Borderline: A Novel Part 16

Because Bernard was being a twit, Anna was tempted to allow herself a small curl of the lip to let him know they were all aware that the mayor had railroaded him, but she was too tired to be petty. The mayor was an interesting woman. She was pet.i.te and, though she had a gym-toned body, she worked at hiding the fact with soft silk that flowed from her shoulders, lending fullness to small b.r.e.a.s.t.s and roundness to what Anna guessed would be sinewy arms. Her hair was incarcerated in what Anna thought of as a Texas bob, very expensively blond and done in stone. Rather like a toned-down, b.u.mble & b.u.mble version of Ann Richards's coif.

The eyes were her most captivating aspect. She had schooled herself in dress and makeup, hair, nails, even body type and managed to create a package that was both attractive and businesslike, physically unremarkable, neither s.e.xy nor uns.e.xed, the fine line women in politics had to walk every day on the way to their closets. To a careful observer, though, her eyes gave her away, Anna thought. They did tonight, at any rate. Surely she hadn't been entrusted with running a city with eyes like that. The Christian right wouldn't allow it. Not in Texas.

Judith Pierson's eyes burned. If Anna squinted, she believed she could almost see the conflagration behind the brownish green irises. The mayor had the eyes of a hungry vampire or a sainted lunatic in mid-vision.

"Mayor Pierson."

The man Bernard had introduced as Darden White spoke from his corner. Anna had forgotten he was there and his voice startled her. Darden had drifted out of her consciousness as a fat old guy in the mayor's entourage. When he spoke he was so very much there, she was surprised she could have overlooked him.

"Can I get you a coffee or a soda?" White asked his boss deferentially.

The mayor paused, took a breath, then said: "A soda if they've got it. Thank you, Darden." When she turned back to the table the fire in her eyesiret s might not have been extinguished but it was no longer in sight.

As he left the conference room it occurred to Anna that he might have intentionally disappeared into the woodwork, the way she often disappeared in plain sight along trails, situated where the natural line of sight would miss her, quiet and unmoving as a rock. People would hike within feet of her, chattering and laughing, never noticing that they were being watched.

"Paul, could you tell us what happened?" Bernard asked, and sat back as if he didn't wish to have the messiness of their adventure splash on him during the telling.

Paul looked to Anna to see if she needed to say anything before he began. She didn't. Paul started with the rescue of Easter, and then told of losing the raft. The chief ranger rolled his eyes at the mention of the cow but otherwise made no comments.

Anna watched Cyril and Steve and Chrissie. The twins were uncharacteristically quiet and Chrissie slumped in her chair with no more life than a deflated balloon. They were exhausted and, now that the adrenaline had been reabsorbed and they were no longer living from moment to moment trying to stay alive, the full impact of the deaths of Carmen, Lori and Helena's mother would be hitting them.

The deaths were waiting to hit Anna. She could feel them like black shadows drifting between her and the overhead fluorescents, swimming past the corners of her eyes always just out of sight but for a gray wisp or a stealthy movement. Ghosts were not the spirits of the uneasy dead, but the projections of the living, drifts of guilt, fear, failure and mortality too great to be contained in the mind.

Anna didn't know why they had chosen to join the specters that had followed her home from Isle Royale or whether or not they would remain with her. Logically she should have been able to banish them easily. She had neither caused nor contributed to the cause of any of the deaths. She had saved whom she could, doing the best she had with what was at hand. That used to be good enough to get her to sleep at night.

No more.

"Chrissie found the woman caught in the strainer," Paul said, and he leaned over to pat Chrissie's shoulder. He smiled at her with the full force of priest and father figure behind it. Chrissie visibly grew stronger; she sat up straighter and tossed her head. Her hair was so filthy and matted it more or less clunked but the gesture had a smidgeon of the old arrogance and Anna was pleased.

"Do you want to tell this part?" Paul asked. Years as a priest would have taught him the necessity of letting people share their horrors, Anna realized. There was much about her husband she did not know, they'd not been together long enough. Instead of making her uneasy she enjoyed a tickle of excitement at the wonders she had yet to discover in this man she had married.

"Yeah. Okay," Chrissie said as she pulled herself together to be a productive member of the adult world.

"Paul, if you don't mind . . ." Bernard left the sentence unfinished but hisinieig meaning was clear. He wanted to hear a real account, not one by a girl in her teens or a middle-aged woman who'd recently fallen apart.

Chrissie began to deflate again. "I wasn't in on a lot of this part," Paul said easily. "Chrissie's the only one who was there start to finish."

