Shutter(4)

How obvious it was that poor Anne had no idea what she was doing with a baby. The conception had been a hurried affair, and I was a haunting reminder of Anne’s bad decisions. After two and a half drinks and a two-block walk back to her small, cold college apartment, she had finally surrendered to my father, a boy named Abel who had pestered her for months with smiles and dimples. She’d tried to take his picture, but he always refused. She pressed the button anyway, collecting photographs of fragmented faces, eyes and lips segmented by his intruding hand in frame.

The morning after she finally gave in, Abel kissed her and said he would be back; she never saw him again. Never in class, never on the street. Her friends remembered him with curly hair and light eyes. But Anne remembered his black hair, straight and shiny, and his eyes, dark brown and mysterious. He had a small mole right above his left cheekbone.

Anne has never forgiven me for coming into her life and yanking the brake on her future in the most unforgiving way. Here she was again, living with her mother, me at her breast, my eyes wide open. And what of Abel, this ghost that was my father? She screamed his name as she packed to return home, me in her stomach. She would shout his name in desperation as she walked alone outside my grandmother’s house. And for this I was sorry.

Three years after she had come home to the reservation, on the anniversary, she left us. The house was quiet except for the slow stir of coffee in the kitchen. My grandma sat in the blue of morning, the cresting sun hauling light from her white cabinets. She lifted me on her knee and smiled. We both knew that it was better this way. Grandma’s arms were strong and able and experienced. I knew she wouldn’t drop me.

That was all I saw of my mother for a few years, except for a picture that my grandmother had pinned to her bedroom wall. My mother, wearing a light pink sweater, stood in the rain, her moist hair forming into ringlets. She grinned with her eyes straight ahead. When I made my way into my grandma’s room and stared at the photograph, Mom’s eyes followed me. I would run from left to right, right to left, and her eyes turned with me. Sometimes I would just sit and talk to the picture, imagining our conversations.

After Mom left, my grandma took me to the medicine man, and he sang for me. His hands were strong and thick but soft. When we came into his house, he spun me in circles. He blew smoke and said prayers; his bone whistle echoed in my head for hours. I finally started to sleep, an hour here and there, eventually in blocks of three and four.

I learned early that no amount of prayer or smoke or love was ever going to change the fact that these lights wanted to talk to me. Even at three years old, I knew it was something that deeply terrified my grandma and our medicine man. It was something that I was going to have to hide from them.

As I got older, I taught myself how to look beyond the ghosts and mute their voices. I learned to listen to the world in ways no one could imagine. My ears focused on the sounds in Grandma’s house: the creaking door hinges, the high-pitched scream of Grandma’s tea kettle, the tick of her scarecrow clock. I integrated their voices with these sounds, with the songs of birds at my grandma’s bedroom window, the constant drone of Highway 666 to our east, and the whispers of the wind coming through the valley beside the Chuska Mountains. I learned to listen for wild horses running in the wash below the house and the herds of sheep grazing in the valley. Anything to keep the sight and sound of ghosts from taking over my every waking moment.

But no matter how strong I think I am, this thing—call it a gift or a curse—is still a part of me, just like my veins, heart, and hands. It is attached. It is a part of my voice and vision—this visually enhanced speakerphone from some other place. I can’t turn it off.





CHAPTER THREE

Nikon D50 l8-55mmDX Revisited

I DIDN’T KNOW how long the detective had been tapping on my window. Droplets of water covered my windshield.

“Are you okay in there?” I watched his lips move, only half hearing the words. I rolled down the window.

“I’m fine. Long night.”

“Shall I get one of the guys to drive you home? You look tired.”

My head throbbed. “I’ll be fine. Just needed some rest.” I turned the key, surprised that I’d fallen asleep at the scene. I could see my breath. My skin felt thin and brittle in the morning sun. The office was only a few miles from here—I could bag things up there and move on home to bury myself in some blankets.

The APD crime lab building was shaped like a giant adobe cube. The small, square windows floating six feet above the ground let light in for about two hours a day during the steely gray Albuquerque winter. The building sat between I-25 and the Rio Grande, flanked on one side by a city recycling plant and, on the other, an emissions testing center. Sometimes, in the morning, if you were there early enough, you could smell the sweet dough and heated yeast of the bakery on the corner, but only if the wind blew in the right direction.

The photo and video offices were empty, with one last fluorescent light in the corner blinking toward extinction. Duplicated DVDs and CDs sat out, waiting for cases. I pulled the cards from my camera and began the download, the computer spinning in time and my brain along with it. The download bar ticked slowly. I hoped it would finish before my boss, Samuels, arrived. With only 35 percent of it downloaded at 8:26 A.M., I wasn’t going to make it. The thought hadn’t finished before the front doorbell began to chime.

“Rita! Are you in here?” Samuels’s horrible voice boomed through the building.