Her reading had turned morning in California into late afternoon in Albuquerque. Russ was waiting just inside the gate, in his sheepskin coat. He looked ashen and unslept. When she put her arms around him, she felt him shudder. As a kindness, she let go.
“So,” he said. “They did transfer him.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No. You and I can go together in the morning.”
In her homesickness, she’d lost sight of the trouble in their marriage. To see Russ in the flesh, so tall, so youthful, was to recall her cruelty to him and his pursuit of the Cottrell woman. Although she gathered that Cottrell had opted out, plenty of other women were available to distract him from the awfulness of a mentally ill son. In the wake of the calamity, it seemed all the likelier that he would end up leaving her. And she deserved to be left; she felt as capable of accepting divorce as she was capable of everything else. But the prospect did remind her that she hadn’t had a cigarette since leaving Pasadena.
When she lit up, in the baggage-claim area, he sighed with displeasure.
“I’m sorry.”
“Do as you please.”
“I’m going to quit. Just not … today.”
“It’s fine with me. I’m tempted to take it up myself.”
She extended the pack to him. “Want one?”
He made a face. “No, I don’t want one.”
“You just said you were tempted.”
“It was a figure of speech, for God’s sake.”
Even his sharpness was sweet to her. She and Bradley had never come close to being sharp with each other. It required long years of togetherness.
“We need to rent a car,” he said. “Kevin Anderson drove me down here—he’s on his way back to Many Farms. Do you have the credit card?”
“I do.”
“You didn’t wear it out in Los Angeles?”
“No, Russ. I did not wear it out.”
In the rental car, which conveniently already stank of smoke, he acquainted her with the financial dimension of the calamity. A tribal council administrator, Wanda, had recommended a lawyer from Aztec, oddly named Clark Lawless, whom Russ had met the day before and been impressed with. Because Lawless was the best, he was expensive, and Perry had committed two felonies in the state of New Mexico. As a mentally incapacitated juvenile, he would be charged with the crime of “delinquency,” for which the sentence would typically be confinement in a mental-health facility, followed by at least two years in a reformatory. But Perry was an Illinois resident. Provided that his parents agreed to have his mental illness treated, at their own expense, Lawless was optimistic that a judge would grant them custody. Lawless was well liked at the district courthouse.
“That’s a blessing,” she said.
“You haven’t seen Perry. He hasn’t said a coherent word since they picked him up. He just moans and covers his face. I give a lot of credit to the Farmington police. They put him in the cell that was closest to the desk. If they hadn’t been on top of it, he might have broken his skull open. My guess is that he’s—I mean, based on my counseling experience— I suspect he’s manic-depressive.”
She gasped, in spite of herself, at the evil hyphenated word. Outside the car, a blighted part of Albuquerque was passing by. Warped plywood on storefronts, broken bottles in the gutter. Her father in the evil state, playing ragtime at three in the morning, before the crash.
“Are we sure it wasn’t the drugs? What drugs did he have?”
“Cocaine.”
“Cocaine? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Neither have I. Neither has Ambrose. Where he got it, why he had so much of it—no idea.”
“Well, could that be why he crashed? If he was withdrawing—”
“No,” Russ said. “I’m sorry, but no. It’s my fault, Marion—I knew he wasn’t right. David Goya told me he wasn’t right. He was obviously not right, and now—there was another thing, last night. Early this morning. When he came out of sedation, they had to restrain him again. He’s psychotically depressed.”
A pair of hands was moving randomly in front of her. She directed them toward the cigarettes in her purse. It was good to give them a task.
“Anyway,” Russ said, “we’re looking at a long recovery. I don’t know if they’ll bill us for his time in the facility here, but Lawless is going to cost at least five hundred dollars, probably a lot more. Then however many weeks or months in a private hospital, and further treatment after that. Are you sure you want to be hearing this now?”