Paul leaned back, closed his mouth firmly and smiled encouragingly at the bedraggled teenager.

Chrissie regained the oxygen she'd lost and puffed up a bit. For a moment she scanned the table the way a practiced speaker might a.s.sess their audience. Anna's eyes followed hers, interested to see how the mayor would respond to the change of narrators. Mayor Pierson had lit up again. The soda White had brought back-a diet 7UP-was at her elbow, the tab not yet pulled. She was leaning in, her lips slightly parted as if she wanted to lap this part of the story up like rich cream.

"I was down farther than everybody else," Chrissie began. "And I was kind of freaked out, the water was so . . . you know . . . so pushy. I'd gotten turned around and I was walking away from everybody else instead of toward them when I saw this bunch of branches and things caught between two rocks, like a beaver dam or something, just a bunch of sticks and logs and brush."

"The woman was caught there? Washed down by the river?" Judith jumped in, and Anna was glad to see Chrissie had recovered enough spirit to be annoyed by the interruption.

"I'm getting to that," she said with exaggerated patience. "Anyway , there was this bunch of branches and things caught between two rocks."

The backtracking was sawing at Judith Pierson's nerves. Her lips were pursed as if her tongue was busy checking the sharpness of each tooth.

Satisfied the woman had been put in her place, Chrissie moved the story along. "I thought pieces of our stuff had got caught up and I went to see if maybe I could get it. When I got close I saw it was this Mexican woman. The water had tangled all her hair into the sticks and her arm was woven through it so she looked like one of those sculptures of people becoming trees, you know like the Greeks liked to do, people turning into different things?"

It wasn't actually a question; Chrissie was in the habit of ending her sentences on an up note.

"She was dead," Judith said. "My G.o.d, how awful for you." She reached a hand across the table but Chrissie was having none of it.

"She was not dead," she said repressively. "She was all alive and pregnant."

The mayor reacted as if Chrissie had slapped her, unaccustomed to being rebuffed, probably. "She wasn't dead?" she asked Paul.

"No," Paul said. "She died later but she was alive when Chrissie first found her."

"Did she say anything? Did she talk to you?" the mayor ask" t/foed Paul.

"She did not say anything," Chrissie took back the floor. "She was alive but she wasn't exactly conversational. Jeez Louise, she'd probably drank about half of Colorado or wherever. She didn't say anything."

"Sorry," Judith said, evidently recalling her manners. "Please go on."

"Thank you," Chrissie said, unappeased. "We made a line of us holding to each other and Anna cut her out of the sticks. Then we floated her back to sh.o.r.e and carried her up out of the water to the cliff where there was shade."

"And the poor thing died there," Judith said, shaking her head. "Such a waste."

"Not yet," Chrissie said. "She didn't die right off. She said 'my baby' then she died, okay?"

"G.o.d, that is so sad," the mayor said. "I suppose she was trying to cross the river so she could have the baby on American soil. As long as they think they can, they'll try it. It's not fair to anybody."

Martinez put down his foam cup and unfolded his legs.

"We don't need to go into the political ramifications now, Mrs. Pierson," the chief said as he shot his river ranger a hostile glance.

Mrs., not Mayor. Bernard definitely used the t.i.tle as a way to strip a woman of her professional power, should she be so brazen as to have any.

"Did she have any ID on her?" Pierson asked Jessie Wiggins. "Do we know who in Mexico to inform?"

Wiggins shook his head, the bald spot flashing dully under the overhead lights. "Unless somebody comes asking after her, we may never know. If she was crossing to get to relatives here-that's often the case-if they're here illegally, they won't come forward. Even if they did, identifying the body might be out of the question. The river will have taken it. Next time we find it, if we do, the turtles and fish won't have left us much to go on."

"I don't think she was a poor Mexican woman crossing the river to have her baby in the U.S.," Anna said.

Jessie and Bernard and Judith stared at her as if toads had just hopped out of her mouth.

"Mrs. Davidson," Bernard began.

"Anna," Anna said.

Bernard's face settled fractionally and was made older and kinder. "Anna," he said. "This kind of thing happens on the border every day. Not this tragic or dramatic, but people die trying to smuggle themselves in. Truckloads sometimes."

"I read the papers," Anna said. The breach in the chief's charade when he was forced to say her name had been sh.o.r.ed up. He was pushing to get her back intot h"I her a.s.signed role. "I first thought she was washed away trying to cross so she could give her baby American citizenship. But she wasn't a poor village woman with no resources. At least I don't think she was."

