Finding Casey: A Novel Read online

  Glory groaned. Tripe soup. Joseph and Juniper couldn’t get enough of it. The name alone was bad enough. Two parts cow’s stomach, it was the color of the khaki slacks she’d worn when she worked at Target. The dish took all day to simmer in chicken broth, filling the house with the most awful smell, and filmy grease that coated the surface had to be skimmed away from time to time. “Please stop talking about it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t feel well. I wonder if the eggs in my omelet were bad.”

  “Mom?” Juniper said, inching closer, and then Glory smelled her daughter’s bubble-gum perfume. Combined with the goat fajitas from a nearby vendor cart and the baked-sugar smell of kettle corn, just the thought of menudo was too much. She got up, raced to the nearest trash can, and in one long heave, lost her lunch. She rinsed her mouth with the bottle of water she carried everywhere and chewed some gum to get rid of the taste. Juniper appeared and put her hand on her mother’s back.

  “Oh, my gosh, do you think you have food poisoning?” Juniper said.

  The way only a woman’s mind can work, Glory began adding up clues. The intermittent nausea, dizziness that came out of nowhere, and a mental picture of the calendar that hung inside the pantry door. When was the last time she had her period? April? May? I certainly hope it’s food poisoning, she thought, because what kind of birthday present is turning forty-one only to discover you’re pregnant?

  Chapter 3

  October 2008

  The clay pot simmered on the stove burner, the scent filling the kitchen and drifting out into the great room. If pressed to name the ingredients, Glory would have said barnyard animals, vinegar, and a thousand heads of garlic. She had banned menudo entirely from the house during her first trimester of pregnancy. She wouldn’t even let Joseph cook it outdoors. While the nausea had lifted in her fourth month, just as the obstetrician had promised, certain smells, like tripe, made her want to gag. Who in their right mind found a cow’s stomach appetizing? Not just Joseph, but also Juniper, eighteen years old and a junior at UNM Albuquerque.

  Glory, preoccupied with nausea and the overwhelming fact that in a few months she’d have a baby, hadn’t thought of the micaceous pot in months. All summer Juniper worked at Jackalope, the Spanish mercado on Cerrillos, with outbuildings selling furniture, rugs, pottery, and jewelry, and a prairie dog habitat at its center. There tourists could watch the endangered squirrel cousins dig their burrows, raise their babies, and tip their heads back, yipping to each other like miniature coyotes.

  Glory bent to open a kitchen window. “It smells like you’re boiling socks in here.”

  “Sorry.” Joseph turned down the burner and gave her a kiss. “Ready for the sonogram?”

  Glory smiled. “Are you kidding? I’ve been chained to the bathroom for months. I’m more than ready.”

  Joseph covered the pot with its braided clay handle lid. He plucked his keys from the hanging rack and hollered to Juniper, who was studying in her room. “Back in an hour, arbolita,” he called, his pet name for her in Spanish, little tree.

  “Find out what sex it is!” came back from her room.

  Glory had agreed to the amniocentesis for health reasons, but she clung to wanting to be surprised about the baby’s sex. She felt in awe of one of the last few mysteries in pregnancy. Of course, such thinking was silly, because everything about this pregnancy was already a surprise—she’d never thought it would happen to her, especially at forty-one. It was a good lesson for Juniper. See what happens when you’re careless with birth control? Glory had told her. She wasn’t convinced Juniper was sexually active, but whenever the topic came up, they talked about birth control and safe sex. Juniper had only recently acquired her first real boyfriend.

  “Andalé,” Joseph said, and opened the door off the kitchen that led through the garden to their carport. He’d put in a flagstone path the first summer they moved in. Though they’d been in this house for nearly three years, it seemed to be in a constant state of renovation, thanks to Joseph’s many relatives in the building trade. His extended family was like a small city, including fifth cousins, their in-laws, and friends of friends. The Vigil family tree was more like a vine that twisted and turned through New Mexico’s complicated history. When it came to making the house their home, all Glory really cared about was that the bathrooms worked and that the kitchen was finally finished. The six-burner Blue Star gas stove they splurged on allowed Joseph to cook every night. He was now 180 pages into Vigilia Libro de Cocina Familiar, The Vigil Family Cookbook, and every week he tried out a different recipe. Another woman might have felt threatened by a man taking over her kitchen, but it was fine with Glory. Otherwise, he and Juniper might have starved to death the last few months, when all she could stomach was 7-Up and saltines.

