Donn's Legacy, page 3
She inspected every inch of the building’s interior with quivering whiskers and a wet nose. The furniture must have met her approval because she settled down on top of the pine table in a compact bundle and stared at the desert that stretched out beyond the fence.
“Let’s leave her here while we grab dinner,” Graham suggested. “We passed a taco place a few miles back that looked open.”
We left Striker to guard the yurt and drove back up the road to the restaurant Graham had seen. The all-night eatery took up the right half of a gas station, with counter service inside the convenience store. Graham ordered our food, and I wandered the shop, selecting sour candies, mini donuts, and potato chips to keep handy in the yurt. My purchases made, I joined Graham in a faded yellow booth to wait for our dinner.
He leaned against the hard plastic mold of the bench and leafed through the Arts section of the Albuquerque Journal. His posture was lazy, with one leg crossed over the other and the newspaper suspended between his elevated hands. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew his expression would be one of easy contentment, as though we were sitting in the kitchen of Primrose House instead of a Chevron.
I had always assumed Graham’s relaxed attitude had been because of his surroundings. Prior to this trip, I’d only seen him on his home turf. But he had carried that calm demeanor through every rest stop on the long drive here, and I realized that, in addition to his talent for sculpture, Graham had a knack for being comfortable anywhere he went. He could settle into any chair, pick up an abandoned copy of the local paper, and lose himself in the moment.
I envied that. No matter where I was or what I was doing, my mind wanted to focus on being somewhere else and doing something different. There always seemed to be some errand that needed running or question that needed answering. Like right now. How could I relax when tomorrow we would be visiting my childhood home?
“You okay?” Graham asked.
“Yeah, why?”
“You’re shaking the whole booth.”
I pressed down on my bouncing leg, forcing my foot to stop tapping. “Sorry. Now that we’re here, I’m excited to start seeing everything again.”
“Here.” He handed me a section of the paper. “This might help distract you while we wait.”
Attempting to mimic his Mr. Cleaver-like posture, I flicked open the paper and skimmed the current events. None of it interested me—I doubted I would care about local government business even if we were back in Donn’s Hill. As a tourist, I felt especially disconnected from New Mexico’s news.
Then a headline caught my eye with a word I had never seen before today but with which I was now intimately acquainted: YURT RESORT DEATH RULED ACCIDENTAL.
A woman found dead in the Socorro County desert died from hypothermia, officials said Friday. Camila Aster, 24, of Gainesville, Ga., was found in her pajamas just a few hundred yards from her motel outside Escondida after an unusually cold overnight low of 26 degrees Fahrenheit.
Aster was reported missing on Oct. 28 after failing to check out of her room on time. Resort staff found the door to her unit ajar and no signs of a struggle. She was in the Socorro area on vacation to visit the Very Large Array and was traveling alone, according to police.
“This was a shock to all of us,” said Lucille Hawkes, owner and operator of the Yurt in Luck Resort. “Our guests are like family.”
A chill ran up my spine, and I checked the date at the top of the page. The paper was only a day old. Within the last week, this woman had been staying at our exact same motel. What were the odds hers was the Tortoiseshell room?
One in ten, my brain chirped helpfully. But I knew in my gut that the luggage Fred Hawkes carried out of our unit hadn’t been left behind by anyone who’d gone home alive. Our room had last been occupied by the now-deceased Camila Aster.
I kept reading, rabidly curious to know more about the woman whose suitcase had so recently been wheeled out of our bathroom.
Authorities warn that hypothermia can set in at temperatures as high as 50 degrees, especially if alcohol or other substances are involved. Aster is the 22nd person to die of exposure this year…
My vision fuzzed, and my mind stopped processing the words in front of me. Suddenly, I was no longer sitting in a cheap taco shop. I was crying on the swing set in my mother’s backyard, clutching the chains at my sides and struggling to process her death. I hadn’t seen her die. I hadn’t even been allowed to see her body. All I had was a single word, a nonsensical bunch of syllables I hadn’t understood and hadn’t wanted to.
Exposure.
The word unleashed a tidal wave of emotions that would have knocked me over if I wasn’t already sitting down. As the cashier dropped a paper bag full of burritos onto our table, I burst into tears.
CHAPTER THREE
My plans for our first day in New Mexico were simple: sleep in to recover from the drive, take Graham to visit my mother’s grave, and stop by the house where I had spent the first eight years of my life. There was just one problem: sleeping in required falling asleep in the first place.
After my unexpectedly emotional response to such a simple word, Graham and I returned to the yurt to gulp down our dinner. He heroically tried to stay awake and talk to me, but there wasn’t much to talk about. We both knew the real reason I was crying was that I was completely exhausted from the trip, and hunger tended to bring out my emotional side.
Graham was snoring as soon as I turned out the light. I tried to follow suit, but my mind kept going back to the day my mother died. It returned again and again to the word I had never wanted to hear again.
Exposure.