"And why is that, Mrs.-Anna?" The chief caught himself and, not being rude by nature, used the name she'd given him, but Anna could tell she was Mrs. Davidson, tourist/victim again.

"She had a Brazilian bikini wax and a pedicure," Anna said.

Judith smiled, a testament to the art of cosmetic dentistry. "You're not from Texas, are you, Mrs. Davidson?" she asked with a hint of conspiratorial humor in her tone that kept the question from sounding confrontational.

Anna didn't reply. Regardless of twinkles of merriment, the mayor was being confrontational. Anna waited to see why, which direction the attack was going to come from.

"What was the woman wearing?" Judith Pierson asked.

Anna drew a blank.

"She had on a rayon dress with a floral print from Wal-Mart," Chrissie piped up. Anna raised an eyebrow and the girl looked slightly abashed-not because she'd interrupted, Anna guessed, but because she'd admitted to being a Wal-Mart shopper and in the fat section, no less.

"You are a very observant young woman," the mayor commended her, and Chrissie shot Anna a glance of triumph. At some point during the long, long day Anna had evidently become The Enemy. Perhaps the fact that she was wearing Chrissie's friend Lori's blood all over her had something to do with it.

"Mexican girls might not have good medical care or education, but they've all got television sets in their houses. These girls watch their idols and emulate them, giving each other pedicures and manicures and waxes," Judith said. "They are no different from American girls when it comes to fashion."

The comment was a mild reproof aimed at Anna's perceived prejudice. Anna resisted the temptation to ask the mayor if she had a bikini wax.

Dismissing the question of the woman's motives for being caught dead in Santa Elena Canyon, Judith turned her attention to Jessie Wiggins. The chief ranger had lost control of the meeting and, by his look of tired annoyance, Anna figured he didn't know how to get it back.

"Up in Chisos we heard that there had been shots fired," the mayor said. "Is there anything to that or was it just a rumor? I know how these things can take on a life of their own through the grapevine."

Jessie took off his gla.s.ses and brushed one hand over his brow, an homage to the hair that had once fallen in his face. "There were shots," he said. "Two people were killed. We can't give out any names until we've notified the families."

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To her credit, the mayor was stricken as well. Judith Pierson had made all the right sounds, shown the appropriate facial expressions while listening to the story of the Mexican woman caught in the strainer, but the news of the deaths by shooting penetrated the perfect facade to affect the muscles beneath the makeup. Her eyes widened then narrowed, and knots rippled on her cheeks as her jaws clenched.

"Two people were shot and killed?" she asked, heat and horror taking her voice up half an octave.

Stirring behind her caught Anna's ear and she looked to where the mayor's head of security sat. Confusion and concern clouded his wide soft face. From the way his eyes were fixed on his boss, Anna believed it was more for the mayor's reaction than the murder of two women.

White women.

The death of the Mexican woman hadn't brought on such a tsunami of barely suppressed emotion. Uncharitable, Anna thought of herself. There was a difference between a tragic accident and homicide. She hoped that was what had unbalanced the scales of their compa.s.sion. And maybe the death of Helena's mother was a tragic accident, precisely what they said it was, a woman who cared enough for her child to want it to be born in a country where it might have a better chance at a good life. Whatever the reasons, the woman had ended up in the river, Helena had been born on American soil. Anna had no intention of letting that fact slip away in the general circus that was forming around this incident.

In the canyon, it had crossed her mind that the shooter might have thought she had murdered the woman and, bent on revenge, shot the party up then panicked and ran. Of course that would mean the avenger had been atop the canyon watching the woman dying down below and done nothing to help her. Or he could have come too late to help, only in time to see the woman die and the baby being brought out.

Anna wasn't so much thinking as falling asleep in her chair.

She bestirred herself to hear the chief ranger speaking her dreams: "Lots of times these girls come across and are met by a relative or boyfriend. Could be the boyfriend was waiting, saw her go under and was following along the rim trying to see where she washed up. When he saw the rafters, he panicked and began shooting."

"That makes a horrible kind of sense," the mayor said. Her firm mouth, the drop in her voice, indicated the end of the discussion, but the fire Anna had seen burning behind her eyes was not extinguished by this line of logic, merely banked. Anna hadn't taken to Mayor Pierson the way she had to Lisa Martinez but, when it came down to it, Anna was a lousy judge of character. It was a weakness she'd had to sh.o.r.e up with observation and patience. For her the days of rushing headlong into relationships of any kind had been sufficiently perilous she learned to wait and watch. It was possible this smoldering politician was a fighter for justice and the rights of the downtrodden, that the fire was burning for a good cause.

