The cottonwoods along Las Lomas Street turned gold the second week of October, and Sophie watched them from the window of her aunt's spare bedroom with a kind of careful attention that she had not, until recently, applied to trees. They were not the cottonwoods of La Conquistadora, of course. Those grew along the creek bottoms below the mesas, scattered and wind-bent and tough, turning the same gold every fall but against a sky so big it dwarfed them. These were city cottonwoods, planted in rows along a sidewalk, watered and tended and civilized. Sophie found that the difference bothered her in a way she could not quite explain and did not particularly want to.
She had been in Albuquerque for almost three months, first at Aunt Tessa's and then, after pledging Alpha Delta Pi, at the sorority house on campus, though she still came to Tessa's most evenings because the sorority house was loud and full of girls who wanted to know things about her that she did not want to share. In that time she had learned that it was entirely possible to wake up every morning, eat breakfast, dress, walk to lectures, sit through them, walk to Tessa's, eat dinner, and go to bed, and that going through the motions did not actually require much in the way of feeling. She could make conversation. She could laugh at things that were funny. She could ask and answer questions about classes and weather and plans she had no real interest in making. She found that she could do all of it quite competently, which was good, because competence was about the only thing she had left. Sophie Degarrin had always been a girl who worked with what she had.
Tessa Morgan watched her niece the way you watch a horse that's gone off its feed. Not with alarm, exactly, because Tessa was not the alarming type. With the steady, measuring attention of a woman who had raised show dogs and grown prize roses and knew that living things mended on their own timetable, not yours.
Tessa's adobe house on Las Lomas sat up the hill from the university, a small, warm, cluttered place full of books and pottery and the remnants of a life lived with enthusiasm if not always with plan. There were watercolors of the Rio Grande valley in the hallway. The kitchen always smelled of coffee and green chile and whatever Tessa had decided to attempt for dinner. She had made up the spare bedroom for Sophie with clean sheets, a reading lamp, and a vase of zinnias from the garden that she refreshed every few days without comment. It was a kind house. Sophie was grateful for it and said so, often, because it was the sort of thing she could still say and mean.
"You could come with me to the garden club today," Tessa offered over coffee one morning, in the tone of someone who knew perfectly well the answer would be no but felt obligated, perhaps to the universe, to keep asking.
"I have a class at eleven," Sophie said.
"You have a class every day at eleven. I sometimes wonder if the university constructed its entire schedule around your need to avoid my garden club."
Sophie smiled. It was a real smile, small but genuine. Tessa noticed, and the relief she felt was something she was careful not to show.
"Aunt Tessa, I'm sure your garden club is lovely."
"It isn't. Dorothy Price brings the most appalling finger sandwiches, and Helen Medina talks about nothing but her dahlias, which, between us, are not nearly as impressive as she believes them to be. But there is sherry, and at my age sherry covers a multitude of sins."
"Maybe next time."
"You've been saying that since August." Tessa took a sip of her coffee and studied her niece over the rim. "But that's all right. Next time covers a lot of territory."
Sophie carried her coffee to the window and stood looking out at the street. A boy on a bicycle pedaled past, and somewhere down the block a dog was barking at something only it could see. The light on the Sandia Mountains was that particular shade of morning rose that people who were not from New Mexico found astonishing and that people who were from New Mexico found as necessary as breakfast. Sophie watched the light and felt the familiar ache settle behind her ribs. It arrived with the first clear moment of every morning and stayed, sometimes faintly and sometimes not, until she was tired enough to sleep.
She had not told Tessa about Adam. Not really, not the heart of it. Tessa knew that a boy was involved, knew that Sophie had left the ranch because of a disagreement with her parents, knew that the disagreement had been serious enough to make her niece's voice go flat and careful whenever anyone brought it up. But she did not know about the office, about the whispered words, about the door closing softly behind him. She did not know about the monsoon breaking over La Conquistadora the evening Sophie left, the sky black and boiling over the mesas. Sophie had sat in Christine's car with her jaw set and her back straight, watching the country she loved blur past through tears she would not let fall until Christine gave up trying to talk and just drove.
Tessa did not know about Danny, either. Not really. She knew that a young man had been killed in a ranch accident. She knew Sophie had been there. She understood in a general way that the summer had held more than one kind of loss. But she did not know that Danny Parks had died in a golden haze of dust in a branding pen with the sun straight overhead and not a breath of wind. She did not know that his dark hair had gone red on the ground, or that Sophie sometimes woke in the small hours with the sound of Louisa's scream still ringing, a scream that had lasted only a second in real life but that in Sophie's dreams went on and on.
