Los Niños de la Corizon

Donna Dufresne

            We were curled up on the leather couch in front of the fire at Grampy Bates’ ranch. I’d brought the hatbox I found in Mama’s old closet that afternoon, and we were rummaging through old photographs, letters and other memorabilia I hadn’t seen before. On top of the pile there was a yellowed envelope marked “Tito”. I emptied its contents onto the coffee table, and images of our little brother, Timmy, spilled out onto the glass surface. Dodie and I had never discussed our brother’s death. It was as though we had both decided that he had never really existed, and that life would be somehow more bearable if we didn’t look back at all that sadness which enveloped the family for years starting in July of 1979. Dodie was only thirteen and didn’t remember all that much anyway. But I was sixteen, and I was supposed to be in charge. I was the one who should have been watching him instead of burying my nose in a book.  Of course, I, being the older sister and all, took on the responsibility of babysitting when mama wasn’t around, and she wasn’t around a lot back then. It seemed like the minute Colonel Joe (our nick name for Daddy), got back to the ranch from some overseas gig in the military, she would pack her bags and disappear for a few days or even a few weeks down to the Double B Ranch to visit Abuelita, my grandmother Lena. Often, she would slip across the border to teach dance in Cousin Enriche’s studio in Monterrey. It didn’t seem all that unusual. It had been a set family pattern for as long as I could remember.  When we were younger, she would pack us up even if Colonel Joe was away and leave us with Abuelita. We thought she was going to Mexico to dance, but I know now that it was much more than that.

            At sixteen, I had begun to resent my mother for shirking her responsibilities onto me. I remember thinking “Doesn’t she know I have a life?”

            I hated being in charge of Dodie and Timmy out at the ranch. Dodie was too much of a girlie girl for me, and Timmy was just a pain-in-the-ass ten-year-old kid, who suffered from boredom and wouldn’t leave me alone. Colonel Joe would be off mending fences or seeing to ranch business, expecting me to run the house while mama was away, and I had begun to despise everything about my mother. I thought she was a selfish and inconsiderate bitch, and after Timmy died, I pretty much divorced myself from my family and retreated even further into my books and horses. That must have been when I decided I was going to go to Harvard Law School, to get as far away as possible from the McCullagh Ranch and my bohemian Mexican mother and her dancing cousins.

            The territory of the heart is not one I am proud to lay claim to. I had spent a lot of years burying my feelings about Timmy’s accident, the trauma and the rifts it had caused in the family. It was not something we as a family ever talked about. We each shrank into our own private cocoons, shaken by the possibility of our fragile mortality and the empty place at the dinner table. Dodie put her mind on boys, I on books, and mama and daddy on booze to dim the echo of the cavernous silence between them. Measured against the terrible grief I felt over my “friend” Ed’s death, I now can’t even imagine the pain of losing your own child. 

I’ve read enough books by politician’s wives and celebrities who have shared their grief with the world to know better, but back then I showed my mother no compassion at all. By the time I was twenty, I wondered “Why doesn’t she just get over it?” baffled by the constancy of my mother’s depression and the dark void that sucked me in. I simply could not breathe in my mother’s house. I could not bear to spend more than an hour at a time sitting with her. I could not bear the cross of her grief and my own complicity and guilt. It was, after all, my fault that Timmy died.

He really was a great kid. Smart, athletic, and promising to grow into a very handsome young man. We used to joke that he was the heart-throb of the fourth and fifth grade at the elementary school. The next James Dean. But he paid no mind to the teasing of his older sisters. He brought me bouquets of flowers whenever he went wandering out on the plains or along the creek. He’d snuggle up to me and beg me to read aloud from Treasure Island, because I “did the voices so well”.  In fact, Timmy was becoming closer to me than he was to mama. Although he’d always been mama’s favorite, as far as I could tell, her aloofness in the last few years before his death had distanced her from all of us.

Funny how you build up a story about someone. You work so hard at believing that story your whole life, there’s no room for an alternative memory.  It’s only since mama’s death, six months ago, that I have opened up to understanding who she really may have been. I had forgotten how close we were as children and what a good mother she was; how beautiful I used to think she was, and how I would watch her dance in her studio for hours. I’d forgotten the warm smile and sparkling eyes and the way she adored us kids, especially Timmy and me. The memory I’d held onto all these years was that of a broken-down woman who was immersed in the grief of her only son’s death. I just didn’t get it. It seemed to me that we had all moved on. My father began to perk up after several months. But mama seemed to shrivel up and die. Then again, it’s hard to comprehend the emotions around an incident you have worked so hard to forget.

