Chapter Four

The Secret Sister
Chapter Four
Sophie
June 1984

In February, before everything came apart and disappeared as fast as it had begun, they walked hand in hand in the deep silence of a snowstorm. He’d appeared at her door at almost midnight with a red runny nose and his hands stuffed deep inside his coat pockets. He stamped his feet before crossing the threshold of her front door and backing up to the old, iron woodstove she had packed full of logs just minutes before.
“It’s really coming down out there. You want to go walk?” He’d said, but she already held her coat in her hands, ready to slip it on. Of course she would go. She always did.
Outside in the grey-purple night, flakes, fat and nearly round, settled in her hair and on her shoulders, crowding the sky above them as they walked under the amber streetlamps, imprinting the fresh, virgin snow with their boots. They crossed the street and into the desert, letting the lights of town fade out behind them so that the sky lit their way by itself, glowing from somewhere or something (the moon? the sun? stars?) reflecting off the clouds.
“Isn’t it strange when the world gets all violet-y grey like this?” She asked Loren.
“You’re strange, but you know that. I’ve said nothing original here,” he replied with a soft smile. The cold bit at her bare face, but hearing Loren’s breath next to her, his shuffling feet, the scratching of his soft blonde-red beard against his nylon coat neck, warmed her even with him at his usual respectful distance.
“No you haven’t. Not at all.”
He bumped her with his shoulder, nudging her sideways then gave her (or maybe himself) space again. The world felt padded, insulated as if containing absolutely no hard edges or sharp angles. Even their voices could go nowhere, give no echo, and instead practically stopped where they began.
Maybe that’s why they kept mostly silent, slowing up after a while until they practically meandered along, Sophie kicking the sagebrush she came to, knocking them naked, wondering how long it would take for them to be covered in white again. The Reno news forecast called for at least three inches here, more than they had seen in years, really. And just like what happens whenever they are in for a good overnight snow, the town hunkered down quiet. Not one car could be seen. Sophie imagined most of the town streets, with the exception of Main Street possibly, were completely blanketed and undisturbed. Like she and Loren were the only two people here to make any sort of mark. The only two people left.
She didn’t know what had made him take her hand then, what made him bridge that distance he always seem so determined to hold, as they fell to a stop there in the middle of the desert, maybe a mile or so out of town, right in front of the barbwire fence they had walked alongside the entire time that kept them out of the base’s land.
But there it was, long fingered and cold, cupped around her own.
She looked down at it then up at him and underneath his beard he smiled and furrowed his brow as if to say, “I shouldn’t do this. But I have to.”
* * *
But now it was June, and the world a very different place. Sophie had been holed up in her bedroom since sunrise, thinking, curled into the window seat wrapped up in an old thin blanket, looking down and out at the world around her. She had been anticipating this morning, this day, with a mix of dread and relief for months now. She’d thought long and hard about what she might feel, what she might say to herself to get through all this mess. But really all she felt was this strange sort of benign numbness. And so she sat thinking about everything and nothing all at once.
June 2nd. Since he’d told her about the significance of this date the previous August, back when their conversations were casual and information was given with barely a thought to any sort of pain it would contribute to in the future, she hadn’t even thought much of what would come to pass because at that time she was in no way in love with Loren the way she was now. But since that February snowstorm when he took her hand out in the middle of the desert, and she realized that she meant nearly as much to him as he did to her, June 2nd had been a fixture on her mind for nearly every minute since.
The sky shone bright and blue and the dry earth had already started to warm from the cool night before. She wondered if nice weather would be expected in Wyoming as well. 8am here. 10am there. Only 6 more hours until Loren would be a husband.
* * *
Sophie could come up with ten or so distinct days (or nights) in her life that she thought defined her, gave her presence, and made her a human being solid and alive on this earth. Other people probably had more moments to shape them, Sophie imagined, but ten by the age of twenty-six was enough for her. Plus, it was encouraging to note that three of these days (or nights) had occurred in each of the past three years. It meant her life was speeding up, meaning more, and things were happening now that were not happening before, and good or bad, the fact that more moments, more events had come into existence meant she was getting to have them in the first place. And that was good because it meant she was not sitting as still as she had been and hoped it meant she would not sit as still as she thought she always would. It helped her to anticipate movement.
The first and most obvious experience to shape the rest of her life would be today, Loren’s wedding. She didn’t know how just yet, but the fact it would alter her forever was just plain inevitable. This day, June second, was an ending, the stopping of a period of time that began the day she met him when he literally tripped over her while sprawled out on the lawn of the elementary school… otherwise known as the second day to shape her life in the past three years.
Both moments Loren. Both moments to do with him.
But the third most important day came long before he ever did and had absolutely nothing to do with him, and for this she was thankful. She’d hate everything in the past few years to be just about him. She never wanted to be the sort of woman whose life could not move forward without a man as a catalyst. Instead, the day her mother asked her in the dead of winter three years before if she wanted the pink house for her own filled the spot.
“What do you mean, want it?” Sophie had asked as her mother sat down on the recliner chair and covered herself with the green and brown zig-zag patterned afghan Sophie had just folded neatly over the back of the couch. Wind howled against the front of her small duplex, slamming the screen door against its frame, the cold seeping in underneath the closed wood door void of its weather stripping. Warm currents of heated air pushed against the draft to no avail and the living room kept a chill even with a bright open window bringing in light. Stupidly sunny but freezing at the same time… Nevada at its best. What Sophie wouldn’t give for a sky grey and dark, and heavy clouds hanging low in the valley. Something anyway, besides a bright blue world and the deceptive appearance of warmth to tease Sophie into the hope it was such. She guessed that was how things just had to be around here.
“I mean want it. Do you want it? I want to sign it over to you.”
Sophie wandered her living room, picking up her knick-knacks from their proper places, dusting the area where they had been, and setting them right back where they belonged, turning them just so.
“Why?” She finally asked even though she knew what was coming.
“I just can’t be in this town another minute.”
Of course she couldn’t.
Sophie’s mother told people all the time the things she could not tolerate. And she could not tolerate this town. Her mantra muttered almost daily, like a prayer, was that she had to leave. Run away. Get out of the town where she had always been and barely left. Move on. See other things. Be in another place all together so she didn’t have to be here. Nothing good ever came with being here.
But her mother never left. She was eternally the boy who cried wolf. Every minute her mother couldn’t stand to be in this place would turn into an hour, a day, a year, a decade and here would be her mother still, static and unmoving as just about everyone else. Here. Still wishing she were somewhere different. And Sophie just got sick of hearing the word escape her mother’s lips and attach to anyone who would listen, this wishing for movement completely absent of the motivation to move.
“Sure. Why not? I’ll take it,” Sophie adjusted her lace curtains to open halfway and let the afternoon sun light up a strip of living room carpet the color of wet rust. Particles swirled in the sudden disturbance of air then settled, glittering in the light like fairy dust. Sophie realized she’d have to wash them again and reached up to pull them off their white metal rods. Nevada, its dirt and its tendency to weigh down and coat every potentially pretty thing with heavy grit always got Sophie thinking how much work there was in keeping things the way they could be.
“It’s a darling little house,” Sophie continued. “And it would be free. Can’t beat that.”
She rolled up the curtains around her arms like a window shade, shot a quick smile to her mother and she didn’t give it another thought. Not that day, not the next week, not the next month. Not until the day after a storm brought in a dusting of snow and bitter cold temperatures did Sophie’s mother show her just how serious she was about the idea of leaving. She met Sophie at her duplex after work to take her down to the courthouse to sign the papers so she could have the house free and clear.
“You’re getting the house one way or the other, sooner or later. Take your pick,” her mother said once Sophie realized what was going on. Janice Vallstead had the papers set out in a neat, orderly row on the counter at the recorder’s office, her notary stamp set out next to her like a salad fork. The empty courthouse, ready to close up for the evening, echoed with an occasional footstep and closing door and the night darkened the windows behind Janice’s head.
“Couldn’t you have told me this earlier, Mom? You couldn’t have said something to me earlier about this? You just drag me down here?” Sophie looked at Janice and Janice turned away, pretending to ignore the conversation. Sophie could see clear as day what would happen as soon as Janice left the building, drove home, went to her weight watchers meeting or choir club at her church or whatever. She’d have a story to tell: Sophie and Nadia Welsh had been in and argued about a matter they should have discussed in private. She’d make sure to use exaggerated gestures and widen her eyes at all the proper places and the other women would eat it up. Because that is what people did in this town, Sophie knew that, just like probably every other small town in existence. They told stories about their outsiders.
“I told you about this months ago,” her mother insisted. “That day at your house. You said you would take it. I’ve made plans.”
Sophie tingled with realization but said nothing.
“Now you two can settle the differences tonight, Nadia. I have these papers all worked up. If you need to come back in the morning or another time, there is no problem with doing that. No need to rush.” Janice sounded the way a mouse would if it could talk. Squeaky and pitched, but tiny. She was also part of the “haircut club,” an unofficial grouping of women Sophie had noticed perpetually had the exact same haircut. She’d discovered this phenomenon years ago as a kid and as time progressed, the style of the haircut changed, but was always, always repeated among these twelve or so women.
Lately, they had come up with a style that was about shoulder length, permed in the back so that it took on the shape of a wavy triangle and feathered in front, lapping over the ears. Janice’s hair on this particular afternoon was a stunning example, lit up like a halo around her head. This haircut told everyone in the most subtle of ways to stand back. She was a chosen one. She mattered.
“I’ll just tell you one thing,” her mom hissed, clutching Sophie’s elbow in her hand. “If I don’t get out of here, it won’t be long before you’re finding me dead in the bathtub. And I swear to the powers that be, Sophie, it won’t be long. That “later” I speak of will come a lot sooner than you think.”
Sophie took the pen and swiftly signed her name. “I take it. I give up.”
Janice smiled, pleased. Sophie walked out the courthouse doors and started on the way home, walking halfway there before her mother pulled up next to her in her old pickup truck.
“Get in, you little shit. Quit pouting.”
“You can’t say that kind of stuff to me, mom. I know what you’re doing.”
“Once again, your father wins out, doesn’t he? He gets to be the martyr.”
“I’m walking home.”
“Just get in.” Her mother reached across the seat and pushed open the door.
“He didn’t kill himself, mom. And obviously you’ve won. You get to be the martyr.” Her mother sighed. An old argument played out again and again in almost the exact fashion every time. Sophie slid into the seat. “You knew I couldn’t make a scene. Why do you always do that?”
“Because you let me.”
* * *
It wasn’t until Sophie had the deed in hand a few weeks later that the situation felt real enough to finally ask her mother. “But where are you going?”
They had finished breakfast and together smoked cigarettes at the dining room table. Sophie would never normally smoke inside anyone’s house, but her mother never smoked outside her own. Since they barely talked to each other without a cigarette in hand, if Sophie wanted to have a conversation she figured this was a good enough compromise. The table underneath their elbows wobbled from a loose table leg so even the slightest movement shook the contents cluttered on top. But it was otherwise sturdy, dark solid oak and Sophie couldn’t remember the house without it as an ever present fixture.
“Winnemucca? Elko? I don’t know. I won’t know until I get there.” They sat centered below a small ornate chandelier type light, Sophie didn’t know what to call it, with crystals (or plastic rectangles that resembled crystals at least) that had dulled with dust and cobwebs, and gold plating that had long since chipped away, leaving the underbelly of dull grey metal exposed for anyone to notice. A built-in hutch took up the entire face of the north wall, filled full of old porcelain dolls her mother had collected throughout the years and placed haphazardly inside with little regard to presentation. Instead, close to what Sophie figured were fifty dolls dressed in costumes ranging from a 20’s flapper to a pioneer girl, a teeny-bopper girl in a poodle skirt to a Scarlett O’Hara replica. Their bodies mashed together, legs and arms entwined, peering out the glass doors as if claustrophobic and gasping, fighting for a view of the world.
For a woman so anxious to leave her place in life for so long, her mother certainly didn’t try to keep her possessions at a minimum. Not only was her hutch seconds away from breaking open and spilling forth all its contents, but so was every closet, every cupboard, and every one of the four bedrooms in the house, including the storage areas tucked into parallel walls in the loft upstairs. A dumping ground for bad memories, the garage had filled with clothes and tools and God knows what else. Sophie hadn’t been out there in years because of the way she felt overwhelmed and panicked inside it due to the sheer disorganization. That garage had been a mess since Sophie remembered it existing in the first place, if she wanted to really think about it. The place was her mother’s catch-all, somewhere to throw something away when she didn’t want to see it anymore, but couldn’t quite muster the courage to get rid of.
