The Shadow Catcher

(J-J doesn’t answer.)

What do you think? (I finally ask.)

You know what I think, (she says.) I think this is all some hoax you’re buyin’ into. For whatever reason.

You’re not curious?

I didn’t get the so-called call. So I’m not so curious. But you do what you hafta do.

Well, I’m gonna drive to Vegas.

— you’re going to drive?

I think that’s the point.

— how far is it?

Five, six hours.

— you’re gonna go alone? Take someone (she argues. My sister’s version of directions.)

“I’ll be fine, don’t you worry.”

“Call when you find out. Call me — promise.”

“I promise.”

“I love you, Cis.”

“I love you back.”

But still I want to tell her that for someone as used to chasing shadows for a living, used to searching history’s mists to tell a story, how can I refuse this chance to face this ghost?

edward and clara

Clara could hear them moving in the room next to hers, on the other side of the thin wall, their morning sounds discreet as dawn, and just as purposeful.

Even in the dark and through the wall she could distinguish between the two of them — the dowager, the slower of the two, coughing up deposits from her lungs, spitting, while the other one, younger and more eager to begin the day’s adventure, tiptoes to the chamber pot, delivering the sound of liquid streaming against porcelain. Then she hears the older woman positioning her pot, followed by an almost inaudible hiss and the sharp inglorious smell — even through the wall — of urine.

This business of waking down among the elements still rankled her. It was barely civilized, she thought, this so-called house — a wooden shelter, as makeshift as their pretended family was. Their pretense of putting forth the myth of an extended clan bound by duty and devotion. That myth was as wormy as the floor joins and the crossbeams, but Edward had built it up around him out of nothing, cleared the land and raised the timbers, tarred the roof and seamed walls. It might as well have been a shantytown, she’d thought when she’d first seen it. She might as well be living in a tree. Or in a tipi. Half an inch of timber backed by tar black and rough paper was all that stood between her bed, her being, and the untamed Wild. There was a floor and a stone fireplace in what was called the kitchen, but the walls were less a solace than a taunt that they were all an inch away from living like some primitives. All six of them. An inch away from being Indians.

Her known world had collapsed within a single violent instant of her parents’ deaths six months ago. Not only had she lost the people she loved most, she had lost the world that had defined her. She was too old to think herself an orphan, too habituated to her parents’ love to think herself destitute. Never, in all her childhood years and childhood fantasies, had she entertained the possibility that she’d end up living in the West, living in the wild, living anywhere at all except within the comforts and the confines of a modern city.