That day was hot. I remember it because I couldn’t find a cool place in the house to read. My bedroom was too hot, the pool was steaming, and the other rooms in the house were stifling, even though they were cooler than the outside air.  I finally opted to curl up in the hammock on the veranda, where I could at least rock myself and create a little bit of air. I remember what I was reading. It was Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and I was both precocious and conceited enough to believe that no one in my family could possibly understand the depths of such great literature. I had already decided that Dodie was as dumb as a stump and should have been quarantined in special ed classes, and quite frankly, I had never seen my father, “Colonel Joe”, pick up anything but a newspaper.  My mother seemed to spend more of her time writing than reading.

I was a little pissed off at my mother. No sooner had daddy gotten home after three months in Central America and who the hell knows where else, then she packed up her bags and announced that she was going down to visit Abuelita and Grampy Bates for a few days. Dodie was away at cheerleading camp, and Timmy had the company of our cousin, Donnie, who was visiting from Denver, Colorado to keep him occupied. Daddy and I could manage just fine without her, so she said, and there were T.V. dinners in the freezer. Translation: I was in charge. Daddy wasn’t all that useful when it came to managing the family. After being away for months, the bills had piled up and there were lots of details about ranch business to attend to. He was apt to hole himself up in his den for hours at a time, which meant that I had to watch over Timmy and our little shit cousin, who was trouble on wheels for all I could see.

Cousin Donny was the only child of daddy’s sister, Carlene, who married a doctor who was from Philadelphia and had never set foot on a ranch. They lived a suburban life in Denver, where Donny had anything he wanted, including his own phone and T.V. in his room.  He brought an artillery of amusement with him, including skateboards, pogo sticks, and a BMX bike.  Whenever he came out to the ranch for a visit, as he had for the last four summers, all hell broke loose.  The positive side was that I could rest assured that the boys would be entertaining themselves all day long, and the only interruption I could depend upon was fixing meals.

For lunch, I cooked up some hotdogs and let them chow down on Potato Stix and Bugles with 7-up. Daddy said he wasn’t hungry and shut himself up in his office where I could hear the adding machine clicking away. By the time I got the dishes cleaned up (it was the maid’s day off), the boys were long gone. They didn’t tell me what they were up to, but Timmy was a good kid. He knew the limits. They weren’t allowed down in the stockyard, or in the stables without adult (or older sister) supervision, but other than that there wasn’t too much trouble they could get into. I could watch and hear activity around the pool from the veranda, and it was quiet and still. Most likely, they were riding bikes up and down the red dirt roads, eating each other’s dust, and would return hot, sweaty, and filthy, expecting to jump in the pool.

I must have dozed off on the veranda, somewhere in chapter 27 of Tolstoy’s epic, which was flat upon my chest when I was startled awake by a truck horn beeping loudly, and careening around the curve in the gravel driveway, and shouts in Spanish, sounding frantic.  Daddy came running out of the house. The screen door slamming loudly behind him, shouting “What the hell’s going on!”

It was Roberto, his right-hand man who worked as a foreman in the stockyards.

“Senior Joe – come quickly – the boy –Tito –he’s hurt real bad. I think his neck it may be broken….”

“Jesus H. Christ!” I heard daddy yell as he grabbed his hat from inside the door.

I rolled off the hammock and jumped into the truck bed, as daddy jumped in the cab with Roberto. We sped off on two wheels to the back of the property where there was a riding ring. Manuel slammed the breaks in a cloud of dust, and we all jumped out. That snapshot is frozen in my memory – not a pretty picture I would choose to pull out of the family scrapbook, but one buried so deep I have a hard time conjuring up the image. But it’s there, that frozen moment when I looked inside the ring and saw my brother Timmy lying still and lifeless with blood trickling from his mouth and his eyes wide open from the life having been sucked out of him. I couldn’t move. I stood there frozen, in front of the truck. Donny was frozen across the ring from me, his hands knotted in fists by his side and his face contorted in horror, or terror – I could not tell. I could not think. Everything had suddenly turned to ice in a day that started out to be hotter than hell.

