The-Hummingbird-s-Cage(100)

The first person I saw when I woke in my hospital bed, though, was Terri. Ten years older, beaming at me as if merely waking up was an achievement.

“Girl,” she said, “you’re back!”

When Laurel and I hadn’t arrived at the airport in Boston as planned, she and her husband, Greg, had placed enough calls to Wheeler to find out why. They flew out at once. They took care of Laurel till I was released.


*

It’s been two years since Insurrection Day, and I haven’t been back to Wheeler since. I sold the house, leased a small one in Albuquerque near the university, started classes again. I’ll get my English degree in June. After that, Terri and Greg have invited us to spend the summer with them in Boston—they have a daughter close to Laurel’s age, and the two have become great friends. In the fall, I’ll start working on an MFA in creative writing, and have accepted a job as a teaching assistant.

On weekends, we drive up to Taos. I found my Oma’s little house outside town, abandoned, in disrepair. I used the money from the sale of the Wheeler house to buy it. To replace the rotting boards, repair the leaking roof. We painted it inside and out, and sowed fields of wildflowers all around.

Then we drove stakes of all sizes into the soil and tied links of pretty chain from branches. We used them to mount and hang a dozen hummingbird feeders—sequined glass, brushed metal, a crystal lantern, a dewdrop, giant strawberries and oranges, a red rose, a cobalt blue bottle, a tiny glass chandelier.

When we talk about Morro, about Jessie and Olin and Simon, it’s usually there in Oma’s house.

Although I’ve never been back to Wheeler, I did get close once.

It was a few months after I was released from the hospital, a day in late autumn when Laurel was still in school. I rented a four-wheel drive, hit the interstate and drove west. About thirty miles this side of Wheeler, I began scanning the landscape hard.

In time, I spotted the makings of an old dirt road cutting off south from the highway. Or, rather, the remains of a road—overgrown and pitted from rain and wind and disuse, sloping up toward a toothy break of hills and disappearing over the other side.

I pulled off on the shoulder and cut the engine, torn about whether to drive up this particular path or turn around and go back, even if I had just come a hundred miles to find it.

Finally I switched the engine back on and turned off the highway.

It was slow going over the rough terrain, up and up the sloping hills, then over. A mile or so farther on, I stopped again.

This time I left the Jeep and walked to the edge of the road.

The valley cuts east-west here, just as before. But now it’s filled with wild grasses, brush, pi?on, juniper trees. Gone are the wheat fields, the cornfields, the orchards, the trees of every kind, the wildflowers of every color. There is no Willow Creek tumbling down the Mountain.

There is no mountain.

At least, not the one I was looking for. What’s here now has the bulk, the breadth, of a mountain, but it’s barely a third the size of the one I knew. Just a moderate incline to a smooth summit of moderate height. Much like any other in the range. Nothing extraordinary.

And from where I stood, I should have been looking at Olin and Jessie’s farmhouse. But there was no farmhouse. There’d never been one. At least, not the big house with the wraparound porch, built of gray stones dug up from the soil every spring.

Instead, next to the road were the remains of a little woodframe, long collapsed in on itself, its fallen timber now scattered and rotted. The only portion still marginally intact was a brick fireplace rising out of the ruin, its chimney toppled.

This was where Olin and Jessie had lived.

It had taken a while to track them down, searching through the microfilm in the periodicals section of the university library. Two small obituaries in the Wheeler newspaper, both dated 1939. Jessie had passed first, in late April. By July, Olin had joined her.

I noticed far off the road a large mound of gray stones, cracking apart from erosion, sprouting so many weeds you could mistake the pile as part of the landscape—not collected over years of farming. But there weren’t quite enough stones, not quite enough years, for Olin to build Jessie that farmhouse.

Finding Reuben, Bree and Jean had been easier. They were so recent, by comparison, that an Internet search was all it took. And Trang was difficult only if you didn’t know what to look for. His was a brief newspaper notice: Asian male, mid-to late teens, no identification, discovered under an overpass along the interstate just outside Wheeler, hypothermia.