The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,13

to catch his breath, before continuing. “Gil starts telling the dude he’s free to go but the kid won’t leave interrogation because he looks like he peed all over himself. So we get him a jumpsuit to wear. The kid is changing and Gil has me put the kid’s clothes in an evidence bag. Then Gil says to the kid,” Cordova changed his voice, moving it down an octave and making it sound monotone, “‘Did you know that when you stabbed your cousin it left blood on your clothes?’”

Cordova started laughing again. “And I’m thinking, ‘Damn, I’ve been staring at this kid for three hours and I didn’t see any blood splatter.’”

Gil was getting restless, but Cordova was almost to the punch line. “You know that T-shirt the kid was wearing I thought was tye-dyed, no? It was blood. The dude was stupid enough to wear the shirt he killed his cousin in to the station.” Phillips started to laugh, joining Cordova, who was almost doubled over.

Gil watched Cordova and thought about Melissa Baca. He knew that Ron and Cordova were friends, but clearly Cordova didn’t know about Melissa or he wouldn’t have been so animated. Gil decided it wasn’t his place to say anything. That was up to Kline or the Bacas.

“Gil, man, you are the man,” Cordova said, a few more times before Gil could duck out.

After she left the police station, Lucy took the highway north out of Santa Fe, the snow-covered Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the Jemez Mountains to the west. She followed the road past Tesuque and Pojoaque pueblos and turned toward Nambé Pueblo, heading into the moonscape desert that was blinding in the morning sun. The hodoos and mesas, whittled by wind and rain, cast a puzzle of shadows on the soft hills. As she drove, Lucy did what she always did—she watched the sky.

The huge clouds impossibly hugged the curvature of the earth, the immensity of the sky dwarfing the land below it. The clouds were crisp and God-lit. She thought of adjectives for the sky as she drove—massive, turquoise, vast. She dismissed every word as she thought of it—too stupid, too worn, too inadequate. She wished she had been born a poet so she could find a way to describe the Northern New Mexico sky.

Her best attempts had made her sound like a community college creative-writing professor or an advertisement—”an empty canvas of light and space filled with frothy clouds and azure nothingness that is all-encompassing in its beauty.” She laughed out loud—then watched the shadow of a cloud pass over a mountain, creating a moving stripe of slate across a brown hill.

Ten miles later, the wrinkled cliffs and canyons of the desert plunged into the tiny valley of Chimayó, studded by old orchards and cottonwood trees that the winter had turned a soft brown. The trees blended into the nude-crayon bluffs like an earth-toned Impressionist painting.

It was January, so there were few tourists at the Santuario de Chimayó when she pulled up.

Lucy walked through the wooden gates and curved archway and into the small courtyard crowded with gravestones, wooden crosses, and tall cedars. She stopped to study the tombstones, which bore names like Seferina Martinez, Jacinto Ortiz, and Abenicia Chavez. Old Spanish colonial names that she couldn’t properly pronounce, but which made her wish her own name had a little more flair. She looked up at the church—wooden, adobe, and lopsided. She heard pigeons cooing in the twin belfries. The pitched tin roof gleamed in the sun, its silver ridges blending into the blue-white sky. A rickety ladder on the roof led to nowhere in particular. She walked though the church door and almost tripped in the near black. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, and, as unassumingly as she could, she slipped into a pew, trying to look like she belonged and hoping that no one would ask her anything Catholic. The pews were wooden, made soft over the years. The kneelers were wood as well, with no cushioning for the faithful. Old, uncomfortable Catholic furniture. Made two hundred years ago in the belief that those who seek God must suffer to find him.

She hadn’t been lying to Tommy Martinez when she said she’d been planning to get up early. She had been planning on coming here.

It had become her habit to sit in the church at least once a week for a few minutes, sometimes hours. She wasn’t Catholic—she wasn’t anything—but the church comforted her.