Rusty, Timmy’s young palomino, was pacing the ring with a wild look in his eye, his tail flying, and ears laid back and his legs all sixes and sevens in the skittishness of confusion. Timmy wasn’t supposed to ride Rusty without me or mama supervising. He was a young horse and fairly green, but keen at barrel racing and circus tricks. Timmy was a dare-devil on a horse. He was athletic and had a solid seat. There’s no way he would have fallen off Rusty unless he was showing off, trying out some new tricks. Even then, I couldn’t believe that Timmy would have gotten hurt. He was like a cat with nine lives. Every time he fell off a horse he landed on his feet with his hands on the reigns. I couldn’t imagine what had happened in that ring that day. Whatever it was must have been my fault, because I was supposed to be keeping an eye out for the boys.

I never saw Daddy move that fast before. He vaulted over the fence, not even bothering with the gate. “Maggie!” he shouted at me to snap me out of my stupor, “Get the damned horse!”

I ducked under the fencing and caught Rusty on the fly by the lead rope which was dangling from his halter. It took a minute to calm him down and get him down to a walk instead of a trot, and he was all lathered up. Horses are funny like that. They are like errant children when something goes wrong. They take it to heart, and you can read on their face the combination of remorse, embarrassment, and “Oh shit – I’m in trouble now!”

 I noticed that Donny was still frozen against the fence opposite the gate, and I shouted out to him to open it up so I could get Rusty cooled off and back in the stall. When I glanced back at the ring, daddy was holding Timmy’s limp body in his arms, and for the first time in my life I thought I heard my father cry as he rocked back and forth. I heard him moan, “Oh no, Oh God, please, no…. Timmy……don’t……”

I made Donny come to the stables with me, figuring he needed to get away from the scene. It still hadn’t donned on me that my brother was actually dead. I figured he had the wind knocked out of him or something, but I didn’t comprehend that he was gone by the time we got there.  Donny was silent for the first minute or so, but then, as I handed him the curry comb to groom Rusty before bedding him down, he burst into tears.

“It’s all my fault! I’m sorry! We were just fooling around……. I ….” By then his sobs were so deep I couldn’t understand a word he said.

“Come on, Donny,” I said as I placed my hand on his shoulder, “Let’s forget the grooming and go help Timmy.

But it was too late for Timmy. It was all too late. The medics did their best to revive him, and they called in a helicopter to medivac him to the hospital in Old El Paso, but it was a hopeless gesture.  They said he probably died instantly from a fatal blow to the head. He’d gotten tangled in the long lead rope when he fell at high speed, and the horse inadvertently kicked him to death as he trotted around the ring.

I sat in that hospital late into the night with daddy using the pay phone every five minutes, trying to reach mama at Abuelita’s, and Donny totally traumatized and begging to go back home to Denver. Timmy was pronounced dead on arrival. Abuelita was trying to track mama down, who had supposedly gone across the border to a dance competition.

Just as I was finishing up telling Dodie what I remembered about Timmy’s death, Abuelita came in with a tray of hot cocoa. The three of us cuddled up on the big old couch before the fire. Dodie was crying, but I hadn’t managed to get there yet, although I pretty much felt like crap with the resurgence of old feelings of guilt. Dodie had unearthed a missing journal for 1980 which she was thumbing through while I recounted the events surrounding Timmy’s death.

Abuelita patted my knee and said, “You mustn’t blame yourself Magadalita. It was an accident – just a misfortunate accident which was bound to happen. Tito was like a high-spirited horse who would have burned himself out eventually. He was always challenging himself to try the next hard thing, taking risks he was not ready for. I saw it the day he was born, the way he came into the world as though it were a big adventure. His cry was more like laughter – as though he were delighted to be free of his mother’s womb and to begin an exciting journey. As he grew older, I saw so much of Carlos in him, the way he was so comfortable in his body and his athleticism. He was as comfortable on the back of a horse as Carlos was out on the dance floor, but it was the same thing, you know. He was a handsome boy, with your grandfather’s eyes, your mother’s cheekbones, and the fine nose of Carlos. There wasn’t a drop of Joe in his blood. I knew that from the moment I set eyes on him, and I prayed every day that he would not be cursed by the Blessed Virgin Mary, that Joe would not find out, and that he would live a long and prosperous life. But my prayers were in vain.”

There he was again. Carlos – the elusive tango dancer whom I only recently learned was Mama’s lover for twenty-five years, and possibly my father and most definitely Timmy’s.

“Abuelita,” I said in a voice crackling with exhaustion, “What do you remember about the day that Timmy died?”

