Zigzag (31 page)

“What?”

“We know we'll never be a normal family again—you didn't need to remind us,” Iris said, glaring at me.

I sat up on the edge of the bed and tried to make sense of what was going on. “First of all, I didn't even know they were coming—they just showed up. And second, if you think what you saw yesterday was a ‘normal family,' you're blind. I haven't seen my father in three years, I barely know his wife, and I've never laid eyes on David before. How is that normal?”

Marsh wasn't sure; he looked at Iris for the answer. “It's normal because your father isn't dead,” she said. “You don't have any idea how we feel, and you don't care either.”

Suddenly I was really sick of Iris, sick of her rag-mop hairdo, her whiny voice, her skinny barfing body, and her crappy attitude. Where did she get off, anyway?

“You, my dear cousin, have no idea how
I
feel, or how I've
ever
felt, for years and years. Whereas, I have been doing my damnedest all summer to care about the two of you. But right now, I have to admit, I don't care. Not one little bit.” I stomped over to my open duffel bag to see if I could find something to wear that wasn't filthy.

Iris tried to hide her shock that I was actually fighting back—I guess she thought having a dead father would easily trump anyone else's emotional baggage. Marsh, however, took a few steps back from his sister, no longer sure whose side he was on.

“At least you
have
a father,” Iris said sullenly, trying to win back her advantage.

“Look,” I said. “You had a father for twelve years; Marsh had one for almost ten. I barely had one at all, even though now that I'm practically grown up he wants to get to know me. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but my relationship with my father is certainly nothing to brag about and nothing for you to be jealous of. I know you're unhappy, Iris, but I wish you'd stop trying to blame it on everybody else in the world!” I grabbed a T-shirt and the least crummy pair of shorts I had, and slammed into the bathroom.

When I came out they were both looking glum, although Iris was quick to put a polish of anger over it for me.

“I don't have any clean clothes,” I said. “Make a pile of anything you want washed and I'll stay here and do laundry this morning while you go see your mom.”

“Ha. You probably just want to stay around here to flirt with Cesar some more.”

I did have an ulterior motive for not going along, but not the one Iris suspected. I thought Dory ought to talk to her daughter
without me around for Iris to deflect her anger toward. Marsh would be there, of course, but maybe it would be good for him to know that he wasn't the only one having problems since their father's death.

I was relieved to see the two of them ride off with Savannah—we definitely needed a break from one another. While the clothes were spinning in Sukey's machine, I sat outside under a cottonwood tree and looked at some magazines that were lying around for the guests; they were full of beautiful pictures of the New Mexico landscape. I was examining a particularly gorgeous photograph of a place called Ghost Ranch when Cesar came up behind me and looked over my shoulder.

“That's my favorite place around here,” he said. “Georgia O'Keeffe lived there for years—you know, the painter?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Didn't she paint big flowers?”

“Yes, but she also painted those mountains. Do you want to go see them? I don't have to work this afternoon. I could take you—and the kids, of course.”

I grimaced. “The kids probably won't be speaking to me at all by then. But I'll ask them. How far is it from here?”

“Not too far—an hour and a half. Worth the trip. I'll show you O'Keeffe's paintings of the place. We've got a book.”

We sat looking at the paintings until it was time for Cesar to pick up the kids at the hospital. I loved the colors in her work, the pinks and reds and almost blacks, and the curvaceous lines that made the hills seem to be living, breathing beings. I was looking forward to seeing the place she'd lived and painted.

I was folding our clothes and stacking them in piles by each suitcase when I heard the car doors slam. Iris headed straight to room 5, like a tiger who'd sniffed out a deer.

“You told her! You promised me you wouldn't, and you did!”

“And you told me you were going to stop throwing up. And
you didn't.” I was carefully smoothing the wrinkles out of one of Iris's tiny shirts, but she grabbed it away from me.

“I'll never trust you again!”

I sighed. “Iris, will you cool it with the self-righteousness for a minute? You're in trouble here and somebody has to figure out what to do about it. It's not a secret I could keep; your mother had to know.”

But Iris was not giving in that easily. “You've got her all crazy about it now. She says I have to go see another shrink and a nutritionist and God knows who else as soon as we get home. I knew she'd go apeshit.” She threw the clean shirt on the floor and stomped on it with both feet.

“Well, of course she's upset. You're doing something dangerous, Iris. You've got to stop it!”

“I can't stop it! Why can't you get that? And it's not about wanting to be skinny either. You think you're so smart, but you don't even know why I do it!”

“Do
you
know why you do it?”

“Yes! Sometimes. I don't know exactly, but I know that sometimes I just can't stand to have food inside me—it makes me feel . . . soft and . . . weak. I don't need food the way other people do.”

“Listen to yourself, Iris. Everybody needs food. You can't continue to live without food!”

“Maybe I can and maybe I can't.” She tilted her head up defiantly.

If I'd had a moment or two of regret about breaking her confidence to Dory, it was gone now. Iris needed more help than I could possibly give her.

I told her I was going to Ghost Ranch that afternoon with Cesar; she and Marsh were welcome to come along if they wanted.

“Marsh and I have plans. Tony is letting us ride Eleanor and
Ruby. So you can go off with your new boyfriend and do whatever you want to. Don't let
us
get in your way.”

“Oh, Iris, you know he isn't my boyfriend. I barely know him. Can't you at least
try
to be a civil human being?”

Her answer was to walk out the door and slam it behind her.

I guess it was on the drive
to Ghost Ranch that I realized I'd have to come back to New Mexico again; it wasn't just a wish—it was a necessity. The shapes and colors were as vivid as Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings: thick blue sky, swirling white clouds like ghosts themselves, dark gnarled trees standing out against the reds and pinks of rugged buttes. As we were driving we watched black clouds gathering in the distance just beneath the fat white ones. They seemed to sit on the tops of the hills.

