Shutter(27)

We eased into our muddied, rutted driveway, our tires rumbling in deep tracks, as the moon was high in the sky. I could not help but think about the story my grandmother had just told. How cruel life could be, and death, a crueler and more evil experience. I didn’t like how Navajos thought of death, like a first-class ticket to hell, and even at that young age, I wondered about all of it. What was real? Who was telling me the truth?

I LOVED BEING there in my grandmother’s house. The familiarity of the green checkered curtains blowing gently in the breeze of early summer, the still-warm tortillas sandwiched between the handmade potholders. We would talk and talk about everything while country songs drawled from the speakers of her clock radio. Every day was like this with my grandmother. This was where I wanted to be forever, where I belonged, free from the press of civilization.

Grandma had other plans. She prepared me for what was to come. It was time for me to move in with my mom. Grandma explained that I would return each June through August to be here among the tall, blooming stalks of Indian tea, to witness the invitations to late-night singing beckoning from spray-painted roadway signs, and to spend the cool nights on the porch with my grandmother.

But Grandma encouraged me to stay with my mother. “This is not where I want you to end up,” she would say. “There is nothing here for you.”

“But you’re here.”

“I will always be here,” she would reply. “You will not. I don’t want you ending up like Gloria.”

I didn’t trust that my mother could take care of me. After all, she had left me here and moved on with her life. She rarely visited. It was like Grandma had to remind her that I existed, and in doing that, Grandma had to remind my mother about her bad decisions.

That night, my dream was touched by a freezing fear. I saw myself get up off the couch, my bare feet touching the stony linoleum. I walked to Grandma’s door and pressed my face against the stained wood to check that she was still breathing—something that I had done since I had learned about the miracle of the beating heart. Grandma had read me a book about the heart’s chambers and the electricity of our own bodies—miraculous, but also, something that could stop with little warning. My grandmother’s mortality was something I feared more than the approach of my own death.

In my dream, I could not hear her breathing. I let myself in. There she was, lying in her bed, not breathing. I grabbed her limp body and desperately tried to shake the life back into her veins, but she was gone. My body began to fade, my strength failing, my arms disappearing into nothing. Pieces of my teeth began to fall into my lap, and as I used my tongue to feel where they were coming from, I only pushed them out faster and faster. As I disintegrated into nothing, I jolted from my sleep. My grandmother sat at my feet, staring at me like she had watched the whole thing unfold on a movie screen.

She grabbed my hand and led us out into the morning. She took a softened satchel from the pocket of her light cotton dress. She spilled some of the bright yellow powder into my hand and into hers as she prayed softly in Navajo. She prayed for me, for my mother, and for our future. We sprinkled the yellow corn pollen in our hair and in our mouths and distributed what was left into the air. She looked at me, smiled, and turned to walk back toward the house. I stayed behind and watched the last of the floating prayer catch the beams of the rising sun.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Canon 5D—In Two Pieces

HOSPITALS SMELL LIKE alcohol pads and Band-Aids. That’s how I knew where I was.

“Hey, look, I think she’s waking up. I think she can hear us.”

“Lady, can you hear us? Can you hear what we are saying to you?”

I didn’t know where the voices were coming from, and I didn’t care to find out. A rubber-gloved hand pulled at the skin beneath my left eye, a flashlight stinging. I sat straight up in the hospital bed.

“Hold on, young lady. You’re going to have to lie back and relax. We’re running a few tests—making sure everything is okay up there.” The doctor chuckled and poked at my forehead.

“I told you, Rita.” Angie spoke up from the chair in the corner. “I think this job is getting the best of you.”

“Or you need to get to work!” Erma’s ghost sat next to Angie. “I can hold this door all day.” A bright light rose behind her as I watched shadows move through and around her.

I tried to shake off Erma and the whitened, sick haze in the room. Lights bubbled and circled around Erma and Angie. Features emerged, like faces silhouetted through clean white sheets on a clothesline. They pressed in and out and talked in a million hushed voices. I had to get far away from Erma and this place as soon as possible. When there are one or two of them, their voices are manageable. But a hospital full of lost souls had their eyes on me now, knowing I could hear them thanks to Erma. I felt their deaths, just like the Winters scene, and it was getting worse.

“Rita, are you okay?” Angie pressed. “What’s the matter with your eyes?”

“Can she see us?” a little ghost asked. “I heard that she could see us.”

“Oh, she can see you just fine,” Erma offered. “She can hear you too.”

I looked down at the little girl; she was a shell of white light. Something about children’s voices always forced me to look.

“She looked at me!” She raised a finger to my face.