Too tired to maintain this optimistic view, Anna let it slide.

"It's after midnight and these folks have had a hard day," Jessie Wiggins said. "This thing isn't going to be figured out in an hour or two. What do you say we finish up in the morning?" He looked at Bernard and the chief ranger nodded.

"Where are you staying?" he asked the table in general.

"Campground," Steve said. "Our stuff is in our car. The gear we used on the river was provided by the outfitter." It was the first time he'd spoken since he'd been introduced to the chief ranger when they first arrived. The richness of his voice had thinned and he sounded forty years older than he had on the river. His eyes had a hollow look and though Anna knew-or hoped-he would again be the nineteen-year-old boy whose wit and courage had helped them get through, she doubted that the shadows of the deaths he had witnessed would ever truly disappear. Cyril had aged, as well, and Anna got a glimpse of what the twins would look like in their forties: still reedy, still as close to identical as opposite genders could get, but no longer straight-backed and supple, no longer light on their feet.

"Is there someplace we could get a shower before you take us to the campground?" Cyril asked. "We don't want to attract skunks."

The glimmer of humor cheered Anna. Cyril was stronger than she had thought, more resilient. Watching the young woman straighten her shoulders and steady her gaze, Anna made a mental note to find the cow, save it again if it was still alive. The thought was absurd. How would she know one scrawny Mexican cow from another? What difference would it make even if Easter was still alive, which wasn't b.l.o.o.d.y likely?

Absurd or not, Anna would do it.

At the moment she wanted a shower and she wanted Helena back and she wanted to curl up with her head on Paul's shoulder and sleep until Rip Van Winkle called her to breakfast.

"How about you two?" Bernard asked Paul.

"We have reservations at the lodge," Paul said.

"For tonight? I thought you were supposed to be on the river for the next couple of nights."

"Right," Paul said, and sighed. "No reservations. Surely they'll have one empty room."

"Not with the convention and the mayor here," Bernard said.

Anna stood. She'd been sitting too long. People had been talking too long. The room had too little air. Currents from the rangers and the mayor and the three traumatized kids buffeted her brain and the fluorescent lights burned like acid on the backs of her eyes. "We'll work it out," she said, and began edging around the table toward the door. She wanted a shower and food and all the niceties but more than that she wanted out of there. The desire had blown up from a spark to a conflagrk rd ration and she felt her skin would begin to curl and peel and fall away if she didn't get into real air, air with s.p.a.ce around it to breathe free of the pressure of the suffering souls incarcerated in this room.

Paul stood, as well, the intention to stay by her side clear on his face. The need to settle them safe for the night kept him from following. "We'd appreciate the showers and anything else you can do for us," he said.

Anna grabbed for the doork.n.o.b. The misery clogging the air, the walls of dun and the acid light were coming together, the crush of humanity pushing down her throat. Unease was turning to panic, and the fact of the panic scared her even more. She jerked on the door and it opened so quickly the edge caught her in the shoulder, knocking her back and into the still-seated mayor.

In front of her, as startled as she, Lisa stood, Helena in her arms.

Anna reached for her, an unformed vision of taking the child and running into the night ricocheting around in her skull. Lisa let her take the baby but didn't step out of her way. Instead she tucked her arm through Anna's like an old friend on a shopping trip.

"Helena ate like a little pig," she told Anna. "Then she burped all over Bernard's in-box and fell fast asleep. When we get home we'll give her a bath. I got more baby stuff than one little boy could ever use."

The warmth of the baby safe in her grasp, the warmth of Lisa's arm in hers, the warmth of the woman's eyes, poured into Anna and the freakish need to flee was quieted.

"Thanks," Anna said simply.

"Good, you two will stay with us," Freddy said. "That's settled." He wasn't entirely successful at keeping the dismay from his voice but Anna didn't care.

Mayor Pierson stood, making a cramped threesome between the door and the conference table. A confused half smile was on her neatly lipsticked mouth and her head was c.o.c.ked slightly to one side, as if listening for an explanation that was being given too quietly to be heard by human ears.

"What a lovely baby," the politician said smoothly. "How old is she?"

"Twelve hours, give or take," Anna said. She held Helena closer. If the mayor went in for kissing babies, she was going to have to wipe the lipstick off before she laid a lip on this one.

The half smile didn't slip. Judith turned back to the men, an audience she was surer of. "Am I missing something?"

"Mrs. Davidson-Anna-was able to save the woman's baby," Bernard said. "It's the one bright spot in this mess."

"But the woman died," Judith said, sounding annoyed at the chief ranger's stupidity.