18.
I’D UNLOADED A COUPLE OF BOXES AT OUR NEW LITTLE adobe when a tall tie-dyed fellow in a cowboy hat sauntered into our yard wanting to know where I’d come from and why.
“Just need to lay low for a while,” I told him.
He nodded. Evidently, that was the right answer around here. “I live up the road,” he said. “You can call me Tex.” He had an underground bunker, he said, “For when the shit hits the fan.” He scratched his beard. “I have a kind of a sixth sense about people. I can tell if somebody’s friend or foe and you’re friend, I can sense that, so you just scramble on up to my place and I’ll hide you in my bunker if it comes to that.” He winked at me. “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not comin’ after you.”
Yes. This was the place for us.
THE SINGLE MOTHER who lived around the corner took a few more days to appear, skittish, on my porch. She wore an Adidas running suit, said she’d noticed Sol building a chicken coop in the backyard and did we have chickens?
“Not yet,” I told her, “but we have chicken dreams.”
She squinted at me. “Are you Ariel Gore?”
I felt a sudden panic at being found. “Yes?”
But she wasn’t a process server. “Oh my God-Ariel Gore. I’ve read all your books. You look just like your author photos. I thought you lived in Los Angeles.”
“No,” I confessed. “I live here right now. But, you know, I’m trying to lay low.”
She nodded, held my gaze. “Me, too,” she whispered. “An ex-husband situation.”
“I understand,” I promised. “Say no more.”
INSIDE, I TOOK a random book from the shelf. I needed a new oracle. All Things Are Labor by Katherine Arnoldi. I fingered the gray cover and asked, “What am I doing here?” I opened to a random page, pointed to the middle and read, “What we are looking for is something small that we can use. This is all we need, a little bit, something that happened by chance, something common like a broken piece of glass, some string, a book of matches: just a small thing where there is nothing but what is here to find.”
My oracle. I didn’t know what it meant, exactly. Except that I should pay attention.
THE LOCAL NEWSPAPERS called that winter mild even though it was the coldest of my life. Cold and easy. The snow glittered, dusting our little adobe as we settled in.
The first dawn of spring came and Sol bought baby chicks from San Marcos Feed Store out on Highway 14.
Maxito squealed as he fed them under their heat lamp. “My chickies getting so big.”
Sol drove me to the train station every morning and Maxito to preschool.
The girl I’d let blindfold me in Albuquerque winked at me from her seat across the aisle.
I winked back. But I never missed the 5:34 train again.
In my advanced fiction workshop at the university, we discussed the elements of story. Alexandre Dumas said that to make a novel, you need a passion and four walls. To make a passion, Wallace Stegner added, “you need people in a bind, a situation full of love, hate, ambition, longing, some tension that cries out to be resolved.”
What cried out to be resolved here?
This was supposed to be a book about a typical caregiver – a daughter with children of her own trying to help her terminal if eccentric widow-mother through a final year. But now here we were mid-narrative, more than a year gone by, and no one had died and I didn’t have a mother anymore and the semester was wrapping up.
Soon I wouldn’t have a job.
SOL BROUGHT MY coffee out onto the front porch at sunrise, set it on the low table. “Do you think you’ll ever see your mother again?”
I leaned back into the big equipale chair and it creaked the way it did. It seemed like a crass question, but maybe a reasonable one. “I guess not,” I said.
Sol sipped her coffee. “How do you think we’ll find out when she’s dead?”
I didn’t know how we’d find out. “We’ll find out,” I said. “Everyone loves to spread news of death.”
My cellphone buzzed just then and I cringed the way I always cringed then, but it was just Abra, a 20-something acquaintance from Portland, texting to say I’m moving to Santa Fe to go to the Native Arts College, If you still have that trailer, can I rent it?
I texted Abra back: Sure.
SO ABRA MOVED into the six-by-ten turquoise trailer. She was just a few days out of the hospital with a new type 1 diabetes diagnosis, but she smiled bright like any kid getting ready to start college. Over coffee on the dusty porch, she pushed her hair out of her face, looked at us and around, out across the high-desert street and beyond to the naked hills and she said, “Aren’t we the Californian, Dominican, Native Alaskan diabetic, gay-straight alliance? I hope there aren’t any neo-Nazis out here.”
So many people to hide from.