The Big Dark Sky (12)

Katherine’s blue stare, as clear as Santa Fe skies, fixed on Joanna’s eyes, like a laser reading code. “You loved your father.”

“Well, of course. He was my dad.”

“How well do you remember him?”

“I was so young. And after all this time . . .”

“He was not an outgoing man. Your mother said shy, but I thought . . . well, something else. I believe he married your mother because he was unsure and somehow empty, while she was so centered and complete. Your life at Rustling Willows was idyllic, wasn’t it?”

Joanna shrugged. “It was a beautiful place. Idyllic? I guess so. My memories of it are . . . misty.”

“I was there for a week, when you were seven. I remember it well. The natural beauty. The relaxed pace of life. I’d say it was one step away from paradise.”

“Until it wasn’t.”

Picking up a bagel and spreading cream cheese on it, Katherine said, “I’m not a psychiatrist, and I’ve never played one on TV, but I suspect that to some small extent, subconsciously, you blame your father for leaving you alone, for having to leave the ranch.”

“What sense does that make? He didn’t want to die.”

“The subconscious isn’t always rational, sweetie.” Katherine reached across the table and put the bagel on Joanna’s plate. “The book you’re working on . . . does it draw on any childhood experiences that might have stirred up all this?”

“No. Nothing like that. Anyway, something’s happened that puts the dreams in a different light.”

When Joanna finished recounting the phone call she had received a few hours earlier, Katherine said, “How peculiar. You’re right to be wary of this woman, whoever she might be. There’s a world of scam artists these days. But surely you do remember Jimmy Two Eyes?”

Having picked up what remained of her bagel, Joanna put it down again without taking a bite. “He’s real? You remember him?”

“Jimmy was three years older than you, the child of Hector and Annalisa . . . something. Alvarez! Hector and Annalisa Alvarez.”

“Hector . . . he was the ranch manager,” Joanna said, as in her mind’s eye the figure of the stocky, broad-faced, ever-smiling Alvarez formed like an apparition coalescing out of mist.

“Yes. And Annalisa was cook and housekeeper. She and your mother were close, more like sisters than employee and employer.”

Although she hadn’t thought about them in a long time, in fact perhaps not in twenty-five years, Joanna’s memory now conjured the faces of Hector and Annalisa with such clarity that she wondered why they hadn’t come to mind—and often—since she’d moved from Montana to Santa Fe. Annalisa had been like an aunt to her, Hector an honorary uncle. Although she had been only nine when she’d last seen them, it seemed inexplicable—even perverse—that she had deleted them from her life as if they were old data of no further use.

Unsettled by all this, Joanna was further bewildered that, in spite of a concerted effort, she could not recall their son, Jimmy. “It’s like . . . like I’ve had some kind of selective amnesia and haven’t been aware of it. Jimmy, huh? Jimmy. Jimmy Alvarez, right? So why the ‘Two Eyes’?”

“That’s what the ranch hands called him,” Katherine said.

There had been four of them, lean men with sun-weathered faces and calloused hands. Joanna remembered them, although not vividly.

When her father inherited the ranch from his old man, the year she was born, maybe sixteen or eighteen men had worked the place, because it had been a cattle operation in those days. Her dad sold off the livestock, a few hundred head, and cut down on the staff and turned Rustling Willows into a horse ranch. He bred superior quarter horses to be sold for racing, as well as certain breeds of show horses for those with the money to indulge in that expensive hobby.

“They never used the nickname in front of Jimmy’s parents, but they didn’t mean to mock the boy,” Katherine continued. “There was something affectionate about it. They pitied Jimmy, as most people did. They feared him a little, too, though the poor child wasn’t a danger to anyone. It was what he represented that they feared.”

“What do you mean? What did he represent?”

Katherine regarded her with concern. “Dear, you really can’t remember him?”

“I really can’t.”

Although some bagel and lox remained on her plate, Katherine pushed it aside. She stared at her empty teacup, reached for the pot that stood on a warming rack serviced by a candle, evidently decided she didn’t want more tea after all, and slid the cup aside, as well. Although she didn’t suffer with a tremor related to age, her hands trembled now.

“Jimmy represented the infinite varieties of chaos that we know might at any moment erupt into our lives, the chaos we mostly don’t allow ourselves to think about. The sweet boy suffered severe birth defects. His head was malformed, as if he’d been born with a skull of wax that too late solidified into bone. His face, with all its problems and those eyes, it was . . . well, an unfortunate face.”

“‘Two Eyes.’ Why call him that? Everyone has two eyes.”

“Not like Jimmy’s. The left was set an inch higher in his head than the right. It was blue and clear, but the right was black and perpetually bloodshot. Mack Northland, the most interesting of the ranch hands, said that when Jimmy stared at you, even though you knew he was harmless . . . it was nevertheless like being watched by both an angel and a demon.” As though the kitchen had turned chilly, Katherine pulled the panels of her scarlet robe together at her throat. “I can’t imagine how you’ve forgotten that.”