Danny and Adam were tangled together in Sophie's mind in ways she could not sort out and had mostly stopped trying to. They were the summer. They were what the summer had taken from her and from everyone. Danny was dead and Adam was gone and Sophie was in Albuquerque learning about Chaucer and the history of Western civilization. Sometimes, sitting in a lecture hall taking notes on the fall of Rome, she would think about a boy from Tennessee who could find an arrowhead where nobody else could see a thing, and about a cowboy from nowhere who rode a horse like he was born to it. She would have to put her pencil down and sit very still for a moment until the room steadied.
She watched for him. She did not admit this to herself, not in those words, but her body knew what it was doing even when her mind refused to name it. She checked the mail at the sorority house every afternoon, though she was expecting nothing from anyone. She scanned the street when a truck engine came down Las Lomas, and her heart would jump and then settle and she would be angry at it for jumping. She looked at every tall cowboy in a hat on Central Avenue, and there were more of them than you would think in a college town. None of them was Adam. She never doubted that he would come for her. She simply waited, and the waiting was the most exhausting thing she had ever done, because it ran underneath everything else, beneath the lectures and the smiles and the competent performance of a girl who was doing just fine, a constant hum of expectation that she could not turn off.
The University of New Mexico in the fall of 1946 was full of men who had survived things, and Sophie could recognize them without being told. They sat in the back rows of lecture halls with their field jackets and their careful silences, men who were twenty-five and looked forty. They startled at loud noises in the hallways. Sometimes they stared at a point above the professor's head with an expression Sophie had seen on Adam's face in unguarded moments, the look of a man watching something that was no longer in front of him but that had never entirely gone away. Sophie understood that look, or thought she did. She did not speak to them about it. She did not speak to anyone about anything that mattered, which suited her just fine because, as it turned out, there was a great deal you could talk about at a university without ever saying a single thing of consequence.
She talked about assignments and dining-hall food and the weather. She talked about whether Professor Hawkins was really as dull as everyone said he was (he was) and whether the new student union building would ever be finished (it would not, certainly not that year). She went through sorority rush because Tessa told her she needed to be around girls her own age. Tessa was right. Sophie could see the worry that had begun to settle in around her aunt's eyes and knew she owed this woman, at the very least, some evidence of effort. The girls she met during rush liked her, because Sophie was pretty and quick and charming when she chose to be. She had her mother's talent for making people comfortable in her presence, a gift that served her well enough now even though the girl who was doing the charming and the girl those other girls were meeting were not, in Sophie's private estimation, the same person at all.
She threw herself into her studies with an energy that surprised even her, because studying was the one thing that filled up her mind entirely and left no room for what she did not want to think about. She sat in the university library until closing. She read ahead in every course. She wrote papers that were longer and more careful than anything the professors asked for. By the end of October her Western Civ professor had written Excellent work on one of her papers and underlined it twice, a distinction that would have delighted the old Sophie quite a lot and that the current Sophie registered with the polite indifference of a woman accepting a compliment on a hat she hadn't meant to wear.
What she could not stop doing was walking. In the late afternoons, when the light went long and gold across the campus and the Sandias turned that deep dusty rose that always caught at something in her chest, Sophie walked. She walked down Central Avenue past the shops and cafes, through the old neighborhoods south of campus where the adobes had thick walls and deep portals that reminded her of home but were not home. She walked because the restlessness inside her was physical, a thing that lived in her legs and her shoulders. Walking was the only way to tire it out.
Sometimes she walked along the Bosque, the cottonwood corridor that lined the banks of the Rio Grande through the city, where the trail was sandy and quiet and the big trees arched overhead like a cathedral nobody had built on purpose. There were small places along the river road where somebody kept horses behind sagging wire, grade horses and backyard ponies and animals that had never seen the inside of a branding pen. She would stop and lean on the fence and watch them graze. The missing would hit her so hard it took her breath. Those horses were nothing like the La Conquistadora remuda, nothing like the string she had ridden all her life. That didn't matter at all, because they were horses. They stood and moved and breathed like horses, and watching them, Sophie felt closer to and further from everything she had lost than she did at any other moment of her day.
Sometimes she borrowed Tessa's car and drove west on Route 66 past the edge of the city, where the buildings stopped and the road climbed to the mesa and the land opened up and you could see the kind of distance that swallowed everything. She would pull over and sit on the hood and look west until looking didn't help anymore, and then she would drive back.