Her mother stood up, left the kitchen and returned with her own familiar coffee cup in hand. The base’s logo on the front had long since faded out from being rubbed raw by her hands perpetually cradling its middle and old coffee rings stained the inside ceramic like layers of sediment.
“You want to do this? You really have to do all this?” Sophie held the deed at arm’s length as if it could reach out and snap her dead in the face. Because Sophie wasn’t sure if she wanted it. She wasn’t sure at all.
Her mother looked at her dead in the eye, something she rarely did if she could help it. Her mother looked a lot of people in the eye, but not Sophie. Not really. Sophie rarely looked her in the eye either. They were both long used to looking away from each other while talking. “You don’t understand, Sophie, what it means to need something more. More than this.”
* * *
Sophie was twenty-two before she realized she had hated every second she had spent in the pink house since her father left all those years before. Because when he lived there the house lived too. Its walls breathed in and out with a pulsating undercurrent of something like consciousness hiding somewhere deep within them. Back then, people wandered through the house like a perpetual stream of life, stopping sometimes to sit on the old plaid couch and drink a beer, their feet propped up on the coffee table in front of them. Sophie would sit between these friends of her father, and he would sit in his leather recliner chair and everyone talked about things like mountains, the base, and the world outside of town that Sophie liked to imagine she’d get out into someday.
When people visited, her father liked to show off his rocks. He’d let the ones that could catch the light do so as it filtered in through the windows in the late afternoons. He’d hold each one delicately between his fingertips, turning them just right to allow for their best presentation. When her father brought out his rocks, the room took on a magic that would brighten the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and even the garage. The entire place enlivened so much Sophie could swear she felt the air actually warm around her as if the house had exhaled. These days, these moments, with the house taking breaths like a living thing, her father presenting his rocks and sharing his knowledge of how they came to be, and people crowding the living room with their bodies, beer and laughter, were what Sophie looked back on as the absolute best of her life.
But then they were gone. Just like that. Her father left and with him went all the luster and living Sophie had witnessed for years. What took his place was something like a shadow, an overcast of sorts so subtle it took Sophie a long time to even realize it existed. The house fell so deathly still and silent, as if somehow giving up without her father there to invigorate and inspire it into continuing. Instead it sat, a corpse, a skeleton, with ghost people stumbling through its bones.
To find somewhere that breathed and bent for the people who lived within it became Sophie’s single solitary goal. She craved a place to have company the same way her father had company. Somewhere for people to come and have a beer and talk about parts of the world Sophie knew nothing about. The pink house had its moment and that moment was long past.
So she made a move one Saturday in the heat of the desert summer. She took a walk down to Patchett’s, a small convenience store nestled in the middle of an R.V. park smack dab in the middle of town, to pick up a local paper and a six pack of Coors, a last minute selection and the same brand her father liked to drink. She thought it a cross between a good omen and a sense of fate that the newspaper bin sat directly next to the refrigerator full of that particular brand of beer. She’d never even bought beer before that day, and still felt she was doing something illegal when she set it on the countertop and waited for the old man who always worked there to ring it up. She masked disappointment when he didn’t card her and instead pulled a twenty from her wallet, smoothed flat with her fingers and set it down for him to pick up.
The summer sun had slipped behind the mountains by the time she walked out the store’s clanging doors and the shadows cast cooled the hot asphalt streets enough for her to wander down the main highway cutting through town without immediately sweating. She made her way to the park across town where she lay on her stomach in the grass away from the few families scattered around the community pool waiting for it to open for the evening swim. She read the classifieds while sipping her cans of beer and found a classified ad for what was to become the first place she ever lived in alone.
And it took on that life. Especially at first. She could put everything in its proper place, the place she had designed for it, and it was good and right and she held high hopes for what was to come even though all her stuff combined barely filled her house enough to look even the slightest bit homey. No matter. To her, what unfolded to her every time she walked in was a dwelling magic with potential.
As the months carried on the way months tend to do, she tried to remedy the sparseness by buying a dark grey couch used from the local paper. It helped a bit by occupying a corner of the room. She draped her favorite afghan over its back and considered getting a cat who might be inclined to sleep there, but never did make it down to the pound and commit to it.
Her next purchase came in the form of a small kitchen table she ordered from the furniture store on 5th street. It sat where a big kitchen table belonged and so it looked dwarfed by the room, almost like it was trying hard to be something it wasn’t. And it disappointed Sophie that it wasn’t quite right and that it didn’t quite fit. So she pretended not to notice it in hopes that eventually she would begin not to realize it at all. But no luck. The disproportionate nature of the whole matter grated on her nerves so much she swore someday to replace it before she went crazy.
Her walls sat bare and stark white and the windows covered with lavender lace curtains she’d bought at the Sprouse Reitz. She didn’t know why she bothered with them since they didn’t match anything else in the house and were almost always dirty. She’d just liked the color, she guessed, and bought them without much forethought, and she’d have to pay the price for it every weekend when she’d take them down to wash the dirt smell off them. But was done was done. And she’d committed to these lavender curtains and would keep them until they fell apart. And that was the way it was to be.
* * *
And now she had the deed to a house she wasn’t so sure she wanted, and most definitely not sure what she would do with it once she had it. How would she ever even begin to fill up her mother’s house with its four bedrooms, loft, dining room, living room, large kitchen and two bathrooms with possessions that couldn’t even fill a tiny duplex? Did Sophie even want this house in the first place with all its hard memories, dark corners and heaviness? But this day, the day the deed sat square in her hand like a dangerous animal placated into a sense of calm, became a very important one to her because she didn’t have a real choice in the matter. The house was hers.
That morning the house became Sophie’s alone, her mother stood, rubbed a cigarette hard into an ashtray and walked the coffee cup to the sink, leaving Sophie alone in the dining room to digest the hard facts. This house. Hers. She looked out the windows lined up in the wall neat and square, their trim probably once painted a nice white but now it had yellowed and peeled from years of neglect and exposure to cigarette smoke. Scratched and clouded from wind and sand, the window panes let outside light through in the foggiest fashion, leaving nothing to see in a sharp or contrasting way. Nothing but blurriness came in from the outside. She’d never have money to replace those windows.
The yard outside also seemed dull and ignored with its dirt floor and dry, brittle fence built tall enough to nearly obscure the entire view from the downstairs to the world around it. She’d have to till the dry soil, plant grass and hope for the best. And those trees. All those trees. Impossible. All she had wanted to do was start fresh and here she was again right back where she started and a sense of helplessness clung to her like the smell of smoke embedded into every corner and crevice of this house. No one had cared about this house for a long time. Could she even begin? With all this hate in her heart she had for it?
It was very easy to recall all those years of bland nothing punctuated by fierce pain and fleeting hope and happiness. Those memories held fast. The fights between her mother and father, the emptiness left once her father moved onto Lydia, the knocks on her window at night that she didn’t want to come… but hoped would come. Sophie thought maybe it was best to leave the past in the past and not return. It was hard enough just to visit.
But at the same time there was a sense of hope that she wanted to try on, the idea of something different she wanted to entertain. So she just went ahead and let herself, just this once. She closed her eyes to picture the house as her own and this day became one of the most important ones she lived. The daydreams gave her a home for herself. A place to be Sophie. And she’d make it hers. And that was that.
She’d paint the dining room a soft peach so that light could filter in through those windows and enliven and brighten the place so she could sit there in the morning and read. She’d wallpaper the kitchen in some sort of pink pattern maybe, or paint it a pretty robin egg blue. She’d take the loft upstairs as her bedroom so she could feel in place on top of the trees and have a place to escape to and hide within. The two windows on the opposite sides of the loft had window seats, and those couldn’t be wasted. For as long as she remembered she’d wanted her bedroom in the loft and now she could have her chance. Her mother had a small cramped bathroom built up there a few years back out of a dressing closet and the original drawers were still there, built into the wall. Sophie could put her fresh towels and other toiletries in them tucked away out of sight.
If the house were Sophie’s, she planned on it being a different place than it had been while she was growing up. It would be neat and quiet and just the way she needed it, not full of her father yelling, her mother crying, the clutter everywhere making her crazy, and the men. She would change history, change the course, shift perspective. If it was ever to be done, it would be done now. Headfirst.
Because it wasn’t necessarily just the painting and lack of clutter that made her hopeful, it was the change in environment and the difference of the details. It was an opportunity for the past to be irrevocably erased and molded into new form, so the present could happen on a different landscape. This wouldn’t be the same house and she wouldn’t be the same girl. The changes she’d be more than determined to make would alter the world and that world around her would, in turn, alter her. She’d evolve to who she’d always wanted to be. A fresh coat of paint on her past might just be enough.
When Sophie walked through the kitchen a little bit later, getting herself ready to leave, she looked down into the sink and saw her mother’s cup half full of cold black coffee. Two days later that same cup of coffee still sat in the sink now surrounded by a variety of other mismatched dirty dishes. But her mother was gone, taking nothing but her old tired suitcase and a few things that must have been important enough to bring along, leaving Sophie with a house full of everything else.
* * *
Sophie wasn’t sure if she could even say the trees in the side yard were planted per se, or if seeds were randomly thrown out just to see if they would take root or not. Elm and oak trees dominated the yard, competing with one another for space to extend their branches. As Sophie grew so did the trees and now they covered the yard in an interwoven mess of leaves so thick that she could barely see down between them from her bedroom window. She took Loren there once just a week or so ago, as soon as the weather warmed enough, to make love to him underneath the dome of dark green silhouetted by bright silver moonlight. With him on top of her, between her, and inside her, she felt completely covered and confined. It was the only time she’d enjoyed the trees and their canopy of outstretched tangled arms.
Otherwise, like today, they just seemed messy and out of sorts and just plain difficult to look at. Sitting there in her window the day of Loren’s wedding to his pretty Nicole, Sophie thought she might take the day to prune them into submission, get them neat and natural and not nearly as overwhelming as they had become.
Or not. Probably not. Most likely not.
The first year she lived in the house after her mother left, she was sure that any second her mother would return as if away on a long trip to see family or a vacation somewhere exotic. She even went as far to think her mother might have been planning all along some way to get Sophie back into the house to stay with her since she never really wanted Sophie to venture out alone in the first place. Maybe her mother thought a month away would be enough time for Sophie to get moved in and settled before driving back into town in her dodge pickup and return to her life like nothing had ever happened.
But her mother didn’t come back. Not a month later. Not two months later And as her mother stayed gone, Sophie got happier… at least in a general sense. Her mother had always been her only friend in town, her only confidante and her only company. She loved her mother and didn’t want to seem ungrateful of her attention, but there were times, many times, where she just couldn’t stand her.
The first few months her mother was gone were punctuated by her hastily written letters postmarked from Elko. She gave quick updates mainly with not much else but reflections on the very basics of her life given the kind of sparse detail she gave in real life conversation. The first letter arrived once Sophie gave up on the idea that her mother was right around the corner waiting to come back. She had taken a job as a waitress at a truck stop she never bothered to name. She said she liked the people she met and the money was decent enough for her to rent a small mobile home and still have a little left over to play the nickel slots on Friday night which was just the exact same thing she did living here.
After that first letter, Sophie wondered why she’d bothered to move when her life barely changed, but she couldn’t really judge, could she? She was living in the same house she’d lived in since she was born and was pretty much doing the same thing she always had except for a tiny blip in the screen when she’d lived in that tiny duplex for a time. Her life had barely changed either since she returned to the pink house she’d grown up in. Except she didn’t have her mother wandering around hating everything and everyone. That was one thing certainly different.
* * *
When Sophie couldn’t sleep, and there were many nights she couldn’t sleep, she’d wander up and down the streets, looking in at people’s houses. If lights were on and curtains open, she’d take a look at what hung on their walls, what played on the television if she could see it, and took notice of the color of their kitchen. Sometimes dogs ran up and down behind chain link fences, barking at her until she shushed them. And the ones she knew best she would pet.
Walking at night calmed her, put her in a place of thought that she couldn’t get to normally when people were around to see her move. It was easy to feel omnipresent, out alone, watching people’s stories unfold around her. In a town stretching one square mile from end to end, she had long since memorized who lived where and what houses sat on which streets. Shifting amongst the lives of the people who were so quick to ignore her here made it easier for her to look them in the eye and think, “you think I’ve done wrong? I’ve seen what you do.”
