The-Hummingbird-s-Cage(5)

“Girl, are you sure about him?” she’d ask.

I was troubled that she doubted his intentions. Or my judgment.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked.

“Jo, he’s calling you all day. He wants to know where you are, who you’re with. He’s tracking you.”

But I’d never had a serious boyfriend before Jim. My role models for romance were Byron, the Brownings, Yeats and a manic-depressive mother who cycled through the wrong men all her life. What I saw in Jim was passion and commitment. He took me on picnics in the Sandias. We rode the tram to the peak, and he proposed on the observation deck. We spent our first weekend together in a bed-and-breakfast in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside Santa Fe, watching the sunrise from our bedroom window. I felt caught up in a whirlwind, breathless, but happy to let it have its way with me.

Still, when he urged me to drop a study group for semester finals so we could spend even more time together, I balked. It was our first argument. There wouldn’t be many more. He told me he cared for me, wanted to be with me, thought I felt the same. Disappointment infused every syllable.

I felt cornered. I blurted, “Terri thinks we spend too much time together already.”

Jim’s face went blank. For several seconds he didn’t speak. Then, “She said that?”

I didn’t answer.

“Well,” Jim said quietly, “I didn’t want to tell you this, but there’s more to Terri than you realize. Remember when we met? Terri called me a few days later. She said she thought we should get together sometime. I told her I was interested in you, and that was the end of it.”

He was studying me as he spoke.

“I chalked it up to a misunderstanding on her part. She’s never called since. I didn’t want you to think less of her.”

My heart began to thud against my rib cage. Blood pulsed in my ears. Terri, the sleek golden girl who excelled at everything she ever tried her hand at, who could have any man she wanted—did she want mine? Was she looking out for me, or just sowing seeds of doubt to clear a path for herself?

“I thought you trusted me. Trusted us.” Jim shook his head sadly. “I don’t want to break up with you over this.”

There must be a moment when every animal caught in a leg trap runs through the minutes, the seconds, before the coil springs. Before the swing and snap of hard metal on bone. The reversible moment—the one it would take back if only it could.

Winter break was coming up, and Terri was heading home to Boston. We had been best friends since the first day of college, but suddenly she seemed like a stranger to me. By the time she returned, Jim and I were engaged and I had dropped out of school. I wouldn’t take her calls anymore or return her messages. After a while, the calls stopped.

Just before the wedding, I returned home to my apartment to find a message on a slip of paper wedged in the doorjamb:

Run, girl, run.

But the reversible moment was gone.





March 6





We live just outside Wheeler, a city of twenty thousand bordering the Navajo reservation. The town is roughly equal parts Caucasian, Hispanic and Indian—not just Navajo, but Zuni and Hopi, too. It’s been described as a down-and-dirty sort of place. Billboards crowd the two interstates that run into town and out again. Signs are always advertising half-off sales on Indian jewelry—mostly questionable grades of turquoise and silver crafted into belts, earrings and squash blossom necklaces, but also smatterings of other things, like tiger’s eye cabochons set in thick rings and looping strands of red branch coral. The town is notorious for its saturation of bars, liquor stores and plasma donation centers. Unless you live there, or need gas or a night’s sleep, or you’re in the market for souvenirs of Indian Country, it’s more of a drive-through than a destination.

The McGill County sheriff’s office is headquartered in Wheeler, but its jurisdiction actually lies outside the city limits—about five thousand square miles of high desert. The rugged sandstone mesas that make up the northern horizon begin about twenty miles east, and they are something to behold, rising up out of the earth in a sloping, unbroken line, bloodred and striated.

In any given year, the county might see two murders and a half dozen rapes. I know, because Jim likes to tell me, studying my face as he recounts the details, which are far more lurid than what makes it into a deputy’s report. A dozen arsons, two dozen stolen cars. Four hundred people will drive drunk. Thirty will go missing, and some will never be seen again. Three hundred will be assaulted—at least, those are the ones that make their way into a report. These usually consist of brawls between men who’ve had a few too many, or jealous fights over a girl, or squabbles between neighbors. Less often, young men will jump a stranger for his wallet or whatever contents of his car they can easily pawn. And some are what are commonly known as domestic disputes.