Red Weather

8. The Yellow House

42 8 TheYellowHouse Late one afternoon, as she chopped onions in the kitchen, she realized it had been a month, the time she’d promised to rent the room, and she had no thought of leaving. A month and what had she done with these thirty days? In the rush of sun and fruit drinks, of days at the volcano lake—of being included—what had happened to the search? I needed to get settled, she told herself. To figure out how to start searching . I couldn’t just start asking questions. She didn’t know who she was arguing with. Herself? Her brother? The absence that was her parents? Maybe they were just the excuse to leave Will, to leave behind the life— the existence—she’d made for herself. They were my excuse then, too, she thought. My reason for hiding away. Her brother would never have lost sight of them. He never hid from who he was. In Coatepeque, Neva was still hiding. From who she wasn’t. When new people at the bar began to ask her things, she smiled and stirred her drink. She changed the subject. She asked them: “Are you going to eat those peanuts?” or “Can you watch my purse while I go to the bathroom?” She could’ve invented a past, but with teaching and tutoring, learning the bus routes, and always watching, asking, looking for a clue to follow, for a way to ask a question—with all of this, she would have had to keep a notebook ready to consult. If someone asked, “How old are you?” or “Where are you from?” she’d have had to pull the notebook out of her purse and flip it open the same way she opened her Spanish dictionary to look up a word she needed. Cleveland, the Invented Neva Dictionary might say. Twenty-seven. No, not me, not ever. I’ve never been married. Sally, a sister with golden hair. A cat named Puff, border collie named Puck, who died when I was twelve. 43 Lawyer, nurse, Methodists. No, not interested in politics. Still married , still living in Ohio. Yes, they call every other week. “I haven’t given up,” she said aloud, as if Harker were in the room with her. But she could see that she’d made a choice to put them away for a while, like a pair of dolls left over from childhood, tucked into a bottom drawer or a box under the bed. It was why she had married Will, to put them away, but his rage had made her miss them more. When he pushed her over the couch, she thought, for the first time in years, of the boy falling down the stairs. His bruised brain leaking slowly, so slowly, that he didn’t die for days. She kept watch after Will pushed her, wondering when she would begin to talk, to tell stories the way the dying boy had. Half memory, half dream. Names and dates. Names that, in time, yielded more names. But she lived when he did not. She had a bruise on her left hip and the wind knocked out of her. He had an autopsy in an FBI office and a trial named after him. She was thirteen when it happened, fourteen when they left. At first, it felt like a rising excitement, joyous and noisy. It began when her mother met Gus, one day at the Chattahoochee Arts Festival when he and Millie his girlfriend had just walked up to her, and Gus had said, “I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re Indian.” (“He shouted it,” her mother would say, laughing. “People turned and looked!”) They discovered they were cousins of a sort—“white cousins,” they called it, because they were related through their white kin, not their Creek blood. Gus was Oklahoma Creek through his father, but his mother’s family was from North Carolina. “Third cousins once removed.” Harker tried to explain it to her, but the math of it—like all math—eluded her. They called him Uncle Gus—it was traditional—and as it was also traditional for a woman’s male relatives to take a special interest in her children, Gus did his best. The house was filled with people that summer. “The Indian Summer,” Harker and Neva called it when they were older, without a trace of irony in their voices. Gus and Millie came. She...