Diamonds at Dawn

By Catalina Claussen

"Are you there, Ama?" In "Diamonds at Dawn," seventeen-year old Ahzi Toadlena is adrift, and has been since she was nine. One winter morning she awoke shivering. At dawn, the fire had gone out in the hogan along with the warmth in her mother's arms. Page after torn notebook page chronicle Ahzi's grief, but on the eve of her eighteenth birthday something new is stirring in her: not one, but two crushes. Chadwick, a prep school boy and "fairweather" friend from Albuquerque, and Maverick, a charming misfit, have worked their way into her heart. And to make things worse her best friend, Cascade, is sweet on them too. Ahzi knows what she needs to do. She has to leave her grief behind. She climbs to the highest mesa on the ranch and casts her poems to the wind. In the weeks that follow, amidst concerns over fur trappers on the southwestern New Mexico ranch, a possible murder charge, and Ahzi's journey through grief, Cassie, Chad, and Maverick unwittingly piece the poems back together in a kind of secret map of the heart. The map shows Ahzi that falling in love doesn't mean abandoning the memory of her Ama nor her best friend. And the map is a key to all their healing. Will adventure and mystery on this southwestern New Mexico ranch resolve matters of the heart? Will Ahzi and Cassie's friendship last? "Diamonds at Dawn" is the promised sequel to "Diamonds at Dusk" and readers will not be disappointed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Progressive Rising Phoenix Press, LLC
• Release date: Mar 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781946329677

Catalina Claussen

Catalina Claussen is an award-winning young adult novelist, poet, and short story author who carries on a love affair with the land, language, and people of southwest New Mexico. She lives with her dog Bandit and raises a prolific organic garden on a ranch in the Mimbres Valley. Her two young adult novels Diamonds at Dusk (2016) and Diamonds at Dawn (2018), have been recognized by the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards, The Wishing Shelf Book Awards in the United Kingdom, and the New Apple Book Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing. Last year she released the young adult novel Holding on to Hope and her debut short story collection Being Home: A Southwestern Almanac. Being Home, Too is the sequel to her debut short story collection, Being Home: A Southwestern Journey. To listen to the podcasts of the stories included in this book, go to the author's website at catalinaclaussenbooks.wordpress.com.

Book preview

Chapter 1

December 21st the dark season. My grandpa, my Sicheii, is worried about me. Early this morning I felt the recurring wall of heat pressed up against my cheeks, warming my purple velvet skirt and blouse and the sterling silver squash blossom necklace, so that when he picked me up in his arms, the rich fabric and precious metal imprinted my mother’s death on my skin. And then I awoke in my seventeen year-old skin wrapped in a goose down comforter, Navajo blanket, and the stillness that follows a snowstorm. The heady scent of cinnamon tea fills the air.

Sicheii never shows that he’s worried. I can tell by what he doesn’t do. I don’t hear the rhythmic rocking of his chair, nor the paper ripple as he turns each page of the Navajo Times. And in the silence that is his uncertainty, I feel helpless. I can’t shake the feeling of the flames on my skin that, year after year, on the eve of Winter Solstice, haunt my dreams. And I have a crush, but it’s more than that.

The hardest part of all of this is the silence. In Navajoland I can’t talk about my mom because the elders say that kind of talk will interrupt her journey to the other side. But I live here in southwestern New Mexico, far from the rez and just about everything else. Here where the rattlesnakes sun themselves on the road in late August and deer come right up to you because they don’t know any better, this should be the place where memories take shape and the whole horizon opens up. And then there’s the crush. I can’t tell Sicheii because what girl in her right mind from anywhere on earth would do that. And I can’t tell my best friend, Cassie, ’cause, well, I just can’t.

The sun is up, and so am I. I pull on my snow leopard print robe and shield my eyes from the glare bouncing rainbows off crystalized mounds, blanketing fairy rings, deer beds, and quail runs in white. That’s when I see a page from my journal caught in the wire surrounding Yas’ corral. I pull on my roping boots and make a grand but swift entrance into the living room, Morning, Sicheii, and head out the front door.

Dressed in his tribal print PJs and his Dallas Cowboys robe, Sicheii glances up from his tea long enough to realize he needs a double take. If he was a regular, run of the mill grandpa, right about now I’d get first and last name treatment, a good clan calling out, followed by pointed questions leading to self-reflection and personal growth. Like this: Ahzi Toadlena of the Sage Brush Hill clan born to the Bitter Water clan, where are you going dressed like that?! But he’s not. He’s my Sicheii, and he doesn’t say anything. I pull the front door closed behind me and the screen door slaps shut.

Yas saunters out of his barn and into his corral as soon as he hears me coming. He whinnies in greeting, shakes his head, and lets a shiver run across his thick white winter coat.

Good morning, boy, I whisper as I press my cheek up against his, enjoying the depth of his fur. I pull back. He looks me over, telling me that a bathrobe and ropers is not proper riding attire, not to mention my long black hair that is currently in a tangle. I know. But it’s urgent.

I walk around to where the fence wire meets the rough-hewn barn and pull the journal page into the safety of my pocket.

Aren’t you a little underdressed for a ride?

My heart slams against my rib cage. I don’t know why I should be surprised to see Maverick Britton. He shows up almost every Saturday morning looking, as Cassie says, devastatingly gorgeous, and with some excuse to help Sicheii. Cassie Jennings is my best friend and newest member into the ranks of the flirting, so she has a tendency to exaggerate. But this morning I’d say she’s spot on. Maverick takes the nineteen-year-old bad boy look to the extreme with his black jeans, black Carhartt jacket, and black felt cowboy hat. And I like it.