Take Denise Dupree, her girlhood neighbor, for example. On one of her late night walks, Sophie found Denise crumpled up on her front lawn sobbing into a baby blanket, rocking back and forth and sort of uttering this guttural howl wearing nothing but a flimsy nightgown. Sophie had no idea what had happened, but could guess easy enough. Denise had no children, had no reason for a baby blanket, and looked longingly at pictures of her friends’ children in the smoke shack on breaks.
Stuff happened like that sometimes to show Sophie people lived their lives suffering all one and the same.
A few months later, Sophie decided to walk out into the desert one awhile near the town’s border under the water tower where she saw Denise’s car parked in the shadows. She crept up carefully, not meaning to spy exactly, but just to see. Denise was nowhere in sight, but Jason Johnson, who was not her husband, was. Head back, eyes closed, obviously in the middle of a blow job. Sophie knew that was what was happening because she’d seen Jason in that state so many times before herself. So when Denise was nasty to her at work that next week, Sophie just pictured her with her head in Jason’s lap, taking in someone who was not the man she had promised her life to. Knowing this little indiscretion about Denise was enough to calm her when Denise said the things she always had to say. Because despite any pain she had herself, Denise could be wicked mean to others in general and to Sophie in particular.
These walks held beauty as well. She met Loren this way one night late the previous summer when the asteroid showers lit up the August sky in a series of fast, whizzing, shooting stars. She’d ended up on the front lawn of the elementary school, arms and legs spread as if making a snow angel. He’d nearly tripped over her while looking up at the sky. She’d been concentrating so hard on other things she’d never even heard him coming.
* * *
When Sophie moved out of her duplex and back into her mother’s house, she was so eager to do so that she managed to move her couch on her own. She loaded it up so one end hung out of the back of the small pickup truck she’d borrowed from her old man neighbor then drove slowly up to the top of town. She dragged it out and up the porch steps made of railroad ties and to the front door. She found it a place for it in front of the wood stove that provided the only source of heat for the entire house and covered it with the same afghan she’d had since she was a little kid. The rest of the furniture her mother left still sat in the spots long ago relegated to them, leaving the living room crowded and Sophie rather unsure of what to do next.
And here was where Sophie got stuck. Even though she had a house full of stuff she could use, she didn’t use anything that wasn’t hers. She used her own dishes and cleared out a cabinet just for them in the kitchen. She slept in her own bed in the small downstairs bedroom her father had used to store his rocks in because the loft was so full of her mother’s things she could barely get up there. Alone in a house that was supposed to be hers, nothing felt like hers. It was like she was house sitting, essentially, except the owner was kind enough to let her bring in her own furniture and other household items for the meanwhile. So after about four months, after the summer warmed the desert and Sophie got sick enough of looking at the house the way it had always been, she decided to start making the changes she’d imagined making that day her mother presented her with the deed in the first place.
The dining room table and the piles of newspaper that sat on top of it came first. She dragged the table outside and broke table legs loose. She took an axe and split the top apart and set what remained behind the garage, arranging it in a neat little pile, thinking she might use it next winter for firewood, even though it was nice oak. She just hoped her mother would never see it in this condition. She didn’t want to seem disrespectful. She put her own small dining set in its place underneath the aged chandelier type light she’d always liked. And there in the small dining room with the crowded built in hutch and yellowed walls and windows, her dining set looked much better than that old wood table ever did. Plus it fit better than it ever had at her old place. This made Sophie hopeful for things to come.
And from there Sophie continued. She hunted for boxes outside Ned’s liquor store’s back doors so she could pack up the dolls and such that crowded the hutch doors. She shined the glass until it was gleaming. She basked in the emptiness the room took on as she cleared out her mother’s things and made room for her own. She only had a few trinkets and collectables worth displaying in the hutch, but it didn’t matter. The room was already making sense, already had become her dining room and not her mother’s.
She swept and scrubbed the old linoleum floor after that, polished the windows the best she could and finally when she had done all she could do, she walked down to the hardware store on main street and picked out the shade of peach that she thought best matched her daydreams of what she envisioned her dining room to be. The next Saturday, over the blustery and cloudy morning, afternoon, and evening, she painted the dining room just the way she wanted it and the following morning she got up especially early just so she could see the sun filter into the space and fill it with light.
In the early morning sun, the shade of peach she had hoped so much for, the shade she envisioned would help fill the room with peace and tranquility appeared orange. Sophie tried to mask her disappointment, reassuring herself that even though it wasn’t perfect, it was still better than what had been. But she found herself wandering back to the dining room multiple times that day, attempting to stumble on the room in the proper light, hoping that somehow the paint would appear right and perfect in her eyes. But it didn’t. Only once dark outside did it take on the tone Sophie wanted it to. So she cried herself sick, pulling her hair and punching the tops of her thighs hard with her fists. Finally, once settled, she sat down at the dining room table and resigned herself to going down to the hardware store and trying again once she had the rest of the house in order.
“You can fix it later,” she told herself as she smoothed her hair and looked about the room as if someone were watching her. “You can always fix it later.”
And so the dining room remained its orange-y peach color while she worked to make the house around it her own by taking one room at a time. She emptied the kitchen cupboards and packed her mother’s dishes away in the garage. She threw away all of the food, the spices, and everything that remained in the fridge that she hadn’t bought. She scrubbed the butcher block countertops and cleaned the windows and their sills the best she could, digging dirt and dried up insects out of every crevice. She painted the walls a robin egg blue and liked the result well enough. Better than she did the dining room.
She sanded down and painted the old cabinets, ripped up the linoleum floor and replaced it with tile she laid herself. She did everything herself, except when Katie and Sam helped her, and it took her several months just to finish the kitchen, but once she did she felt proud and accomplished and never wanted to leave the room. She’d even find herself sitting on the counter reading before bed some nights, not wanting to wander through any other part of the house.
And so she continued. She concentrated on selling most of her mother’s furniture; some dressers, a couple of extra beds, the two sofas and the recliner chair that crowded the living room. She eventually got the house empty enough to move her own things where she wanted them to be and began to feel at least a little bit settled. It wasn’t until well into the second year she lived there that she painted the living room a soft yellow. She bought matching curtains made of a delicate print of daisies and ivy that twined together as if linking arms to cover the three main windows. She liked the way her living room ended up feeling cheerful and sunny like the outside was coming in.
She was more adventurous in the loft, her bedroom, painting it a rather dark plum, which she wasn’t sure she liked anymore than the dining room, because her room felt like a closed up womb whenever she went in it. But she found a white bedspread in the Sears catalog, white sheets and pillowcases, and it lightened up the room enough that she didn’t feel the need to do anything more to it.
The beginning of the third year, right after she met Loren, she ripped out the carpet herself with a little help from Sam and Katie. She refinished the hardwood floors, shining them into a dark mahogany. The absence of carpet left the house echoing and empty-sounding and she liked it that way.
And this time out of all the time she’d been alive she was the happiest, calm and warm in the place she’d made for herself. A place linked to but separate from her past. The place she needed to be if she was going to be anywhere.
* * *
The day of Loren’s wedding, Sophie showered; the first shower she’d taken since he left her this final last time. She closed the door and lit a couple candles she kept by the sink and shut off the lights lined up over the vanity. She let the water run so hot she could barely see because of the thick steam. And that was good and fine. It was hard to look at her body when his hands on just been on it three days before, running his fingertips over her skin, both of them memorizing the image, the sensation, because they knew it would be the last time something like this could ever happen between them. Their moments together had already gone on too long, been too much. They both had long since been drained from the output of energy it took to keep this going for the past few months. When his hands at last left the curve of her hips, when his lips separated from hers for the final time, she sighed a great sigh, the relief overwhelming. He did the same.
After the shower she dressed. Baggy Levi jeans rolled to her calves, a loose white tee shirt and huarache sandals. She pulled up her red hair into a sloppy ponytail, bumpy and still dripping wet. And she didn’t care. She paced the house, checking the windows for smudges, the bookcases for dust, the sink for dishes. Nothing much really to keep her focused and occupied so she wandered the rooms of her house instead, feeling out the world in this new sad space of hers. The story had ended. The path stalled. A dead end. Nothing more to this one except the credits running down the screen.
She could barely stand the thought of her bed still smelling of him, still smelling of his beard and his body from being tangled up in her sheets sweaty and clutching. She’d purposely avoided washing her bedding as a sort of way to keep him there just a little while longer. But it became too much now that she was clean and warm from the shower, her body completely absent of him. Because now he would become just like the others; someone she’d have to ignore and block out from her memory forever. And that was the worst because the memories having to do with him were the best of her life.
“You have to forget me now,” he said as they lay in this bed the final time, limbs entwined, skin sticking together in the most intimate of places. “Don’t you?”
She paused then pulled his hand to her mouth and kissed his fingertips, each one, before she answered. “As soon as you walk out of here, I will have already forgotten your name.”
He stayed quiet a long time, so long Sophie didn’t figure he’d answer. But he did. “The last thing I am going to do is believe that.” But he knew better than to doubt that she didn’t mean exactly what she had said. He understood most everything about her now because he’d taken the time to. And he’d have to be a fool not to know just how determined she was to do just that. She would forget him.
Because this was the only way to deal with the crushing sadness she’d have to feel when she’d run into him and his pretty Nicole. Pretend it wasn’t there just as she had done since she was fourteen with all the countless other men and boys she’d taken. Just like the others, she’d learn to be able to look through him like she would a stranger. Put him in her past like she had put everything else.
She stripped her sheets from her bed, dragged them downstairs then stuffed them in the washer. Started a cycle with the hottest water possible. But she smelled them first. Inhaled them, smothered herself with them. Sobbed. Then she went numb all over and there was nothing left to do but stand there as the machine started to shake and rumble, washing Loren away.
* * *
What was next?
When she closed her eyes that June 2nd, freshly showered and wondering what she could do with the rest of her life now that everything had changed and gone the path she knew it would, she imagined Loren in a freshly pressed suit waiting at the end of an aisle at a church somewhere in Wyoming looking on at his bride, a fresh-faced tiny blonde thing with a veil to cover her face and a lace gown that trailed twelve feet behind her. She carried a large, cascading bouquet of lilies and baby’s breath and walked in time with the organ playing in the background. All eyes on pretty Nicole. Loren watching her come to meet him there at the end of the aisle, seeing his entire life meld and fix itself in his line of vision. This would be his life. His life with Nicole, making love and making babies, teaching students and living life. There it was all there right in front of him. And Sophie let herself entertain the notion that somewhere deep down inside he thought of her, the woman he claimed to love but never felt an obligation to. The woman he claimed to love above all others. And yet here was the choice he made instead. She let herself entertain that thought for a good long while, at least until the afternoon when she decided it would be best to organize the garage so that in time she could clean it bare. The last thing she’d do for this house on this very, very important day.

Chapter Three

The Secret Sister
Chapter Three
Sam
December 1989


He didn’t know where else to go. So he stayed. He found a studio apartment near downtown and a job cooking in a casino coffee shop. He ducked around Reno in his old, grey hooded sweatshirt, expecting any second to run into someone he knew from town, from high school, from somewhere. It was a city, sure, but not a big city. And he never knew who might stop him in the street, push him to talk, make him explain what made him up and leave the way he did. So he snuck around like a criminal, studied his surroundings, avoided the people he crossed paths with, and stayed away from the University where a few of his old high school classmates lived in dorms. And so far more than a month had passed, and Sam remained invisible.
He’d found a female kitten maybe five or six months old at the most, one day on a walk just a week or two since he’d found himself here. She’d purred for his attention, rubbed her thin body against his legs as he tried his best to walk quickly away, tripping him up as if on purpose. They met in broad daylight, after a graveyard shift he’d covered. She came at him from under an old beat up Chevy pickup sitting on two flat back tires in front of an old brick house. She stared up at him, narrowing her eyes and blinking sweetly, the way cats do, confident in her choice.
“What a pretty thing you are,” Sam said, finally kneeling to her and extending his palm. She nudged it, rubbing herself with it down the curve of her back, purring at him easily. She had to be the palest orange tabby he had ever seen, beige almost, barely striped, eyes green-rimmed but yellow inside. So very thin. Her meow sounded like the baaing of a lamb, but higher pitched, more delicate. Her chin quivered like a newborn baby’s.
Sam decided he would hate to leave her there, so trusting of people who could pretty much do whatever they wanted to her, so he called for the kitten to follow him up the street and away from the car she’d come out from under. She let him pick her up (incredibly light she was) and tuck her into his jacket. There she sat calm and quiet until he could sneak her into his studio apartment. The manager was adamant about not allowing pets on the premises. “Too many strays. People just leave them here when they take off.” she had said as he sat down to sign the paperwork to move in.