“Oh,” she said, “that day. That day was a terrible day. We did not have those fancy cell phones, like you girls carry around with you today. It was not all that easy to make contact by phone in Mexico.  Your mother had gone down to visit Carlos shortly after Joe returned from wherever it was, he had been with the army for three months. I did not think anything of it. I knew that she would not leave the children unless everything was in order, and it was not unusual for her to visit Carlos at such times. She could not get away when Joe was gone, because you were all older and in school. It wasn’t like the old days, when she could pack you up and bring you down to the ranch to stay with me. That was before you were in school and had other obligations. She was like a caged cat during the months that Joe was away. She could not stand being parted from Carlos, nor he from her. Joe would be gone for months at a time, leaving her with all the responsibilities of the McCullagh Ranch, as well as you children.  I think he understood how difficult it was for her – how it grated against her artistic sensibilities. She would stick around for a week or so after Joe returned from one of his army ventures, then she would flee across the border under the guise of having to work on some dance routines with the children or at her cousin’s dance studio in Monterrey.  The family was still involved in the international ballroom competitions back then, and your mother was paramount in the preparation of studio dancers. She was very good. I do not know if you realize how good she was. Had she and Carlos stuck together as dance partners and not become involved as lovers, she may have become world class by the time she was twenty-five.”

“Abuelita,” I interjected, “How did you track her down when daddy called down to the ranch?”

“Oh – that was a terrible thing,” she began, “First of all, Joe thought for some reason that she was visiting me on the ranch, and I had to explain to him that no, she had gone to Monterrey to help Enrique with the dance camp to prepare for the fall tour of Los Campos de Mexicanos. But, in truth, I knew that she would be with Carlos the whole time. They traveled back and forth between Monterrey and the beach house Carlos had bought for them.”

 “So – what happened when daddy started calling down to the Ranch to tell you that Timmy had the accident? What did you say to him?” I asked.

Abuelita thought for a moment as though she were trying to reach back into the past and dig up the fact which had been buried all those years. “Well, at first I did not understand the dire circumstance. I told Joe that your mother was in Mexico and I would try to reach her. But then he called a half hour later and said it was really important. I tried and I tried.  I called the beach house, I called the studio…I could not get through. We did not have answering machines back then. I called my brothers, my mother, and all my cousins. No one knew how to find Carlos or your mother.  Finally, I convinced my brother, Enrique to drive down to the beach house and try to wake them, hoping that they were there and not on some excursion to dance. He arrived around midnight, and he pounded on the door until Carlos finally was aroused and answered. Your mother was there. Enrique explained that Timothy had been hurt in an accident with the horse and that it did not look good. What they did not know at the time was that Timmy was already dead. Your mother flew from Monterrey to Old El Paso on a small plane which Carlos had managed to procure on a short notice. By the time she arrived back at the McCullagh Ranch, Timmy was long dead.”

“Holy shit,’ Dodie piped in, “that must have caused a raucous.”

“What do you remember, Dodie?” I asked.

“Humph,” she said, “not much. As you know, I was away at cheerleader’s camp at the time. I really don’t remember much at all. I mean what was I – 13 or 14 years old?  All’s I remember is daddy coming to get me early. I was called into the Nurses Cabin at the camp and daddy was sitting there waiting. He was all red-eyed and he hadn’t shaved.  It wasn’t the red eyes but the fact that he hadn’t shaved that alarmed me. I mean daddy was a military man, always impeccable in his appearance – at least in public, when he wasn’t out on the ranch. I remember my heart leaped into my throat when I saw him. I was sure something had happened to mama, or maybe they were getting a divorce or something. He took my hands and looked me straight in the eye and told me that Timmy had died in an accident out on the ranch and he’d come to fetch me for the funeral. I remember feeling kind of relieved that it wasn’t mama at first. I knew she was down in Mexico. But then it sank in that it was Timmy, and on the long drive back to the ranch I felt a little numb. I wasn’t all that close to Timmy, he being such a boy and all, but he really was a good kid, and I couldn’t bear the thought that he would no longer be with us.”

“O.K.,” I sighed, “I guess that’s it for morbidity for the night. I think we’ve had enough talk about Timmy, mama, and Carlos for the time being.”

Abuelita gathered up the cups and plates and shuffled off to the kitchen. Before we went off to bed, Dodie handed me the journal she’d been thumbing through.

“You might want to read this. I didn’t get a chance to, but I scanned it. I think it’s mama’s account of Timmy’s death.”

