Shadow Play Read online

  “I know, I know,” I said. “Just for today, be grateful. Let go the stress.”

  Removing her hands slowly, she extended a thumb and jabbed right into my lower neck muscles.

  “Ow!” I said.

  “You’re way too tense today, Laura. I don’t know, I can give you some shiatsu massage, but Reiki isn’t going to work for you. Just for today, let go the stress. Let go your anger.”

  “I’m not angry,” hearing the barking words, sighing, “well, I might be angry but I don’t know why.” I knew why. “Give me the massage then.”

  “It’s your daughter, isn’t it.” Squirting massage oil on her hands, she slapped my naked thigh so I’d roll on my stomach. “Or the guy. Or both.”

  I buried my forehead on the brace, didn’t say another word as she worked my neck and upper back muscles. Usually I fall asleep when she does this. Not today.

  Later, while I was dressing, Georgia watched me clip my Beretta inside my belt, snuggled hard in that small hollow down there just above my butt.

  Shaking her head, disapproving the gun. “Why do you carry that around?”

  “I have a permit.”

  “No, I mean, why have a gun at all?”

  “Protection,” I said, snarking a smile sideways, “for snakes and sich.” Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven.

  “We’re going to start all over again,” she said. “Reiki, guns, I can’t reconcile the two in one.”

  “Because I’m a woman?”

  “No. Because it’s a gun. Don’t bring that in here anymore.”

  On time at the railroad car diner, on Valencia near the Air National Guard buildings, I waited for Spider to show up for lunch. By two o’clock, I knew she’d blown me off again.

  Spooning mouthfuls from a bowl of intensely delicious chili, medium-hot jalapeno peppers on the side, I read three more articles from FitPregnancy magazine. BREASTFEEDING PROBLEMS SOLVED. PRENATAL FOOD RULES: WHAT TO EAT, WHAT TO AVOID. You’d think I was having the baby, not Spider. SEX. KEEP IT FUN THE WHOLE 9 MONTHS. I fumbled at the first pages of a large section on the best new baby products, spilled chili on the magazine, and asked the waitress for another napkin. She looked fondly at the magazine, then at my face, figuring I was either a bit old to be having a baby or a bit young to be a grandmother. I raised my eyes to her, but she just smiled and went to pour coffee for two men at the far end of the counter.

  I left her a big tip and went to my doctor.

  A close friend I’d met through Reiki claimed she could astral travel. Get out of her body, her consciousness free to roam the planet. I’d like to do that, I’d like right now to project myself at the murder house, but I haven’t reached any stage yet where I’m logically able to believe in stuff like astral traveling.

  Surprisingly, Nathan accepted Reiki without question. To him, to a Navajo, things floated in and out of the body, good things, evil things. But he’d renounced guns, I don’t quite know why, I’m not sure. More on that later.

  Reiki helps the arthritis pain in my right shoulder.

  Reiki channels universal life energy. In Kanji, Rei is the Japanese ideogram for a universal, transcendent essence, spirit, and power. Ki, like the Chinese Chi, is the energy of the vital life force. I revel in my life force these days.

  3

  “Lab results are back,” Dr. Wallace announced.

  “Good?” I said.

  “Inconclusive. Chromosomal issues.”

  “You sound like a therapist. Issues.”

  “A useful word, nowadays. Whenever the lab results are…inconclusive.”

  “So?”

  “Let’s see, how long has it been?” She pillaged my patient’s folder, yanked out a stapled report and tossed it in the wastebasket. “Duplicate,” she said. “So much paperwork, nobody checks for duplicates.”

  “Except you.”

  “Mmm. Here. Six weeks. Have you had your period since?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Something chirped underneath her jacket. She retrieved a pager, glanced at it. “This can’t wait, Laura. I apologize. Mmm, I’ll be a few minutes. Do you mind waiting in here?”

  I was already pulling out my laptop as she left without waiting for an answer. Billie Wallace paid a heavy price for being one of Tucson’s best OBGYN doctors. She took few new patients, never refused a direct request from a friend or fellow doctor, worked fourteen hour days for weeks at a time.

