Sweet Water (35 page)

Just before dusk, Mama’s prostrate form was spotted by a combination of a chopper and one of Lanny’s mounted cowboys. They found her unconscious but alive. She was covered with bruises and lacerations, was badly sunburned and ant-bitten. Marisa fought back tears, what her sixty-six-year-old mother had endured looming huge in her mind. EMTs administered emergency hydration with IVs and the ambulance blared up the road toward Odessa with Mama as its passenger.

Terry estimated she was ten miles and half a dozen arroyos from Agua Dulce. Astonishing facts. To cover that much ground, she had to have been walking in the blistering sun for almost the entire time she had been out of touch and out of sight.

Marisa and Terry followed the ambulance. So did most of Agua Dulce--Tanya and Jake, Bob, Mr. Patel, his wife and his two children. Lanny had been good enough to offer Aunt Radonna a ride. The only Agua Dulce resident missing was Ben.

The bedraggled entourage filled the hospital’s small waiting room, stark in its plainness, as the last rays of daylight crept away and dark slithered in. Bob and Mr. Patel and his family stood guard over a humming cold drink machine. Mrs. Patel, dressed in a red sari and a ton of gold bracelets, and the two Patel children, dressed in shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops, took seats away from everyone else. Tanya and Jake sat side by side in armchairs, holding hands. Lanny sat in the corner out of the way with Aunt Radonna, who continued to weep and sniffle.

Since the incident with his daughters, Lanny had kept his distance from the café and Marisa assumed his children had won the battle for sovereignty over the Winegardner millions. Lanny was still friendly enough when she saw him, just distant. By now he surely must have heard about Marisa’s affair with Terry.

 
Terry left her side to find a men’s room and Tanya came and plopped down beside her. “Were you and Terry really in a hotel in Albuquerque?”

Marisa looked at her, unwilling to share.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were sleeping with him?”

“I’m not sleeping with him,” Marisa lied, unable to label the way she felt in his arms as sleeping with him.

The hairdresser frowned and made a noise in her throat. “Whatever. I’m not criticizing. He’s a cool guy. Why wouldn’t you screw him?”

Stung again by Tanya’s bluntness, Marisa grunted. “Cut it out, Tanya. The whole place might hear you. Besides, I’m in no mood for this.”

“I saw how he looked at you the very first time I met him in the café. You should hang on and run with it. See where it goes.”

 
All I know is I want to see where we can go.

 
His words scrolled through Marisa’s memory. The whole damn world wanted to see where they could go. To her dismay, where they could go was becoming muddier by the minute. “Have you and Jake made up?”

The hairdresser smiled. “Things are pretty good. It’s kind of been like it used to be, when we first got together.”

“Does he know you had a thing with Ben?”

“I didn’t do that. I just said I might ‘cause I was so pissed off at Jake.”

“You should be careful what you say. Someone might believe you.”

“Whatever. I wouldn’t leave Jake to hook up with a drunk. Been there, done that. Jakes’s treated me good. He’s the best guy I’ve ever been with. He ain’t Superman in bed, but he cares about things, you know? And I owe him.”

Marisa read Jake Shepherd as being a salt-of-the-earth kind of individual. If he didn’t care about things, would he have married a prostitute? “What do you owe him?”

“He saved me. And it couldn’t have been easy on him. I’d been using for a long time.”

Somehow, learning Tanya had been a drug user came as no surprise. Marisa didn’t bother to ask how long or what, but the good opinion she already held of Jake Shepherd climbed several notches. “You’ve decided to go with him to Arizona, then?”

“I don’t know. He’s still looking for something closer to here. A guy at the Four Sixes told him their horse wrangler needs a hand. Jake’s real good with horses.”

A doctor in blue scrubs came into the waiting room and asked for Marisa. Except for Aunt Radonna and Lanny, every Agua Dulcian in the waiting room gathered in a half circle around Marisa. The doctor gave the disparate group a quick once-over before going into his report. He had installed Mama in the ICU, suffering from dehydration, exhaustion and exposure. He asked for the name of her neurologist. Before he finished, Terry had returned and stood at Marisa’s back, his palms resting on her shoulders.