  In the garden off the portal, her favorite place, summer had hung on tight through fall. The wisteria was in the throes of its final bloom before winter set in. An army of yellow columbines had rampaged through the flowerbed, giving it the random look of a meadow. The restored fountain spilled clear water down three tiers. A cinnamon colored rufous hummingbird zoomed by a black-chinned hummingbird battling for territory of the feeders she had to fill several times a day. This summer an albino hummer had appeared, visiting the feeders every afternoon, and Glory tried in vain to get a picture of it. As she stopped to watch the antics, she said, “Listen to you two. There’s enough to go around, so learn to share.”

  The moment she said the words they struck her oddly, as if somehow they were more important than the simple message she intended, and she hesitated there for a moment, wondering why. Pregnancy had fundamentally changed her, and while she was lying there ill all those months, she’d had time to think about subjects she’d never before given a moment’s consideration. She’d ultimately come to the conclusion that she’d never been happier in her life, and that having a baby was the best surprise ever.

  “Glory!” Joseph called. He was holding open the door to the yellow Land Cruiser, and she forgot the birds entirely.

  “Here we go.” The sonogram technician named Katie squirted gel onto Glory’s bare stomach. Her belly was only slightly rounded at five months, giving her the look of a garden Buddha. With the shades closed, the room felt dim enough to fall asleep in, but Glory was too excited to relax. This was the moment she’d get a glimpse of the baby that so far had only made her sick—including the amniocentesis to test for birth defects—and that would make everything real. She and Joseph had countless discussions when she discovered she was pregnant. Initially, she was stunned into silence, and Joseph had been the one to bring up options, as in, Did she want to terminate the pregnancy if it was determined something was wrong. Of course not! she’d answered, but deep down she worried she wasn’t up to the challenge. The possibility of children had never entered her mind, but now that one was on the way, she would do whatever she had to in order to protect it. Did she have it in her to be a good mother when she’d never even been an aunt? All those years with Dan and nothing had happened, so she wasn’t always careful. In Joseph’s first marriage, he and his wife had tried and gotten nowhere, so he wasn’t careful either. They loved each other when the urge overtook them, and interrupting their passion to use birth control rarely occurred to her. Here was why it should have: At age forty-one, she was considered an “elderly primigravida, high risk.” The first time Dr. Montano mentioned the term, Glory got a mental picture of Baba Yaga with a baby bump. Every passing day she wondered if she’d have the courage to terminate if the baby was found to have Down syndrome or spina bifida or something worse. She dreaded that amnio needle so much that she would have traded another trimester of nausea for it rather than have something so sharp anywhere near the baby.

  Well, maybe not a whole trimester, but a week or two. She was so often sick that she knew each individual bathroom tile.

  She and Joseph both watched the monitor, trying to tell the difference between what was baby and what was just the swooping white
trace the ultrasound wand left behind. When the technician turned up the volume, the room was filled with a glub-glub noise that sounded like an underwater drumbeat. On the screen, Katie pointed the cursor to a dark gray pulse. “That’s your baby’s heart,” she said, and Glory felt Joseph take her hand. “Now look here. That’s your baby’s face. Do you see it?” she asked, and Glory tried to follow the pale, drifting peanut on the screen. “See the ribs? The spine?” the technician said, pointing out flashes of white.

  “Maybe I need glasses,” Glory said, and just then Joseph gasped.

  “Aieee! Is that a hand?”

  The technician laughed. “I can tell this is your first baby. Yes, that right there,” she clicked the transponder over yet another moving part, “is your baby’s hand.”

  “Is he sucking his thumb?” Joseph said.

  “Looks like it,” the technician said. “Do you want to know the baby’s gender?”

  Glory knew Joseph and Juniper were dying to find out, so she said, “All right.”

