Owen's Daughter (6 page)

When Peter went off to Gallaudet University, Margaret had moved to Santa Fe herself, though out in Eldorado, the planned community some referred to as “the White Reservation”—she couldn’t afford the historic district like her aunt. They talked on the phone twice a day, met often for lunch, and had season tickets to concerts at the Lensic Theater. The first indication anything was wrong was her fall, nearly three years ago. Margaret drove to the hospital and met Ellie in the emergency room at Christus St. Vincent’s. The young doctor who attended her had taken Margaret aside while an RN put in an IV and prepped her for surgery.

“Your aunt’s leg will mend in six to eight weeks,” he said, “but she shouldn’t live on her own anymore.”

“What do you mean?” Margaret asked.

“The stage she’s in, she’ll require professional home health care.”

“I keep an eye on her,” Margaret told him. “I just live fifteen miles away.”

“I’m afraid I’m not making myself clear,” the doctor said, frowning. “Breaking her leg was a blessing. It could have been much more serious. Does Alzheimer’s run in your family?”

“Alzheimer’s?” Margaret echoed.

“You haven’t noticed any signs that your aunt is altered?” he asked as if Ellie’s life were a hem that had been taken up.

“Her hearing isn’t the best, and from time to time she gets confused, but I haven’t noticed any significant changes.”

“Come with me,” he said, and pulled aside the privacy curtain. “Ellie, how are you feeling?”

Her aunt had a smile for everyone. “I’m just
dandy
,” she said, her voice taking on a sarcastic edge. She pointed to the lab tech, who was organizing the vials of blood he’d taken. “Except for that vampire who’s stealing my blood.”

The doctor smiled back. “You’re in the hospital, Ellie. Do you remember breaking your leg?”

The smile widened, then faltered, and Margaret could see the bafflement on her aunt’s face. “Yes, you’re here to deliver my firewood. It’s about time. Don’t bring any of that, that . . .” Her words trailed off. “Pinecone! Like you did last year. It’s terrible. Spits and burns like crumbled papers.”

“I’ll make sure I don’t,” the doctor said. “Can you tell me what year it is?”

“Of course I can. It’s 1986.”

It was 2007.

“Who’s our president?”

“Clint Eastwood. He’ll never be a Ronald McDonald.”

“Thanks, Ellie. I’ll check in on you later.”

“I like my firewood stocked neatly, young man,” she called after him. “Or don’t expect a tipper.”

Back in the hallway, tears brimmed in Margaret’s eyes. How had she missed this? “What about those new drugs?” she asked the doctor. “I’ve heard they help dramatically. Can’t we try her on those?”

He looked away before answering. For once, the ER wasn’t busy. Two male nurses were popping rubber bands at each other. “We can try, but I expect she’s too far into the disease for there to be any appreciable improvement. I’ll order a brain scan, but you need to start planning for her release.”

“What should I do?”

“I recommend assisted living, with a long-term facility attached.”

“She can’t go home?”

“Not without help.”

“What if I move in?”

He shrugged. “That could work for a little while, but believe me, I know dozens of folks who were sure they could handle it and couldn’t. It’s exhausting. Your aunt can’t be left alone, even to sleep. I’ll have you follow up with a neurologist. Right now, I have other patients. There will be someone taking her up to surgery any minute to pin those bones back together.”

Later that week, while Ellie recovered in the hospital, Margaret straightened up her aunt’s house and looked after Nash, Ellie’s massive orange Maine Coon cat, quite possibly the most aloof animal that ever lived. Margaret brought along her dog, Echo II, worrying how Nash might react, but he couldn’t have cared less. He prowled around the house, crying, as if that would bring Ellie home. As Margaret gave the house an overdue cleaning, she found half a sandwich tucked under the cushion in her aunt’s favorite chair. Dirty dishes in the cupboard. Inside the broom closet, she discovered a wad of newspaper tucked behind the mop. Unfolding it, she realized they were crossword puzzles. In some, the blanks were filled in with spidery handwriting, difficult to read. Everyone’s handwriting got worse over the years. Some of that could be blamed on computers. But whatever her aunt had written in the blanks weren’t letters. It might have been shorthand, that outdated form of note taking, but she couldn’t prove it. As she cleaned, Margaret remembered how Aunt Ellie was unable to reach for a certain word in their phone calls over the last year or so, and not all that often, but often enough, she’d confused Margaret’s voice with that of her sister, Margaret’s mother, who had been dead for decades.

