Waking the Moon

to her own devices, Kendra would lie outside by the pool with her + 87 factor sunscreen and a pile of Sandman comics, and read and doze until she dried up into a little heap of brown dust and blew off into the Mazatzal Mountains.

Although really, Angelica couldn’t blame her for wanting to do just that. Huitaca was a glorious place. She had bought the land a year after Rinaldo died. She had just sold her first book—Into the Nysean Fields: Empowered Dreaming For Women Who Have Suffered Enough—for a modest five-figure advance. She’d visited Sedona on the tour promoting Nysean Fields, fallen in love with the buttes and vast lonely expanse of the desert, the blue sky like wet enamel paint and the wonderful midnight incense of pinon pine burning in fieldstone fireplaces. She’d found this place for sale and closed on it a month later, hired a brace of architects and contractors and carpenters. A year later she moved in.

She named the spot Huitaca for the Chibcha moon-goddess, a deity known for her love of indolence and intoxication; one of Her more easygoing incarnations. The compound was tucked between sandstone crags and a pinon-topped bluff where ravens and vultures nested. In the chaparral roadrunners and chachalacas rustled, hunting snakes and the little spiny lizards that hid among the stones. On spring mornings she could hear the chachalacas screaming raucously from the tops of huisache and scrubby pines. The cloudless air smelled of hot dust and pine resin; on summer evenings she could see prayers for rain rising like blue smoke from the distant belfry of the little church in Cottonwood.

Huicata was a few miles from Sedona, with its crystal wavers and wealthy pilgrims seeking enlightenment at overpriced restaurants that served blue corn chips and free range lamb fajitas. Every now and then a gaggle of tourists would find its way through the hills to Huitaca. Then Cloud and Kendra would get to do their stuff, politely but firmly directing the disappointed women back into their rented four-wheel-drive vehicles, watching until they jounced down the dusty gravel road, and out onto the main highway. Huitaca was an enchanted place, almost as beautiful as the Furiano villa on Santorini. Outsiders were only welcomed on special occasions.

The main house was dazzling, three thousand square feet of low-E glass and adobe and two-hundred- year-old beams salvaged from a deconsecrated church in Phoenix. The walls were hung with Navajo sand paintings and an entire steer’s skeleton had been reassembled above the massive fieldstone fireplace, its bleached bones threaded with beads and feathers and rattles made from the shells of tortoises. The floors were covered with hand-painted tiles imported from Tuscany, and small dried bundles of sage burned day and night in front of a tiny altar near Angelica’s bedroom.

But it was outside that Angelica did much of her work. The pool and its surrounding patio were set in a sort of natural amphitheater. On clear nights it afforded an unobstructed view of the eastern sky, with the violet-tinged buttes and hillsides erupting like frozen geysers of stone above the desert. On the patio, there were studiedly naturalistic plantings of native grasses and succulents: lecheguillas, the thorny leafless wands of ocotillo; rock nettles and prickly pear. Collared lizards slept upon the tiles; horned toads crept into the crevices where tiles had cracked, and laid their eggs among shards of terra-cotta. A colony of sidewinders visited there as well. Once Martin had tried to kill one, but Angelica stopped him—

“They only come here to drink,” she said. To his horror and amazement she stooped above a snake as long as Martin’s arm and thick around as his wrist, its head a raised fist, the dry husk of its rattle a blur.

“Here now,” murmured Angelica. Before the rattler could strike, she grabbed it behind its head. It dangled from her hand, writhing and twisting into improbable loops, its tail slapping her thigh hard enough to leave a red streak like the mark of a belt. Angelica held it at arm’s length and gently squeezed its jaws, so that Martin could watch the venom stream in milky strands from its hollow fangs onto the tiles. Then she let it go. Martin jumped onto a chair as the rattler made its crazy sideways flight across the patio and finally disappeared into a stand of prickly pear.

“Let them drink if they want to,” Angelica commanded. “And don’t you ever kill one.”