But Sam didn’t care about what he’d promised when he’d needed a place, a cheap place, quickly. He’d figure something out when it came down to this cat. Find another apartment or something if it came down to it. He was already attached. Already bonded to the lump of warmth tucked deep away under his arm.
In the small kitchen area, consisting mainly of an old refrigerator, small stove and one long, narrow burnt orange formica counter top with a couple of oak veneer cabinets tucked underneath it, he opened a can of tuna for her to eat while she roamed around, slinking under the unmade sofa bed in the center of the room and appearing only when he called her. Stella. Like it had always been her name.
Dependably silent except for a steady purr, she seemed to know she could not be found, almost the way he knew he should not be found. He filled a small bowl, one of the two he actually owned, with water in the bathroom sink (the only sink he had in the place…what kind of apartment with a kitchen doesn’t have a kitchen sink?) and set it next to the tuna can that she had pushed herself into face first, nudging it against the wall in her hurry to eat all she could. As if it could be taken from her any second.

That morning, two weeks after he found her, he left her curled up in the mess of blankets on the hide-a-bed mattress he never bothered to fold back into the mouth of the old green plaid sofa. He scratched the top of her head, and she stretched and yawned in the lazy, drowsy way he’d become accustomed to. And in the two weeks since he brought her home with him, he had yet to hear her let out even the slightest hint of the baaing meow she had given that first morning. Nothing came from her that remotely resembled that one burst of communication to let him know Stella had decided Sam was hers. He had not much choice in the matter. It was the way it was.
Stella remained on his mind throughout the day as he worked, broiling steaks, frying hash browns, and grilling pancakes even as late as three o’clock in the afternoon, which Sam just thought absurd. Pancakes were for breakfast. Or maybe even dinner. But lunch? A late lunch? On Christmas Eve? Then he remembered Stella needed cat food. The small bag he’d bought her a couple weeks ago had all but disappeared. He’d stop off somewhere after work. Take a ride. Get out somewhere beside here, the casino he saw day in and day out. And home. The place he saw every time else.
This brought Sam to where he sat that Christmas Eve. Waiting on a bench for a woman he did not know. Slouched over, legs spread open with his hands folded together between his knees, he did not turn around to face the entrance of Savon Drug because he did not want her to catch him look to see if she was coming.
He’d stopped off the only place he’d thought would be open, a store he’d seen near the university but never really paid much attention to before tonight. It had taken him a half hour to find it again, driving up and down hilly streets deserted in the way they always are when there’s a holiday. He’d probably only passed a handful of cars the entire time and that realization simply made him sad. Nothing more than that. Just that same heaviness pressing down deep in his chest. The same thing he always noticed when he felt alone. And then, he was most definitely alone.
Now? Not so much. All due to a random sequence of circumstances: if he hadn’t picked up a graveyard shift, if he hadn’t brought Stella home, he’d have never stopped here for cat food and that silly hot pink collar he found hanging on a hook right there eye level—something he would never thought to buy (with four dollars he did not have to spare), but a touch of sentimentality made him think it might be nice to give Stella a small gift for Christmas. She was Stella after all, a cat he’d found somewhere along the way who wanted very much, it seemed, to remain with him. She deserved a collar at the very least.
And if he never stopped here at this Savon Drug with its tall windows bright with blinding fluorescent light and its dated exterior jutting upward with sharp angles and wood beams circa something like the 1950’s, he’d never have met Olivia at her cash register, standing with one foot propped up on a stack of hand baskets, arms crossed in front of her chest, looking nearly bored to tears.
“You alone for Christmas Eve? I mean, except for the cat of course?” She asked, dangling the collar between her thumb and forefinger.
“I am.” Sam shrugged, smiling at her because she was smiling at him.
“Really.” She hit the total button on the cash register and motioned to the total displayed in bright red numbers. “I happen to alone too. Not even a cat to keep me company.”
Somewhere in the brief chit-chat that followed, she’d ask him to wait for her to get off work so they could get a drink.
Even when he told her he was only nineteen and couldn’t go to a bar she shrugged like it didn’t matter.
“We’ll work something out. We don’t need a bar to get a drink.”
Just like that.
“Give me an hour,” she handed back his change, let her hand linger. He crumpled the bills around the pennies she had set on top of them and stuffed everything in his front jean pocket.
So he had agreed to wait.
Written in her own hand on the plastic nametag adorning her navy smock, curly and sloppy, big circles dotting the i’s. Olivia.
Olivia.
He could say, and would say later when he spoke of her, that she was pretty in a very non-decorative way: not a lot of makeup, a little heavy, with dry brown hair pulled back in a long braid. Older than he was for sure, probably mid-thirties, but he liked women that way, (though he hadn’t known many by this point) because they seemed shaped with experience, both good and bad. They were women he could learn from.
Olivia.
The few words she had spoken to him by then made her voice seem simple, flat, and nearly monotone. But her eyes. They made up for all that borderline dullness because they jumped with light and glittered as if dancing to music. As if her voice had its own fast, frantic beat.
Not to mention an infinite amount of time seemed to go by whenever she blinked. Sam played this over and over in his mind as he sat there waiting for Olivia. A full lifetime could pass by before her eyelids closed and opened again, like her thick dark lashes were weighing her lids down against their will. She reminded Sam of the way a horse would blink.
Something that simple had made Sam fall almost instantly and absolutely in love.
* * *
The parking lot grew empty as he waited, except for the few randomly scattered cars that sat like they had been abandoned. His old yellow station wagon also remained, parked closest to the automatic doors under the pale yellow fluorescent lights humming above him, leaving halos in the cold winter air. From the bench he could see down to where the bulk of Reno spread out far and wide in a blanket of light. The city had settled down into a calm quiet. Being Christmas Eve and all, people were most likely home cooking dinner and eating with their families or whatever else people did on nights like this. And Sam sat on a bench waiting for a woman he’d just met. Someone who really had no intention of being alone, if she could help it, it seemed. Sam was okay with that. He understood the feeling completely.

He didn’t hear her walk up behind him and had no idea of her presence until she touched his shoulder softly, leaving her fingers to settle near his jacket collar, as if she had always known him and their personal space had been established long ago. There was no formality between them, she seemed to say. He jumped a little, surprised because she had been so quiet walking up. He wondered if she had done it on purpose, like she wanted him to startle.
She wore a thick brown coat too long in the sleeves that made her appear as if she had no hands. She sat with him on the bench, closer than what would be comfortable for strangers. Sam inhaled. She smelled fresh and clean, like laundry soap. His bag of cat food rested in between them. He picked it up and cradled it in his lap like he would a child, so as to have less space between them. She brazenly closed the space with the edge of her full hip.
“So,” Sam said, turning toward her. He smiled slightly. “Where are we going to have that drink?”
“My apartment. It’s about a block that way.” She motioned down the street with her chin. “Is that all right with you?”
He looked down the street where a block of brown apartments stood. “Those there?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“No big plans then. I have you for a while?”
“You have me as long as you want.”
She stood up and stuffed her hands in her pockets. Her nose shone a deep red against her otherwise pale face. “You coming then? You can live your car here. No one will bother it. Is that it there?”
”Yes, the yellow one.” he said then stood up. He had to be over a head taller than her. He could see the pale, stretched part right down the middle of her scalp. She breathed evenly, a little heavily even, her lips parted so the air she exhaled turned a deep white in the cold, so deep he almost couldn’t see her face through it. She turned and walked away from him, not another word spoken. Sam liked women he didn’t have to say a lot to. He liked the ones that knew what they wanted, and what they wanted from him. This was Olivia. She asked him to walk with her to her apartment to have a drink. She wanted him. She didn’t make much of a fuss about it.
Sam followed her through the nearly empty parking lot toward the street, lagging back a ways, dragging his feet, because as much as he didn’t want to admit it, walking next to her felt awkward. He didn’t know her and felt that giving her polite space was appropriate. She didn’t seem to mind at all. She might have even welcomed it through her own body language. Her braid whipped back and forth across her shoulders as her body jerked with the impact of her light, quick steps. She walked the way a child would if it were happy. When they stepped through the shrubbery outlining the parking lot and onto the sidewalk that would lead them up to her apartment, he turned back toward his car, suddenly realizing he was still carrying his cat food. There would be time for figuring all that out later. The last thing he wanted to do was ruin the rhythm of all this.
* * *
Like a full, sagging, breast. That’s what her belly resembled, stretched down and swollen like that. When he thought about it, and he tried very hard not to think about it at all, nothing else came to mind except a giant blob of something hanging off his sister, dragging her down with its round, solid weight. He couldn’t have known she was in there. If he had known she was… well, obviously he’d have waited until she was out. And he never would have seen her that way. Not ever. He’d probably still be there in that house, being hid from. A fool to the end.
But her bedroom door had been closed and yellow light from her desk lamp filtered through to the hall from under its bottom. Even if the bathroom was empty, the door was always closed. Always. They had to lock the door in order to not get walked in on. It had been that way. But Katie had been walked in on.
He’d just wanted to take a piss.
He slammed the door shut again so hard his hand tingled itself numb. Was there just a giant tit hanging off Katie? He remembered thinking exactly that. Such an absurd thought! He almost wanted to open the door again because he could believe more that his sister was growing a huge breast on her trunk rather than comprehend she was nearly ready to give birth. She just about had to be with a belly like that.
What a fool he had been.
Sam stood out on the front walk a long time, debating what to do next, kicking at the rocks his invisible father had set in concrete before he was born. Though not able to see them exactly except for in certain angles where the moonlight hit them just right, he did his best. And in a small way it was just satisfying enough just to think he might be stirring one up out of its concrete hive, knocking it loose from the place it’d been all this time.
“Stupid girl.” He muttered over and over. “Stupid fucking dumb girl.”
He saw her then in the long full coat she had been wearing for months, when it wasn’t nearly cold enough to wear it. The way she held big heavy things up against her stomach, like schoolbooks or grocery bags, was so obvious now, though minutes ago he would have barely given it a passing thought. Her body had recently grown fuller and rounder, he knew that much. She had suddenly grown hips and breasts in place of her stick thin figure, becoming a woman instead of a girl.
In that he felt a loss almost like a death. Like she had turned away from him and made another choice. He would remember Katie’s pregnant stomach forever, much like he would remember Sophie’s bright red lipstick when he found her hanging dead in her garage. Those types of things you just don’t forget. Just like you don’t forget those moments that suddenly and forever identify a person you thought to be someone totally different. Or moments that make you feel so terribly insignificant and unconsidered.
The tips of his fingers grazed the sidewalk underneath him as his body finally grew limp. Only then he realized he’d sunk down onto his knees. He let his fingers wander in order to feel the contrast of the grainy concrete against the smooth polish of the stones it surrounded, the rocks cut and polished so their faces lay flat upward, displaying their different colors and inner textures to the world.
That was when he stood, walked to his car, got in and drove.
He didn’t know where he was going. He drove up and down each street in town, looking at the houses as he passed them. He instinctively knew which house came next, who lived in them, who had died in them. He drove by Sophie’s little pink house, still empty and dark. He passed by the courthouse, the library. He drove up the road to the dumps nestled high in the mountainside. He killed the engine, looked out at town, placing himself outside it as much as he could without disappearing from its peripheral.
“I’m done here.” He started the car finally. “I’m done.”
Much later, when he walked back into his house for the last time, he listened for movement in Katie’s or his mother’s rooms. Nothing. How could Katie possibly sleep? How dare it be so easy? He pressed his ear to her door. He felt he had to literally swallow back the instant surge of anger fighting its way upward, so instead of kicking the door down and screaming at her, he closed himself up in his bedroom and paced. He thought he might never sleep again. He was that keyed up.
It took him more than just a while to settle, to sink down cross-legged on the worn carpet at the end of his bed. The beginning of dawn was just barely making its way through the slits in his aluminum blinds. His closet sat open and gaping there in front of him, clothes hung neatly inside it on wire hangers. Then, in a sudden, swift movement, he stood and he pulled as many of his shirts and pants, hangers and all, off the closet rod and threw the whole mess on his bed. Shoes, ties, old pairs of jeans he didn’t even wear anymore followed that. A monopoly game even. All scattered across his twin size bed in a large soft mound.
He threw socks and underwear from his dresser drawers on top of the pile. All he pretty much owned lay right there in front of him. Not much more than that anywhere else, except for a toothbrush in the bathroom he never wanted to see again. Soap maybe? Who cared? That stuff he could get later, somewhere else.
