Day of the Dead (3 page)

***

Maria Elena tried
hiding out in silence now, avoiding Señora Duarte’s question and piercing gaze with a simple shrug rather than a verbal reply.

“You’re wrong there,” the señora said, pulling her reading glasses down onto her sharp nose. She glared through them at a stack of papers on the desk in front of her. “You really are lucky. It would seem you have a patron,” she continued, “a benefactor in the States who has arranged for you to come live with him and his wife and go to school.”

Maria Elena’s jaw dropped. Once she had loved school. She had wanted to grow up and become a teacher, but the last time she had actually attended school had been three years earlier in the orphanage. In Colima, there had been a few classrooms, fewer teachers, and even fewer books, but at El Asilo Seguro no one bothered to pretend that they intended to reform or educate their charges. Maria Elena’s heart beat fast at this first tiny glimmer of hope. Perhaps her long-abandoned dream was possible after all. It was strange that she hadn’t been consulted about these arrangements in advance, but still…

“I have examined the papers,” Señora Duarte went on. “Everything appears to be in order. You are to catch the bus from Hermosillo to Nogales this afternoon. The ticket is right here, as is your passport and identification card. You’ll find some money here as well, enough so you’ll be able to buy food and water for your journey. You will be picked up at the bus station in Nogales and taken from there to your new home.”

Maria Elena’s head teemed with questions. She had heard some of the older kids talking about passports and identification cards. Legal ones were very difficult to come by, and forged ones were obtainable only by those with enough money to pay the price. What would happen to her if she reached the border and for some reason her paperwork wasn’t in order? And how would she know this person—this kind stranger—who was supposed to meet her in far-off Nogales?

“But…” she began aloud.

Señora Duarte’s disapproving frown silenced her. “Certainly you wouldn’t be so foolish as to turn down such an opportunity!” she declared.

“No, señora,” Maria Elena murmured in agreement. “I would not.”

“Very well, then.” Señora Duarte picked up the papers and stowed them inside an outside pocket of the knapsack, which she then zipped up. “Here,” she said, handing it over. “You can’t travel in your uniform. Go see Señora Escalante. She’ll give you something suitable to wear.”

As directed, Señora Escalante had outfitted Maria Elena with two sets of someone else’s cast-off clothing—one to wear on the bus and another to change into later. The skirt and blouse were too small; the shoes far too big. They flopped up and down when she walked. By the time she had walked through the bus station and found food to eat, Maria Elena had painful blisters on both heels. But none of that mattered. Her feet might be sore, but her heart was light. She was out. She was free. She was on her way to a new life.

At the bus station, she wondered briefly what would happen if she tried to trade the ticket she had—the one to Nogales—for one that would take her back to Chiapas.
But who would be there if I did go home?
she asked herself. She knew for sure that her father was dead. Most likely, so were her mother and brother. After four years, who would be left to take her in or even care about her?

In the end, she boarded the bus for Heroica Nogales.
Where will I end up?
she wondered as the blurred landscape unfolded outside the moving window. Along the way, the world outside that window became more and more barren. More and more empty. That emptiness bothered Maria Elena. It reminded her of how empty her life was. It made her wonder what her new life would be like. Who were these kind people—this man and woman—who were taking a stranger into their home? Were they hoping for a daughter to replace one they had lost, perhaps, or were they looking for a servant—little more than a slave—who would work for them for next to nothing?

Other girls had left El Asilo Seguro in similar circumstances. A year earlier, Maria Elena’s friend from Colima—Madelina—had been adopted out and had gone north as well—north to what they all regarded as the Promised Land, north to the United States. There was a graffiti-covered map of North America on the wall outside Señora Duarte’s office. After Madelina left, Maria Elena had often stared at the map of the United States. It had to be a huge country, and she puzzled about where in it her friend might be living. Now she wondered if she might find Madelina again. Years from now, would they somehow meet somewhere in that strange new country? Perhaps they would sit together in some nice place—a fancy restaurant, possibly, with brightly colored tables and umbrellas outside—and laugh and talk about how much their lives had changed since the old days in Colima and in Hermosillo.