“Storm in that valley,” Cesar said. “Keep watching—you'll see lightning.”

Sure enough, the zigzag of white electricity cut through the dark clouds again and again. I couldn't stop looking. “Will the storm come here?” I asked.

“Nah. It's just a local storm. You see them a lot in the afternoons in the summer. They look like a big deal, but they run through fast. In twenty minutes it'll be clear over there again.” And, of course, it was.

As we turned into Ghost Ranch, I couldn't keep my jaw from sagging open. We were in a long valley, surrounded on three sides by glorious red mountains. “How can you want to leave this?” I asked Cesar. “I've never seen anything so beautiful in my life.”

He parked the car and gazed at the view with me. “I know it's beautiful, but I've seen this beauty so often, I want to see a
different beauty. I want to be as surprised by something as you are by Ghost Ranch.”

That I understood. I was beginning to see that if you tried to put yourself in another person's head, their feelings often did make sense. Unless they were Iris.

Cesar insisted we climb the trail known as Chimney Rock, which ended on a high plateau from which you looked across at two large “chimney” rock formations, and beyond them Abiquiu Lake and the Pedernal, a dark butte also painted often by O'Keeffe. Cesar knew a lot about the geology of the place, but I found it hard to take in much information—I was too overwhelmed by what I was seeing. It seemed to me it would be hard to live here and
not
want to paint.

By the time we climbed back down we were starving. Cesar opened the trunk and took out a cooler. “There's no place to eat around here, so I always come prepared.” We sat at a picnic table and he pulled out two tuna salad sandwiches, two ripe tomatoes, a carton of Sukey's potato salad, a dozen chocolate chip cookies, and a jug of lemonade.

We polished off the sandwiches and tomatoes without pausing to breathe. Cesar smiled at me. “Okay, I think we can slow down now. Nobody's going to steal our cookies.”

He made me laugh, which I hadn't done all that much of this summer. But what I appreciated most about Cesar was that, when he asked you a question, he actually listened to your answer.

“So, Iris is mad at you because you have a father and she doesn't?”

“Something like that. She's mad that her father died and she blames the world for it. I think she's really mad at her father for dying, but she knows that's ridiculous.”

“Maybe mad at herself, too,” Cesar said. “I think that happens—people feel guilty that they didn't appreciate the person enough while he was around.”

I nodded. “That makes sense. Anyway, I'm in the path of her fury at the moment, even though my dad's been AWOL for most of my life.”

“You sound kind of angry yourself.”

“Do I? I didn't think I was until I saw him here, with his wife and son. I guess I didn't know what I was missing. It would have been nice to have him around when I was young. Now I think I definitely missed something.”

Cesar handed me a cookie. “I can't imagine growing up without Roland around to give me grief.”

“Your dad's great!”

“Yeah, he's a good guy. I guess what I really can't imagine is growing up with only one other person around. Just you and your mom.”

I nodded. “It can be intense sometimes. But my best friend, Franny, comes over a lot, too. And, of course, Chris.”

I'd filled Cesar in on the basics of my relationship with Chris on the ride down in the car. Now he stared at me like he was putting together a puzzle. “Most of your relationships are intense, aren't they? Your mother, your cousins, Chris.”

I thought it over with a big bite of potato salad. Cesar didn't know Franny, yet, but she could have fit into that lineup, too. “I guess you're right. I started out thinking I didn't give a damn about my cousins—I thought they were snotty and unfeeling. But now I've gotten all knotted up in their dramas. It's easy to like Marshall, but I actually like Iris too now, even though she makes me so crazy sometimes I'd like to shake her. I guess I admire the ways in which they're both trying to be strong, even though it backfires on them half the time.”

“You're a strong person, too—that's why you admire it in them.”

“Me?” I laughed. “You wouldn't think so if you'd seen me at
the beginning of the summer, after Chris left for Italy. I thought I couldn't live without him.”

“So, this summer has made you strong, too.”

Maybe Cesar was right. I still missed Chris, but not with that terrible ache. I missed him in an excited way now because I knew that when we met again we'd both have stories to tell each other, we'd both have changed.

“Will you stay together when your boyfriend goes east for college?” Cesar asked.

“That was the idea,” I said. “But I guess you never know what's ahead of you. I'm not so worried about it now.”

He smiled. “Maybe you'll come back to New Mexico for college.”

“Maybe. But you'll be far away by then.”

“Maybe,” he said. We smiled at each other in the nicest way, as if we were making a promise that the future, when it arrived, would be fine.

F
inally Dory was getting out of the hospital. Savannah planned to drive us down around noon to pick her up, so we spent the morning making a welcome home cake, with Sukey's help. All the Bolton-Packers had seen Marsh's drawings by then and flooded him with compliments, so it wasn't hard for Sukey to talk him into decorating the top of the big flat cake. She offered him a selection of icing colors in little tubes, but left the picture itself up to him.

I think Iris was as worried as I was that he'd do something gross or gory—the upside-down van, maybe, with our bodies hanging out the windows—but since we weren't speaking I didn't know for sure. However, Marshall came through. His picture, only slightly squiggly due to his unfamiliarity with the use of icing as a drawing tool, was of the front of the Black Mesa Motel, the pink adobe walls with the pots of white lilies and a string of red chili peppers hanging by the front door. On one side of the building stood the cottonwood tree that shaded our room; on the other side he'd drawn in the three of us, standing in front of the horses, Eleanor and Ruby. When Sukey saw it, she ran for her camera, saying she'd never be able to eat it unless she captured the image on film. It was a masterpiece in sugar.