I woke up screaming. My heart was racing, and I fumbled for the lights. The bedroom flooded white as daylight and the door burst open. Ex in a pair of dark green sweatpants and black T-shirt, and with a panicked expression. The light turned the windows into mirrors, and I caught a glimpse of myself huddled against the headboard. I was shaking, and I hated that I was shaking. Ex looked around the room, searching for danger.
There wasn’t any. There was nothing there but me. My phone showed 4:30 a.m. I said something obscene, and then, liking the way the words felt, I let loose a slow, steady stream of profanity, like air slowly leaking out of a balloon. The tension left Ex’s shoulders.
RAnother nightmare?” Ex asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
“Are you going to be able to sleep?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
He lifted an eyebrow and walked out of the room. I went to the bathroom, and I was still standing over the sink, washing my face and waiting for my hands to get steady again, when I heard him come back in. The squeak of the bed as his weight pressed it down. The soft, unmistakable zip of playing cards being shuffled. He was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, a legal pad and ballpoint pen beside him. The cards were a standard red-backed poker deck.
“Gin rummy?” he asked.
I pushed the hair back from my eyes. The prospect of trying to force myself back to sleep or else make it through the long hours until dawn with no company apart from my thoughts had been charmless anyway. The sense of relief left me smiling.
“Sure,” I said. “You deal first.”
We didn’t talk about it. Not about the secret thing living in my skin, not about the bad night in Chicago. Not about Eric or the nightmares or the shame that kept me from wanting anyone to know that I was struggling to make it through the day. Everything we said was about the cards or movies we’d seen when we were kids or the relative strengths of Wonder Woman and Superman. We were innocuous together. The anxiety faded slowly over the span of hours, but it faded.
It only occurred to me when the sky outside the window started shifting from black to charcoal and the distant mountains started to be a visible horizon that, with my dark hair and white T-shirt, I looked like I was trying to be a photo negative of Ex. I was up 620 points to 570 when Ex put down his cards, stretched, and yawned wide enough that I could see his back teeth.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
He touched my shoulder before he went out. Nothing more. Just a little contact, and then gone. While he banged around in the kitchen, I laid my head down on the pillow. I closed my eyes just for a minute to rest them. When I opened them again, it was almost noon. I heard the front door of the ranch house close, but then nothing, so I figured Ex had been heading outside. I got up, switched out my pajama bottoms for some blue jeans, pulled a thick gray wool sweater over my T-shirt, tugged on my boots, and headed out.
The kitchen and living room were shut down. Cleaned and everything put away the way it’d been when we’d arrived. The ashes were all gone from the fireplace. Ex’s suitcase and laptop carrier were by the door, ready to be packed out. I snagged a rubber band out of my pocket, pulled back my hair, and tied it into a rough ponytail before I walked outside.
The cold felt like being slapped. Sunlight that intense and total didn’t have a right to go with air that frigid. And it was dry enough I could feel my eyes getting gritty just walking across the wide gravel driveway.
Most of the places we’d gone, we’d rented minivans. But most of the places we’d been, there had been four of us and Aubrey had been driving. When I’d place. E met Ex, he’d had a little black sports car, a very pretty motorcycle, and a cot in a barely converted garage. Now he was leaning into a black and silver Mercedes two-seater with a roof that hardly seemed higher than my hips. Some tastes don’t change.
“Hey,” I said.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Ex said. “I’m just trying to figure out how we fit all the luggage in here last time.”
“With difficulty.”
“Yeah, that sounds right. Well, there’s still some coffee in the thermos there. I cleaned out the fridge, but we can stop in Española for some lunch if you’re hungry.”
“I take it we’re going somewhere?”
“We are,” he said. “Taos.”
I crossed my arms. “Taos?”
“Well, not in the city proper,” he said. “We’ll be going through it, though. There’s a little town about twenty minutes northwest of there called San Esteban.”
“I’m not going to see Chapin’s pet shrink,” I said.
“No. You’re not. The Catholic sanctuary in San Esteban is where Father Chapin and the others are. Their base of operations. We’re going to see them.”
“I don’t mean to be dim,” I said. “But why are we doing that?”
“While you were asleep, I figured out my Plan B. Father Chapin is … He’s the best at what he does. Better than I am. Better than those idiots in Hamburg. He and I have a history, but I thought that if I told him everything about your situation, we could ask him for help. That was Plan A, right? Ask for help.”
“That’s what I thought. So Plan B is … what? Ask again?”
