“She did,” he said. “I think she just needed a reality check because she came back before long, and her hair had grown out some, and she’d gotten rid of all that women’s lib talk. She probably realized that everywhere has its problems, you know? Maybe Colfax wasn’t so bad.”
“My dad basically had the same reaction,” Lydia said, nodding her head, subdued by the direction this visit had gone in. “He did the exact same thing: got out of town the second he could. Rio Vista was his India. Only we never came back.”
“I’ve never really thought about it like that, but it totally makes sense,” Raj said. “You can’t really blame them, worrying about their kids. Wanting to raise us somewhere safe.”
“We were so much happier in Denver,” she said, “with the library and the doughnut shop and everything, at least for a while. So much happier—and then we just weren’t.”
Lydia glanced at the magazine page still facedown on the table, and when she looked up she caught Raj staring at her. She picked it up and turned it in her hands. She didn’t need to say, All because of this, because Raj was looking at the picture now as well, and she could tell exactly what he was thinking: All because of this.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The photograph earned front-page spreads across the West and even made Life magazine’s The Year in Pictures, just opposite the image of an American army helicopter tilting away from a crowd of refugees. The freelance photographer, tipped by a pal in the Denver Police Department, popped his shutter just as Tomas lunged down the porch steps of the house next door to the O’Tooles’, where he and Lydia had gone to wait for help. The photo captured them plunging through the crowd of paramedics and cops, with Lydia glancing up at the camera, eyes wide with terror, face masked with blood, limbs knotted around her father. A gray blanket dragged behind her, and one of the cops could be seen reaching down to lift it out of the snow.
For days after the photo was taken, Lydia inhabited a hospital room crowded with flowers and balloons and yarn-tied get-well cards. In addition to all the bedside visits from doctors and nurses, she’d been interviewed by a pair of bossy policemen who smoked too much and could never quite figure out how to work their tape recorder. Worst of all, the cops kept leading her dad away from her bedside, and whenever he returned he looked scraped out, as if they were collecting little pieces of his soul in jars somewhere. Before long the policemen were replaced by women who wore turtleneck sweaters and beaded necklaces and looked like teachers. They were kind and brushed her hair and always asked how she felt. She’d look at her dad—fiddling with the bandage on his palm, scratching at his beard—and tell the women that she felt just fine. No nightmares? She’d smile and lie. None that she noticed. No sadness? She missed her friends, was all. No pain? The stitches on her forehead were beginning to itch. Once when her dad was out on a Jell-O run, they asked her if she knew anything about his special friends, but when Lydia said What friends? they just fluffed her pillow and encouraged her to get some sleep.
Soon Lydia was walking through the hospital lobby, squeezing the hands of nurses as Tomas steered her into the backseat of the used station wagon he’d purchased during one of her naps. He told her to hide under the duffel bags and blankets back there, and doing so felt like the most natural thing she’d done in ages.
—No one’s allowed to see us, he said. All part of the deal.
Three hours later the rest of the deal was clear as they dragged their bags into a two-bedroom A-frame cabin in the hills north of Rio Vista. Tomas had apparently arranged to buy the cabin, along with its massive workshop and eight acres of juniper pine, sight unseen. The place had been unoccupied for years and it had cost him practically nothing, but in order to call it home he still had to cash in nearly every cent of Rose’s life insurance. Though it would take him another six months to sell their house in Denver, and he spent a lot of that time in a financial panic, never once did he mention returning to the city.
At first, the ten-year-old Lydia thought the move to Rio Vista was an adventure worthy of a storybook. Tomas loaded their grocery cart with TV dinners and candy bags and ordered a set of Holly Hobby bedroom furniture from the old brick J. C. Penney outlet in Colorado Springs. He assured her that until the following fall—seven months away—she didn’t even have to think about school or homework or making friends. Everything about this new life carried the feeling of a dream, especially the tiny town of Rio Vista. The valley smelled of campfires and freezer frost, and Main Street’s wooden sidewalks clopped beneath her feet as she ran. Behind town, the Arkansas River roared south, its rocky banks stapled with railroad tracks and mining chutes. The mist rising off the river was so eerie, the mountain peaks so soaring, that she often felt as if she and her father had moved to a paragraph in a fairy tale—
Except that during all of their time together Lydia found it upsetting that they never spoke about That Night, especially because it felt as if it had slithered forward in time and consumed every other night in her life. Sometimes she would hear her father crying in the shower, or she’d catch him pulling the phone into the pantry and whispering in the dark. Once when he fell asleep against a tumble of pillows on the floor, she looked at him over the top of her book—his beard growing gray and scraggly, his wool sweater unraveling, his horn-rims sitting crooked on his nose—and whispered it, just to see:
—the Hammerman, dad. where’s the Hammerman?
He groaned in his sleep and she wondered if his nightmares were as bad as her own.
Lydia’s fairy tale in Rio Vista fully lost its shine when Tomas, after tapping his remaining savings, decided to take the only job he could find: working as a corrections officer at the state prison on the southern limits of town. When he shared the news over toaster waffles one evening, Lydia was full of complaints. Not only was Tomas compromising himself—a phrase she’d heard him say a zillion times—but he would have to be gone all night.
—We all start on graveyard.
—but i’ll be alone.
—I thought you were okay.
—i am.
—Then what’s the problem?