“How are you, Papa?”
“I don’t know. Goddamn remote.”
Her face grew solemn, as if she realized the severity of his illness. We were all speechless for a moment while I stared at her. Sonja, at thirty-one, strongly resembled my sister Irene when she was younger, though they were nothing alike. My sister had always been demure, reserved, conservative. Sonja stayed out late nights. I worried about her and the younger men she dated, some of whom attended the college in Quah. I wanted her to settle down; Ernest and I both did, but the more we brought it up, the more she withdrew from us.
“There’s a guy I want to meet,” she finally said.
“A new guy?” I said. “What does he do?”
“He’s a musician,” she said. “I’m going to see him play tonight at a bar near campus. Tonight I’m going to talk to him. I’m finally going to meet him. I’ve thought about it for weeks.”
“A musician? What’s his real job?”
“I haven’t even met him yet.”
“Well, how old is he?”
“I don’t know. Twenty-three?”
I didn’t say anything. I got up, and Sonja followed me, helping me take the dishes into the kitchen. I turned on the water in the sink and rinsed the plates, then handed them to Sonja to put in the dishwasher.
“Did you talk to Edgar about Ray-Ray’s anniversary next week?” she asked.
“I was busy helping Irene at the powwow all weekend, but yesterday I tried calling him, and he hasn’t called me back.”
“Me either,” she said. “I’m concerned.”
“I am, too,” I said. “It’s been too long. It’s been weeks.”
“He might be embarrassed,” she said.
We’d had an intervention with Edgar six months earlier. He had been living with his girlfriend, Desiree, in New Mexico and got hooked on meth. He’d stolen money from Desiree and from us. Before the intervention, he had visited and said he needed money to pay for an alternator replacement on his car, plus repairs for an oil leak. Ernest loaned him over $400 in cash. He’d already dropped forty pounds in weight, so we were on edge. Sonja thought he was doing cocaine, too. Edgar was only twenty-one, my youngest baby. The thought of his drug use had nauseated me. I could hardly eat. A month later Desiree had called and said she had to bail him out of jail for breaking into a car.
Ernest, Sonja, and I had driven to Albuquerque to confront him. We arrived at the rental house he shared with Desiree, who was waiting for us on the front porch when we pulled into the drive. Edgar was taking a nap on the couch. When we walked in, he woke with a start and sat up. He didn’t say anything, but he looked terrified. I think he knew what was happening. I sensed that Desiree had already said something to him, and that he expected us. We all sat down at the kitchen table with him and told him we were worried, his drug use out of control, he was slowly killing himself, and we didn’t want to watch him die.
“You have to realize the harm you’re doing to yourself,” I told him. “We want you to get help before it’s too late.”
I thought the intervention had worked. He broke down, told us he would go to rehab as long as we paid for it. Sonja had already found a residential treatment center in Tulsa, where he agreed to check himself in the following week, but he never went. We couldn’t force him to go, and his relationship with Desiree was falling apart. We had spoken to him a few times on the phone, but he mostly kept his distance from us, which surely meant he was still using. I prayed he would come home.
In the kitchen I wiped my hands on a dish towel and turned to Sonja. “Do you think there’s any chance he’ll show up next week?”
“He knows it’s important to us,” she said.
“You think so?”
“I mean, I think so.”
“Tell him it’s important to Ray-Ray,” I said.
THAT NIGHT ERNEST WOKE ME from sleep. He was standing beside the bed with his hand on mine. I felt the coldness of his hand and sat up.
“What is it?” I said.
“There’s a noise,” he said. “It’s coming from somewhere outside. I have to go outside and check.”
“What kind of noise?”
“I don’t know, a hard knock. A clanging. I heard it outside. I have to go check.”
He started for the door. I didn’t want him going alone, so I put on my slippers and followed him down the hall into the kitchen, where he peeked out the window. He turned on the back porch light, unlocked the door, and stepped out. I waited by the door, watching from the window while he looked around. He walked to the side of the house, then to the middle of the backyard. He stood still for a moment, as if he’d forgotten something. Then he headed to the shed, and I saw the light come on in there.
I opened the back door and walked to the shed. Once, a few years back, we kept birdfeed in large sacks out there, but that had caused a problem with mice. That was the winter Ernest was hospitalized for pneumonia, and every day when I returned home from the hospital, I found another dead mouse in a trap. We never went into the shed anymore.
“I’m looking for the rocks Edgar was talking about,” Ernest said.
“What rocks?” I said.
“The colored rocks. I think he said green or red rocks.”
“When?”
He hesitated, confused, so I waited for him to finish. He kept looking around. The shelves were mostly filled with old paint cans and tools. There was an old basketball trophy in the corner of the shed. Ernest picked it up and held it so that I could get a good look at it. “Edgar’s trophy,” he said. “Basketball from junior high. When was it?”
Things were getting more difficult at night, much worse than during the day. Sleep problems, the confusion of dreams. He had always been a deep sleeper and heavy dreamer. We used to tell each other about our dreams, laughing at the absurdity, the surreal humor, even back when the kids were still young. But now it was too difficult to watch him mumble on about things he created in his mind—hearing noises, looking for figurines.
He stared at the trophy, looking sad. It was as if he understood how confused he was. Maybe he realized the foolishness of his actions, waking up in the middle of the night and dragging us both outside to the shed. But I let him have his time.
He said, “I guess he’s gone, Maria.”
I waited for him to look at me.
He said, “I wish he’d come home.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Let’s go back to bed.”
THAT NIGHT, unable to fall asleep, I sat at the dining room table with my notebook. I journaled intermittently, which had always helped ease my mind:
The bonfire is in five days. I have so much I need to do to prepare for it, but I worry Ernest can’t handle it anymore. I want Edgar here. I don’t want to lose him like we lost Ray-Ray.
I considered the complexities of time, how slowly and how quickly it moves. Fifteen sad years had passed since Ray-Ray died. We had started having the bonfire on the tenth anniversary of his death, and for the past five years it had become a way for us to get together and be honest with one another and focus on the importance of our family, our land. Even though Ernest and I had both grown up near here, I never felt such a strong connection to the land around us until we started doing the bonfires. But with Ernest’s declining Alzheimer’s over the past year, I feared this would be the last bonfire. Our very first bonfire, which was Ernest’s idea, he and Edgar went out to gather firewood together. They came back laughing about something Edgar had seen, a stick or twig he had mistaken for a snake, which had made him drop the firewood and run. Ernest kept laughing about that, I remember. And as we stood around the bonfire, reflecting on what we were thankful for, Ernest had said: “I’m thankful we can laugh even in times of sadness.” This was our gift to Ray-Ray, our way of understanding and making healing and sadness feel eminently right.