“I don’t know. . . .”
But that night on TV, the Pirates game Dad had wanted to watch was canceled for rain. So we turned on the DVD player, having neglected it for months, and up came the last movie we’d left in the machine: Ace in the Hole. As you may or may not know, Ace in the Hole is an awesome, twisty fifties noir about this drunk, disgraced big-city investigative journalist who has to go work for a crappy little paper in Albuquerque. Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Dad tossed aside the extra-butter popcorn we were splitting, and our platter of ham roll-ups (our family recipe—like Fruit Roll-Ups, almost as gummy, but made with prepackaged ham from the convenience store instead of fruit). He stood, spread his arms to the heavens, and shouted, “THE STARS ARE ALIGNED!” And so that summer we spent a week in Santa Fe.
We hiked Tent Rocks and ate ice cream made to look like baked potatoes at the Cowgirl and shopped for cheap art at the street market in Old Santa Fe. On the last evening before our ten a.m. flight home, while we perused the gift shop of our pink adobe motel for every kind of chili product available—from red chili jam to chili chocolate to chili-flavored soda—the cashier told us about this great, isolated lake in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Though I was pretty sure we’d be captured by hill people, Dad was like, “Nah,” so we set out in the late evening.
It was dark and cool when we got to Santa Cruz Lake. Beyond the parking lot was a squat beach and, reaching out into the water, a long metal dock. We clanked over the walkway to the end of the dock and spread out a blanket. The water was dark and pretty deep. It lapped gently at the dock maybe a foot below the platform, the hush, hush, hush of it the only sound forever. We lay back and tilted our faces up into a million stars you could never see from the suburbs. Instead of the Sugarbrook sky, filmy and gray with streetlights and stadium lights and neon signs, the sky out there was huge and dusty with limitless solar systems.
“See, Immy?” Dad said hoarsely. “The stars are aligned.”
The very next book Dad wrote was The Case of the Weeping Woman. The plot had Miles Faye traipsing out to Santa Fe to help a cousin accused of drowning his girlfriend in Santa Cruz Lake. Weeping Woman went big, his biggest novel yet, and in interviews he said he was inspired by the universe, New Mexico, and Subway.
If we hadn’t seen the ad for the Santa Fe Wrap. If the Hyundai Santa Fe hadn’t parked so obnoxiously that we paid particular attention to it. If a mass of air hadn’t cooled to its saturation point, condensing water vapor into clouds that poured rain on a ball field in Pittsburgh, leaving us no choice but to turn on the DVD player and find Ace in the Hole. For Dad there’s some kind of mystical significance behind the ifs, playing one big cosmic game of connect-the-dots. Not god or anything. Meaning.
Even when I was little and playing literal connect-the-dots in my coloring books, it kind of seemed like bullshit. Whatever blocky shapes emerged from my crayon, they never really looked like flowers or balloons or boats. Just jagged approximations in purple wax.
What I’m thinking is: Of course there was a Santa Fe Wrap advertisement in our booth—we always chose that table because it was farthest from the bathroom. That meant it was closest to the front door, where every few minutes a customer would let in a blast of baking heat or biting cold, depending on the season, making it pretty undesirable to everyone but us, so whatever ads were plopped on the table before the breakfast shift likely stayed there past lunch. And duh, we passed a Hyundai Santa Fe on our way out; it is, after all, a top safety pick. And sure, Ace in the Hole was in the player. It’s one of our favorites; we once went through a snap where we watched it six times in a month. There’s a reason for everything, if you look hard enough. An answer for every mystery.
If Dad met my mother on February 14 of 1995—the day he showed her the body of Siobhan Faye and gave her a stone heart, as much a twentieth anniversary as any for my I-now-know-unmarried parents—then Lindy was wrong about Valentine’s Day meaning nothing to Dad, especially if he and Mom had ever talked about marrying. That day meant everything to him, even when nothing else did; I know because even in the bad times, he told me my bedtime story.
I’m on his trail. I’ve felt it all along, and if I wasn’t 100 percent positive he was off trying to save my mother, I am now. This is proof, actual and undeniable. What’s more, I think he left the heart for me not as a clue, but as a map. Hoping just this once I would see it too, the picture in the stars, and use it to find my way to him.
TEN
“Why are you doing that with your face?” Jessa winces at me while I lead us through the frosty parking garage.
“Doing what? I’m smiling.”