He took the edges of his bed sheets and folded them over the top of the mound as best he could, dragging it down off the bed with a soft thud as it hit his floor. He dragged it out the door and down the hallway, leaving his urine stained, sunken mattress exposed and the dull bulb hanging naked from his ceiling light. As quietly as he could, and he figured he wasn’t really all that quiet, he dragged everything out to his car and stuffed it all in the back, slamming the door closed on it, peering through the window almost astonished at what he was doing, but more certain it was necessary than anything he ever felt was necessary in his whole life.
That was the night he left without the slightest idea that was what he was indeed doing. Late fall, mid-November. He passed the lake, sped past it, did not look toward it once. Just kept his eyes focused ahead. He wanted to keep going until he absolutely had to stop. Then finally he did, in Reno, two hours away when bright sunlight blinded him through the passenger side window and he could barely stay awake, hypnotized by the empty desert highway that led him wherever it was he was going.
He pulled off the freeway and tried to sleep in his backseat at the far end of a casino parking lot. He curled up in his clothes and sheets but couldn’t keep his eyes shut. He just stared at the ceiling of the station wagon, the old, stained butter yellow vinyl, grey with fingerprints and smudges. He’d never really noticed them before and found himself trying to figure out who’s were Katie’s, who’s were his, and somewhere in there, just which one’s were Sophie’s.
* * *
As soon as they walked in her apartment, Olivia began shedding her clothes. First she unzipped her coat, flinging it onto the small kitchen table nestled into a small nook off the kitchen and near the front door. Then, still walking, she kicked her shoes off by the couch then hopped along, removing her socks and tossing them behind her shoulder as she walked up the narrow dark hallway toward her bedroom door. Just before she closed it behind her she slipped out of her shirt, letting her long braid snap back and forth against her small bare back held straight and strong by the curve of her narrow waist. Sam felt fairly certain she was showing off, or at least showing him just a taste of what might come. And it had worked. He struggled against the erection taking form, trying to think of just about anything else but Olivia’s curvy, milky-white back.
A Christmas tree sat in one corner of the living room, a small one, hip high with an angel on top. Its lights blinked furiously, providing most of the light in the otherwise dark room. Pictures littered the white walls of Olivia’s small apartment. They were of the same girl, her daughter, Sam assumed. Sam examined each while he waited. The pictures seemed to be arranged in an order, taken youngest to oldest. He found the first of the series near the front door, a picture of the girl only hours old encased in a solid pink frame. She had that puffy look of a just born baby. A small white bow had been tied into her black hair and one dark eye squinted half open. Her hands closed tight into fists that she held close to her swollen, red face. The next picture, she was just a few months old, plump and smiling. He could see she was mixed, a half black-half white baby. The pictures went on and on, in matching pink frames, up the hallway and back down into the living room, hung in a zig-zag pattern. Up and down they went, showing the girl through the years.
Finally the last picture stopped in the middle of one of the living room walls. The daughter appeared to be about nine or ten. This one was a school picture, the ones taken at the end of the school year, right before summer, where the backgrounds are brighter and the photographer gets a bit more creative. It had a white background splashed in pink, orange, blue and green neon colors. The photographer staged large paint cans as props and the girl sat on one, smiling so big her eyes were half closed. Her hair had been pulled up into a side ponytail that directly above one ear. It puffed out, a pretty caramel brown, long and wild. Sam wondered where the most recent picture might be. It was December now, Christmas Eve, and fall photos were surely taken already, and probably handed out. Where was that one?
Olivia walked back out dressed in jeans and a clingy black sweater. Her brown hair had been let loose from its braid and brushed shiny. She had applied bright red lipstick. She seemed different now, softer. A mother? Not like the supermarket cashier that had walked in a few minutes before who seemed a bit hardened and maybe even slightly cold. (Not that Sam had minded before. He, and he hated to admit it, liked this softer Olivia better though. He couldn’t help it.) She picked up what she had taken off, went out of sight, and came back empty handed. She walked practically tip-toed into the kitchen, maneuvering herself around the corners of walls and furniture without looking at them. She watched him instead. He stood in the living room with his arms limp at his sides. He didn’t know where else to put them.
“My daughter,” Olivia said from the kitchen. Sam nodded. He felt he knew a little bit more about her now, more of her history. He added it to the memory of the way she blinked and he loved her more. She had a daughter. She was a mother. He imagined her holding the little girl baby when she was born. She imagined her feeding the baby, then feeding the girl, getting her dressed for school, fighting with her about what clothes to wear. He smiled. He felt like he had been there as well, watching everything from above, like he was fastened to their ceiling.
Olivia pushed a red plastic cup of wine into Sam’s hands and sat on the old worn couch, rubbing her hand against its blue and green flowered pattern. She pulled her legs up and tucked her bare feet underneath them. She smiled softly, welcoming him to her. Light from the kitchen doorway spilled into the edge of the living room carpet, leaving an amber colored patch in the shape of a triangle. Sam stepped into it. Olivia sipped wine from the cup, holding onto it with graceful fingers, as if she were caressing something dear to her. Her lips went to the cup like she was kissing it and broke apart from it the way she might break apart from the lips of an acquaintance. Not a lover. It was colder, more formal, nothing lingered. Another memory of her forever in his brain.
“Are you uncomfortable?”
“No,” Sam replied, taking a larger drink from his cup than he had meant to. The wine, thick like blood when he swished it in the cup, was dry and bitter. Deep red drops clung to the sides. He wasn’t uncomfortable. He had been telling the truth. He loved standing here in this small cramped apartment because here was the place Olivia slept and ate and bathed, where she had lived her life before he knew her. These were the couches and chairs that she had picked out at some point, selected because she had liked them. Things she had to make a definite choice about and this was the decision she had made.
Everything in her apartment was lined up and orderly, even her videotapes were alphabetized. He thought because he had seen all this that night he had somehow altered his life as well as hers just by being where she lived and understanding how she lived. He felt neither of them would be the same ever again. They would be forever imprinted with each other, just because of this moment. It made him feel high and giddy, almost like he was on an intense drug.
This may have been why it was so hard to move out of that triangular patch of light. He was overwhelmed.
“Come sit,” she instructed. She patted the cushion next to her, smiled. So he did. And she leaned forward and kissed him. Just like that. Her breath had that bitter wine taste to it, but it didn’t matter. He grabbed her face with his hand, bringing her closer, kissed her fiercely.
The feeling he had then was either one he had never had before, or one he had all the time. He just couldn’t be sure. He knew though that he wanted to consume her, somehow kiss her until he came to know her inside and out. And he felt at that moment anything was possible. They broke apart. She did actually, maybe taken aback by his aggressiveness, he wasn’t sure. His hand still held her chin, however, but he loosened his grip, kissed her in a bit more tender way. He wanted to memorize her features and know all her memories. He wanted to hear what her parents were like, where she had lost her virginity and how old she had been. When her birthday was.
She blinked in her horse-like way. He wanted to ask if her daughter blinked the way she did. He wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to get enough. Finally, after seemed like years of them staring at each other, she leaned over, opened one of the drawers of her coffee table, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Then she let them sit on the table, unopened and unlit.
“Where’s your daughter?”
“With her dad.”
“Your ex-husband?”
“I never have been nor ever will be someone’s wife.” She reached for the pack again, like she had decided something, and pulled a cigarette out. Then another.
“Your ex, then?”
Olivia laughed. “Something like that.” She lit the two at once and put one of them in between Sam’s lips.
He loved her laugh because it came from a light place just beyond the opening of her mouth. It had a high pitch like she had at some point rehearsed it, trying to get it to sound a certain way. Maybe that was in order to get it to sound like something different than the way her laugh was naturally. Maybe she had done this when she was young, a teenager perhaps, and after months of conditioning, it had finally stuck. Sam loved this about her because no matter what, Olivia was not a pure element. She was not completely natural. Her laugh was just a soft sweet hint of that fact. He felt himself being immersed in her.
In Olivia.
Later on, when the wine was in his head and she had straddled him on the couch, kissed his neck and ears, and rubbed herself against his crotch in a way he had never had a woman do before, he leaned in and whispered to her.
“You’re beautiful.”
She turned away from him like she was shy then put her hand up to her face to hide a smile. Her cheeks flushed and she would not look at him. It had meant something to her, he decided, to hear what someone thought of her. It excited him to see her vulnerable because she had never seemed vulnerable to him. It was a contradiction. A multitude. A layer.
“The way you look at me makes me feel studied,” she replied finally.
“Is that a bad thing?”
“No,” she said, seeming to consider it a moment. “It’s not a bad thing.”
She stopped, sat there as still as she could. He studied her. Lifted her arms to study her fingers and hands, slid her shirt up over her head to examine her soft stomach, saggy with excess skin and a few stretch marks. She watched him do it, never once let her eyes close. He felt just born, like his first experience ever on Earth was sitting in Olivia’s apartment and sinking all of what she was into himself.
This was the woman he loved. He’d loved others, he imagined. But not like this. When he thought of the others, no matter if it were now or any other time, he categorized them. Put them in columns so he could differentiate between those he loved and those he thought he loved once.
Olivia was in the column of love. The only one.
The rest were on the other side now, moving there the moment Olivia touched his shoulder outside the supermarket. Christine. Amy. Michelle. Brenda. Kim. Linda. Camille. Sarah. Others he couldn’t remember the names of anymore. Olivia put them there, set them apart.
He finally reached out and cupped her breast in the black satin bra encapsulating it. She let him, closed her eyes even, bit her lip. He touched her hair to feel its texture. Dry yet smooth, just as he imagined. Olivia set her hips in motion again, reaching her hands up his shirt, running her fingers down his sides with a touch so delicate he could barely feel it. She unbuttoned his jeans.
San decided he would be by her house every day to take her and her daughter to the park. He would call her before he went to sleep at night then marry her and have ten more children with her. He would convince her to be with him. He would convince her to be his wife.
She stood up, pulled her shirt down and took the empty bottle of wine to the kitchen with her, leaving him alone on the couch. He felt the air shift and move in the space around him empty now without her. The connection broken. He wanted her back. When she walked back into the living room she lit a couple of candles then turned off the Christmas tree lights. The living room glowed orange and the shadows were deep and black. It made her look different, like another person had walked into the room. He wanted to study this one as well.
“You got family around or what?” She asked as she sat back down on the couch again, leaving him hard with his pants still unbuttoned. She lit another cigarette.
“Not here,” Sam said.
“You’re not going to see them for Christmas?”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “I’m Jewish.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“They moved to North Carolina this past summer. We’ll have Christmas in March. That’s when I fly out to see them.”
Olivia seemed to consider what he had just told her. He looked away from her quickly, scratched his nose. Sniffed. The lie came out so quickly he couldn’t take it back. He couldn’t even alter it to become more truthful. And he didn’t want to.
“Okay,” she said finally.
“Okay what?”
“I’m ready to fuck.”
“I love you,” Sam said. “I know it.”
“I’m not in high school sweetie,” Olivia said, standing up and towering over him. Looking away. “Don’t say that shit to me.”
She took his hand and led him to her bedroom. He stood over a head taller than she did. He would remember long after that night that the top of her head smelled like apricots when he pulled her closer to him, wrapping his long arms around her shoulders from behind, nosing his face into her long shiny hair.
And that was all it took. She was naked before they reached her bedroom, and she pushed him through the doorway while he backpedaled, cupping both her breasts in his hands and biting gently into her neck.
He thought he might love her forever.
Her room smelled like cinnamon. What glimpse he got of it before she pushed him down on the bed and straddled him was that it was neat, tidy, everything in place. Books lined up in a small bookcase near her door, largest to smallest. Her bedclothes smelled freshly washed. He imagined that if he pulled open her dresser drawers he would find that her clothes would be organized as well, folded and piled in distinct rows. He loved these details, embraced them in the split second it took to notice them.
Olivia screamed like she was being killed from the second he entered her. He liked it at first, got off on it, really. Eventually though, he had to cover her mouth with his hand because he was losing focus.
But she bit it. Hard. Made him groan.
The nightstand lamp stayed on, the bulb in it so hot and bright the room seemed bleached white. Sam had never had sex in the light before. Maybe the closest he ever got was moonlight filtering in through blinds or spilling into car windows. Most times though it was fumbling sex in pitch black dark. But Olivia never reached over to turn the lamp off. Most girls liked the darkness, the shadows, shy with their bodies, or ashamed of its soft spots and dimples. Not Olivia.
