Abiquiu

by ZOE BOYER

As she drove, bluffs leapt out from the shimmer of heat haze one after another like the flipped pages of a pop-up book. Striated in shades of terra-cotta and rust, ocher and taupe, they reminded Nico of sand art souvenirs she had purchased on vacations as a child—small glass bottles into which layers of colored granules had been poured creating kaleidoscopic patterns. Time had done the pouring here, layering shale, siltstone, Entrada sandstone, Todilto limestone, and gypsum. The two-lane highway carved through these sinuous scarps beneath a turquoise sky.

Every few miles, descansos loomed from a roadside ditch, piercing the seamless bolt of turquoise. They were painted bone white, most worn near to splinters, though a few looked more recent. Some were bare while others were piled with plastic drugstore flowers, laminated photographs, and stuffed bears, fur bronzed and matted with dust. Though it had been years since she’d driven this road to visit her father, Nico knew to keep an eye out for swerving cars, drivers too lit to navigate the painted lines. The memorials slid by her in ghostly procession. With each one, she couldn’t help imagining the firework of shattered glass, the keening of torn metal, flame licking up from under the hood. She knew what it was for a person to fuel their self with alcohol, how so much of their life became flammable.

When Bode’s General Store appeared on the roadside, Nico stopped, tugged by the taut leash of memory. Though they had lived in Chama when Nico was young, her father often drove them down to Abiquiu on weekends. Born and raised in Española, he preferred the desert landscape and adobes to the pines and log cabins of the high country. Abiquiu had all the beauty of auburn earth and gold-thorned cholla without the reminders Española held of a childhood that had mired her father in such grit he was still spitting out sand.

In Abiquiu, Nico and her father went on rambling hikes, chased lizards through dry washes, crept beneath the barbed wire of cattle fences down to the lake. They waded out through silt and sedge to swim beneath the silhouette of Pedernal, its blunted peak looming over the land like a benevolent god. After, still slick and plastered with dust from their journey back up to the road, her father would stop at Bode’s and snag the last of the day’s breakfast burritos, red for her and green for him. They would devour them on the drive home, juice running down their wrists as they wound along the Rio Chama and up toward the mountains.

Now Nico entered the store and slowly browsed the aisles as she waited for the small line at the counter to disperse. Not much had changed since she’d last been in. Bode’s still carried an odd assortment of outdoor gear, tourist trinkets, local artisan goods—like salves from a nearby lavender farm she had loved when she was younger—and the sort of organic hippie snacks you would find at Whole Foods. When the line cleared and she’d finished admiring a rack of cast-iron pans shaped like cacti and ears of corn, Nico approached the counter. She ordered a red burrito for herself, then, as the woman behind the counter turned to the register, added a green burrito, as well. She liked the idea that she wouldn’t be coming to her father empty-handed.

After Bode’s, Nico took a detour through the town proper, a small, ramshackle collection of dirt roads and crumbling adobes. Houses sprouted from the earth like crooked teeth, their windows shattered, walls pockmarked with age. Where facades had fallen away, piles of rubble pooled at the bases of buildings, as if the earth were swallowing the town in pieces, returning it to dust. Only the curved adobe walls of the church rose smooth and unblemished from the midst of a well-tended garden of wildflowers and Russian sage. A statue of the Virgin Mary presided over a congregation of bees bowing at the nectarous altars of blooms, her stone bleached white as a cow skull by the punishing sun.

In the Southwest things didn’t so much decay as desiccate—buildings, creatures, people. It was how Nico came to think of her father. Her parents had split when she was thirteen, and Nico and her mother went down to Albuquerque to live with her grandmother. After that Nico only saw her father on long weekends and holidays. Each time he arrived to fetch her in his rust-eaten pickup he looked a little more worn, his skin sun-seared, lined deep as arroyos. It seemed as though he, too, was crumbling to dust.

Nico’s phone rang as she sat in the lot beside the church eating her burrito. She scrambled to wipe her hands before reaching into her pocket, answering on the last ring. It was her mother wanting to know if she’d made it yet, what was taking so long, was she driving safely? She asked again why Nico had wanted to visit now, when it had been so many years. Oh, and would Nico mind swinging by once she was back to return the dress she had borrowed in time for her mother’s Monday meeting? Nico assured her mother she was driving safely, that she hadn’t arrived yet because she was taking time to savor the views, and yes, she would bring the dress back once she was home. She kept her side of the conversation brief, ending the call by pretending that another car was waiting for her spot.

She wound through the narrow streets of town and back out onto the highway, headed not for her destination, but another detour—the lake. As she drove, she considered the one question she hadn’t answered. Nico knew why she hadn’t answered it—she hadn’t yet told her mother she was pregnant. So far only her husband knew, and they had a lunch planned with her mother for Sunday. She felt a small frisson of excitement every time she thought of the moment she would share the news, her mother’s elation. But for reasons she couldn’t quite explain to herself, she wanted to tell her father first.