Back then, it was only when my father arrived that I heard anyone ask the important question: what had my mother been doing out in the desert in the middle of the night? She was supposed to be covering the graveyard shift for a friend at the call center while our neighbor Darlene watched me.
Nobody had an answer for my father. And when I got older and asked the same question, he didn’t have an answer for me. He thought she might have been exhausted and delirious from picking up too many extra shifts. He felt guilty about that. If she hadn’t been a single mother, if he’d known about me sooner and been able to help, would she have been working so much?
As I lay awake in the yurt, I wondered if my father had been right. Did she really wander into the wilderness in a fit of delirium? What if she meant to go out there? What if she was looking for something?
What had she seen?
And had Camila Aster seen the same thing?
I didn’t know why a stranger’s death was eating at me so much. Camila and my mother were just two women who happened to freeze to death in the same state. As far as I could tell from one newspaper article, their similarities ended there. But the word nagged at me, tugging at the corners of my mind until my brain folded in on itself like origami.
Exposure.
I forced myself to stay awake and stared at the stars thought the yurt’s skylight, terrified that if I fell asleep, I would wake up alone in the cold, dark desert. It wasn’t until the glow of dawn peeked through the window that I finally allowed myself to drift off.
Too few hours later, the pinging of my phone dragged me back into consciousness. It was a message from Kit: How’s the trip?
OK so far, I typed back, too tired and groggy to even attempt to tell her what had happened the night before. Going to visit Mom’s grave today.
Wish I was there with you, Kit sent. Lay a flower for me.
I snuggled back against my pillow. Imagining Kit standing beside me at my mother’s grave washed away a layer or two of the sorrow that had drenched my soul after reading the article about Camila Aster’s death. I wished Kit were here now. We could catch up over breakfast and laugh a few of our troubles away.
Will do, I sent back. What are you up to today?
Well…
A moment later, an image popped up on my phone. Kit grinned at the camera, green hair wild and thick eyeliner smudged around her eyes. She looked like she had just woken up. The skin at one of her temples looked slightly red and swollen, and silver gleamed above and below her eyebrow.
Did you get a new piercing? I asked.
While I waited for her reply, my brain processed the other details in the picture. Kit was somewhere crowded. Behind her, I could see the curly red hair of our former cameraman, Mark, who also left our show in favor of working with Amari. And behind him—
I sucked in a breath through my teeth.
Behind Mark, I could just make out the boarding area of an airport gate.
Holy crap! I typed. Where are you right now?
Yes to new piercing LOL. And NYC, baby! We had to wake up super early but it’s gonna be worth it when I’m in FREAKING PARIS in eight hours!
She sent another photo. This one was a double selfie with her girlfriend, Amari. They both grinned from ear to ear as they held up their plane tickets. Kit had used an app to add a curly French mustache to her face and put a digital beret on Amari’s usually shaved head. A ghost emoji completed the picture.
My fingernails scraped down the back of my phone’s case as I gripped the screen. We didn’t even have the budget or the manpower to film in Moyard, and they were going to France? She was going to Europe without me?
For once, I was glad we were communicating via text and she couldn’t see the envy on my face. It made it easier to fake the right emotions. Exciting! How long will you be there?
Just a week. Hoping to sneak in a visit to the Louvre while we’re there. Don’t know if my phone will have service but I’ll send pics when I can!
Another message from her interrupted me as I was typing a reply. Have to board now—talk soon!
I tossed my phone back onto my nightstand.
“Everything okay?” Graham asked.
The aroma of a rich, dark roast reached my nose. He had packed his percolator from home, not trusting the motel to have a decent one. The bag of mini donuts was already open on the table.
“I’ll be better with some breakfast in my stomach,” I said as I climbed out of bed. “Did you bring any cream?”
An hour later, Graham filled a pair of thermoses with more coffee for the road, and we headed out the door. Striker wasn’t invited on this portion of the trip; the yurt resort was nearly an hour from the cemetery, and we decided it wasn’t worth putting her through that long of a journey just so she could wait in the truck. After so many hours wincing every time we passed another car, it was a relief to travel without any yowls from the back seat.
My mother had been buried in a large memorial garden that, from the outside, looked like it could be a soccer field if not for the flat grayish rectangles set into the grass. A tall chain-link fence protected the cemetery from vandals, and an unnaturally wide variety of conifers, oaks, and shrubs dotted the park.
We picked our way through the rows of in-ground headstones, using a printout from the cemetery’s website as a guide. The closer we got to my mother’s marker, the worse I felt. I hadn’t been back here in over ten years, not since before I started college.
I should have visited her more frequently.
I should have known my way here by heart.
By the time we reached her tombstone, my guilt had latched onto my shoulders and compressed my chest. I forced myself to exhale slowly as I crouched beside her grave. With a shaking hand, I ran my fingers over the inscribed letters:
Evelyn Clair
She passed through nature to eternity
“What does that mean?” Graham asked.
“It’s from Hamlet.” I smiled, recalling my father’s explanation for choosing the inscription. “My dad and Darlene came up with it together. They thought my mother never seemed afraid of death the way people sometimes are. She knew it was just another phase of the journey.”