In fact, she watched their reflection in the mirror that ran the length of one wall. She wouldn’t let him turn her any other way. Watched her reflection like she was fucking herself. How can I fuck you, Sam thought. If you won’t let me?
This was not the woman he loved.
He closed his eyes then, imagined a pitch black car and a shy faceless girl and came.
Quiet. He crumpled up on her, let her claw at his shoulders as he grew soft inside her.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered. Then crying replaced the screaming. Sam opened his eyes and there she was under him, bawling her eyes out.
“Why are you crying?” He asked. He shouldn’t have. But he did.
She pushed him off her, bent over and grabbed the underside of her knees and rocked. He put his hand on her back and rubbed it because he felt like he should. Finally, after what seemed like hours of rubbing her back, afraid to stop and bring forth the next set of events, she turned around and curled up into his chest like a small child.
I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “So sorry.”
After falling asleep, she held his hand, clutched at it, and kept it enclosed in both of hers, tight enough to hurt. They faced each other all night while she held their hands together as if praying. Praying for him almost. The light from her bedside lamp was blinding.
Each time he tried to move his hands away, she held them tighter. He wanted to sneak out but he was stuck there. Connected to her. Afraid she would wake up. So he finally gave up and let it be. Let her sleep so softly he could barely hear her breathe.
She slept like a stone in that bright white room. Even when he buried his face beneath the blankets he could see the bright red of his closed eyelids. There were times throughout that endless night where he wondered if she was dead because he couldn’t hear her breathe without leaning close to listen. He thought the tight clutch she had on his hand might be some sort of rigor mortis and that made him nervous. But whatever he did, he could not get her to release that grip. So instead he had to watch her most of the night, eyelids heavy with wine and lack of sleep. Had to watch her sleep like a child.
And he grew sick of her.
He was still awake early the next morning when she moved close to him and kissed his neck with sour wine breath. He did not love her. Her lips were dry and sticky and they clung to his neck a long time before she moved back. She stood and pulled a silky pink bathrobe over her naked body. It hung over her full hips and made a swishing sound when she moved around the bedroom and hallway picking up their clothes, crumpling them together in her hands.
He stood and took the pile from her, sorted his jeans out, pulled them on.
“Merry Christmas,” she whispered close to his ear. She smiled and looked at him for a long time. Her eyes still seemed drowsy but they were deep and wet. Kind of glistening. She seemed happy. He smiled back quickly and pulled on his shirt. She walked away from him, rubbing her hand across his stomach as she went.
“Merry Christmas,” he replied, his voice flat.
“You want some coffee?” She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, her reflection bouncing back from the large mirrored closet doors she couldn’t stop watching herself in the night before. She rubbed her fingers underneath her eyes and pursed her lips at herself, turned her head side to side.
Quit watching yourself like that.
“Uh, you know, I should probably get going soon. I mean, I could stay for a cup but after that I should go.”
She focused on him while still facing the mirror. He saw her both sides of her face because of the angle he had: One side a reflection. The other, real. Her eyebrow twitched just a little. She turned and walked out, leaving him alone in her room. He could hear her slide open the balcony door. He tied his shoes. Took his time.
He found her smoking a cigarette in the cold air. Her apartment faced the mountains, blue and speckled with spots of snow. Coffee brewed in an old worn pot.
He sat across from her, took a cigarette since she didn’t offer. They didn’t speak. Olivia looked toward the mountains, squinting out at the bright blue sky, letting her robe flutter open, her white legs exposed. A naked plastic doll sat on the table between them with one eye open and one eye shut. Its course yellow hair was a mess, all tangled up and ratty. The doll stood out in her place, and seemed strange surrounded by neatness and order.
“You done?” Olivia stood and flicked her cigarette over the edge. She didn’t wait for an answer. She took the ashtray and walked inside. He followed her again, holding out his half-smoked cigarette like he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with it.
He felt like he was chasing her.
She walked to her front door and opened it. She held out the bag of cat food for him to take. “I had a nice time, Sam,” she said. She did not look at him when she spoke. She looked past his shoulder. Her face was hard and her nostrils flared slightly. “Take care of yourself.”
She was a mess of contradiction. He remembered the way she bit him. His hand still stung. It still had a red mark in the shape of her teeth. A perfect crescent moon. She had cried. She wouldn’t let go of him while she slept. Now as she stood at her door, cold and mean.
He reached out to hug her because he felt he should. She turned her head to refuse him. Then she closed the door. She hadn’t even waited for him to make his way down the stairs. He bit his lip. Bit it until it stung, standing at her door for a minute, looking down at her welcome mat. He wondered if she might be on the other side watching him through the peephole. He hoped she would open the door again and he waited for it. But she didn’t.
Finally he walked down the metal steps that led to her door and made his way up the street toward the supermarket where they had met. He glanced back to her apartment building a couple of times and once he even stopped. He would come around again, he decided. He would walk by one day soon. He would try to love her again, even though she cried and bit him. Even though she screamed and couldn’t stop watching herself in the mirror. He might even go up to her door again. He didn’t think she would mind, but then he reconsidered when he remembered when he’d stepped out her door. Her focus had traveled past him, over his shoulder. Distant.
He sat in his car and started it. It shook alive then died. He started it again. The same. Then he tried again and it ran. He let it warm up and he turned the heater on as high as it would go but it just blew cold air. He held his hands in front of his face, the same hands she had held tightly all night. He touched the parts of his body where her body had been, where her hands had touched him, his legs, his arms, his stomach. He felt her all over him. Now it was done. Olivia had let him go. It seemed like such an easy thing for her to do. It seemed so easy for anyone to do. It was like he only mattered for a moment.
* * *
He couldn’t say what led him back a week later in the pitch black, starless night. A cold, dry wind blew east, howling through the bare branches of the trees that lined the perimeter of Olivia’s apartment complex. It wasn’t hard to find her balcony because it was the only one in the complex crowded with people, flush-faced, smoking cigarettes, with New Years hats pulled tight on their heads. Their bodies pressed together, their voices melded together in a dull roar and in the middle of it all was Olivia. She wore her hair sprayed stiff, ratted high, and her lips dark with red lipstick. Probably the same shade she’d worn for him just days before.
Sam slowed the car when he saw her. She pressed forward to the rail of the balcony, her eyes locked with his. Her eyes sparkled under the heavy makeup that had been applied to them, the black eyeliner, the thick mascara. Still alive and dancing after all that bullshit put on them. Sam smiled, hopeful, stopped where he was so his brake lights lit up the entire parking lot. Olivia leaned up against the rail, pitching the top of her body over the top, balancing herself with the core of her body, leaning out to him. Then out of nowhere she pitched the wine glass she’d been holding toward his car and it shattered against the roof into a million tiny pieces that glittered in his headlights.
“Fuck you!” She screamed, flipping him off with both hands. “You stupid asshole. You piece of shit!” The crowd around her had quieted, turned toward him. A girl helped her keep her balance.
“Who do you think you are coming back like this!” He heard her scream one last time as he pulled away quickly, breathless, never feeling more stupid and alone his entire life.
Stella didn’t meow once when he put her in the car with the rest of his things the following morning. She just curled up into the seat beside him, purred patiently and let him decide where she would be taken.
He scratched her head, let her lean into him. Then he started the car packed up with the things he’d brought from home, just as they had been a month before when he’d taken his first steps outward.
“And then I’m gone.”

Chapter Two

The Secret Sister
Chapter Two
Katie
November 1989

Katie draped her arms over the curve of the steering wheel, leaving the engine on so the old truck purred and rattled so as to massage the small of her back she pressed into the seat. That Friday afternoon would become one of many where she waited for him at the Depot gate in his truck he lent her to take to school. After staring out at the horizon a while where the lake shone a bright brilliant blue, and thinking a lot about nothing much, she picked up her Senior English textbook, pulled out the notebook paper she crammed into it and set the mess on the seat next to her. She still had over an hour to wait for Noe. Since she had nothing else to do but read her weekend assignment for her Senior English class, that was what she decided to do.
November came faster than she thought it would. Too fast. Part of the reason had to be because the weather remained warm much later than it should have. The town only just had its first snow the weekend before. Even Halloween had held none of the crispness of fall it usually did. But the main reason the months melted away the way they did was obvious: she didn’t want them to come. There once was part of Katie that thought her pure will could keep the days from turning over into new ones and she could remain trapped in time until she was ready to move forward. Eventually though she realized that this way of thinking probably did nothing more than contribute to the rapid evolution of these very days into the weeks and months that passed by so quickly it was almost incomprehensible. Even in the short time of the past couple of weeks, the trees lining the town’s streets had dropped most of their leaves and littered the roadways, leaving their bare skeletons exposed to the ever-present wind. One day everything was green and warm. The next? Brown and bone cold. The air at night, already relatively thin, had grown bitterly dry and the smell of chimney smoke, noticeably absent until recently, now lingered well on into the next morning from the night before.
All this happening when summer had just been there, and everything coming to a head now was just then beginning to find shape. This very point and time seemed so incredibly far away, a dot on some distant horizon, a “we’ll deal with it when we get there” sort of matter. Now, months later, here in mid-November, Katie sat reading “The Lottery” and kicked up the heater in the truck just a notch to make things cozier. She did her best to stay occupied these days, and for now all she could do was try to hold on to another Friday quickly passing, and not think ahead another minute.
She finished the story some time later, stuffed the notebook paper back inside and set the book next to her on the seat just in time to watch people who gathered around the gate wait to leave. They stood grouped together all wearing the same brown steel-toed work boots on their feet and flannel jackets they left hanging open so their backs flapped in the wind. It was hard for Katie to distinguish just who was young and who was older between the men, since most standing there were weather-worn and dusty, hunched over a bit, but strong and solid nonetheless, each one of them. The mixture of both the vigor of youth and the inevitable defeat of aging present in each made them all seem eternal and unchanging, deeply similar and intricately connected to one another, no matter the gaps of time between them.
The women speckled the spaces between them, nearly blended in with the men due to their similar dress and posture but distinct in their general shape and mannerisms. Their faces seemed brighter as well, less broke down and more open, their chins lifted upward. She wondered a second about why women in general could look so much stronger than men sometimes, even though everything about them was smaller.
She spotted Noe and kept him in her field of vision, right where he should be. His body was that of a typical Paiute, with thin arms and legs and a straight full abdomen, characteristics easy to spot. Not many there looked like him. With small eyes, bright and black, punctuating his round, pie shaped face, his own vision darted from place to place, person to person, all the while his body kept perfectly still. From a distance Noe could look suspicious at times, wary, but that was only from far away. Close up one could see sweetness bordering on naïtivity, the very characteristics that made Noe so approachable by others, for better and for worse.
When it was time to go, Noe walked out of the gate with a light step, almost the way someone might bounce in light gravity, like on the surface of the moon. He slapped his friend Raymond on the back and grabbed his shoulder playfully. He smiled.
That was something Noe didn’t do a lot. Smile. When he did however, his face turned soft and child-like as if something had erupted from somewhere deep beneath his normally still surface. Seeing him smile was a surprise, almost a shock. She sat back in the seat and looked down at her hands. Around others, those smiles came somewhat easier, and in a certain natural way. With her he was heavy and sullen. Almost stone-faced most times.
A jarring metal-on-metal sound announced his opening of the driver’s side door. She slid over to let him in, along with the smell of dust and crisp weather. His flannel jacket scratched her neck when he stretched his arm across the back of the seat. She pressed up close to him, opening her legs to allow room for the gearshift. He kissed her quickly and put the truck in gear.
Raymond had been walking toward the end of a long row of cars when he turned around and jogged toward the truck as if he forgot to tell Noe something but then suddenly remembered. His flannel jacket, a blue and black plaid pattern, had a long, crooked tear in its side and white padding hung out of it like innards. He heaved forward underneath massive shoulders and solid arms. He snapped gum with a thick jaw and Katie could see the indentation of where the muscle contracted and relaxed underneath his mocha skin. A dirty blue baseball cap covered black, tightly wound curls barely peeking out over the nape of his neck.
“Button your coat,” Noe said, nudging her. “Hurry.” He rolled the window down and Katie fumbled the large brown buttons between her fingers, pulling the coat closed over her pregnant stomach.
“Hey,” Raymond said as he leaned into the truck and rested his elbows on the half-rolled down window. “We’re going to be at the Pits tonight. I’ll be bringing a keg and so will Jackson. It’ll be a good time, you guys should come.” When he smiled, two even rows of bright white teeth clamped together between his lips which were full and beautifully shaped, much like a woman’s. Katie liked that Raymond seemed happy all the time. Always grinning, always including her in his invitations.