Margaret rented out her Eldorado house and moved into her aunt’s full-time. For as long as Ellie was in the wheelchair, they did fairly well, but when Ellie began to get up and wander the house in the middle of the night, Margaret had to hire a nurse. Things muddled along until Ellie’s occasional incontinence turned into a daily occurrence. Whenever the nurse tried to change her diapers, Ellie became combative.

After a black eye, the nurse quit, and Margaret found an assisted living situation for her aunt, spending so much money a month that Margaret wondered if she needed to put her aunt’s home on the market. But given the economic downturn, the house wouldn’t fetch anywhere near what it was worth, if it sold at all.

Ellie lasted about two and a half years after her diagnosis before dwindling away.

When Margaret began forgetting words, having trouble with occasional numbness in her hands and feet, and tripping, she was terrified. The Internet search she shouldn’t have done had nothing but dire predictions, and yes, those symptoms could happen to early-onset Alzheimer’s patients. Margaret was fifty. She wasn’t ready to have this happen. After insomnia settled in, she called Dr. Silverhorse, who had been Ellie’s neurologist. Like a lot of Santa Feans, he was a transplant from the East Coast. Once in Santa Fe, he’d changed his name from Silberferd to Silverhorse. He sported a long silver ponytail and a silver bola tie at his neck, but he still wore his yarmulke. “I want you to run every test there is,” she told Dr. Silverhorse. “I don’t care if my insurance balks at it. I’ll pay for it. Just run them all so I don’t have to drag this out.” And then she bit back the sob that threatened to escape her throat.

“Oy,” Dr. Silverhorse said. “There is a saying, Margaret, about borrowing trouble. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?” But in the end, he relented. That was two weeks ago. Now she was waiting to hear her results.

Staring at the Navajo rug, she realized that had she paid attention all this time, she might have recognized the work of her old friend, Navajo weaver Verbena Youngcloud. Verbena’s no-nonsense advice and friendship had sustained Margaret through difficult times. After Margaret left Blue Dog, the artist community where she’d lived until moving to Santa Fe, they’d drifted apart. Now, Margaret didn’t even know if the Navajo weaver was still alive. The rug had all of Verbena’s trademark idiosyncrasies: brown-and-beige storm clouds in each corner, the margins featuring giant water bugs. In one corner, there was a whirling log no bigger than a pinky finger. The whirling log design was a part of the Nightway chant, a Navajo ceremony. As such, it implied good luck to the Navajo but was generally mistaken for a swastika by anyone unfamiliar to the culture. Weavers had pretty much stopped including the whirling log, but Verbena Youngcloud was stubborn, and it made Margaret smile to remember her. It had to have come from Crystal Trading Post, because they always snapped up Verbena’s work. She’d ask Dr. Silverhorse where he bought it.

Memories of her life in Blue Dog flooded her mind. Peter was twenty-five now, married, teaching at Gallaudet, a university for the deaf. But just after his fifteenth birthday, Peter had had an accident. Margaret had organized a family trip to Mexico, even though Ray wasn’t keen on it. At the time, she’d thought he didn’t want to leave L.A. because of all his pending movie deals. But he’d agreed to go for three days, so down they flew. One afternoon, she’d decided to take a walk, shop a little, and meet up with Ray and Peter for dinner. But when it started raining, she’d come back early and heard her husband on the phone, saying, “I love you with all my heart.” Since the words were not directed to her, this had come as a surprise. They’d had the fight of the century. From the adjoining room, Peter had heard them screaming at each other. Distressed, he’d run out into the rain and was gone for hours. Apparently, he’d jumped into a pool filled with stagnant water and hit his head. He’d contracted meningitis, nearly dying.

Peter had survived but had lost his hearing. When the opportunity to attend a school for the deaf in New Mexico came up, mere months after the accident, Peter left their home in Southern California and moved in with the Hidalgos, a couple who’d raised their own deaf children. They opened their home in Santa Fe to the newly deaf teenager, allowing him to immerse himself in deaf culture while he attended Riverwall, the school for the deaf. Margaret, by then divorced from Ray, sold her waterfront house, leashed Peter’s dog, Echo I, bought a used Toyota Land Cruiser, and followed him, stopping at the town of Blue Dog a half hour outside Santa Fe, even though Peter insisted he didn’t want her anywhere near him. Peter had been furious with his mother for not being able to restore the family and for the divorce, and with the world because he had lost his hearing. He’d refused to consider cochlear implant surgery in part to punish her. But Margaret stayed. For a song, she rented an old Victorian house on the Starr ranch. Until Peter stopped blaming her for the divorce, she passed her time at her easel, painting, and taught herself American Sign Language.