Sophie went to the State Fair in September because she had always gone to the State Fair in September. She had won a barrel racing ribbon there at thirteen, on a horse that had since gone to pasture, and for as long as she could remember the fair had been one of the fixed points of the year: the livestock pavilions, the rodeo, the smell of roasted chile and fry bread and the warm sweetness of cotton candy drifting across the midway. People came from all over New Mexico for it. Ranchers brought their best stock. Cowboys came to compete. Sophie had not thought about any of this when she told Tessa she was going. She had just thought it was September, and in September you went to the fair.
It was not until she was through the gate and into the noise of the crowd that she understood what she had walked into.
She saw the cattle before she was ready for them. They were in the livestock pavilion, a long building that smelled of hay and manure and the warm, heavy sweetness of grain, and the Herefords were impossible to miss. Big, white-faced, beautifully conditioned, wearing La Conquistadora's crown brand on their left ribs. Sophie stopped walking. She stared at the brand. She had watched Ignacio heat that iron a thousand times. She had watched her father press it to hide, had smelled the smoke and heard the bawl. One of the steers turned his big head toward her and regarded her with the patient, incurious expression of an animal that has been handled well and has nothing to fear from people.
If La Conquistadora had cattle here, then someone from La Conquistadora was here with them.
Sophie's first thought was her parents. Her second thought was Adam. Her stomach dropped at both. She had not asked Tessa whether Degarrin and Louisa were coming to the fair. She had not mentioned the fair at all, and Tessa had not brought it up. Asking would have meant admitting that the possibility of seeing her own parents in a livestock pavilion was something she could not face, and that was not an admission Sophie Degarrin was prepared to make to anyone, least of all herself. And Adam had been gone barely a month. She had no idea where he was or what he was doing. The thought of seeing him across a crowded arena, of having to look at him and not be able to go to him, was enough to make her turn around and leave. She nearly did.
But Sophie Degarrin had never run from anything, and she was not going to start in a livestock barn. She kept walking.
She found them in the next aisle. Toby was leaning against a pen rail with his hat pushed back, talking to Esteban Salazar about the condition of a yearling bull. Esteban saw her first. His face opened up and he straightened and took off his hat, and Toby turned to see what had caught his attention.
"Well, I'll be," Toby said.
Sophie smiled at him, and the smile she gave Toby was not the competent smile, not the performing smile. It was closer to real, because Toby was Toby, and you could not fake anything around a man who had been reading people and horses for forty years.
"Hello, Toby."
"Hello yourself, Miss Sophie." He looked at her the way he looked at a horse he was sizing up, steady and unhurried, taking in everything without appearing to take in anything at all. Whatever he saw, he kept to himself. "Didn't know you were coming."
"I didn't know you were here."
"Somebody's got to babysit these cattle. Your daddy doesn't trust 'em to behave in public without supervision." A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. "Can't say I blame him."
Esteban shook her hand and told her the yearling bull had taken second and that Ignacio's green chile had won a blue ribbon in the agricultural building, which Sophie suspected Ignacio would consider a greater achievement than anything the cattle had done. They talked for a few minutes about the stock and the fair and nothing that mattered. Esteban did most of the talking. Toby watched her.
Sophie waited as long as she could bear it. Then she asked the question as casually as she could manage, as though it had only just occurred to her.
"Are Daddy and Mother here?"
"No, ma'am," Toby said. "They stayed home this year. Your mother wasn't feeling up to the drive, and your daddy didn't want to leave her." He said it simply, without emphasis, the way Toby said everything, as though it were just a fact and not a thing that needed interpreting.
The relief was so sharp Sophie could feel it in her hands. She had been gripping the pen rail without knowing it, and now she let go. Her parents were not here. She would not have to face them. She would not have to stand in a livestock pavilion and pretend that nothing had happened, that her world had not cracked open in the office at Casa Blanca and been swept away in a monsoon that she could still hear when she closed her eyes.
But the relief lasted only a moment before the other thing arrived, the thing that was worse. Louisa wasn't feeling up to the drive. What did that mean? Louisa Degarrin had never not been up to anything in her life. Was she ill? Was the staying home deliberate, a calculated absence meant to let Sophie know that the family's September tradition had been broken along with everything else? Or was Louisa simply unable to face the fair without her daughter, the way Sophie was unable to face the ranch without her parents?
Sophie could not ask Toby any of this. She could not ask anyone. She knew that if something were truly wrong, Tessa would have mentioned it. Tessa would not have let her walk out the door without a word. So it was probably nothing. Louisa was probably fine. But probably was not the same as certainly, and the distance between those two words was exactly the kind of distance that could keep a girl awake at night.
"You tell them hello for me," Sophie said.
Toby nodded. He looked at her a moment longer, and Sophie could see him deciding whether to say something else. He decided against it. That was Toby. He knew when to leave things alone.