As the words left my mouth, I heard them in my father’s voice, and I felt the truth of them. My mother had traveled the country looking for what she called “spiritual nexuses,” places where the veil separating the living and the dead was the thinnest. She had spent spring after spring in Donn’s Hill, trying to connect with the other side through her friend and psychic medium, Gabrielle Suntador.
She wouldn’t have been afraid to cross over.
She wouldn’t have lingered here.
Just the same, I stood and leaned against Graham, closing my eyes and mentally feeling for her presence. While the black tourmaline protected me from unwanted energy, it was more of a one-way mirror than a brick wall. Slowly, as my breathing grew more regular, I allowed my consciousness to spread out.
The longer I waited, the sharper my other senses grew. I could smell woodsmoke in the air and hear footsteps in the grass, but I felt nothing else.
As I suspected, there was no trace of her here.
The guilt I had been feeling detached from my chest and evaporated into the chilly air. I might not have made the pilgrimage to my mother’s grave as often as other people visited their departed loved ones, but I thought of her every single day. I carried her memory with me. Wherever she was, I was confident she didn’t resent me for not placing flowers on her grave every week. And if she wouldn’t blame me, why should I blame myself?
A smile settled onto my lips. I opened my eyes and instinctively looked for the source of the footsteps I had heard. An elderly man shuffled by a few rows away from us. He stooped to collect a bundle of dried roses from the base of a wide tombstone, replacing them with a fresh bouquet. He stood there for a few silent moments, clutching his feed cap to his chest.
Something about his posture sent my mind back to the first time I had been in this cemetery.
“There was an old man there,” I remembered aloud.
“Where?” Graham glanced around until his eyes landed on the man with the roses. “That guy?”
I shook my head. “No, not him. My mother didn’t have a funeral. Not like they do in Donn’s Hill anyway, with the big church service and the procession to the cemetery. We just had a few prayers at her grave.”
“That sounds nice. Intimate.”
“I guess. I didn’t really have anything to compare it to. I could barely process any of it. But my dad was there, and Darlene, and this little old man I’d never seen before.”
Graham’s brows furrowed together. “You didn’t know him?”
“No. Is that weird?”
He watched the elderly mourner in front of us, then shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he worked with your mom, or maybe he just happened to be here and stopped to pay respects or something.”
“Yeah.” I chewed my lip, then sighed. “Holy crap, I’m so tired. My brain keeps fixating on the weirdest things. I’ve got words and images flashing on repeat in my head, and I can’t make any sense of them.”
“Let’s head back to the yurt,” Graham suggested. “We’re on vacation. Vacations mean naps.”
“That sounds phenomenal.”
I knelt and rested my hand against my mother’s tombstone one more time. It felt like the right thing to do, but even as my skin touched the cool stone, I knew it was an empty gesture. My mother’s spirit wasn’t hanging around her coffin. I didn’t need to trek all the way to New Mexico to see her.
All I had to do was dream.
CHAPTER FOUR
I stood in my mother’s backyard. My gaze passed over the weedy flower beds and empty bird feeders to rest on the swing set, where a pair of vacant seats creaked and twisted in the wind. The swings pulled at me, begging me to sit down, pump my legs, and soar into the air. But the rusty chains—and the memory of the last time I’d sat in that spot—kept my feet rooted where they were, glued to the cracked concrete of the patio.
I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, expecting the clean scent of lavender I remembered from my childhood. Instead, the foul stench of rot and decay invaded my nostrils. My eyelids flew open, and I glared at the overflowing garbage bins by the back door.
Reality so rarely measured up to dreams.
If this was a dream, I could stand still, awash in nostalgia until my mother’s shimmering form took shape at the edge of my vision. Then I would hear her voice, clear as the tinkling of wind chimes from the neighbor’s yard, calling my name.
But this was real life. I wasn’t likely to see her here.
Despite being fully rested from my nap, I felt like the world around me was cloaked in a layer of surreality, almost real but not quite, like an optical illusion my eyes were on the verge of seeing through. Darkness slowly gathered as the sun set behind the low hills far to the west, but I half expected to blink and find myself in total blackness. Then, just as they had too often in my nightmares, a pair of glowing red eyes would open in front of me.
I turned and squinted at the kitchen window, sure he would be standing there, watching me the way my mother always had. The window was empty, but I still reflexively checked for the piece of black tourmaline on the cord around my neck.
“Doing okay?” Graham asked. He sat on the patio, rubbing Striker’s ears as he watched me.
Her yellow eyes followed me around the yard as well, wide and upside down from her position in Graham’s lap. She lay on her back with each of her four legs sticking out in a different direction, in protest of her harness.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Has it changed a lot?”
I closed my eyes again and pictured the yard as I’d known it as a child—and as I’d known it in my dreams. “It’s too quiet. In my memories, it’s always summer.”
“I like picturing tiny Mackenzie playing tag on the lawn with a bunch of other little kids.”