Martin had never threatened another snake, but he and the girls were much more careful about swimming after dark. That was fine with Angelica: she preferred swimming alone. The pool itself was a good twenty feet deep, designed to resemble a natural spring-fed mere. And it was small—three good strokes and Cloud was across it. Angelica had been concerned about its impact here in the desert, although not enough to forgo its construction, or to curtail the steady trickle of water that coursed from a hidden spigot into the narrow end of the pool. In its depths flecks of gold and silver glittered from a mosaic, done in the style of the women’s apody-terium in the Forum Baths at Herculaneum. It depicted the phases of the moon, with a triumphant female figure at center, the full moon held like an offering in her cupped hands.

Now, Angelica toyed with the idea of taking a swim. It was the twenty-ninth of June, and hot enough that your spit would sizzle on a rock. But Cloud was still there.

“I guess I’ll go on in,” Angelica said at last. She finished her wine, setting the empty goblet on the table beside her chaise. “Don’t miss your ride into town,” she called out, and went inside.

Cloud waited till she was gone, lying on her stomach and letting her hands trail through the blood-warm water. My ride, she thought. She flexed her hand, the hand with the three gold rings piercing it, feeling the water lap against the sensitive delta of flesh. Near her float, a beetle flailed against the surface of the pool, a small dun-colored atom of the desert. It had probably never seen this much water in its life. Cloud slid her hand beneath it, lifted it so that the beetle was marooned on one of her knuckles. For a moment it remained there; she watched as the film of water on its mottled carapace dried. Then its wings lifted and it flicked off into the heated air.

My ride, thought Cloud, and dived beneath the turquoise water. Maybe Kendra and Martin were too brain-dead to notice, but Cloud had figured out a pattern. One night a month Angelica got rid of them, with excuses mundane or byzantine by turns. Tonight, Cloud would peer a little more closely at that pattern, and find out just what was really going on at Huitaca.

I’ll have a fucking ride, all right. And she swam to shore.

Angelica’s preparations were, as always, simple. She waited until she saw Cloud saunter back to the gardener’s cottage. Then she turned from the window. She walked down the hall into the bedroom wing, went into the bathroom with its imported coralite marble floors and the frieze of ecstatic maenads she’d had smuggled into the country from Turkey, and stepped into the shower, a tall cubicle of green industrial glass.

Inside the light was diffuse: like showering beneath a hurricane sky. An alabaster dish held natural sponges and soaps scented with wild lavender and catmint; there was also a small canister of sea salt. Angelica poured a tiny mound into her palm, touched her tongue to the bitter crystals, and then let the water sluice it away. The smells of salt and lavender made her think of the Sea of Crete off the coast of Santorini; made her think of the Aegean, of narcissus nodding on stony hillsides and wind marbling the waves to whorls of white and midnight blue.

Afterward she changed into a plain white linen shift, sleeveless, knee-length, belted with a cord that only Angelica knew was made with real gold thread. She pulled her wet hair back into a ponytail, fastening it with a strip of leather. Then she sat at the battered Mission-style table she used as a vanity, the unstained wood so old and weathered it was soft to the touch, like suede. A small round mirror rested against a piece of lava from Akrotiri. Pots and tubes of expensive cosmetics were strewn everywhere, but Angelica ignored them. Instead, she reached for a terracotta vial stoppered with a cork, and tapped a little heap of coriander seeds into a marble pestle. She ground these, together with a piece of red sandalwood and a few slivers of dried blood orange peel, carefully rubbed the powder onto her breasts, wrists, thighs, neck.

All this while Angelica stared into the mirror before her. It was ancient, of polished metal that had corroded with time, so that her reflection was pocked with darkened spots and craters. Around its border were painted arabesques of dark green and umber, the fluid pattern broken here and there by a pair of eyes. Scungilli, her uncle had told her when he had given it to her, nearly twenty years before in Florence. Octopus.

“It was your mother’s,” he had said. There was a little break in his voice. Not of sorrow, Angelica knew that now. Remorse, perhaps, or apprehension. “Your father has forgotten I have it.”

“My mother?”

Her uncle nodded. He was older even than her father, for all that his youngest child was only seven. She