"I don't know!" Even behind the camouflage of the sunglasses, Julieta's face looked agonized. "How could I possibly know?"
"Does Tommy have any characteristics that would make him particularly vulnerable? Joseph describes him as a boy with a lot of internal conflicts-"
"Look, before all this, I'd spent maybe four hours with him. Once for his admission interview. A couple of chance encounters around school. He was in the drawing class I teach, along with six other kids, but we had only two classes before all this came up! Beyond that, I don't know anything about him but what I've read in his records."
"Then why do you care so deeply about him?"
"I care about all of my students! Every one of them! He's a very sick and troubled boy! I'd be the same with-"
"Why didn't you ever have children? You want children."
"Why didn't you?" Julieta shot back. "We're about the same age."
Cree bobbed her head: Clearly, Julieta would demand reciprocation for eveiything she revealed. "My husband died unexpectedly before we had kids. We were going to. I'd like to, but I've never… I've never found the right man. Sometimes it makes me feel very sad, very incomplete. No-it just about kills me, Julieta. I'm thirty-nine and probably I'll never have a child. But I'm lucky to have two beautiful nieces who I'm very close to. Kind of their half-mom."
"So I'm half mom to my students." Julieta tipped her hat brim lower over her face.
The horses huffed and shied. As they craned their heads, Cree saw the object of their concern: a dead coyote, fifty feet ahead, stretched along the ground as if it had died running. Its gray fur was matted, and something had been nibbling it, leaving the eye sockets round black pits on its narrow skull. The belly had been eaten away, too, leaving a dark cavity and baring a length of dirty white spine. She caught the smell as they let the horses find a wide route around it. The sight struck Cree as sorrowful, a dark omen.
She waited until they were well past before continuing what increasingly felt like an interrogation: "Is that why you started the school? To be near children-to be half mom?"
Julieta had found her armor in the interim. "What does my past have to do with Tommy? Look, I came to you with my best guess as to who this 'entity' is. I've come a long way, haven't I? Aren't I doing a good job of embracing your worldview? Why don't you go do whatever it is you do to find out if it's the rotten awful ghost of Garrett and then… exorcise it or kill it or whatever's supposed to happen?"
"If it is Garrett's ghost, I need you to help me figure Garrett out. Tell me why his compulsion to hurt you would be so strong. That it would manifest as an urge to vengeance so enduring it would continue even in the absence of his body, so deliberate it could do anything as complex and devious as this."
Julieta's face was set as if indicating that she'd said as much as she'd intended to.
Frustrated, Cree briefly let go the reins, threw her shoulders back, and brushed her hair away from her face with both hands. The bandage above her brow pinched.
They rode on at a walk for another ten minutes in silence. Julieta showed no indication she was going to say any more.
"Whatever it is," Cree said at last, "if it's the ghost of Garrett or someone else, I don't kill it. I wouldn't know how to do that."
"Then what do you do?" Julieta said numbly.
"I figure out a way for it to come to terms with why it's there. And if you have any role in why it's there, I can only do that if you do the same-come to terms with why it's there. If you're part of its world or play a role in its compulsions, you're the one who has to let it free."
"If it's Garrett, I'd rather kill it."
Cree shook her head. "Can't. It's already dead. You've got to integrate it in some constructive way. Release it by somehow dealing with its impulse."
Julieta brought Madie's head up and angled her path toward the left, up a low rise. Ahead, Cree saw the tip of a huge derrick like the one she'd seen from the highway.
"I'd rather kill it," Julieta repeated quietly to herself.
16
They dismounted on a hilltop a hundred yards back from the edge of a cliff that marked a natural fold in the land. The broad, shallow valley ran several miles to the east and west and was full of activity: swirling dust, vehicles, and, tiny as ants next to the equipment, men. Mounds of mineral stuff lay heaped randomly, roads winding between them. Broad ramps led out of coal trenches and up both sides of the valley, giant trucks inching up or down. About a mile to their left, Cree saw a colossal orange cube surmounted by a towering crane like the one she'd seen from the highway, rotating as it dragged soil and rock in a bucket the size of a house. Closer, along the near side of the valley, a complex of yellow steel buildings stood surrounded by parking lots full of cars and pickup trucks. A rumble of engines filled the air, and diesel exhaust smothered the sweet scent of the desert.
Julieta took off her sunglasses, squinting against the glare and the distance. She pointed to a little sports car, incongruous among the pickups.
"Proof positive our industrious Donny is on the job today."
"He won't mind you being here? If you're such enemies-"
"I called him earlier. He gave me permission to trespass. We occasionally trade such little courtesies as part of our arbitrated right-of-way settlement. Not that I don't ride on McCarty property all the time anyway-this isn't their only mine site, Donny's here only on Saturdays. And nobody else would give a damn."
"Why did we come here today, Julieta? I don't need to see this. I need to hear your story."
"You want to see where Garrett died, don't you? The dragline-that's the huge derrick thing-has moved since then. I wanted to show you where it was when he died, so if the ghost had, whatever you call it, perimortem memories, you'd know where the accident happened. I don't know how this works-would its memories kind of cling to the dragline, or to the place where the dragline was? He fell off it when it was over there"-she gestured with her sunglasses to the east-" about where that spit of land sticks out above the valley. You can't see it from here, but there's a used-up pit there. The whole operation was-"
"Julieta. I've done the math, okay?"
"What math?" Julieta started to replace her sunglasses, but Cree caught her arm and held her gaze. Beautiful astonishing dark blue eyes, suddenly frightened.
"Tommy's age, your divorce. He's your child, isn't he? That's where we should begin."
Julieta's expression changed suddenly. It was the face of a person receiving an arrow-one that had been expected. Feeling it pierce deep, painful yet familiar from years of anticipating and imagining its stab. She dropped her sunglasses and shook Cree's hand away as she stepped clumsily back to sit on a slab of sandstone.
Cree took Madie's reins and tied both horses to a pinon tree before retrieving the glasses and sitting next to Julieta. Below, the mine ground away at its business. A solitary crow, flying above them out over the rim, seemed to change its mind when it saw the operation and veered away to the east.
"Is this how it's supposed to be?" Julieta said quietly. "The way you… do what you do?"
Cree was anything but certain, but some reassurance was called for. She arched her shoulders, took a deep breath, and swept her hair back with both hands. "There are a lot of aspects to it. But right now, yes, this is what we should do."
"Why do you do that?"
" Do-?"
"You're talking like me. You're acting like me. That gesture." Julieta took off her hat, shook her hair free, and then repeated Cree's movements. Only then did Cree realize she'd been doing it.
"I'm sorry. It's… unconscious." Cree nodded and tried to smile.
"It's what I do when I'm frustrated," Julieta went on. "Or getting down to business. To something that's hard but that has to be done."