  Nathan left a cryptic message, just two names. I called Alex on my cell, asked her if she’d run data checks on Leon Begay and Jodhi Patroon.

  “Nothing on the woman,” Alex said. “Driver’s license has to be a fake. The address doesn’t exist. Social security number was never issued.”

  “Try running the name through INS databases. See if she’s in the country illegally, maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  “The guy, though. Begay. Tons of data, I’ve got his whole life in front of me. Bet you didn’t know his brother was a big Western movie star?”

  “Begay?” I’d seen almost every Western made in the past fifty years.

  “No. His brother is Vincent Basaraba. Big, in the sixties and seventies.”

  “Billy,” I said.

  “Yeah. I see that, a movie about Billy the Kid. Says here, the brothers grew up in Monument Valley. Their father worked for John Ford. An extra, in all those movies Ford shot with John Wayne.”

  “Fort Apache,” I said. “That trilogy around nineteen fifty. I know about that. What else?”

  “Basaraba is the executive manager of that casino in west Tucson. The new one, looks like a huge pueblo, with fountains.”

  “Tucson?” The brothers lived twenty miles apart, did they know about each other? “My ex was a Begay,” I said. “But on the rez, that name’s like Jones or Smith. Anything else?”

  “Nyet.”

  “Nyet?” I said.

  “Don’t ask, I mean, like, ask me later.”

  Dr. Wallace came back, tapping my files, wanting me off the phone.

  “Gotta go,” I said to Alex. “Get some general background on Basaraba. I’ll meet you for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Sorry,” Dr. Wallace said. “Six weeks after the miscarriage, one normal menstrual cycle since. Okay. The labs.”

  Six weeks.

  I’d not told Nathan anything. Away in Atlanta for a training conference when I had the miscarriage. Worse than that, he’d never known I was pregnant, since I’d barely known. The miscarriage happened somewhere around ten weeks. The first trimester. The pregnancy an accident, a blessing, a wild hope to be a mother.

  “How are you doing with this, Laura?”

  “Sorry. Guess I was drifting off into…whatever.”

  “Have you talked to Nathan about this?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “He doesn’t want children.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “You’re somebody.”

  “Do you want me to put you in touch with a support group?”

  “Miscarriage? A twelve-step program?”

  “It’s not a joke.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s definitely not a joke. An accident, but not so funny.”

  “You feeling guilty?”

  “Say what?”

  “Guilt. As in, Why me?”

  “No.”

  “Embarrassment?”

  “You mean, like, Is there something wrong with me? No.”

  “Talked this over with Nathan?”

  “Yes,” I lied. She studied me closely.

  “Laura, you’re lying through your gorgeous Julia Roberts lips.”

  She wrote something on a lavender Post-it, peeled it off, stuck it on the right sleeve of her coat. “Let’s go through the obvious,” she said, peeling two reports out of my patient’s folder.

  “First trimester pregnancies. One-quarter of all miscarriages happen during the first trimester. Lots of reasons. Irregular menses or ovulation, no ovulation, uterine fibroids…dah
dah dah…Okay.” Noticing that I was looking at my hands, she put her palm under my chin until I met her eyes. “Laura. When the maternal age is thirty-five or greater, things get kinda dicey. Law of averages, law of statistics, whatever. In your case, I’ve ruled all of those conditions out as the problem with having another baby.”

  “So why?”

  “I’d say, my sweet Laura, mostly, you’re just a tad too old.”

  “Goddammit,” I sobbed.

  She dropped the patient’s folder, knelt in front of me, grabbed my hands, put my hands around her neck, moved into me, hugged me, held me, I just couldn’t stop weeping, all those days, those weeks when I wanted to tell Nathan and didn’t.

  “Thank you,” I said finally.