I held the thin notebook with its marbleized cover. It was marked 1980, a year that was missing from the documents found in the trunk in the bank vault. The journal had been tucked away in the hatbox in my mother’s old bedroom on the double B ranch for over twenty years. Inside was the fragile bird of my mother’s broken heart and I wasn’t sure I was ready to hold that busted wing. It was the story of the dark night which my mother had begun her solo journey into depression and near suicide after saying goodbye to her only son and the leaving the only man she ever really loved. I didn’t think I should open that journal by myself. But I did.

Death Would Be a Splendid Thing

Magdalena’s version

I brought mama’s 1980 journal to bed with me and curled up with it under the covers. Though I wasn’t really sure I wanted to know what was inside, I knew that if I wanted to make peace with my mother and myself, I was going to have to bear witness to her pain. It wasn’t something I could run away from anymore. I opened the notebook marked “1980” on the spine and began to read my mother’s fine, but shaky handwriting.

January 27, 1980

McCullagh Ranch

            Valium and bourbon get me through the afternoons and the long, sleepless nights. I haven’t had the heart to clean out Timmy’s room, and Joe finally took it upon himself on Sunday. I could not bear to be in the house, watching Joe and the girls pack up all his belongings, those little boy things that are so treasured by a ten-year-old. I imagined the collections stowed away in shoe boxes, shiny rocks and pen knives, dried up mouse skeletons, arrowheads and pottery sherds.  I took Dickie out for a ride for the first time in months. It was the first time I had set foot in the stables since the accident. Rusty had been sold a few weeks after the accident and his empty stall was a sore reminder. Dickie was lethargic and poked along as if he had picked up on my dark mood. I just sat there listless and pathetic on my big old gelding, plodding through thick tears on the cold, Texas plains.

            I cannot explain why I burst into tears at odd moments. The intersection of the cereal aisle in the grocery store can send me into hysterics if I get a whiff of Captain Crunch or some other favorite of Timmy’s. I am not fit for the public eye. My children and my husband roll their eyes. I know what they are thinking, “There she goes again…but where was she when it happened?”

            Yes – where was I when my little boy died? Far, far away in that other life I used to know, in the arms of my lover, my son’s father, another woman’s husband. A life I cannot seem to fight my way back to because it is too painful of a reminder of peace and happiness, a thing I will never know again.

            I will try to remember. Not because I want to. I do not remember for myself, but for my daughter, Maggie, who will one day need to remember as well. I reach my hand out of the formidable darkness toward the faint glimmer of hope that she might one day forgive me. It is the tiny gossamer thread that keeps me tied to this earth.

When Joe returned from Nicaragua in June of 1979, he was edgy. I always tried to have things nice when he came home – fresh flowers on the table – a special meal. Usually he was relieved to be back at the ranch and once that uniform and his fatigues were hung in the closet, he’d return to his old cowboy self. We’d spend a few days riding the range with the kids and visiting his family. But this time was different. He didn’t want to do any of those things. He seemed bothered by what he had seen. He paced the den like a caged lion, and I knew he wanted to pick up that phone and make a call – an important call – to let someone know what he knew. But he didn’t. He was short with the girls, and intolerable with me. I’d finally had enough and informed him that I had to go help my cousin with the summer dance camp and I would be back in two weeks. It was a relief to get out of there. When I left on July 1^st, Dodie was off to summer camp, and our nephew, Donny, was on his way to the ranch to spend the summer with Timmy. Maggie had her usual pile of books to read and several horse shows lined up. Other than Joe’s foul mood, everything seemed in order.

As always, my heart was torn between my children and Carlos. I hated leaving them behind. When I was away from them, I had the same longing I felt for Carlos when we were separated. During the long drive to Mexico, I would spend hours trying to reconcile my heart with my head. Part of me wanted to bring the children with me and leave Texas behind once and for all – and live as a family with Carlos. But I knew that would never work. I knew that Carlos and I would not sustain our passion and drive were we living a normal life together. The silk scarves which tied us loosely together would become knotted up in red tape. Neither of us had the attention our spouses had for the details of life. We would be a shipwreck in no time at all. Still, we could not say goodbye. We could not keep away.

