Shutter(54)

“Oh, no.”

A young man got out of the truck. “We lost Grandma,” he said.

“What happened?” Grandma was tearing up. Mrs. Bitsie was her dear friend. They used to talk, drink coffee, and share their garden vegetables with each other. I felt a lump rising in my throat.

“They said it was a stroke.” The young man wiped away tears. “We’re going into town to meet with the people from the funeral home right now. Her services will be up here at Saint Mary’s. We had to let you know. You were one of her only friends.”

“Thank you, dear,” Grandma said.

I helped Grandma into the house. Sadness filled the room, expanding out and up, enveloping the two of us in an uneasy silence. I poured a cup of Grandma’s thick coffee.

“Grandma, are you hungry?” I wasn’t, but I knew she should eat. Sadness had a way of starving our bodies.

“No,” she said. But her stomach growled loudly right on cue. We looked at each other and laughed.

“I’ll make us some sandwiches,” I said.

Grandma sat at the table and watched as I chopped up onions and pickles and boiled eggs. Tuna fish salad was always her favorite, on wheat bread. Out the window, I could see Mrs. Bitsie’s dog, George Bush, standing at the gate of her garden, still guarding her treasures from the roaming packs of strays.

Grandma was staring at the Bitsie house when I placed her sandwich on the table. Cars were beginning to gather—some rusty trucks and tattered ten-year-old cars. George Bush barked and barked but never left his post at the front of the gate. No one was getting into that garden.

“Grandma, did you want to go over there?”

“No. That would just make me miss her more.” Grandma shifted in her seat. “I guess all of us old people are just going to start dropping one by one.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re healthy and you’re not going anywhere.” There was panic in my voice.

“Even if I died, I could probably still come and talk to you every day. You still do that? Talk to dead people?” Grandma looked at me sideways.

“No, Grandma, I haven’t done that in a long time,” I lied.

“Not even your mom? You’ve really never seen her again?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said.

Grandma kept watching everything across the street, pushing away the plate I just set in front of her. I couldn’t eat either. The thought of Grandma leaving this earth had haunted me forever. She was all that I had left—my whole family. And here she was, refusing to eat, her heart reaching and shuddering from all the death and tragedy that was befalling us. I ached to protect her heart from the pain, to fix this battered house. But there was little I could do except keep her company.

When Grandma fell asleep that evening, I walked out to the eastern side of the house and watched the clouds curling and swelling, the flashes of lightning in the distance over Albuquerque. By the time the sun was getting ready to settle down for the day, the storm was practically on top of me, my lungs and nose filling with the smells of wet sagebrush and heavy-soaked earth.

“Can I ask you about something?” The voice came from nothing, just a faint white flicker in the darkness. It didn’t matter. I recognized her immediately.

“Yes, Mrs. Bitsie. You can ask me anything.” I tried to make out her features or a silhouette—anything. She was only a glimmer now.

“All those kids at the house are fighting.” Mrs. Bitsie was angry. “They never cared about me when I was alive—never came to visit me. Now that I’m dead, they’re sure over there dividing up all of my things and moving in.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even supposed to be talking to the spirits, especially here at Grandma’s house.

“I need you to go over there. I never had the chance to tell anyone about my will. I have everything arranged, just like I wanted. It’s all in the blue lockbox up in the crawlspace in my closet. Let my grandsons know that it all goes to them. Their mother left them here years ago and never bothered to come back for them. They were all I had.”

“Do you want me to go over there right now?” I asked. But she was gone. There was no voice and no light. Just me again. Alone. In the dark.

Back in the house, I checked on Grandma, still asleep, her radio on low, KTNN’s canned voices coming out in Navajo. I sat in front of the living room television. I wanted to ask Grandma what to do, but I had the feeling she wouldn’t want me to go through with Mrs. Bitsie’s request. She didn’t want people to know about my curse. She’d protected me from it my whole life. But I didn’t feel like letting Mrs. Bitsie down.

My shoes sunk into the still-soft mud in our driveway as I walked to Mrs. Bitsie’s house, which was surrounded by cars I didn’t recognize. George Bush left his post to come over and greet me, wagging his tail, and I wondered if he could see Mrs. Bitsie’s ghost too. I could already hear voices arguing inside the house. Five or six kids played outside with sticks and a weathered kite that couldn’t catch a breeze. Even if it did, the kite would have been lost to the dark or to the abandoned power lines on the side of the rugged mesas.

The wooden steps outside the entrance creaked and moaned as I went to the door and knocked. At first, no one heard me. I knocked again, harder, until my knuckles stung. This time, an angry woman opened the door. I tried to smile, but the heaviness in the room pulled my grin to a slim, flat line. I shook hands with everyone: the two grandsons, a girlfriend of one of the grandsons, two older Navajo men with cowboy hats, thick necks, and bulging bellies under tight western shirts. Both had those long stringy mustaches that Navajo men try to wear, just ten to twenty hairs that grow from the edges of their mouths. I knew they had to be Mrs. Bitsie’s sons. Then there was a woman with lots of jewelry and makeup who had the most damaging glare I had ever seen. I knew her as Rosie, Mrs. Bitsie’s daughter, a Mormon who reformed after twenty years living out of the bottle. They all were mad as hell—Mrs. Bitsie’s ghost included.