"You take care of yourself, Miss Sophie."
"I will."
She walked to the horse barns because she could not stay in the livestock pavilion any longer and she was not ready to leave the fairgrounds. The barns were quieter, the air thick with the smell of hay and leather and the warm dusty sweetness of horses in close quarters. She walked the aisle slowly, stopping to look at each animal, reaching through the rails to touch a nose here, a neck there. These were show horses, quarter horses and paints and a few Arabians, groomed to a shine that no horse on La Conquistadora had ever achieved or needed to. They were beautiful. They were not her horses.
She was standing at a stall near the end of the row when she heard a man's voice from the next aisle, low and unhurried, with a drawl that belonged somewhere south and east of Albuquerque. It was not Adam's voice, not remotely, but it had something of the same ease about it, the kind of voice that never needed to be raised. Sophie put her hand on the stall rail and stood there for half a minute before she could get her feet to move.
She left the fairgrounds before the rodeo started. She drove Tessa's car home and parked it in the driveway and sat behind the wheel for a while with the engine off, thinking about Toby's face and her mother's absence and all the things she had not asked because she was afraid of what the answers might cost her.
She had done her crying. She had cried all she was going to cry, in the office at La Conquistadora with Adam's arms around her, and in Christine's car, and on the bus to Albuquerque, and on Tessa's shoulder the first night when the whole thing finally came loose, and in the bathtub with the door locked and the water running because there are some sounds that a nineteen-year-old girl does not want her aunt to hear. She had cried until there was nothing left. What came after the tears was something she was not prepared for and did not have a word for yet, a kind of blankness, a flatness, as though the world had lost a dimension and everything she looked at had gone thin and far away. Sophie did not know if this was grief or if it was something else, something worse. She only knew that she could function inside it, and that functioning would have to be enough.
The letter arrived on a Tuesday in early November, in her mother's handwriting. Sophie saw it across Tessa's kitchen table and did not pick it up for two days.
When she finally opened it, sitting on the edge of her bed with the afternoon light coming through the window and the sounds of the neighborhood settling in around her, she read it through once and then sat holding it for quite a while.
It was a careful letter, Louisa at her most controlled, and Louisa's most controlled was very controlled indeed. The ranch was well. The fall shipping had gone smoothly. Ignacio had put up his green chile for the winter and it was, according to Louisa, even better than last year's, which Louisa attributed to the July rains and Ignacio attributed to his own genius. The truth was probably somewhere in between. Rufina was once again threatening to retire, but as she had been threatening to retire since before the war, nobody was losing much sleep over it. Degarrin's horse had thrown a shoe on the ride to the east pastures and he had walked the better part of eight miles home, which Louisa reported with the mild, fond exasperation of a woman who had spent twenty-five years married to a man who would sooner walk eight miles in his boots than inconvenience anyone by asking for a ride. The calf crop had been good. The weather was turning. Danny's roses had been cut back for winter.
Danny's roses. Sophie read the line again. Her mother had planted roses over Danny's memorial stone. There was a memorial now, a marker under the old orchard trees near Casa Blanca. Sophie did not know what it looked like or what was carved into it. She had left before any of that. She had left the ranch before the shock of Danny's death had even begun to settle into the real and permanent grief that comes after, the kind that doesn't go away.
She thought of Danny sitting beside Louisa on that bedroll at the ice cream social, telling her about the old Indian who came to him in a dream and taught him how to see what was hidden in plain sight. After that dream Danny could find arrowheads and spear points that other people walked right over. Danny had been about the best man on the ranch. The best rider, certainly. The one with the beautiful deep Tennessee voice and the quiet way about him that made everyone, including Louisa, want to sit down and talk for a while. Sophie had liked him very much. And she had chosen Adam anyway, the dangerous one, the one who didn't fit, the one her parents could never accept. Danny had died in a branding pen and Adam had been put in a truck and driven away. Now Sophie was reading about roses she had never seen over a grave she had never visited, for a boy who had deserved a whole lot better than what he got from the world.
The letter did not mention Adam. Of course it didn't. His name was nowhere on the page. His presence was everywhere on it, in every careful sentence Louisa wrote and in the careful space around every sentence where his name might have gone and didn't. The letter said Come home for Christmas and We miss you very much and Your father asks about you every day. Sophie could hear her mother's voice in every line, proper and measured, not apologizing, because Louisa Madison Degarrin did not apologize. But reaching. Reaching across the distance in the only way she knew how, which was to write about the ranch and the weather and the roses and to sign it with love and to hope that something in those small and ordinary reports would be enough to bring her daughter home.