By the time I reached our little house on the beach in La Pesca, I had become that other Magdalena, the one whom Carlos loved more than his life. Texas, Joe, and yes, I am ashamed to admit even my children, were neatly tucked away as if they were but a dream life and this life was real. Carlos’ wife was safely tucked away in Argentina, where it was cooler. We had at least two weeks of bliss ahead of us. In the day time we would teach at the dance camp. At night and on weekends we would retreat to La Pesca. I would call home every two days to make sure the children were alright and to fulfill my obligations as a wife.

Joe still seemed preoccupied when I called. Rumors of war and revolution were heating up in Latin America. We saw it in Mexico with the influx of wealthy oligarchy buying up villas in Monterey and their sudden emigrations to Florida. The maids and wait-staff in hotels and restaurants changed seemingly overnight from round-faced Mexicans to fine boned Salvadoran peasants hiding behind frightened eyes. News from Chile was even worse. Under Pinochet’s regime there were stories of the disappeared, and Carlos fretted for his brothers who owned a family vineyard at the foot of the Andes. I was caught between two worlds – a husband who made clandestine trips throughout Latin America and may have contributed to the unspeakable repression, and a lover who had political ties to revolutionaries in the universities which were nurturing the seeds of communism. La Pesca was our refuge from the real world, a no-man’s land where we could put everything we knew aside. I was not the wife of a CIA operative strangled by the constraints of the cold war. Carlos was not the passionate puppeteer of revolutionary intellectuals. We were simply Carlos and Magdalena. Dancers. Lovers.

            I had been in Mexico about a week before Abuelita sent word about Tito. Carlos and I were exhausted. We had been working on a new routine for the debut of a Nuevo tango composition by an expat Chilean guitarist, which we would perform in Madrid at the internationals in the fall. At night, we fell into bed and each other’s arms drinking in each other’s love, not wanting to waste a second of this precious time together.

It breaks my heart now to think of it. Our love, our passion, was forever transformed that night when there came a pounding on our door. Love will never be the same. It is forever dead to my soul and I cannot even bear to write or think of Carlos who will always be associated in my mind with the unbearable loss I feel.

February 6, 1980

            Joe told me I am an embarrassment to him and the family. He is ashamed of me. I cannot raise myself out of bed. My hair is dirty, but I do not care. He thinks I am addicted to the valium, but I don’t need it. I could stop any time. I just don’t want to. I do not want to feel the three-headed monster pushing up against my womb which was last occupied by my Timotito, my little boy.

            My body was so limp and lifeless when Joe tried to wake me, he thought I was dead. He shook me and shook me, but I could not respond. I could tell he thought I’d taken an overdose. But I hadn’t. Finally, he gave up and began a tirade of shouting.

            “Damn it, Maggie! You think you are the only one who has ever lost a son?! Think of all the boys who have died on the battlefield. I have held them in my own arms, knowing that their mother’s heart was going to break. But I have never seen anyone, and I mean it, Maggie, as self-centered and narcissistic as you. I have sat with mothers and fathers whose boys could not be identified except by their teeth – and you know what? They didn’t curl up and die. Life fucking goes on! You take the worst blow life has to offer, and you pick yourself up and you come back from the dead to the living. What about your other children!  What about me!  Look at you – you’re a pathetic mess, a poor excuse for a wife and a mother. Maggie and Dodie need you. For Christ sakes, I need you!”

            I couldn’t stand listening to his bellowing voice punctuating my brain like an assault rifle. I turned onto my side and put the pillow over my head, and I felt the jolt of electric pain in my body when Joe slammed the door behind him. It made me think of that awful anti-communism advertisement about the slamming of the “Iron Curtain”.  It seems like my marriage to Joe has been a series of prison doors slamming tight. He, locking me in the isolation of having to do battle with my own feelings. Me locking him out of each layer of my heart and throwing away the golden key.  But I know he is right. It is now or never. I either join the living – or I join the dead.

            The day that Timmy died, Carlos and I were at the beach house in La Pesca. We had been exhausted. The weather last July had been unreasonably hot and humid, and the dance camp was intensified by physical discomfort. At night we came home and swam naked in the ocean before settling for a late dinner. I did not feel right. My nerves were on edge and I did not know why. I could not make love, and Carlos was pouting because I had snapped at him to leave me alone. We were both on edge because of the heat. He sat up for a while, reading his newspapers, while I collapsed in bed early.

            Sometime in the middle of the night there was a pounding on our door. It took me awhile to realize that it was real because I was disoriented and did not know where I was. I thought I was home on the McCullagh Ranch, and in the back of my mind was the dreaded visit of army officers informing me that Joe was dead.