Maria Elena took the papers out of the zippered pocket and studied them one by one, but they told her nothing. She had purchased some food from a stand outside the bus station, and she had eaten it all before she ever boarded the bus, savoring the wonder of eating food she had chosen for herself rather than having it slopped carelessly into a bowl by the resentful woman who had parceled out stingy servings of bad-smelling food to the inmates at El Asilo Seguro. There, Maria Elena had always gone away from the table still feeling hungry. Today she felt the strange sensation of being full. Lulled by contentment and the motion of the bus, she fell asleep.

She spent three hours on the bus—three glorious hours—where no one told her where she had to go or what she had to do. When the bus finally reached the station in Nogales, Maria Elena was awash in a combination of anxiety and anticipation. But then she saw him standing there on the platform, watching for her. Catching a glimpse of her face at the window, he smiled and waved. In that moment she recognized him. He was someone who had come to El Asilo Seguro the summer before, a kind doctor who had treated the children there, many of whom hadn’t seen a real doctor in years, if ever.

Señor the Doctor,
Maria Elena whispered to herself.
That is good. That is very good.

Weak with relief, she grabbed up her knapsack and raced for the door.

Two

APRIL 2002

Under a clear blue April sky, Brandon Walker swam his laps one after the other. He didn’t bother about timing them. At age sixty-one, he was no longer interested in setting speed records, and he didn’t count laps, either. What he wanted was to maintain his endurance, so he swam until he couldn’t swim any longer, then he stopped. He was a little winded, but not too bad. The heated water in the newly installed lap pool was kind to his joints, especially his right hip and left knee, both of which had been giving him trouble recently.

When he had gone in for his annual physical, Dr. Browder had hinted that it was about time to discuss the possibility of hip- and knee-replacement surgery. Brandon was considering the possibility all right, but not very seriously. He’d get around to having joint replacement surgery about the same time someone perfected the art of human brain transplants. In the meantime, he’d get along as best he could without complaining. If he didn’t gripe about it, maybe he could keep his wife, Diana Ladd, from setting another doctor’s appointment.

The cordless phone he had carried out to the patio rang with the distinctive ringer that said someone was calling from the locked security gate at the front wall. Had he been home alone, he would have had to scramble out of the pool to see who was there and let them in. Fortunately, Diana was home and in her study, locked in mortal combat with the stalled beginning of her next book. Convinced she would welcome any interruption, Brandon kept swimming. Besides, the visitor was probably UPS or FedEx bringing some new missive or assignment from Diana’s New York publishers. Most of the mail, packages, and e-mails that arrived at their Gates Pass home near Tucson these days were part of Diana’s ongoing business. Years after Brandon’s failed reelection bid for the office of Pima County sheriff, he had adjusted to being retired and mostly out of the loop. Diana Ladd was still working hard; Brandon was hardly working.

His wife came out through the sliding door onto the patio trailed by Damsel, a now three-year-old long-eared mutt Diana had found as a shivering, starving, and abandoned pup outside their front gate on a chilly Thanksgiving morning two and a half years earlier. Brandon and Diana had agreed that, with their daughter Lani off at school, the last thing they needed was a puppy. In the end, however, sentimentality had won out over good sense. Their Damsel in Distress—Damn Dog, as Brandon often called her, since she was usually underfoot—was now a well-loved and decidedly spoiled member of the family.

Walking toward the pool, Diana beckoned her husband to climb out. They had been married for more than twenty-five years, but in his eyes she was still as beautiful as she had been that stormy summer afternoon some thirty years earlier, when he had knocked on the door of her mobile home in a teachers’ living compound near the Papago village of Topawa. He had gone there looking for Diana’s first husband, Garrison, who was a suspect in a homicide that then Pima County homicide detective Brandon Walker was investigating.

By the time Brandon arrived at Diana’s house, Garrison Ladd was already dead of what would be ruled a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but neither Brandon Walker nor Diana Ladd had known that then. The detective had sat across from her in the living room of a threadbare single-wide mobile home, asking tough questions about her husband’s doings and whereabouts. As he did so, Brandon was struck by Diana’s delicate beauty; by the hard-won poise with which she answered his troubling questions; and by her unwavering loyalty to her jerk of a husband, even though by then she must have suspected some of what had gone on behind her back.

