The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “Then do it now,” I demand. “Pretend I’m some client.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “Yes, there is,” I say. “I hurt. I hurt all the time.” Tears pierce the back of my throat. “You’ve got to have some magic that makes things disappear. Some potion or spell or cord I can tie around my wrist that’ll make me forget how you drank . . . and how you cheated on my father.”

  She steps back, as if she’s been slapped.

  “What could you give me,” I ask, my voice shaking, “to make me forget . . . that you forgot about me?”

  My mother hesitates for a moment, and then walks stiffly to her shelves. She pulls down three containers and a glass mixing bowl. She opens the seals. I smell nutmeg, summertime, a distillation of hope.

  But she does not mix me a poultice or make a roux for me to swallow. She doesn’t wrap my wrists with green silk or tell me to blow out three squat candles. Instead, she comes hesitantly around her workbench. She folds me into her arms, even as I try to break free. She refuses to let go, the whole time that I cry.

  * * *

  It seems as if we have been driving forever. Ruthann and I take turns during the night, while Sophie and Greta sleep in the backseat. We head north on Interstate 17, passing places with names like Bloody Basin Road and Horsethief Basin, Jackass Acres, Little Squaw Creek. We pass the skeletons of saguaros, inside which birds have made their homes; and the smashed amber glass from beer bottles, which line the side of the road like glitter.

  Gradually, the cacti vanish, and deciduous trees begin to pepper the foothills. The altitude makes the temperature drop, to a point where the air is so cool I have to roll up the window. Walls of striated red rock rise in the distance, set on fire by the rising sun.

  I’m not running away, not really. I just sort of invited myself to accompany Ruthann on a trip to visit her family on Second Mesa. She wasn’t too keen on the idea, but I pulled out all the stops: I told her that I thought it was important for Sophie to learn about the world; I told her that I wanted to see more in Arizona than the jail system; I told her that I needed to talk to someone, and that I wanted it to be her.

  As we drive, I tell Ruthann about Fitz’s story for the Gazette. I tell her about the scorpion sting, and what I remembered about Victor, and what Eric already knew. I don’t tell her about my mother. Right now, I want to keep that moment to myself, a silver dollar tucked into the hem of my mind to take out in an emergency.

  “So you really begged to come to Second Mesa because you’re angry at Eric,” Ruthann says.

  “I didn’t beg,” I say, and she just raises a brow. “Well, maybe just a little.”

  Ruthann is quiet for a few seconds. “Let’s say Eric had told you that your mother had been having an affair when he first found out. Would it have kept your parents from splitting up? No. Would it have kept your father from running away with you? No. Would it have meant that your father wouldn’t have been arrested? Nope. Far as I can tell, the only purpose served by telling you would be to get you even more upset, kind of like you are now.”

  “Eric knows how hard this is for me,” I say. “It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle and going crazy because I can’t find the last piece, and then realizing that Eric’s had it stashed in his back pocket.”

  “Maybe he’s got a reason for not wanting you to finish that puzzle,” Ruthann says. “I’m not saying what Eric did was right. I’m just saying it might not be wrong, either.”

  We drive on in silence to Flagstaff, and then veer right onto a different road. I follow Ruthann’s directions to a turnoff for Walnut Canyon. We park in a lot next to a ranger’s truck, but the gates aren’t open yet. “Come on,” Ruthann says. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  “We have to wait,” I point out.

  But Ruthann just gets out of the car and reaches into the backseat for Sophie. “No we don’t,” she says. “This is where I’m from.”

  We climb over the gates and hike down a trail into a canyon that opens up like a seam between the scarlet rocks. Prickly pear and pinyons grow along the track like markers. The path winds tightly, a sheer four-hundred-foot drop on one side and a wall of rock on the other. Ruthann moves quickly, stepping over the narrowest of passes and crawling around spires and through crevices. The deeper we get, the more remote it seems to be. “Do you know where you’re going?” I ask.

  “Sure. My worst nightmare used to be getting lost in here with a bunch of pahanas.” Turning, she flashes a smile. “The Donner party ate the Indians first, you know.”

  We descend into the canyon, the gap between our path and the facing mass of rock growing narrower and narrower, until we have somehow crossed onto the other side. Sophie is the one who spots it first. “Ruthann,” she says, “there’s a hole in this mountain.”

  “Not a hole, Siwa,” she says. “A home.”

  As we get closer I can see it: Carved into the limestone are hundreds of small rooms, stacked on top of one another like natural apartment buildings. The walkway spirals around the mountain, until we reach the mouth of one of the cliff dwellings.

  Sophie and Greta, delighted by this carved cave, run from the cedar tree twisted into the mouth of the doorway to the back of the hollowed room. The rear wall is charred; the space smells of brittle heat and fierce wind. “Who lived here?” I ask.

  “My ancestors . . . the hisatsinom. They came here when Sunset Crater erupted in 1065, and covered their pit houses and the farms in the meadows.”

  Sophie chases Greta around a small square of rocks that must have been a fire pit. It is easy to imagine a family huddled around that, telling stories into the night, knowing that dozens of other families were doing the same thing in the small spaces surrounding them. There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.

  I turn to her. “Why did they leave?”

  “No one can stay in one place forever. Even the ones who don’t budge, well, the world changes around them. Some people think there might have been a drought here. The Hopi say the hisatsinom were fulfilling a prophecy—to wander for hundreds of years before returning to the spirit world again.”

  Across the way, on the trail we’ve come in on, the day’s first tourists crawl like fire ants. “Did you ever think that maybe you’ve got it upside down?” Ruthann says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if the whole kidnapping experience isn’t the story of Delia?” she asks. “What if disappearing wasn’t the most cataclysmic event of your life?”

  “What else would be?”

  Ruthann lifts her face to the sun. “Coming back,” she says.

  * * *

  The Hopi reservation is a tiny bubble inside the much larger Navajo reservation, spread across three long-fingered mesas that rise 6,500 feet above sea level. From a distance, they look like the stacked teeth of a giant; closer, like batter being poured.

  Almost twelve thousand Hopi live in small clusters of villages, and one of those, Sipaulovi, sits on Second Mesa. We park at a landing and hike up a hill, over shards of pottery and bones—an old habit, Ruthann tells me, from when families would bury food in the ash of their housing foundations to keep from going hungry. We reach a small, dusty plaza at the crest of the mesa, a square surrounded by one-story houses. There aren’t any adults outside when we arrive, but a trio of little children, not much older than Sophie, dart in and out of the shade between the buildings, appearing and disappearing like ghosts. Two dogs chase each other’s tails. On the roof of one building is an eagle, with brightly painted wooden toys and bowls at its feet.

  Through the windows of the houses I can hear music—recorded native chants, cartoons, commercial jingles. There is electricity at Sipaulovi, but not at some of the other villages; Ruthann says that at Old Oraibi, for example, the elders felt that if they took something from the pahanas, the pahanas would demand something in return. Running water is a new thing, she says, dating back to the