  The technician clicked several more pictures and zoomed in on three white lines that looked smaller than her pinky fingernail. “Congratulations. You have a little girl. Have you picked out a name yet?”

  Over the past three months Joseph had come up with several boy names, including Cortez (his middle name), Montezuma (the street where they had their PO box), and Geronimo, just to make Glory laugh because she felt so rotten. But somehow they’d never considered a girl’s name. Glory had assumed only a little snips-and-snails boy could make her feel so sick. But Joseph answered the technician without hesitation. “Yes. We’re going to name her Casey.”

  Glory immediately burst into tears. “How,” she said between hormone-induced sobs, “did I get so lucky?”

  “La mano poderosa,” Joseph said, and kissed her on the forehead, while Katie the technician enjoyed her first laugh of the day.

  One of Joseph’s favorite sayings, it translated loosely to “the powerful hand,” and it meant that a greater force, call it God, the Creator, or fate, held the reins in your life. The moment he said that, Glory knew the amniocentesis was going to turn out just fine.

  Chapter 4

  Española, Thanksgiving Eve, 2008

  Inside the word Emergency there are other words, hiding. Emerge is the biggest; merge is one letter less. Subtract another letter and you find four-letter words like mere and gene and grey. Looking for three-letter words, all I could find was cry. I was trying not to. When I’m afraid, I look for whatever words are near me, and then I peek inside them. Sometimes they make a cloak, sometimes they tell a story.

  “Your daughter’s condition is grave,” the doctor said to me the first day we were in the hospital.

  Rave, gear, ear. “She just needs medicine,” I said. “She’ll get better.”

  “We’re all certainly hoping for that,” she said as the nurses fussed with tubes and wires, the smell of medicine thick in the airless alcove. “But right now Aspen is one very sick little girl. Let us telephone your family for you. Just give the nurse the number.”

  “We don’t have a telephone,” I said. Seth believed telephone lines let off radioactivity and gave you cancer.

  “Would you like me to call a chaplain?”

  A chap, or a pal? Why? To make a plan? I sat next to Aspen’s gurney and held her hand. It was cool from the ice bath to lower her fever. “My husband is a minister,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”

  A nurse in blue pajamas came into the room. “Mrs. Smith, the hospital’s going to need your ID and insurance card for the billing.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, though I didn’t have either. “I’ll have my husband bring my purse from home.”

  Whenever I asked about things like that, Seth always said, “You know who you are and so does the Creator. Who else needs to know?” I tried to think of what to tell the billing people when they asked again tomorrow. I left it at home; I’ll call my husband; or I could give them a fake number and that would buy me time. Probably we wouldn’t be here long enough to need anything more complicated. It was just a seizure and a high fever. Soon the medicine would work, and Aspen would open her eyes. That’s what hospitals do. They make people better. No matter what Seth thinks.

  The nurse had so many questions. “How old is Aspen?”

  “Six.”

  “Has she had any other illnesses recently?”

  “A cough.”

  “Did you give her anything for it?”

  “Honey and echinacea.”

  The nurse looked at me funny. “You sound as if you have a bad cold yourself, or laryngitis.”

  “That’s just my regular voice,” I said, which was more of a truth than a lie. “Medicine can’t fix it.”

  “Is she up to date on her immunizations?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Inoculations. Vaccines. Injections. HepB, DTaP, Hib, PCV, MMR, Varicella, HepA? She’d have had them done before she could register for school.”

  She was a nice nurse but in such a hurry, tapping her stethoscope against her hand while she waited for me to say something. “We don’t believe in that.”

  “But she must have had them, otherwise she wouldn’t be allowed to enroll in school.”

  “We homeschool.”

  “I see,” she said, but I could tell she was thinking bad thoughts, such as I was not a good mother, so no wonder Aspen was sick. Seth would say, “That woman’s spiritual compass is off. She needs a sweat.”

  “She’s healthy except for the seizures,” I said. “She had a cold this week, that’s all. Yesterday she had the seizure and this morning she was hot.”

  “I see,” the nurse said, and finished writing on the papers. “A social worker will be around to speak with you shortly.”

