Steve Cash - The Meq

It was then I heard the cats. In slow motion, I turned toward the sound and there were six of them on a window ledge, outlined clearly by the beam of light and staring in at me. I heard a door slam on the lighthouse, the car, the house — I couldn’t decide and all sounds had an echo and the echoes all had different origins.

I heard a voice repeating something. It was a woman’s voice and she seemed to be shouting, “Is me own home! Is me own home!”

I closed my eyes and tried to find what was real and what was not. I knew I was fatigued, but that didn’t explain what was happening. Where was the voice? Whose voice was it?

I heard another door open and a gust of wind followed the sound and brushed across my face. I opened my eyes and a woman in a red cape with a hood pulled over her head stood in the doorway between the shadows of the cliffs and coastline.

“Is anyone—” she started, then stopped when she saw me. She took another step inside the room. “Home,” she said flatly, then added, “Z, is that you?”

I couldn’t see her face clearly inside the red cape and hood, and I knew it made no sense whatsoever and probably proved me insane, but my first thought and explanation for what I saw was that she could only be one person — and that person had died long ago.

“Caitlin?” I asked in a whisper. “Caitlin Fadle?”

The woman slowly pulled the hood down from her head with one hand and unbuttoned her cape with the other.

“No,” she said, taking another step toward me. The firelight framed her face and I knew in an instant why I’d felt that first shiver. “It’s me, Z,” she said. “It’s Carolina.”

There is no word in English, Meq, Basque, or any other language I know that can describe the feeling, the sensation, relief, warmth, surprise — the utter and infinite dumb joy I felt at that moment. Life has only a few moments that can stop the heart and empty the mind. Perhaps that’s why there is no name for them. I only know I couldn’t speak and could barely stand, so I sat down right where I was and stared up at her, and for the first time in years, I felt exactly like the child I appeared to be.

“Is it true?” she asked before I’d said a word. “Have you found her, Z? Have you really found Star?”

She spread her cape on the floor beside me and sat down cross-legged. She wore borrowed clothes — a man’s sweater and trousers, and some kind of all-weather boots that were coming undone. In the center of the red cape was a red cross on a white background. It was the symbol for the International Red Cross Society and explained her cape, but not the rest of it.

I watched her adjust her sweater and run her hands through her hair. She was eighteen years older, in her late forties, and the years had not changed her beauty, they had only made it sharper and more permanent. Her hair was shoulder length and the color of winter wheat, with a few strands of silver among the gold, and the gold flecks in her blue eyes literally danced in the firelight. There were lines and creases around her mouth and eyes, and even they seemed sculpted and natural. She picked up one of my hands, keeping her eyes on mine, and held it gently between hers. I had not yet said a word. I glanced at her hands and after eighteen years and a thousand scenarios played out in my mind of what I would say to her, all I said was, “Freckles.”

She looked down, puzzled at first, asking “What?” Then she looked up and began to laugh, saying, “Yes, yes, yes, they’re everywhere. I’ve got families of them now, Z. You should see them, they’re everywhere.”

“Carolina, how did—”

She cut me off and put her fingers to my lips. “Shhh,” she said. “You must tell me, Z, is it true? Have you found Star?”

“Yes, but—”

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew it was true. I told Owen I knew it was true the minute we heard. I told him, I’m going to meet them, I’m going over there.”

“Carolina—”

“Just a minute, Z. I want to tell you first that I am still angry about you and Ray leaving the way you did. You promised me—”

“I promised you I would find her.”

“But you never wrote or wired or anything, not a clue. not to me, anyway.”

“It’s complicated.”

She put her hand to her face and rubbed her eyes. She was exhausted and pushing herself to the brink. “Where is she, Z?”

I reached behind me and pulled Mama’s glove off the couch and handed it to her. She smiled and held it close to her face and was about to say something, then opened her eyes in surprise and started to cry. I knew she was sensing Star’s presence, touch, scent. something. Anyway, I’m not sure there is a name for that feeling either.

With more hope than truth, I said, “She’ll be back soon.”

“Oh, God, Z, can it be true, finally? So much has been lost. So much time and. so many other things.” Carolina exhaled and drew in a breath slowly, trying to gather herself, then suddenly sneezed violently several times, almost uncontrollably.

I panicked. “You’re not sick, are you?”

“No, no,” she said, wiping her nose and eyes with her sweater. “It’s those damn cats outside. How many are there?”

I laughed and reached for Mama’s glove and she stopped me, grabbing my hand and turning it over until my thumb stood upright. I’d forgotten about the ring.

Her face went blank and her eyes glazed over. She slipped the ring off my thumb and held it in her palm, staring down on it as if it were the most curious and precious thing on earth. Then she closed her eyes and made a fist around the ring, holding it so tight her knuckles showed white through her skin.

“What happened?” she whispered.

“He was in St. Louis, at the house, at the moment Sailor’s message arrived. He. he had to come. he wouldn’t wait. He must have caught this strange virus on the way. He got here before us. He was sick, no, they were sick—”

“They?”

“Nova and Eder were with him.”

“They were all sick?”

“No. It is impossible for Nova to get sick. remember? It was Eder.”

We stared at each other in silence, then the tears started down over her freckles and I couldn’t stop them. I watched them drop and fall off her chin as they ran their course, gravity pulling them on, forcing them downward through space until they hit the ancient hearthstones in front of us, in front of the fire. All the new wood I’d tossed in earlier had caught and the fire was blazing. The tears didn’t last a second on the hearthstones, and each one disappeared faster than it had taken to fall.

“My God, Z,” Carolina said. “My God.”

Death is a mad seamstress, a drunken messenger with no plan or sense of order — no pattern. Life is nothing but patterns and patterns are everywhere where in life, or seem to be. Geaxi finds them everywhere; rock gardens are her favorite because the patterns are oblique and subjective, but ultimately she pays them little mind. Sailor thinks they are absolutely essential and depends on them as he would wind and waves. Opari finds them darkly mysterious and yet useful — the trick, she says, is in discovering their interconnectedness, their weave.

Death is different. It has no pattern, no weave, no design. Death can go where it wants.

I propped pillows up against the couch and pulled all the blankets around us. Carolina lay with her head in my lap and held my hand next to her cheek. If there had been people outside instead of Caitlin’s cats staring in at us, they might have thought they were seeing something very odd — the grandmother in the lap of the grandson perhaps — but it was never that way for us. It never had been that way and never would.

I asked if she wanted to sleep and she said, “Not now, not yet.” We watched the fire and talked. She wanted to know everything about Star and I told her everything I knew, leaving out some of what I’d seen in New Orleans. When I told her she really was a grandmother, I thought her response would be wild and exuberant, but she only held my hand tighter and quietly said, “Good.”