“The Pits, huh?” Noe considered, tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel, leaning forward to block Katie’s view of Raymond. Not to mention Raymond’s view of her. “Yeah, I can probably stop out there for a while.”
“Oh, son, it will be longer than a while. You better make plans for a long night.” Raymond slapped Noe’s shoulder with a hand Katie swore could have been a foot long from wrist to fingertip. He winked at Katie and turned around, leaving them alone.
“I won’t be out there long,” Noe set the truck in drive. “If I go, that is.”
He looked at her in the rearview mirror.
“Just you?”
Noe shrugged.
“If you’re not going to be out there long,” Katie said. “Then let’s just go together.”
“Katie,” Noe said. Then nothing after that. She knew. She was getting too big.
“It’ll be freezing out, you know. It won’t look weird if I’m bundled up.”
He followed the trail of trucks and cars out onto the road into town.
“I have to take Jason back to the res’ tonight anyway,” he finally said seconds away from turning onto Main Street. “His truck’s broke.”
“You can’t stay?”
“Nah. I need to help my brother get his truck running. He’s got his engine spread out all over the driveway. It’s a fuckin’ mess. My Dad’s pissed.”
Noe lived out on the reservation, a small cluster of houses and ranches about thirty miles out of town. She had never been to where he lived, never met his father. Never had an image to put with the place. Even his brother Jason was only someone she saw in passing at parties and he almost never looked directly at her. He was older as well, almost twenty-six, with the same physical features as Noe, except on him they seemed harder, sharper, and lacking just a bit of whatever it was that made Noe so beautiful though she couldn’t quite say what that was; she could only describe it as softness.
Up until recently, Noe liked to stay in town, mostly because it was easier than driving home just to come back a few hours later. Since last Christmas, what he did most nights was crawl quietly through her window after her mother fell asleep. The next morning he showered and left for work before Sam awoke. No one knew he was ever there. It was almost too easy, so easy in fact neither of them gave much thought to consequences after awhile. He began to leave his clothes tucked away under her bed and his shower things in her dresser drawer. They showered together, something they would have never dreamt of doing before, in case someone came home or woke up or called. He even stayed in her bed instead of slipping under it at dawn like he used to just in case her mother came in to check on her, because she never had in those early months. Not once.
Him being there like that gave them a chance to be alone, to make love, and to settle in together so close and tight that Katie couldn’t help but imagine what it might be like to live that way everyday. Just together. But since all this had happened over the summer, neither could bear the newfound anxiety that came along with him sleeping there all night. He was barely twenty-one. She was seventeen. Her mother despised him and had done so since they first got together over three years before. It wasn’t hard to imagine what she would do about all this. Not hard at all.
Now he went home most of the time except when he drank. Then he either stayed with Raymond or he slept in his truck in an empty lot a block over from her house, stretched out with the heater running if he needed it. The next morning he’d show up to shower with tired eyes and slumped shoulders, smelling of old beer, his muscles tight from being cramped in the same position all night. He’d lay with her a little bit before he left for work and cup the round ball of her stomach in his hands, and she’d twist her fingers in his hair. She preferred seeing him just these few minutes a morning a million times over than to when he left for home in the evenings and didn’t see her much in the in between. When Noe went home it was like he disappeared.
They drove up Main Street. Its four lanes were crowded with cars as the town burst alive with its typical five o’clock flurry of activity. When they passed people they knew someone always waved, whether they were in cars or on foot, and Noe and Katie waved back. They passed Raymond standing in front of the bank and talking to someone else and they waved, even though they had just talked to him not five minutes before. Sometimes it felt absurd, waving to the same people over and over, other times it felt comforting that everywhere she looked, Katie saw someone she knew, or at the very least someone familiar. This town was that small.
When Katie saw Sam drive up alongside them in his old yellow station wagon, she slid across the seat and tried to roll the window down forgetting it was jammed. Sam stared ahead. Katie tapped the glass then slapped it with her bare palm when she couldn’t get his attention. He didn’t see her. Or at least he pretended not to. Sam had his window down and his arm stretched out into the space between them as if reaching for her. His fingers spread out like he was testing the temperature of the air. She pressed her forehead to the window and made a face, squishing her nose flat. Sam glanced to his side, locked eyes with her just a second then sped up and drove past. Katie watched the tail end of his car blend in with the rest.
She missed him because somewhere they had separated, her and Sam. It felt like fingers slipping apart from a strong hold on one another, from a tight grip. The loss moved in and out of her mind like little laps of water. There were times like these, sitting in her boyfriend’s truck, crawling up the street after school, the evening and weekend just ahead, when the feeling tugged at her so that she wanted to make faces at him and connect with him again. Wanted him to notice her there waiting for him to see her. But then other times, many other times, the feeling receded, became submerged in all the other ones crowding her head and making it cloudy. This baby. Noe. Her body. Her birthday. Her mother. And that desire to be close to him disappeared. Just like that.
Noe pulled up to her house what seemed like just seconds after seeing Sam. It sat back from the street, painted a pale green with a large window set in the middle of its front. Dead grass carpeted the front yard, the stiff blades different shades of yellow-brown. The cracked concrete driveway sat wide and empty. Her mother hadn’t been home yet. Katie pulled at the seat cover, working the thread out, twisting it around her finger and letting it loose. Then she did it again. The day was losing strength around them. Bare elm trees lined the sidewalks of the quiet street, their branches reaching out over them like hands. It grew darker and colder as they sat there. The remaining light made the cab of the truck hazy and purple and dim.
Here, now, was where they were most alone these days. Katie reached for Noe’s hand and pressed it against her stomach because she knew he would let her. The confines of the old truck with its faded dashboard, broken stereo and slightly tinted windows seemed to make him feel invisible and he would let her do anything here. His palms felt so smooth against her tight, stretched skin.
“It doesn’t kick as much as it used to,” she whispered. “I don’t think it has much room anymore.” She hoped he would know what that meant. They weren’t going to make it until the end of December. They wouldn’t make it until her birthday.
He spread his fingers over her stomach, like he was palming a basketball.
“You’re sure? It’s not just sleeping a lot?”
“I don’t think so. I’m carrying lower too. That book says it means the labor’s getting close.”
Noe stared at his hand while he rubbed her stomach so softly Katie could barely feel it. “It’s almost December though,” he finally said. “Thanksgiving’s next week. Then it’s only five weeks more.”
She bit her lip and looked up at him. His black hair stood straight up and spread out untamed over his head. She loved him the most because of his hair, so shiny and sleek and distinctive, made wild by genetics and not for the purpose of style. He tried to control it with frequent haircuts and mousse but to no avail. Katie didn’t mind because she loved the feel of it poking against her face and body when they were close. It looked like no one else’s. She felt Noe matched her that way because her hair was a bright, deep red and no one else in town had that color anymore. The only one whose hair had ever come close was her half-sister Sophie and she was dead.
“That’s true,” she said, curling in deeper to the curve of his body underneath where his other arm still lined the back seat. She didn’t want him to get scared, to panic. “We do have to figure things out, Noe. Before it comes. We have to figure out what we’re going to do.”
“I know,” he replied. His body tensed around her quickly, as fast a pulse. “I just don’t want to do it right now. Not tonight.”
“I think I should go to Dr. Lowell.”
“Katie, Lynn works there. You said yourself she would tell your mother. You’ve told me that a million times.”
“Maybe she won’t. Maybe if I just talk to them. He can tell me what to do. He could tell me about obstetricians that are close or something? I don’t know. She has to keep quiet anyway. It’s the law, right?”
Noe rubbed his hair with his hands, rubbed it furiously, making it stand on end.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t even know if your birthday matters anyway. It’s all just fucked.” His voice remained very calm, except when it wavered a moment at the word >birthday’ and the word >fucked’ and made these words the only ones Katie truly digested.
“Okay,” Katie said quietly. “We’ll figure something else out. Don’t be upset.”
Noe stared straight ahead, jaw clenched. He rested his hand again on her stomach, then turned toward her, tucking one of his legs under hers. She felt his body relax. She rubbed his smooth brown arm, nearly hairless, much like a child’s would be. She wondered if this baby’s arms would be the same way, brown and smooth. The creases of Noe’s knuckles were a darker color than the rest of his skin. She gathered them up in between her fingers and pinched them into a line, making them stand up. He kissed her on top of the head.
“This is just hard, Katie.”
“I know.”
After his hair, Katie loved his voice best, it sounded similar to a gentle whispering even when he wasn’t trying to talk quietly. However, it was deep too, like a slow grumbling coming up from his chest and out his mouth. It was like he spoke on two levels at the same time; one soft, one hard.
They sat quietly, leaning into one another.
“Your mother’s here,” he said after a while, facing forward and putting both hands on the steering wheel. Katie looked up to see her mother’s car pull into the driveway. Her mother stepped out, squinting into the windshield of the truck with her head cocked to the side. She wore a long, heavy, quilted beige coat with a thick collar, unzipped so Katie could see the short navy dress she wore under it. She bent back into the car and grabbed a purse and a paper sack of groceries that she propped on her hip like a small child. She motioned with her finger for Katie to come in then pointed at her watch. Katie had an after school curfew. She had to be in the house, without Noe, by five-thirty. She checked her watch. It was a quarter to six.
“I’ll be by about eight, be ready, all right?” Noe said. “I’ll pick you up.”
“Okay,” she said.
“See ya.”
“See ya.”
Noe gave her a quick grin. Not quite a smile. Close. He handed her the English textbook. He looked toward her house where her mother was waiting by the front door. He had been this way for months; watching for her mother, icy cold toward Katie when she was around, at least since July anyway, when Katie told him she was pregnant and knew by then that it was too late to do much about it anyway, not that she was sure she could. She remembered the way he had held his head in his hands. “I’m twenty,” she recalled him saying. “She’ll put me in jail.” Katie knew he was right. Then he cried. He sobbed. The sounds clattered deep in his chest. Now he was just quiet, quiet the way she imagined people were as they waited for an inevitable disaster.
“I love you.” Katie clutched the book to her chest and smiled.
Noe paused, looked ahead, then leaned over the length of the seat and reached for her hand. His face turned stiff and serious. “I love you too, Katie. I do. I swear it.”
She waited until he was down the street before she walked up to her front door and followed her mother inside.
* * *
Katie’s mother slipped her high-heeled shoes off and sat hard on the couch, her coat still on. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
“Put away those groceries, would you?”
Katie’s eighteenth birthday was New Year’s Day. There was no way. She dipped her hand into the paper sack and pulled out cereal boxes, green apples, coffee, and milk. She set them on the kitchen table. Then she looked down at them, folding up the empty bag and holding it against her chest. She would be a mother at seventeen and her mother would put Noe in jail because of it.
You can see him two evenings a week, her mother had told her when she started dating Noe at fourteen. He was barely seventeen then, small for his age, baby-faced. Her mother assumed he was her age and Katie never bothered to correct her on that. Eventually though, as was opt to happen in this town, her mother found out about a year after they had been together, just after Noe had turned eighteen.
She wanted to charge Noe with statutory rape, and looked them both dead in the eye when she said it. Katie remembered it as clearly as she had anything: Noe sitting next to her, arms crossed, chest puffed out, defiant.
“We haven’t even done anything,” he spat. Katie cowered in the corner of the couch.
“Well,” her mother set her eyes directly upon her. “Have you?”
“No,” Katie managed. Even though it had been the truth, Katie still felt like she was lying.
“Oh yeah, then prove it.”
So in the most humiliating way Katie could have imagined at the time, her mother dragged her into Dr. Lowell’s office and demanded that he tell her if Katie was a virgin. He leaned back, legs splayed out to the side like a praying mantis’ and crossed his arms.
“I absolutely will not,” he said.
“You have her consent,” her mother practically screamed. “She’s here, isn’t she?”
Still, he wouldn’t budge much to Katie’s relief. No one had been near there that way, looking at her, not even Noe, and the thought of a doctor doing God-knows-what filled her with a sick dread the entire night before the appointment. Instead, he asked her mother to trust Katie’s insistence that she was, indeed, a virgin.
“She will never trust you,” Katie remembered Dr. Lowell saying to her mother as she sat there scowling like a child being reprimanded while Katie tried to get her shaking hands under control. “If you don’t trust her.”
Dr. Lowell even met her in the parking lot while her mother hung back and talked to her friend Lynn, the receptionist. She was sure he had waited until her mother was occupied.