Sophie sat with the letter in her hand and thought about answering it. She thought about what she would say. She would say she was fine, that school was fine, that Tessa was wonderful and the weather in Albuquerque was fine. She would use the word fine so many times that even her mother, who was the world's champion at reading between lines, would understand that it meant exactly nothing.
She put the letter in the drawer of her nightstand beside the one she had not answered before it. She walked to the library and studied until it closed. She walked along Central until the streetlights came on and the mountains disappeared. She came home and ate Tessa's green chile stew and told her it was delicious, which it was, and she went to bed and lay in the dark listening to the radio turned down low, thinking about Danny's roses and about a door that had closed very softly behind someone she loved.
She thought about the last thing Adam had said to her: I love you too much not to go. She had turned that sentence over and over in her mind for three months now, examining it from every angle looking for the place where it cracked. She could not forgive Adam for leaving. She could not forgive her parents. She could not quite sort out what to do with Danny, who had died on a flawless day when the smoke from Ignacio's fire went straight up without a breath of wind to bend it, and who had not deserved any of it.
By December she had gotten good enough at it that most people could not have told anything was wrong. She was pretty and charming and had her mother's way of making people feel as though she were delighted to see them. In a sense she was, since every conversation was a few more minutes she did not have to spend alone with her own thoughts. If there was something a beat too careful about her smile, or a quality of absence in her eyes when she thought no one was looking, well, people were busy with their own lives and their own worries. Their own boys had come home from the war changed, or hadn't come home at all. Nobody was paying close enough attention to one pretty sophomore to notice the difference between a girl who was happy and a girl who was performing it.
Tessa was paying that kind of attention. Tessa had known Degarrins all her life: her brother's iron stubbornness, Louisa's formidable will. Now she was watching Sophie's own version of the family gift, which was to build a wall around the thing that hurt and carry on so capably that you'd never guess anything was wrong. Unless you happened to look into her eyes at the wrong moment and caught a glimpse of what was behind them.
"You could go home for Christmas," Tessa said one evening in mid-December. Her voice was careful.
"I can't," Sophie said. Not I won't. I can't. And Tessa, who understood the distinction, did not press.
"Your father called again today. He wanted to know how you were."
"What did you tell him?"
Tessa poured herself more coffee and considered the question. "I told him you were doing well at school, which is true. I told him you seemed to be settling in and making friends, which is also true, as far as it goes. I told him you were eating and sleeping and taking care of yourself." She set the pot down and looked at her niece. "What I did not tell him is what I have not yet said to you, which is that I watch you, Sophie. Every day. And what I see is a girl who does everything exactly right and who feels almost nothing, and it worries me more than I can say."
Sophie looked at her aunt for a long time. Tessa's kitchen was small and warm, the walls painted a pale yellow that had probably been pale yellow for twenty years. There were copper pots hanging above the stove and a clay bowl on the counter full of the small hard pears from the tree in the backyard that Tessa always meant to do something with and never did. The lamp above the table cast a warm circle of light that stopped at the edges of the room. Beyond the window the evening had come in, and the Sandias had gone dark. It was a good kitchen, in a kind house, in a city that was not the place where Sophie belonged. There was nothing wrong with any of it.
"I know, Aunt Tessa," she said quietly. "It worries me, too."
They sat together in the lamplight for a while without talking. Tessa made cocoa because it was December, and because when you didn't know what else to do you could at least make something warm. Sophie drank it and held the cup in both hands and let the heat soak into her palms. She was grateful for that much, at least. Tessa had put cinnamon in it. The smell caught Sophie off guard and brought tears to her eyes for the first time in weeks. She blinked them away before Tessa could see, or at least before Tessa could let on that she had seen. Tessa was a Degarrin, and Degarrins knew when to look and when to look away.
Sophie spent Christmas in Vermont with a sorority sister named Margaret whose family had a place in the mountains. She skied and skated and laughed and toasted the season and threw herself into all of it with everything she had, and was quietly appalled at how little she felt. When she came back to Albuquerque in January, the cottonwoods on Las Lomas were bare, their branches dark and intricate against the winter sky, and Sophie thought they looked patient. Patient and bare and not going anywhere, which was about the best she could say for herself as well.
She had not answered her mother's letter. She had not called home. She had not spoken Adam's name aloud since the day she left La Conquistadora, and she would not speak it aloud for a long time to come.
But she carried him. She could not get rid of him, and she had tried. Lord knows she had tried. So she would do what any sensible girl from a ranching family would do with something she could not change. The spring semester started. The cottonwoods held on to their bare branches and waited, and Sophie did the same.