The Wilder Sisters (49 page)

Lily made a fist and gently bumped Rose’s arm. “You luckout.” Rose smiled faintly. “Guess we should go to the ranch.”

Lily sighed. “Guess so, but I sure don’t want to.”

The parking lot of the hospital was damp with rain. The snow packed along its edges was dirty, but winter wasn’t even halfway over yet, more would come and cover the grime. “You know what kind of evening lies ahead for us,” Rose said to her sister. “Mami will whip up some wonderful stew, and harp at me when I don’t eat it. We’ll tell our favorite memories of Shepherd and try to maintain a dignified composure, but eventually each one of us will break down. I’m so tired of crying, Lily. It’s like Shep used to say whenever one of the animals died, ‘Weeping won’t get you your horse back.’”

Lily nodded. “Know where I really feel like going?” “The ¡Andale! for a drink?”

“No,” Lily said. “Chimayo.”

“There’s a church three blocks over. Of course, you walking inside voluntarily might give the priest a heart attack.”

“Ha-ha. I just want to sit in the church and smell the beeswax candles burning. I want to touch all those crutches hanging on the wall and remind myself that even if miracles don’t happen anymore, they did once. Do you think I’m nuts to want that, Rose, even if I don’t believe in it?”

Rose hitched her purse up on her shoulder. “Whenever I mention church, you race back to California as if faith’s contagious.”

“This is different. I can’t explain it. It’s just where I feel like being right now.”

“Not me.” Rose exhaled, her breath silvery in the cold air. “Here’s a little update for you, Lily. Your good Catholic sister? Since Austin, and well, a couple of other things, she doesn’t know what to believe in anymore.”

“Nonsense. Your faith’s unshakable.”

“Not anymore.” Rose put her hands into her pockets and looked up at the sky. “It dried up.” She shivered. “I think it’s going to snow again. Wherever we go, let’s find somewhere warm.”

It was dusk, that witchy hour when depending on one’s mood, the purple shadows could turn romantic or dangerous. Lily said, “Let’s do it. Let’s get in the car and drive over to Chimayo.”

“What about Mami and Pop?”

“They’ll go home to a houseful of neighbors and brandy. Besides, we’ve never in our lives minded our curfew. Why start now?”

“It’ll be dark soon. All those thieves and heroin addicts. You’ve heard the stories about Chimayo.”

Lily opened the door to the rental car. “Shep just died. What else can get us? I have a cell phone, four-wheel drive, and this car’s costing me fifty stinking dollars a day, so let’s drive it fifty stinking dollars’ worth. We can listen to my new CD. Nobody’ll dare mess with us. We’re Wilder women.”

Not to mention sisters
, Rose thought.

Out the window of Lily’s rental car, snowy trees and ice-covered rail fences cast sharp profiles. Smoke rose from the chimneys of well-

tended adobes, and every once in a while they came across a roadside cross marking the spot where someone had lost his life and someone who remembered him had left a clutch of artificial flowers.
I’m never going to leave Floralee
, Rose told herself.
I’ll take the feed store job if the restaurant doesn’t work out. This is my home, and it will be until I die, too
. She realized Lily had been talking for a while, and tried to catch up with the conversation.

“So even though I had a four-star migraine and we didn’t do anything, Tres stayed, he didn’t leave. I never knew how intimate not having sex could be. And he tells me this bedtime story! Have you ever heard anything so romantic?”

“I guess not.”

“Come on, admit you’re impressed. When’s the last time anybody told you a bedtime story?”

“When I was a kid, I guess.”

Her sister made a right turn, and they were on a narrow, twisting road with occasional patches of ice. Lily had to slow down and switch over to four-wheel drive. “Never mind. I don’t really feel like talking much either.”

She turned up the CD player, and a woman’s voice sang to them in a plaintive, smoky Spanish. The leather upholstery smelled like new saddles. Rose twisted her index finger inside her curly hair the way she used to when she was a little girl. The music was husky, emotional. Usually Rose listened to whatever happened to be on the radio, to the station the kids had it on before they left.