Riverwall School for the Deaf in Santa Fe had helped Peter learn to accept his new life. While he was there, he’d fallen for Bonnie Tsosie, a Navajo-Ponca girl, and had never really dated anyone else. He married her at twenty-two, way too young, in Margaret’s opinion. But there was no talking sense to him: Hearing kids never wanted to listen, but deaf kids made an art of it. For two years Peter and Bonnie had been sparring like boxers, one week in different apartments, the next in wedded bliss and contemplating having a baby. Now Bonnie was in Chicago, working for the radio show
Native America Calling
. It was the ultimate irony, Margaret thought, for a deaf woman to work for a radio show. Peter said it was only a temporary separation. Margaret relived her fights with Ray and couldn’t help thinking it was her fault for not setting a good example. Sometimes she wondered if society was simply evolving out of the institution of marriage.

And Ray wasn’t her only failed relationship. Of course, there was Owen Garrett, the other man Margaret had fallen in love with. Ten years later, the memory was still tender. “I have to go face up to what I did,” he’d told her, explaining that he believed he’d killed a man in a bar fight and had been running from it ever since. That implied a prison sentence, maybe for life. He’d left behind his horse, RedBow, and for Margaret, a heart that felt as if it were filled with shrapnel. She’d forced herself to let go, but even after ten years had passed, she wondered every day if he might come back. She could have looked for him, she supposed, but the idea of finding him in prison, or with another woman, kept her from trying.

She’d thrown herself into her painting, then, and actually had a show in the Blue Dog Art Gallery, which also doubled as the hardware store. Moving to Santa Fe was another story, a series of doors shut in her face. When Margaret first moved to the city, she’d applied to join the Downtown Artists’ League, which allowed an artist to set up shop a couple of times a year in a parking lot two blocks from the Plaza that generated decent foot traffic. They’d asked her to submit a portfolio. She’d welcomed the chance to update her résumé, listing the places she’d shown and which of her pieces were in private collections. She’d turned in a dozen slides, one large acrylic of cattle, and three oils that were her best work, the paintings she’d done in Blue Dog. The artists were told to pick up their portfolios and wait for a confirmation letter that they’d been accepted. The envelope had arrived two days later, and Margaret had torn it open excitedly. But there in one short paragraph the word
sorry
popped out at her, and she had to sit down and look out the window at the scrubby pi
ñ
on trees and wind blowing over the Eldorado prairie. She knew she wasn’t Fritz Scholder or Donna Howell-Sickles, but she was a fairly decent painter. Not as good as some, but surely good enough to sell watercolors in a parking lot.

That Santa Fe was a good place for artists was the first of many of the city’s myths to be shattered for her. Forget even trying the galleries along Canyon Road. The prices they charged were crazy inflated. The downtown galleries carried original works worth up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, not Margaret’s kind of art.

Everywhere she went, artists seemed to be hurtling over one another for space. Even the walls of the coffeehouse she went to for a change of pace were covered with art for sale. Most of it was high quality. If no one was going to buy your paintings, then why bother painting?

She’d stopped painting anything ambitious. Instead, she did small watercolors of cacti, horses, Santa Fe window boxes, weather-bleached doors, and gates. Of course she painted the remarkable skies, too, filled with clouds that sometimes lined up like freight trains overhead, but only in watercolor or acrylic. Oil was too expensive to waste on this kind of art. She ran
giclée
prints off a color printer, selling them for twenty-five dollars each online and in bulk to a few gift shops. She had steady customers, and soon she couldn’t keep up with the printing, so she hired an outside printer to do the work for her and limited her editions to fifty. It was shocking how decent a living she could make after she took her heart out of the act. Just the sight of one of Verbena’s weavings shamed her, because Verbena had obviously continued caring about art instead of ways to make money. This rug, with its vegetable-dyed, tobacco-brown yarn, was a masterpiece.