Day of the Dead
Nineteen
Brandon dropped Emma at the hospital’s front entrance. By the time he had parked and come inside, Emma was seated at a desk where a young Tohono O’odham clerk sat before a keyboard.
Brandon’s first instinct was to go to Emma and offer moral support. After a moment’s thought, however, he decided against it. Emma’s request would be better received without a Mil-gahn man peering over her shoulder. Brandon stationed himself by the door and tried to look unobtrusive. Not that it worked. Every person who went in or out gave him a serious once-over.
Emma’s conversation was too soft-spoken for eavesdropping. Each time Emma spoke, the young woman would type briskly away. Then, after a frowning pause, she would shake her head. Brandon didn’t have to hear what was being said to understand that.
Brandon was reconsidering his decision to stay out of it when the clerk typed in yet another request. This time, after the pause, she smiled and nodded. Seconds later, she reached over to a printer and removed several pieces of paper. After stapling them together, she handed them to Emma, who studied them briefly and stuffed them into her purse. She rose to her feet. With a nod of thanks, Emma swung her walker around and headed for the door.
Brandon leaped to open the door as Emma approached. “You got it?” he asked.
Looking at him, she shook her head almost imperceptibly, but she didn’t answer aloud until they were outside the building.
“She’s wrong,” Emma said as she stamped along, banging her walker on the sidewalk.
“But I thought she gave you something,” Brandon began. “I saw her hand you-”
“She says there’s no record of anyone named Roseanne Orozco ever being admitted to the hospital,” Emma said fiercely. “She said it was so long ago that maybe they lost the records, but it’s not true. She found my record. It shows I was in the hospital three times-once when Andrea was born, once when Roseanne was born, and fifteen years ago for my hysterectomy.”
Brandon helped Emma up onto the Suburban’s running board. While she settled in, he stashed the walker behind the front seat. Once he was behind the wheel, he realized Emma was staring at him intently.
“Andrea’s right,” she said, nodding. “It was somebody at the hospital.”
“We don’t know that,” Brandon cautioned. “Just because the records are missing…”
But Emma Orozco wasn’t listening. “I could never understand it,” she said. “They told me Roseanne was pregnant when she died, but I could never understand how that was possible. If she’d had a boyfriend, I would have known about him, or Andrea would have. But Roseanne didn’t talk, Mr. Walker. Not to anyone. Not even to me or to her father.”
Brandon had switched on the ignition. Rather than pulling out of the parking lot, he sat with the engine idling while the air-conditioning gradually came on.
“But there were all those rumors,” Emma added after a long pause.
“What rumors?”
“People said some of the doctors at the hospital…” Emma’s voice faded away.
“Some of the doctors what?” Brandon asked.
“Did bad. You know, that they messed with their patients.”
“What do you mean, messed with?” Brandon asked. “As in molested them?”
Emma nodded. “But it was a long time after Roseanne was gone. I wondered if it could have had something to do with her, but my husband…” She stopped and shrugged.
Brandon remembered what Andrea had said about the sins white men committed on the reservation going unpunished. This was clearly another case in point, and he understood where Emma was going.
“Since everyone but you seemed to have forgotten all about Roseanne, your husband didn’t want you causing trouble and bringing it back up, right?”
Emma nodded again. “I shouldn’t have listened to Henry,” she said.
Brandon considered his next words carefully. “Mrs. Orozco…” he began.
“Emma,” she corrected.
Brandon knew that being granted first-name status was a gift, and he accepted it as such. “Emma,” he said, “I must caution you. This is all theoretical. We may be going nowhere with this. Still, it’s a place to start. Given all that, are you sure you can’t remember the name of Roseanne’s doctor?”
Emma shook her head. “No,” she said. “He was young, but all the doctors were young back then. I don’t remember any of their names. They came for a few years and then left. Something about paying off college loans.”
And keeping their butts out of Vietnam, Brandon thought. “It doesn’t matter,” he told her. “The hospital should have records of which doctors were there and for how long. Can you tell me exactly when Roseanne went into the hospital?”
“Early July, right after the rains started,” Emma replied. “Henry and I drove into Tucson to get groceries. When we came home, we got stuck on the far side of the washes over by Ryan Field. It took a couple of hours for the water to go down enough so we could cross. Roseanne was feeling sick. Andrea took her over to the hospital, but they wouldn’t do anything until we signed the papers. When we got home, it was almost too late. Her appendix burst. They told us she might die. Afterward, when she finally got home from the hospital, she was still sick.
“Did anyone at the hospital show a particular interest in your daughter?” Brandon asked. “We’ve talked about the doctors. What about someone else? An orderly, or maybe a male nurse?”
“No,” Emma said. “I don’t remember anyone like that at all.”
“Was there anybody else who expressed an interest in her?” Brandon asked. “Someone from school, for example? Maybe one of her teachers.”
“After her operation, Roseanne was still sick,” Emma said. “When school started that year, she didn’t go back.”
Putting the Suburban in reverse, Brandon backed out of the parking place and headed back to Big Fields. For a while they rode in silence. In 1970, the investigators theorized that the father of Roseanne Orozco’s baby might be responsible for her death, but when they learned their prime suspect-Roseanne’s father-wasn’t the baby’s father, they let the investigation slide. Thirty-two years later, there were other tools that hadn’t been invented or even thought of in 1970-tools that were capable of unlocking secrets that were decades old, but using them meant venturing into an emotional minefield.
They were almost back to Big Fields before Brandon Walker broached the subject. “Where is Roseanne buried?” he asked.
“Over there,” Emma said, nodding in the direction of a small barbed-wire-enclosed cemetery near the far boundary of the village. “Her father’s there, too. Why?”
“Do you mind showing me?”
“No.”
Brandon parked the vehicle as close as possible to the battered iron gate that marked the cemetery’s entrance. As he retrieved Emma’s walker and helped her down to the ground, a collection of curious children gathered around. While Brandon opened the gate, Emma entered, holding her head high. She threaded unerringly through a collection of sagging crosses and simple headstones. Inside a small separately fenced plot were three headstones-two large ones on either side of a tiny white cross. Henry Orozco’s name was carved into one of the large headstones. Roseanne’s name was carved on the other. The cross between them had no name at all.
After examining the middle cross, Brandon looked questioningly at Emma. “Roseanne’s baby?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Roseanne couldn’t name her, so we didn’t either. They took the baby for the autopsy and kept it even after we buried Roseanne. When they finally released the baby’s body, we put her here so she could be with her mother.”
“The baby was a girl,” Brandon said, thinking about what Fat Crack had said about the Tohono O’odham’s lost girls. Roseanne Orozco and her daughter were two of them, right along with Lani and Delia. But that made sense. After all, hadn’t Rita Antone and Fat Crack both taught him that among the Desert People all things in nature go in fours?
“Yes,” Emma agreed.