They began to pass dimly lit single-wide trailers and shaggy horses pastured in fields of dry, brown winter grasses. The occasional adobe storefront offered chile
ristras
and crudely carved statues of the
santos
, or local weavings. “There was no reason on earth Shep had to die in that much pain,” Lily said as they navigated the hairpin turnoff for the church. “If he’d croaked anywhere but America, he’d have done it pain-free. Freaking AMA—at their core they’re Purit- anical Calvinists, and on the outside they dress in worse suits than Republicans.”

They’d never see him alive again, but Rose knew that wouldn’t stop her from finding Shep everywhere she looked around the ranch. “At least it’s over.”

“Yeah, but it’ll take me three weeks of solid bitching before I can stop thinking about it. I’m going to write that hospital a letter.”

They parked the Expedition in the empty lot, and Rose pulled her coat close as they hurried across the cracked asphalt toward the adobe archway. The headstones in the churchyard were rimed with ice. One nice thing about Catholic churches was that their doors were always open. Rose’s heart thumped as it did whenever she tried to tell a lie. She felt ashamed to enter a place filled with such history and hope. “Maybe I shouldn’t go in.”

“Why?” Lily said. “What’s the problem?”

She stopped and looked around her, as if the graves and statues might accuse her out loud of the doubt she felt at her core. “Because I don’t know if I believe anymore.”

“Rose, this place is a tourist spot. Do you think they tell the Japa- nese to stay out because they’re Buddhists? Quit fretting and let’s go inside where it’s warm.”

Lily struck a match and lit vigil candles. Rose stuffed her spare change into the offertory box. When the match burned low, Lily singed her finger and cried out.

“Stick it in the holy water,” Rose suggested.

“Oh, leave me alone,” Lily said sharply, and turned away from her sister.

Standing at the altar, Rose wondered if Lily would ever truly re- cover from Shep’s death. Her sister was tough on the outside, but inside was a different matter. Shep had been Lily’s compass. Not even Tres back in her life could replace that. Rose wandered into the tiny chapel where those who’d made the pilgrimage had left behind crutches, braces, casts, photographs, handwritten pleas, holy cards, artificial flowers, rosaries,
milagros
, and candles—all manner of candles—wax and wick burning so fervently that even in winter, the room didn’t need a heater. The doorway was so low she had to stoop to pass through, to get to that room with the hole dug through the floor. The indentation was nearly two feet deep. Rose got down on all fours and put her hand into the hollow. The red earth felt cold and ordinary to her fingertips. It wasn’t the original earth supposedly responsible for the renowned cures; too many miracle seekers came here and scooped up Dixie cups, Baggies, and film canisters of the stuff for a souvenir for that to have lasted. But over the fill dirt the priests said blessings, and they believed, deeply enough to commit their whole lives to God.

After scooping out her handful, she tucked two dollars into the

donation box. By candlelight the soil appeared silky and dry, and felt to Rose almost as if she was holding a part of last summer in her palm. She fingered the grains, about a tablespoon’s worth. Clasping her fingers tight so she wouldn’t spill any, she slid her fist up under Amanda’s shirt until her hand rested just above the swell of her left breast. She opened her fingers and let the cool grainy dirt fall against her skin, slipping inside her bra cup and down her ribs. As she rubbed it in, she imagined that all its elements could travel through her pores, part the tight muscle beds and soften them, finally arriving at her sore heart in some perfect and pure form at the molecular level. She massaged until the infinitesimal grit began to abrade her skin, and then she removed her hand, wiped it on her pants leg, and walked back into the chapel, stopping at the altar for the
Santo Niño
. She knelt to say a prayer for Shep’s soul. But the sight of the peeling statue lit by candleglow and the bouquet of artificial daisies in the white Easter basket alongside it awoke a question in her that she couldn’t ignore. What was she doing here, really? Shep had been a truly decent man, and if heaven existed, he was already there. Remembering the dead was an act of respect, but it hardly took courage. Rose rummaged through her purse, looking for paper. All those freebie real estate scratch pads left on her doorstep, and all she could find was a couple of old shopping lists:
milk, bread, dog food, cheese, tomatoes, Tampax, fabric softener
on one;
the bank, post office, library, office supply store
on the other. The idea that she had ever planned such an orderly life on a weekly basis seemed positively archaeological. These days she bought stamps one at a time. She turned the lists over and scribbled quickly, filling every inch of one

paper before going onto the next.