Again, the doctor’s puzzled gaze roved over the group. “Are these folks all relatives?”

“Uh, no. And yes.”

Her answer evidently didn’t convince him. He gave permission for only Marisa to see Mama and only for five minutes, which the nurse let stretch to ten. If Mama knew she was there, she didn’t acknowledge it.

When Marisa returned to the waiting room, Terry had marshaled the group and all were in various stages of leaving. Only he and Aunt Radonna stayed behind. He had told Lanny he would give Aunt Radonna a ride back to Agua Dulce.

They claimed three uncomfortable seats in the drab waiting room, prepared for a vigil. Radonna remained quieter than Marisa had ever seen her, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. She had on a wrinkled T-shirt, dirty jeans and rubber shower shoes that showed her red toenails and chipped polish. In the too-bright overhead light, her face looked puffy, not just from crying but, Marisa suspected, from the alcohol binge that had gone on for at least a day and a half. With her makeup gone, furrows of wrinkles showing on her cheeks and neck, mascara smudged beneath her eyes, she looked like what she was--an aging barroom babe. No longer a party queen. She looked pathetic and even older than Mama. Marisa’s anger at her began to seep away.

She couldn’t say as much about the guilt that had been steadily growing within her from the moment Bob’s phone call came to the hotel in Albuquerque.

She got to her feet and paced in a circle around the waiting room, the soles of her running shoes squeaking in sharp little clips against the tiled floor. During the afternoon she had sweated through every garment she was wearing. The clothing had dried and felt stiff on her body, and smelly. Only now did she notice the room temperature must be close to that of a meat cooler. “I hate this,” she muttered, flipping a glance at Terry, who sat slumped in a chair, his elbows resting on the plastic arms, one ankle cocked across his knee.

He looked calm and cool. No worse for the wear, even after tramping through the desert for hours along with the other searchers. His naturally wavy hair was only slightly out of place and he needed a shave. Still, he looked civilized. She couldn’t keep from thinking of herself compared to him. She had grown up living behind a store and café, had moved from there to a cheap closet of an apartment in Dallas. And had never lived in anything different before she returned to Agua Dulce and a singlewide mobile home. He had lived on a farm and in a nice house in Odessa.

Her mother had made a meager living selling simple food and souvenirs. He had grown up with well-educated, well-to-do parents.

Marisa thought about the tawdriness of her tattoos and the fact that she didn’t even have a decent dress and shoes to wear out to dinner in a good restaurant, the kind of restaurant where she would feel more at home in the kitchen than in the dining room.

No matter what words came from his mouth or what he did to help her, Marisa had been kidding herself, believing someone like him could ever have a true, special, enduring interest in someone like her.

The devil jumped up on her shoulder and reminded her he was no novice in the bedroom, either. No doubt his past included a long string of women and, for all she knew, so did his present.

She felt shame, for giving in to the erotic episode in the café kitchen when her mother was in such a desperate place, for stealing time in the Pecos Belle’s apartment and leaving Mama alone in the mobile home. If she were honest, on what grounds could she condemn Aunt Radonna?

She felt like a hypocrite looking askance at Tanya when she could have stopped all that had happened between herself and Terry if she had simply said no that very first night in the café. And now, her carnal desire for him had put Mama’s life in jeopardy.

His eyes pinned her and he patted the empty seat beside him.

She trudged to the chair. He placed a warm hand on her back. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, as if he knew the reason for her agitation.

She didn’t like having him—or anyone—read her mind. She had done plenty that was wrong. Number one, she had put herself ahead of a helpless person who depended solely on her for care and sustenance.

“I know she’s your mother, but you don’t owe her your every waking minute. Her illness isn’t your fault.”