Ex closed the car door. I expected it to have a deep, satisfying clump, but some hidden hydraulics kicked in at the last second, slowing the door down and settling it into place with a barely audible click.
“Plan B is insist.”
Chapter 4
Since Uncle Eric died, it felt like I’d spent more time traveling than being anywhere. I tried to count up the hours I’d spent in airplanes and airports, and came to the rough conclusion that I could have gone around the world five times. Marco Polo and Magellan were homebodies compared to me. I expected the drive north to Taos to be just another trip: a couple of hours in a vibrating metal box, ending someplace I didn’t know. Instead, going down the two-lane highway pointed out something I hadn’t realized. Pretty nearly all the places I’d been to in my long, slow survey of my domain had been cities with airports. With big hotels filled with smartly dressed people lining up to give me whatever I asked for because I’d bodysurfed in on a wave of money.
Now we drove through a handful of towns that were barely more than a few hundred yards where the speed limit went down. In a couple, I could have counted the buildings on my fingers. Twice, we passed little houses set back from the highway like some kind of suburban dimensional warp. I imagined some anonymous subdivision, thousands of identical houses with one inexplicable lot of mountain and grassland. It wouldn’t have seemed any stranger than this.
The cottonwoods by the roadside were black barked and dead looking. The names on the signs were places I’d never heard of, some of which seemed like jokes. I had a hard time believing there was a Rat, New Mexico, even if they were saying it in Spanish. Ex pointed out that there was Boca Raton in Florida, and Rat’s Mouth wasn’t particularly more dignified.
After we passed through Española, I let Ex change the road music from Pink Martini to the jazz piano that he preferred. There was more snow on the ground. At first, it only clung to the shadows where the sunlight couldn’t reach it, but every northward mile gave it more courage. By the time we were threading our way along with a frozen river to the left and sheer and towering cliffs to the right, there was as much white snow as brown earth or green pine.
I wondered what it would be like to live out here, away from the world. I had a reflexive longing for it, as powerful as hunger. To fill up the heating oil, haul in a stack of books as high as my head and enough food to get through the winter sounded like a little slice of heaven. If I’d tried it, I’d probably have been walking the fifty miles to Starbucks within the week. It was a nice fantasy. That was all.
I’d also thought that we’d stick out on the road, a gleaming back sports car twisting through the back roads of rural New Mexico. We spent about half the time from Española to Taos between a silver Lexus and a Cadillac Escalade with a ski rack mounted to its roof. The closer we got to the city, the more the traffic seemed divided. Beater pickup trucks and fifteen-year-old Saturn sedans grudgingly made way for hundred-thousand-dollar SUVs.
The car had a GPS, but Ex didn’t use it. We went straight through town and out the other side before we took an obscure fork from the main road. The road angled north and west, winding along the contours of the land. The asphalt didn’t look like it had ever been adulterated by paint. The roadside was mottled with snow and ice, but the pavement was clear. A chain-link fence rusted in the middle of a field for no discernible reason. The traffic signs we passed were crusted with old snow, the top half of the speed-limit numbers fading to gray. I didn’t realize we were getting close until Ex pulled the car to the right, eased down a short road, and killed the engine.
San Esteban spread out before us. Three streets with a few buildings on each one, like a giant had scattered a handful of gravel. About half were clapboard with pitched roofs. The others were flat-topped adobe with brown stucco and windows so deep that birds had built nests on the sills. A couple of metal Quonset huts crouched together at the north end. Once, they’d been painted in psychedelic swirls that still hung on as paint flakes. One had a gas pump out front so old it wouldn’t read credit cards.
Ex had stopped by one of the adobe buildings with the deep-set windows. At a guess the sanctuary might have been a school once. Or a nunnery. There were no signs on the building to say what it was used for now. There were no street signs. When I looked at my cell phone it was wavering between digital roam with one bar and no service. The whole town was well on its way to not existing at all. Ex put the keys in his coat pocket, took a deep ath, and nodded to himself.
“Stay here,” he said.
“Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”
I thought he smiled a little as we got out of the car. I trailed him down the walk to the blue-painted double doors. They were wood, and so worn by the years it looked like the paint was holding them together. The air bit at my earlobes and made my nose run a little. I kept my hands stuffed deep in my pockets and reminded myself to buy gloves next time the occasion arose. And maybe a scarf. A motorcycle blatted past, the only traffic sound there was. Ex knocked on the door.