Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [23]
That was the beginning, Erik LaGrange thought to himself as he sat on the rock-bound ledge of the mountain. And five years later, this is the end.
At two o’clock in the morning a bleary-eyed Dolores Lanita Walker sat before her computer screen and longed for sleep, but sleep proved elusive this long Friday night, just as it had for days now. She knew she should be studying. Finals were coming. She didn’t really need to sweat them. She’d already been accepted into the medical school at the University of Arizona back home in Tucson. But what she really wanted was to be there right now, to be home where Lani knew she was needed.
Four years earlier, her parents had tried to convince her that it would be far simpler for her to do her undergraduate work in Tucson. Her father had been especially adamant on that score. One way or another, Brandon Walker had lost two of his three sons. He didn’t want to lose her, too, but Lani had stuck to her guns. Rather than stay home, she had come to Grand Forks, North Dakota, and enrolled in a program called INMED—Indians into Medicine at the University of North Dakota’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
As an orphaned Tohono O’odham child who had been raised in an Anglo household and attended predominantly Anglo schools, Lani had wanted to go somewhere else to school, to a place where it would be possible for her to meet and interact with other Native American kids—kids from tribes all over the country, who would know what it was like to live in that uncertain no-man’s-land between Anglo and Indian cultures. She wanted to spend time with people who, like her, negotiated those treacherous minefields every day of their lives.
Lani hadn’t been wrong. Her three roommates in this poorly insulated rental house were proof enough of that. Margie was a Paiute from Nevada, Darlene a Rosebud Sioux, and Laura a Black-foot from Montana. Laura, an accomplished skier, had taught them all to ski, while Darlene had helped Lani learn how to ice-skate. The four girls shared many of the same values and laughed at the same jokes. And they all shared similar beliefs that decreed storytelling to be a wintertime occupation.
It still surprised Lani to realize that her best friend, Leah Donner, who still lived in a dorm, was actually a White Mountain Apache. In the language and history of the Desert People, the word Ohb means Apache. Ohb also interchangeably means enemy.
But when Leah Donner and Lani Walker had met in a Society and Literature class their freshman year, they discovered they had more in common than either expected. Some INMED students came to the U of ND needing and finding remedial help in one or more subjects. Leah Donner and Lani were both outstanding students. Not only were they both smart, they were also orphans who had been raised in adoptive families. The two girls had been abandoned long after the practice of Anglo parents’ adopting Indian children had fallen out of fashion. Leah had been raised in an all-Indian household. She was surprised to learn that Lani’s parents were both Anglos.
It was to Leah that Lani told the story of the blond and black people hair charm—the kushpo ho’oma—she wore around her neck. It was to Leah that Lani first revealed her prize possession—the sturdy medicine basket Lani had woven for herself, making it as much like Nana Dahd’s original as possible. It wasn’t quite as well made as that of Rita’s grandmother, Oks Amichuda—Understanding Woman—but it was respectable enough. And it was to Leah that Lani had finally confided her worries about what was going on with Fat Crack Ortiz—about how sick he was and how much she needed to be home with him.
“I don’t get it,” Leah had said impatiently over dinner the night before. Months later, Leah was still smarting over the fact that Lani had backed out on their verbal agreement to spend the summer after graduation together, volunteering for Doctors Without Borders. Leah was still signed up to go. Lani was returning to Tucson as soon as she