Nico was undoubtedly closer to her mother. This was especially true in later years as her father became distant, due not only to geography, but to the haze of alcohol that grew thicker between them with each visit. Eventually Nico was only allowed to see her father when her mother had time to drive her upstate. They still went on short hikes together, her father quizzing her on the names of the plants and insects he had taught her as a child. But he always had a distracted air about him, his eyes seeming to gaze not before him, but far-off into the past.

He was only ever half there, half the man Nico remembered. She had been furious at first, wanted to shake him each time his eyes grew cloudy or his speech faltered, as though it were as simple as rousing someone from a deep sleep. But she found she couldn’t sustain her anger. In time it gave way to what she truly felt—a profound ache for the parts of him they had both lost.

Still, it was her father who appeared most prominently in Nico’s memories of childhood. She’d grown prone to reminiscence over the past days, having arrived at a moment when the cyclical nature of things became so evident it felt as palpable as the turning of a wheel. Her memories of childhood were rust-hued and waterlogged, set amid junipers and piñon, dripping with burrito grease. And they all featured the silhouette of her father in the foreground as he led her through thickets of chamisa, held back branches for her to pass, stooped to point out some critter scrambling beneath the shelter of a rock.

Friends she’d made in her youth, lessons learned in school, had all faded away. But she held those memories with her father more dear than anything else life had offered. Her father had forged her among the red rocks and now she hoped to do the same for her own child, to guide them through the glory and grit of adventure, teach them the solace of finding yourself at home in the land. Perhaps this is why she had wanted to tell her father first.

Unlike the times she had visited Abiquiu Lake with her father, scraping through thickets of brush, traversing the scars of arroyos, Nico now reached the lake by way of the visitor’s entrance. It wasn’t nearly so triumphant a sight without the hard-fought battle to get there, but it was as beautiful as she remembered. The lake was a mirror of turquoise sky nestled in land layered in rich hues of chili, ginger, and cinnamon, speckled with the saffron of wildflowers, the sage green of scrub.

Nico walked down to the shore and kicked off her shoes, submerging her legs in the shallows, letting the rocks work knots from the soles of her feet. Though she hadn’t planned to, she found herself wading out farther and farther, lured by a coolness that cleansed the heat of the day. Her shins slid through the water, shirring its skin so that ripples fanned out before her, licking the hem of her dress, wicking up the cotton. She walked farther, water lapping at her thighs, her hips, the undersides of her breasts. When the water reached her collarbone, she drew a breath and slipped beneath the surface, lifting her feet from the silt, tucking her knees to her chest.

Cradled weightless in the lake, Nico was struck by an overwhelming familiarity. She felt herself returned to the water, reborn as the child she had been, the version of her father that lived on in her memory—impassioned, lucid, whole—resurrected. She emerged from the depths to the present drawing ragged breaths, her vision starry with beaded lashes. She filled her lungs once more, went under, tried again to slip through the fluid fabric of time. But the sensation diminished with each submergence.

At last Nico pulled herself from the lake, legs stumbling with restored weight. With no change of clothes, she stood at the shore waiting for the sere wind and sun’s rays to dry her enough that she wouldn’t squelch against the car’s vinyl seats. Before she left, she knelt to gather a large chip of coral siltstone, slipping it into her damp pocket where its red dust bloomed through the cotton like a cholla flower. She slid into the car still barefoot, feeling the silt that clung to her toes as she pressed them into the gas pedal and eased out of the parking lot back onto the highway.

Nico drove on through undulating land cast out with a careless hand like a quilt tossed across a bed, not tugged flat at the corners. By the time she arrived at the roadside twenty miles south of Chama, the sun had sunk behind a mountain of clouds massing on the western horizon. It seared the sky in ragged strips, the skin of turquoise peeling back, red bleeding through. It singed the sheep’s wool tufts of clouds until they burned like embers.

She hadn’t meant to arrive so late, night already inking the farthest reaches of the sky as she came to a stop along the road’s wide shoulder, right wheels half sunk in scrub. Nico reached behind the driver’s seat and fetched the bag from Bode’s, the corners now slick with pools of grease. She slid from the driver’s seat to the passenger side and opened the door, stepping down into dust. The earth was bare here, past offerings long since swept away by wind or rain, carried off by scavengers. She had visited this place often, once, the way insects are drawn to a flame, a blaze so bright it warps their navigation until they spiral into the heart of it.

At the time, it seemed she’d just learned to live with what little of her father remained to her when suddenly there was nothing left. But in his absence she was surprised to find her memories of him became stronger. In death he was no longer relegated to the man he was the last time she’d seen him. He became whole again, all of his goodness traversing the distance of those difficult years, returning to Nico. She carried that goodness with her now, offered it up in the form of a burrito, a rock, the news—You’re going to be a grandfather.

She set the rock down first, then spread the burrito’s foil flat across the ground like a small body of water flooded with the red of sunset. She knew the food would soon be a feast for crows, coyotes—knew her father would like that. She sat for a while, one hand on her stomach imagining its swell, her other on the dirt imagining everything that had risen from and returned to it. She stayed until the last licks of color drained from the sky and the black was studded with stars above, headlights along the road. Driving away, she watched in the rearview mirror as her father’s cross caught in her taillights and for a moment blazed brighter than the stars, then sunk into the wash of darkness.