I stand up to my full height, look into his warm brown eyes, and prepare to say something devastatingly smart. All that comes out is, Yeah right, which is just about the most generic, one-size-fits-all comeback a girl can say. There’s something about his wild blond hair, broad shoulders, tanned complexion, even in December, and tapered waist that loses a girl in… thought.

I turn and pull the robe closer, aware that the short skirt of it offers little protection against the elements and his curiosity. Grateful for the boots that come past midway on my calves, I walk back to the house through eight inches of fresh powder. Dangerous. Cassie nailed it the first time. Maverick is dangerous.

The night Ama died,

I was caught up in her arms

My back curled against her,

Matching my breath to the subtle rise and fall of her chest

Dreaming of how her nimble fingers wove

lightning-quick fish-tail braids

In the early morning before school

How she used to try on skirts and say: How do I look?

Before tending to the lambs

Of how she’d warm the house before Sicheii and I woke.

Before…

That was before she lost the ability to feel

And her limbs curled.

That was before her copper skin turned yellow

Especially in her palms

That was before…

I knew in my bones that she was gone.

The house turned cold.

My hair tangled.

And the lambs cried.

That was before she became Kai Toadlena, RIP

(retrieved from Yas’ corral)

Chapter 2

In the safety of my room, behind the closed door, I make plans to be here all day. I throw on a pair of jeans, a gray thermal top that I cut thumbholes in to keep the sleeves down over my knuckles, and a wool sweater, dark gray, collared in roses and kissed with snowflake designs, worn through on the right elbow where she used to lean and tell stories. It was hers. She made it. And when they came to take her things to bury them with her, I ran with it out across the snow-covered sagebrush and hid it in the summer hogan. They all knew, but no one had the heart to take it from me.

Up on the bed I start brushing my hair from the ends up, she used to say, until it shines. I survey my artistic landscape—untitled and unfinished are two words that come to mind. Beaded earrings, three quarters of the way done; an easel full of my latest experiment in paint, a failed abstract cubist thing that lacks dimension ’cause all I want to do is press willow leaves in it; and a collage of Cassie and me, a Christmas present in progress that I wish I could sprinkle with snowflakes to make it sparkle in the light.

Sicheii is up out of his chair, pouring a cinnamon tea for Maverick. Then I hear the mugs graze the surface of the pine-top table. Sicheii’s deep, halting baritone and occasional coyote laughter mingles with Maverick’s cool tenor that nudges up against my bedroom door planks.

The spring in the screen door creaks, and excited, bulldozer knocking comes from outside.

Snow, snow, snow! Cassie calls through the house as she explodes through the front door.

Has no one heard of time for introspection? I love her. But sometimes I need silence, so I can hear myself.

I slide off the bed, cover her collage with an old paint-spattered t-shirt, and come out to join them in the kitchen, just in time to witness Cassie in full Maverick meltdown, again. Cassie is a hugger. She is blathering on in single-syllables, if that is possible, while squeezing Sicheii from behind. Sicheii turns in his chair and gives her his version of a grin, which is a lifted chin and a sparkle in his eye.

She says to me, Snow. Hill. Sled. Coming? with her eyes transfixed on Maverick as she fumbles for a logical place to stand.

I start to laugh at her intensity, knowing that’s not really a question. And with that kind of eye contact, we might have Mr. Danger over there tumbling down some slopes with us.

The thing is, I was just feeling it, that spark of completion on any one of those art projects, but I can see that’s impossible. And the last thing I want to do is stay here, watching Cassie turn to pure liquid. Besides, through the window I can see she’s saddled up Cinnamon, blown up two tractor inner tubes, and strapped them to her favorite all-terrain vehicle, Beau, a dappled gray Appaloosa. Who can say no to that kind of gumption this early in the day?

Maverick, with his teacup pinky suspended in mid-air and questioning eyebrows directed at me, looks on expectantly.

Okay. Okay, I say. Let’s get outta here.

Mounted up on Cinnamon with Cassie in the driver’s seat, Maverick winks at me. Cassie fumbles the reins, and he makes it worse by grabbing her waist. From my seat up on Yas, I maneuver between Cinnamon and Beau and say, You want me to take Beau?

Sure, yeah. That’d be great, Cassie says. She should leave it at that, but then she says, ’cause I can’t seem to, you know… do this.

Okay, Cass. Deep breath.

Up on the mesa top, we free the horses and they run, galloping easily over volcanic rocks piled high with snow. Beau looks too cute with a bundle of flakes heaped on the tip of his muzzle.

Come on! Cassie says, scooping me up from behind and plopping the both of us on a tube with enough force to put us in motion down the hill.

With four feet in the air in a kind of dead bugs caught in a coffee can formation, we head down.

You’re crazy! I scream with a huge grin on my face.

What about me? Maverick shouts after us, as he belly flops on the other inner tube in a Superman position that threatens to either overtake us or obliterate us off the hillside completely. With the two of us aboard one tube, Cassie and I lose momentum. But Maverick, head down, hugging the front of his tube, is coming at us. He is a force to be reckoned with, gathering speed and rooster-tailing snow in his wake. He slams into a rock and is airborne.

By some freak of nature, he lands right on top of us. The force of his landing sets us off balance, and our tube is ejected out from underneath us. Cassie and I land flat on our backs with gravel in the tramp-stamp region and snow threatening to go up our shirts. Maverick’s on top with his melt in your mouth eyes, tossed blond-brown waves, broad chest and open arms, gloating—awkward to say the least.

But then it’s like that all day—fun, flirty, and no one gets hurt. All three of us dragging tubes up the snow-covered grassy bowl, whirling down the chute with Maverick in tow. The sun wanders across the sky and begins to nod off at the top off the mesa. The temperature change is our cue to exit. We set the tubes down at the base and hike to the mesa top. The cliff faces are in deep cool shadow as the sky fades to indigo. The horses by