Carlos answered the door and I could hear voices. It sounded like Enrique’. Carlos’ voice became alarmed and I could hear him ask “When did this happen?”

I put on my robe and shuffled out to the living room. That’s when Enrique’ clammed up. Carlos made me sit down on the sofa and he knelt beside me.

“Querida – there’s been an accident on the ranch. It’s Tito. He fell off his horse or something. I’m sure he’ll be O.K., but Joe’s been trying to reach you all night, calling your mother. She couldn’t reach us but got through to Enrique’.  He couldn’t get through – our phone must be dead again.”

His voice faded away into that hollow jar of fear, a jumble of words muffled by a cotton echo. I could not quite make out what was going on. My body began to tremble, and I broke out in a cold sweat.  I was sure at that point that Timmy had merely broken an arm or a collar bone. There was no indication that the accident was fatal.  My immediate concern was that Joe had tracked me down and might know that I was with Carlos. I began to interrogate Enrique about Joe and if he had talked to him directly and did, he cover for me. Carlos fixed me a rum and Coke and began to make arrangements with Enrique to get me a flight back home. I should have known there was more to the story by Carlos’ demeanor. He was clearly shaken. I could see it in the dark worry of his eyes. But then I thought he should be worried about getting caught with another man’s wife.

Within two hours I was on a small piper which took off from an air field outside of Monterrey. The pilot seemed a rather shady character – an acquaintance of an acquaintance – and not someone Carlos was willing to leave me alone with.  He accompanied me as far as El Paso where he booked me a cab and then returned to Mexico in the night. 

I had not been able to reach Joe all night. I couldn’t imagine where he was. Surely, they were back from the hospital by now. I had called from La Pesca, from Cousin Enrique’s before we went to the airfield and from the airport when I arrived in El Paso. There was no answer. I called my mother. She seemed oddly distant and would not tell me what she knew. All she said was, “Bonatita – you need to get home.” She sounded tired and sad.

It was 4:30 A.M. by the time the cab pulled up to the ranch. The door was locked, and the house was dark, which was unusual. Joe never locked the doors. The car was parked askew in the turnaround drive. I set my bag down, fished my keys out of my purse, and unlocked the door. The silence was eerie – not because the house was empty, but because I sensed that it was full. There was a palpable energy, a sadness that pulsated the air. I flicked on the light in the foyer, and that’s when I saw him. Joe was seated in his big old leather chair in the den. The door was wide open, and he sat there rigid as stone like the statue of the President in the Lincoln Memorial. His eyes were red, and his beard was a stubble of red sawdust on his face. I let out a little gasp of surprise.

“Where the hell were you, Maggie?” he demanded in a voice that did not quite sound like the Colonel Joe I knew.

I could not answer right away. My mind was reeling, trying to make sense of the pieces of a puzzle which did not belong in the same box.

“Answer me, damn it!  Where the hell were you!”

“What’s happened?” I asked timidly avoiding the answer.

“Were you with him?” he shouted.

“Who?” I asked dumbly.

“You know damned well who!  That son-of-a-bitch dance partner you pretend you don’t see anymore!”  With that, Joe threw his glass across the room. It smashed against the wall, spilling the dregs of the rich, brown bourbon which dripped down to the floor like an ugly blood stain.

“I’m not stupid, Maggie. I haven’t got to where I am in my work because I’m blind. I know you better than you think I do. So, when I ask you where you were, you better damned well tell the truth….”

I became alarmed now. It’s not that I hadn’t always imagined what the day would be like when Joe found out about Carlos, but that he was so distraught. I knew that Joe would be angry about Carlos, but I also knew that he wouldn’t be this upset about losing me. Our marriage had long ago slipped into the realm of a business partnership. Joe was not one to spend his emotions on passion. There was something else which he was not telling me.

“Tell me what’s happened!” I screamed.

It was then that I noticed his shoulders shaking. He had been holding back his tears all along. My strong soldier husband who had been through the hell of war and back was reduced to a sniveling and broken man.

“He’s dead. Your son is dead. And we couldn’t track you down. If you were home, it wouldn’t have happened! You selfish half-breed bitch!”

With that, Joe stumbled out of the room and disappeared to another part of the house. I sank to the floor, numb. I could not move my body. I was not sure I had heard correctly. It must have been a mistake. Fingers of sunlight stretched through the east side windows across the floor. Did he say Timmy was dead?