  “Mmm.” Her emotional objectivity slid back into place. “It’s not just your age. The lab reports. From that D&C we did, after the miscarriage. I requested a detailed chromosome assessment. Because of your age, I’d asked for that. I’d asked for a lot of things, but most of it came back negative. In the uterine macroenvironment, no indication of polyps, adhesions, fibroids…dah dah dah…yada yada yada…just stop me if you don’t like all this jargon. No horned bicornuate uterus, no T-shaped uterus, nothing suggesting the need for a laparotomy.”

  “Whoa,” I said. She could make me laugh when she talked technical. “Get back to my chromosomes.”

  “In a word? Two words?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Genetically unlucky.”

  “Plus I’m too old.”

  “Laura, why?”

  “Why do I want to have a baby?” She nodded. “It’s simple. I had a child, but I never really got to be a mother.”

  I’d already gone through everything about my daughter Spider, how I’d been sixteen when I had her, how my former husband Jonathan took her from me when she was barely two years old.

  “There’s always adoption,” she said.

  Oh yeah, I thought. Nathan and I will go to China or Cambodia or Vietnam or Rumania and bring back a little baby boy and call him Nathan Junior.

  “I’ll call around. Just to know about adoption. Okay?” Her pager chirped again. She read it, started to turn from me, stopped. Put hands under my elbows and urged me to stand close. “You can keep trying to get pregnant, Laura. But the odds are really bad. We haven’t even talked about the likelihood of Down syndrome with older mothers. Imagine that you’re pregnant again, you survive without a miscarriage and go into the second trimester, you do a test and the fetus has Down syndrome. I don’t like those odds. You shouldn’t gamble on them, either. Let me show you something.”

  Opened my patient folder, removed a picture and laid it in front of me.

  “Your last sonogram.”

  I couldn’t recognize anything, the images fuzzy, a picture from some primitive technology, like airport controller radar, a funnel-shaped cone rising from the bottom, inside, a small shadowy object like an approaching UFO.

  “Can you tell the sex from this?”

  “Wouldn’t even try to guess. Does it matter?”

  “I want a girl.”

  “Laura, you have a girl, you have a daughter. This is a tiny fetus. Mostly a shadow. You can’t see much, but I can. The head is wrong, the body…even at that primitive stage, it wasn’t normal.”

  “Shadows aren’t dead,” I said. “I photograph the real thing. I know dead when I see it in my lens.”

  “This is my lens, Laura.” She stood up, patted my hand, suddenly matronly. “See you in a month.” And then she was gone.

  I never kept pictures of my baby daughter. Baby Spider.

  Like all mothers, I have my memories, my…mental images. But no pictures. And nobody remembers exact details of a baby, when it’s twenty years later.

  4

  Green Valley is a seniors residential community, twenty miles south of Tucson. The closest I’d ever come to it was driving by, back and forth from Nogales. Housing developments sprawled on both sides of I-19, grouped around the three major cross-streets: Duval Mine Road, Esperanza, and Continental.

  The Green Valley Mall lay off Esperanza.

  That means hope or wish in Spanish, but most of the seniors living in Green Valley spoke little Spanish. I saw Nathan’s dark-rust-red Nissan pickup in the parking lot. I pulled up beside him, facing the other way with our driver’s windows close together. Like when you see two highway patrol cops taking a break, parked side by side so they can shoot the shit or drink coffee together or more probably discuss who’s going to have the radar gun and who’s going to be the chase car.

  “Say hey,” I said. Reaching across to touch his nose through his open window. “What’s the haps, good buddy?”

  But he was already cranking up his windows. Locked his pickup, got into the passenger seat of my Grand Cherokee. I turned sideways, ready to kiss him, but he was all business and no play.

  “Get out on Camino del Sol,” he said. Pointing until I shifted in Drive.

  We took the frontage road, looking for an address he didn’t tell me about. I hadn’t been this far south since two years ago, when Meg Arizana was kidnapped in a shootout at the Nogales border crossing. Since then, new housing developments sprouted everywhere.

  Whatever was in his head, it lay unopened between us.