That very afternoon, as Diana Ladd struggled to cope with the looming disaster that was about to engulf her life, Brandon Walker had longed to take the distraught woman in his arms and comfort her, but he hadn’t—not then. Married at the time, Brandon had managed to maintain his professional distance then and six months later, as well, when a profoundly pregnant Diana Ladd had worked determinedly to see to it that her dead husband’s accomplice, Andrew Carlisle, was sent to prison. Six years after that, when Carlisle was released from prison and came stalking Diana, Brandon Walker had once again been thrown into Diana’s orbit. During those intervening years, a divorced Brandon Walker had looked at a few other women and even dated one or two, but none of them had measured up.

Brandon remembered how someone somewhere had once asked him if he believed in love at first sight. Naturally he had laughed off the question and brushed it aside as if it were too inane to bother answering, but deep down he knew better. He had fallen in love with Diana Ladd the moment he saw her. And he loved her still.

“What’s up?” he asked as she came toward the pool, holding out a towel.

“You may want to go in the back way to dress,” she said. “Somebody’s here to see you.”

Brandon took the proffered towel and scrambled out of the pool. “Who is it?” he asked.

“An old Indian lady named Emma Orozco,” Diana replied. “She’s using a walker, so I left her in the living room.”

“She’s on a walker and drove here by herself?”

“No. Her son-in-law brought her. He’s waiting out front. I offered to invite him in, but she said no, he’d stay in the car.”

“What does she want?”

Diana shrugged. “Beats me. Something about her daughter.”

Once out of the water, Brandon found the morning air far chillier than expected. He hurried to the sliding door and let himself into the bedroom. After dressing he made his way into the spacious living room, where a wizened Indian woman, her face a road map of wrinkles, sat primly erect on the leather sofa, one gnarled hand resting on the crossbar of her walker.

“Ms. Orozco?” Brandon asked tentatively, taking a seat opposite the old woman. “I’m Brandon Walker.”

She turned to look at him and nodded. “Your baskets are very nice,” she said.

Brandon glanced around the living room. Diana’s collection of Native American baskets, many of them finely crafted museum-quality pieces, were arrayed around the room with wild extravagance. They had been part of the household furnishings for so long that Brandon Walker no longer noticed them.

“Thank you,” he replied. “Some of them were made by Rita Antone, a Tohono O’odham woman who was once my wife’s housekeeper and baby-sitter.”

Emma Orozco nodded again. “I knew
Hejel Wi i’thag,
” she said. “Her nephew is the one who sent me to talk to you.”

Despite years of living around the Tohono O’odham, the Desert People, Brandon was still struck by the lingering influence of old ways and old things. Rita Antone had been dead for fifteen years, yet on the reservation she was still
Hejel Wi i’thag
—Left Alone. As a little orphaned girl named Dancing Quail, Rita had been given the name Left Alone in the early part of the twentieth century, long before Emma Orozco had been born. No doubt stories about
Hejel Wi i’thag
and her odd loyalty to an Anglo woman named Diana Ladd were now an enduring part of reservation lore.

Rita Antone’s nephew, retired Tribal Chairman Gabe Ortiz, and his wife, Wanda, were longtime family friends. In the Walker/Ladd household, Gabe was usually referred to by his familiar name of Fat Crack—
Gihg Tahpani
. Not wanting to betray what might seem like undue intimacy, Brandon made no reference to that name now.

“How’s Mr. Ortiz doing?” Brandon asked.

“Not so good,” Emma Orozco replied.

This was not news. A few months earlier, Fat Crack had been diagnosed with diabetes. A student of Christian Science, Fat Crack had, in middle age and with some reluctance, answered a summons to become a Tohono O’odham medicine man. Once aware of his diagnosis, Fat Crack had refused to accept the services of the Indian Health Service physicians and “get poked full of holes.” Instead, he was dealing with his ailment—one so prevalent on the reservation that it was known as the Papago Plague—with diet and exercise, along with an unlikely regimen of treatments that was as much Mary Baker Eddy as it was Native American.