Chapters (41)
- PART ONE
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- PART TWO
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- PART THREE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Then he said, “I couldn’t save her,” his voice immeasurably sad. “We were swimming in Quemado Lake.” He’d told her about this lake, where he’d experienced a mathematical epiphany, and a veil had been lifted. “I’d gone fishing there countless times, I thought I knew that water so well.” He paused, pulled his hair back, breathed deeply. “I should’ve been paying attention. I should’ve been holding our daughter. My wife hit her head on a rock. I was three hundred feet away. By the time I got there they were both at the bottom of the lake. I didn’t know who to save. I tried saving them both.” His voice cracked. “I was selfish. I tried saving them both, and I saved neither.”
It was unbearable. His shame. His pain.
His story really was like the Zuni migration; he’d lost a mother and child to the water, to Zuni heaven.
Perhaps Arlen’s words had brought it all back: She’s not half the woman my sister was.
Arlen blamed Chance for his sister’s death. Blamed Calliope for taking his sister’s place.
Still Chance hadn’t answered Calliope’s question, and her suspicion lingered, palpable in the truck as his grief.
What if they were not driving toward a way home? What if they were driving into a trap?
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-FIVE
MIDDLE PLACE
Sometime during the night, Calliope had finally dozed off and now awoke to alpenglow. Sunrise over the San Juan Basin overlooked Chaco, the sky bright pink and purple above the canyon, illuminating the ancient stone buildings, the Great House spanning the height of four stories, rising against the canyon wall so it loomed even larger, its seven hundred rooms and round ceremonial kivas expanding to the size of the Roman Colosseum. She blinked, her eyes still hazy from sleep, and the sunrays casting a glaze over the buildings. These were not ruins. Calliope wondered how much power a great-grandmother wielded in the Spirit world, for what she was seeing was powerful indeed. The biggest of the Great Houses—Pueblo Bonito, which she’d been fascinated with since her bisabuela had brought her here as a child, this home of the Ancients’ great unsolved mystery—had been restored. Had she expected anything less? Living six months with Chance and his family in the Zuni honeycombs of the Ancients should have prepared her.
It had not.
During her revisionist fieldwork, she’d knelt on the sandy loam of the posthole in Room 33, peeling sandstone and chinking rocks from the hundred-year-old excavation site (where the Hyde Exploring Expedition had trod the ancient, sacred grounds), searching for proof of her bisabuela’s stories, though she could never breathe that humiliating confession aloud to her colleagues. She was there to follow the research, not the other way around. She understood how unprofessional she would seem, what a zealot, a mystic. She’d have been laughed out of academia.