  I got ready for anything. We exited at Continental, passed another shopping center, losing our sense of direction after weaving for ten minutes through several subdivisions with one-and two-bedroom row houses.

  Ahead of us, huge cumulonimbus clouds anviled their way up thousands of feet. Awesome thunderheads, deflecting air travel for miles around. Beyond, to the southeast, sullen, sodden gray clouds streaked with downshafts of rain, completely blotting out the Santa Rita mountains.

  “Monsoon looks like it’ll pass right over us,” I said.

  Nathan flicked his eyes around the horizon. “Not for half an hour,” he said, driving on. “Let’s find this place.”

  But when we did, nobody seemed to be home. After ringing the bell and pounding on the door, Nathan came back to the Cherokee.

  “Let me drive. Shoot a few pictures of the house,” he said. “Get the street sign.”

  “Is this the crime scene?” I asked.

  “No. Just want to remember where this place is, we’ve got to come back later.” Consulting a map. “Go back to the frontage road. South, to the Canoa exit.”

  “So,” I said. Three miles later. Trying to brute-force a conversation, I had no idea what we were doing down here or why. “Who’s the person living back there?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Um, why are we here?”

  “An old friend.”

  “How come if you know him,” I said, all right, I’m thinking, let’s pull this tooth, “you don’t seem to know just where he lives?”

  “Laura, there’s no logic in any of this. Yet. Don’t go looking to pry something logical from me.”

  “Oh-kay.”

  “When this guy moved up to Monument Valley, up in the rez, I lost touch. I thought he was still there.”

  “You didn’t keep in touch? An old war buddy, you didn’t keep in touch?”

  “Canoa. There’s the golf course,” he said. “You ready?”

  “Nathan,” I said. Laying a hand on his right thigh while he drove. “I’ve got to talk with Spider, before she disappears for another night. Got to be home by six.”

  “This is more important.” Moving his right foot to the brake, not really needing to brake, but it moved his thigh and my hand fell off, I’ve learned these signals, now’s not the time, so I just let my hand fall, thinking that we’d crossed further into the dimension where one thing is important to one partner but irrelevant to the other. Like a problem in theoretical logic.

  Momentarily lost on a side street, I finally pointed at a strand of yellow crime-scene tape hung fifteen feet up in a mesquite tree.

  “Fourteen twenty-two…sixteen…over there. Fourteen oh four.”

  Nosing the Cherokee at t
he carport, I parked twenty feet away and turned off the engine. I started to get out, but Nathan just sat still, looking at the front door. Screen set in heavy wrought iron, with a small and larger saguaro design.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

  But he didn’t even hear me.

  “Nathan. Look at me.” Ducked his head, cocked it sideways. “Look at me.” I held his head, held his eyes on mine. “I need something, I need…your friend, was he…you said it was a murder-suicide? Sweetie? Help me here.”

  “Leon Begay,” he said finally.

  “Your friend?”

  “Yes. But he’d never kill himself.” His head twisting gently from my hands. “And what I haven’t told you…Leon’s clan family? On the rez? Six people have died in the past week or so.”

  “More suicides?”

  “Worse. Uh, I’ll tell you later. One thing first, then another.” Pushing away.

  There’s a logic tool called a Venn diagram. A simple thing, two overlapping circles. There’s a common, shared area where they overlap, plus each circle has its own special identity. Sometimes, if you’ve got a wonderful partner, the circles almost entirely overlap. Or sometimes they don’t. Reiki celebrates the shared area.

  Some years ago, I hiked with thirty other people on a butterfly watch in the Baboquivaries, the sacred Tohono O’odham mountains. The butterfly guide, a lep-todopto…something, she explained that when you see two butterflies in a circling pattern. Sometimes, she said, as we watched two zebra longwings courting, neither recognize the sex of the other, they get closer, the male patrols above or behind the female, flutters his wings, rapidly, rapidly, until insemination.

  Other people think that the courtship spirals really signify antagonism, one trying to escape the other.

  5

  These days, I often question myself.