  “Why a social worker?”

  “It’s protocol in cases such as your daughter’s.”

  Cool, root, cop. What did protocol mean? Cases like Aspen’s? “No, thank you,” I said. I saw how that nurse looked at me in my clay-covered overalls. I had my turtleneck pulled up so no one could see the scar on my neck. My raspy voice I was stuck with. I forgot about how it freaked Outsiders to hear it, because I never went Outside unless I had to. Seth told everyone at the Farm that’s how it is in the Outside World. Everywhere you turn, Judgment. Ten, men, met, judge. Dug, jug, mud. Jude, gent. “Really, that isn’t necessary,” I said. “Once my husband gets here he’ll tell you whatever you need to know.”

  I honestly thought Seth would come, once he realized where I’d taken Aspen.

  A man dressed in the same kind of blue pajamas pulled back the curtain that shut out the other people. Like the nurse, he wore a nametag on a chain. “Mrs. Smith,” he said, “things are a little backed up in radiology. We’ll be taking Aspen to CT as soon as there’s an opening. You’re welcome to come along.”

  So many terms and letters I didn’t know the meaning of. It made me dizzy. But Aspen had to get well. I had walked here in the snow, and my tennis shoes were soaking wet. I would do it again, even barefoot. When Seth found out, he would be furious. “Thank you,” I told that man. Then I asked the nurse, “Is it okay if I tell her a story until they get here?”

  She looked at me like I’d said, “Let’s all spread our wings and fly to the moon,” or “Isn’t that Jerusalem cricket adorable?” People say the crickets are ugly, but here in New Mexico they’re called child of the earth, because they have a face, even if it’s a face only a mother could love. I smiled at her, because smiles are the universal language everyone understands. “I doubt she’ll hear you,” she said, “but be my guest.”

  In the Outside World people say things like “be my guest,” and I have to think hard to figure it out because I don’t live there. Not much in guest except for suet, like we fed the birds. This nurse obviously didn’t believe in miracles, which do happen, I know. “Thank you,” I said. Always be polite. Remain calm. Smile. When the nurse left the room, I bent down close to As
pen’s ear and brushed her thin blonde hair back. Her skin wasn’t flaming like before, but it was still hot. “No more playing possum,” I said. “Wake up.” When she didn’t, I said, “Keep trying to get better. Try your hardest. Please.”

  I counted the tubes they put into her. One went into her hand and another into her forearm. There was one down below, too, under her covers, to catch her pee. I jumped to my feet when they started to touch her there, and tried to make the nurse stop, but the man dressed in the blue pajamas put his arms around me and pinned my arms to my sides until I quit fighting. “Relax,” he said, “I’ll explain everything and why it’s important.”

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Heart monitor.”

  “That?”

  “Blood pressure cuff.”

  “That?”

  “Oxygen tank.”

  “That?”

  “Pulse oximeter.”

  “Does it pinch?”

  “She can’t even feel it.”

  Aspen had had seizures since she was three. Whenever they happened, Seth would say, “Laurel, is your mind on yourself instead of the Creator? Is your spirit chaste?” Haste. Teach. Eat. Cheat. Chase. “Maybe you need to pray harder,” he’d say to me, as if the reason my little girl thrashed her limbs and made faces she couldn’t control were proof that I had bad thoughts and a sinful nature. Bad thoughts caused bad things to happen, Seth said, and the only cure was an hour inside the sweat lodge and chanting prayers until your mind traveled outside your body and became one with the Creator. I didn’t know what happened inside Aspen’s brain when she had a seizure, but I imagined it was like a dream where she had to climb a mountain backwards or run really fast to escape the monster chasing her, but she could only run in slow motion. All I knew was that it took away all her energy. She fell asleep after it stopped. Nothing would wake her. Seth would say, “Sleep is free medicine.” I would hold her and when she finally did wake up, it was slowly, and she was confused. But this morning she wouldn’t wake up at all, and her skin was so hot it hurt to touch. I wet a rag and placed it on her forehead, but she didn’t try to push it away or anything. Her breathing was funny, sort of ragged. I woke up Frances, who we share the yurt with.