God, if you’re there, please take Austin Donavan out of my heart. Help me move past this into some place where I can at least function. I’ve tried to make sense of all this, but if there was a lesson for me to learn by in falling in love again, I must have missed it. Austin belongs to Leah and he always will. Now help me let him go
.

At the edge of the paper, she paused, reading over what she’d written, trying to make certain the words she offered up were honest. Chimayo was legendary; one didn’t trifle with such power. Deep down Rose knew she wasn’t saying all that needed to be said. She had to put the other part down, too.

She picked up her pen and began to write, in smaller script this

time, directly over the words on her lists.
If, on the other hand, what I feel for Austin was meant to be
—there came that song into her head again—
then I’m kneeling here asking you to send him back to me in whatever form you care to see fit. I love him as much now as I ever will, and that’s not going to change just because he doesn’t love me back. I’ll take him back in my life even if it means we only get to be these awkward friends who always bump up against the memories of what once happened in my bed, even if only that. Yes
. Then, not because she felt a connection to her heritage, but simply because certain phrases of Spanish beat English hands down, she wrote this too:
Regresame la otra mitad de mi corazón
—return to me the other half of my heart.

She folded and tucked the notes into the basket of artificial flowers. A film of dust coated the
milagros
scattered at the
Santo’s
feet, among them a heart stuck through with a sword, a leg bent at the knee, kidneys attached to the spinal column, and a set of hollow pelvic bones. At the moment she let the notes drop out of reach, Rose vowed that no matter what happened, from this moment forward, she was going to be okay. It was her choice. She understood that now. Prayer seemed appropriate, but none of her Catholic devotions, so committed to memory she recited them by rote. The words that came to her she’d heard recited in AA meetings:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference
. Who could tell, maybe that same minute, Austin was standing in a circle in one of those meetings, saying it himself—in a way, saying it along with her?

Lily sat in the third pew, sucking on her sore finger, looking pensive. Rose scooted in beside her and moved aside a dog-eared Spanish missal somebody had forgotten to put away.

“You were gone so long,” her sister said. “Did you say the rosary twice?”

Rose shook her head no. “I was being incredibly selfish, asking for my own miracle.”

Lily looked surprised. “About freaking time.”

“Do you think you could not talk like that in church?”

“Rose, I think God’s probably got more important things to worry about than my vocabulary.”

“So you admit He exists.”

“I admit nothing. Rose, I believe in
good
. That’s “God” with an extra vowel. I’ve got as much right as the next person to say what’s on my mind, and to say it the best way I know how. That’s the stuff of faith, Rose. Not the hokey-smokey God-box stuff, but belief in
doing
good.”

“
La pasionara
.”

“Yes, I’m passionate, and I’ve decided to stop apologizing for that, too. Tres can take me as I am or he can hit the road.” Lily pulled her knees up on the pew and hugged them. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. Rose could see her sister’s ankles under the designer jeans, the expensive socks with the Ralph Lauren logo peeking out like a tattoo. The heart bore its own sort of ritual scarring, too, even if nobody but a sister ever saw it. “There’s something I need to tell you,” Lily said. “I don’t want to, because it’s going to hurt you to hear it.”

Rose felt her pulse speed up. “Then don’t tell me.”

Lily pressed her lips together. “I have to, Rose. I think not telling you is why we fight all the time. It’s chewing on my guts. I don’t want to go the rest of my life carrying this around even if it means you never talk to me again. It’s time you knew. It concerns Philip.” The hair on the back of Rose’s neck tickled uncomfortably, and she had a feeling she knew exactly what Lily was going to tell her, as soon as she could force her tongue to move past the fear stopping it. Oh, she didn’t want to hear this any more than Lily wanted to tell it. Her sister was going to tell her that she knew what Philip had done, that other people knew. Rose’s face went hot, and she fought the urge to run from the church into the darkness, because anything out there felt safer what was happening right here. “I already know. I know what he did.” She picked up the Spanish missal again and flipped through its impossibly thin pages. “Being his widow makes me sort of like a permanent wife. I wanted to live out this fantasy that my husband loved me, and that part of that love included fidel-