

"Be a girl a while longer, sweetheart. Let me do the worrying."

"Kiktapo!"
came the predawn announcement outside Clara's tent. The bass drum sounded ominous, like distant, early morning thunder. "Everybody up!"

"Oh, God." Clara poked her nose over the edge of the sleeping bag. "This body does not want to move." Or feel the cold outside her cocoon. Or put her feet into cold boots.

But her daughter dragged her up. Once the cocoon's seam was popped open, the butterflies couldn't flutter around fast enough, white breath puffing as they piled on the clothes. Clara made a mental note to dedicate at least one thankful prayer for the invention of central heat.

Dawn light faded in, filling the distant horizon, slowly supplanting misty gray. Dark shapes moved about the corrals, gray silhouettes against the sluggish brightening. Clara noticed the three horses—her bay mare, Anna's paint, and Ben's stout chestnut—already saddled and hitched side by side to a corral rail.

"Pejuta sapa,"
Ben said, greeting her with a steaming paper cup. Literally it meant "black medicine."

"Exactly what the doctor would order this morning," Clara said, letting the steam warm her nose before she took the first sip.

They stood together, side by side like the horses, close enough for the commingling of misty breaths and thoughts in the way of two who'd been one for a long time. After a night spent together, followed by a night in the same room and a night spent apart, they sensed each other's hangovers, unconsciously tuned in to the lingering daydreams and the haunting night musings. It was like old times. The
good
old times, before the guilt, before the loneliness.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Mmm-mm. You?"

"Waste
Chicago."