Marisa heard the words, but they had no impact. She stared at the room’s metal and gray plastic furniture, its painted metal doors, its battered phony wood sofa table, its empty blue Formica-clad receptionist’s desk--all hard planes and cold surfaces, just like her life had always been. Here, she was witnessing her future. Empty hours in hospital waiting rooms like this one for an unknown number of days, months, years. Her own blood relatives had no more than a token amount of time for their dying sister.

All of the softness and happiness of just twenty-four hours ago began to blur. How could she expect Terry or any man who was a stranger to sustain an interest over the long haul? The whole damn situation was unfair, but there it was.

Marisa knew what she had to do. She had to whip herself back on track, had to forget fun and games with Terry, had to return her focus to getting all the money she could raise out of the contents of Pecos Belle’s. She looked away, a knot in her stomach. A few seconds passed before she could speak. “Mama’s all I have, you know.” She didn’t look at him, wondering if those words might hurt him.

He didn’t reply.

“I’m going to stay here,” she went on, deliberately focusing her eyes on the double doors that led to the hospital corridor. “If you don’t mind, you should take Aunt Donna back to Agua Dulce. She needs to get her car and get home.”

“And what about you? You can’t stay here. There isn’t even a sofa. You can’t sleep in one of these chairs.”

“I’m staying. Please. Take my aunt back to Agua Dulce.”

Chapter 26

The waiting room’s glass entry doors opened with a swoosh and Marisa, her aunt and Terry all three startled. Aunt Rosemary strode in, followed by her husband, and charged straight to Marisa, her eyes sparking, her dyed-to-maroon hair protecting her head like a football helmet. “What the hell happened?” she demanded,

Breaking into sobs, Aunt Radonna met her sister. “Oh, Rosemary. It’s all my fault. I should’ve—”

“You were drinking, weren’t you?” Aunt Rosemary gripped Aunt Radonna’s shoulders and gave her a little shake. Her blue glare snapped from Aunt Radonna to Marisa. All three of the Rutherford sisters had similar blue eyes. “If you needed someone to stay with Raylene, you should’ve called me. Radonna doesn’t know how to take care of anyone. She can’t even take care of herself.”

Uncle Duane spoke up. “Rosemary—”

Her head jerked toward her husband, not a hair moving on her red lacquered do. “Shut up, Duane. This doesn’t concern you.”

Aunt Rosemary’s husband shoved his hands into his pockets and rolled his eyes.

Marisa hadn’t heard from Mama’s older sister in months. Without rising from her seat, she looked up at her aunt and opened her palms. “Who knew where you were?”

“What kind of remark is that? Somebody always knows where I am.”

“Well, you haven’t exactly been attentive to Mama or me, either.”

“I’ve been busy, I’ll have you know. But I’m here now.” Aunt Rosemary’s hand went to her hip and she walked over to the double doors that opened out into the hospital corridor. “Where’s that doctor? I’ll talk to him, then we’ll make decisions about Raylene and—”

“We will not!” Anger, heretofore suppressed, drove Marisa to her feet. “In the first place, there’s no decisions to be made. And in the second, even if there was, I wouldn’t consult someone who hasn’t even called to ask about her sister in over six months.”

“Why, who do you think you’re talking to, young lady—”

“Ladies, ladies.” Now Terry was on his feet, patting the air with his palms. “This is a hospital and the patient’s in bad shape. Let’s just cool it, okay?”

Aunt Radonna, now crying again, dropped back into her chair.

Marisa shifted her gaze between the two women. “You two don’t seem to get it. This isn’t the damn measles we’re talking here. You sister, my mother, is dying. An inch at a time.” Hot tears sprang to her eyes as all that had happened through the day landed on her again. “Doesn’t that mean anything? Can’t you stop fighting long enough to—”

“Oh, don’t say that, Rissy.” Aunt Radonna blew her nose on Lanny’s monogrammed handkerchief. “I can’t bear to think about Raylene...leaving. She used to take care of me, when I was just a little girl.”

“I took care of you,” Aunt Rosemary barked, tapping her collar bone with her thumb. “Raylene couldn’t take care of a house cat. Look at how she raised her daughter.”