“Come back if you need anything,” he said, hand on her shoulder, his bald scalp shining in the afternoon sun. “Or if you have any questions.” Katie nodded blindly, not quite looking him in the eye.
“I really am a virgin,” she said. “I really am.”
“Your mother is just very concerned,” he said, stooping to look in her eyes. “After your sister and all.”
She opened the car door and closed it, blocking all sound out, giving herself a safe space to just think. Her mother interrupted it moments later. The car bounced and shifted under her weight as she plopped down, evidence of the worn shocks still needing to be replaced after years of not being done. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window.
“He can bring you home from school,” her mother began. “He can visit if you stay in the living room and I am at home.” She sighed, looking over at Katie and smoothing her face with her soft palm, her skin smelling of cocoa butter. Katie closed her eyes, relieved to have everything be over, to be out in the open.
“You may not have sex with him,” her mother then pinched Katie’s chin between her thumb and index finger, looking her dead straight in the eye. “You understand? You cannot have sex with him. You will not have sex with him.”
“Mom!” Katie struggled to release her face from her mother’s grip.
“I mean it, Katie. I will know.” She released Katie’s chin, pushing her backwards just the slightest bit. “This is a small town. Nothing is secret here. I will put that boy in jail so fast his head will spin.”
The car ride home was quick, but gave Katie enough time to think that as soon as she was ready, she would prove to her mother that she wouldn’t be told what to do. Especially when it came to Noe. Especially that.

Katie ripped open the plastic bag of apples and arranged them pyramid-like into the fruit bowl on the kitchen countertop, taking her time, even biting at her fingernail a little while after she was done. She hated being home alone with her mother. Things seemed so awkward, so out of place, like they were familiar acquaintances with some long-standing grudge instead of mother and daughter. Sam was great to have around because he was the buffer between them, the soft space they both needed. The television blared loudly against the angles of the house with the score of the nightly national news playing out in all its intensity. Katie peeked around the corner into the living room and saw that her mother had already removed her coat and was stretched out on the couch using it as a blanket. Her shoes sat kicked to the side in a way that made them look discarded. She stared blankly ahead at the flickering screen.
“Leave the meat out,” her mother yelled over the television. “We can have spaghetti tonight.”
“There’s no meat, just coffee and apples and cereal.”
“Jesus, Katie. I bought hamburger. Open your eyes.”
Katie walked into the dining room and waved the empty bag. “No meat, mother.”
“Then there’s another bag in the car. Go get it. I must have been too busy reminding my daughter of her after-school curfew to notice I didn’t bring it in.”
“Must have,” Katie muttered as she opened the side door and walked outside to avoid having to walk through the living room and past her mother to the front door.
She had been lucky so far to have carried as small as she had been, making it easier to keep her stomach hidden beneath long baggy sweaters and loose stirrup pants. She knew it helped that she was tall with a long torso and a bit heavy-hipped because for many months the bulge of the baby settled in and curved with the natural shape of her body so that even when she was naked it only appeared she had gained weight around her middle.
However, over the past month her growing abdomen had been harder to hide, becoming a game she played to keep it hidden. She slouched forward and pressed her elbows together in front of her when sitting on couches or in cars. At school, even though she could still fit into the small wooden desks, she turned to the side as much as possible, swinging her legs out in the aisle, crossing them at the ankles, trying to appear casual instead of uncomfortable, especially lately since it becoming more and more cramped for her to remain in that tight space the entire class period.
She felt now though, she was losing the game. Sitting still and squished like that made her back ache. She avoided trips in the car with her mother. Usually about halfway through a class period she would have to get up and walk somewhere to get the cramping sensations she felt over and done with. She asked to use the bathroom or to go to the library so often that every one of her teachers except Mr. McCullers warned her about disrupting class. So for this past week she had to sit cramped up and uncomfortable each class period. This was the only part of the day that slowed to a crawl, so it was easy enough just to deal with it and embrace it until everything sped up again and another day had passed.
Hiding was harder at school than at home. Since it had turned colder, she could wear her heavy bathrobe more frequently or keep under thick blankets while watching television. She complained about the cold as much as she could because she knew her mother would tell her to put more clothes on because she couldn’t afford to heat the house to ninety degrees. When she tucked the blankets around her after settling on the couch to watch a movie or hid behind the back of the couch when she had to talk to her mother, she often wondered if all the hiding and planning was ever truly necessary. It wasn’t like her mother seemed to see her anyway. Unless Noe was around. Then it was like her mother studied every move they made.
The wind picked up outside where just a moment before the world had been still and lazy. Katie stood there a moment and let the crisp, dry air blow against her face, biting her nose and cheeks with cold. The wind could drive you crazy here because it was always there; sweeping wisps of hair in your eyes, slamming a car door shut on your legs, howling through a crack of a door or window. Sam hated everything about Nevada wind, had done so since he was just a little kid because of how raw it made his skin no matter how hot or cold the weather was. He always complained. His abhorrence to wind may have lent to his love for snowfall, and the grey-pink silence it brought with it. He’d bundle up and walk out in the night alone, so he could crunch soft snow under his boots, and Katie imagined, let the muffled sounds of the world come at him slowly. He was the type to enjoy all that silence.
Katie was the opposite. She never minded the wind but almost always got sick of the snow. When it fell, Katie could enjoy it, the patterns it made as it swirled in the sky, but once it sat on the ground for a while, melting in parts and turning stone-hard and grey (as if spoiled) in others, Katie wanted it gone and over with. She hated that most of the time, the dirtiest patches of snow lingered on in the shadiest of areas.
A gust of wind, however, bit you, scratched you, howled in your ears, bent trees against their normal shape in a most unnatural way, then disappeared for another to come and replace it moments later, assuring Katie the world could never be completely still. The fiercest of wind could gather up a wall full of sand miles wide and pelt you with it, leave you helpless if caught in its path, and make you crouch down and cover your most important parts. She’d been caught in a windstorm like that plenty of times and even though it left her skin burning and her eyes and ears scratched with sand so fine it was like glass, it also gave her the sense of things so much bigger than she; uncontrollable, complicated things.
Katie opened the car door and pulled the other sack from the back seat of the car and balanced it on her hip like her mother had done earlier. She held it like she would a toddler, grabbed its underside to hold it steady. She stood there a moment and closed her eyes so she could feel it as if it were real, a real human being attached to her. The wind swirled around her, whipped her hair against her face and shoulders.
Katie walked back in the house. She left the meat out and put the rest of the groceries away. Then she heard Sam’s car pull up in front of the house.
“What are your plans tonight, Katie?” Her mother asked, her voice tired. Katie rolled her eyes. Her mother knew what her plans were.
“I’m going out with Noe.”
Her mother sighed. “As usual.”
“Yes, Mom. As usual.”
“You need to tell me where you are going, and you will need to be home by midnight. Not a minute later, you know the rules. You already disobeyed curfew once today. If you do it again, you won’t see Noe for a month.”
“I know, Mom.” These were the moments when Katie bit back the urge to stand in front of her mother, unbutton her coat and show her just how well she had obeyed the >rules.’ But she didn’t. She went to the kitchen instead and slowly folded the paper sack, smoothing every crease out before filing it under the sink with the others.
Katie remembered her mother before. She remembered her family before. She remembered her mother rushing her and Sam out of the house because she had a man coming over, stuffing money in their hands and giving them a time late in the evening to come back. Then they would wander aimlessly, eat candy and play at the park until it was time to go home. If the man’s truck was still there when they arrived, they waited outside until he left, tucked away and hidden from view in the night shadows. As soon as he stepped out of the door, lit a cigarette, and started up his truck engine, driving off down the empty, quiet street, Sam and Katie walked in the house. Most times their mother would still be in bed, wrapped in sheets and comforters, her hair messed and makeup smudged.
“Get ready for bed,” she’d say flatly, staring out the window, drawing up smoke from a long thing cigarette she held between shaking fingers. And they would.
Then things were different. After school, after their first day after Sophie hanged herself, they found their mother sitting cross-legged in the middle of the living room floor buried in old photo albums and stacks of pictures, her eyes bloodshot and so swollen she could barely open them. She’d thrown her clothes on with no discretion, and they hung loose and crumpled on her thin frame. She had pulled her unwashed, tangled hair up and piled it loosely on her head, and strands of it had fallen down into her eyes. She and Sam had come home to an entirely different person.
“We have rules now,” she said, her voice muffled because she was biting her thumb nail down deep into the quick. “New rules. Everything changes, starting right now.” And it did. Katie had been twelve. Sam thirteen.
Sam opened the front door, keys jangling in his hand.
“I made a face at you today, Sam,” Katie said, peeking around the entryway from the kitchen.
“Really,” Sam replied. “I didn’t see you.” He shrugged off his black leather jacket and threw it on the recliner.
“For Chrissakes, Sam. Could you at least throw it on your bed?” Their mother said as she stood up. “Both of you make me nuts!” She crumpled up her own coat in her arms then snatched up Sam’s and hung them both in the hall closet before stomping up to her bedroom and slamming the door.
“Fuck!” Sam sat on the couch and propped his long legs on the coffee table. He picked up the remote control and changed the television channel. “What the hell is her problem?”
Sam had let his chestnut hair grow long and shaggy. Katie hadn’t really noticed until then how messy and dry it had become either. He hadn’t shaved in days, maybe weeks, and a thin beard had erupted over his face, patchy and young because he had never tried to grow one before. Underneath all that new hair however, he looked the same with his opaque skin, dimples, and brilliant white smile. His brown eyes, wide and rimmed with black lashes and brows, glittered like lapping water underneath a full, bright moon as they picked up the movements from the television he stared at.
Girls loved Sam. They made friends with Katie to be near him. They whispered to her about him in classes or in the library because they thought he was beautiful and wanted to be with him. Before she was pregnant, Katie invited them home after school and Sam flirted with them. Even though he never said outright that he wanted her to do such a thing, Katie knew he liked it when girls came over because of him, and so she made sure to have them there after school. Just to make him happy.
Before all this with Noe, before things got so heavy and serious, it was Katie and Sam almost always, with a girl between them on the couch, or in Sam’s car kissing him on the neck while Katie and Noe looked away and tried not to pay attention. These girls were never girlfriends. Sam never had a girlfriend. They were girls who came back again and again, like they were hoping. When Sam and Katie talked about these girls after they had been left alone, Sam would usually curl up in her bed next to her, hold one of her pillows against his chest, and talk as Katie absentmindedly curled a piece of his hair around her finger and listened.
He told her that he loved them, loved each and every last one of them, no matter what. His eyes grew moist as he breathlessly spoke their names: Amanda. Michelle. Amy. Teresa. Christine. She didn’t know who he loved now.
“Are you going out to the pits tonight?” Katie sat next to him on the couch and tucked her legs under her the best she could, her best way to hide her belly sitting down.
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“I hope you’ll come. I haven’t been around you in a while.” When he didn’t say anything, she looked at the clock above the television. It was already almost six-thirty. Sam stood again.
“Maybe I’ll see you out there. See how the night shapes up.”
“Okay.”
“I might pick up a graveyard shift anyway. Billy’s MIA. So who knows?”
Sam had worked as a cook in the casino coffee shop for the past couple of months. Before that was the pizza parlor. Before that the video store. Noe had told him to get on at the base, but Sam said he wouldn’t do it.
“That place is poison.” He couldn’t even be persuaded to listen, even when talks of a better wage and health insurance came up. There was nothing to be said after that. Noe didn’t know what to think, and when he prodded Katie for an explanation, Katie shrugged and told him she didn’t know why Sam thought the way he did.
Sam nodded at her then and shut the door, leaving Katie alone in the quiet house, the only true sound coming from her mother’s stereo playing through the thin walls of the house. Carly Simon. She would not be back out for a good long while. Her mother needed that separation sometimes, and Katie was thankful for it. So she walked into the bathroom and turned the shower on so hot she was soon surrounded with steam and heat. She pulled off her baggy sweatshirt and knit pants and stepped in the tub, pulling the curtain shut. The hot water mixing with the cool air around her body reddened her skin and warmed it, releasing the tension and pressure she felt in her body. Soon she lowered herself into the tub, stretching out as best she could. She lay there a long time, just letting her head quiet down, letting her body get warm and heavy with the water streaming down from above. She let herself empty out and stayed where she was until the water turned lukewarm.
When she finally struggled up out of the tub and opened the faded flower shower curtain, the bathroom greeted her, foggy and moist. Even the paint on the walls dripped with condensation. She sat down on the toilet, lightheaded and weak, holding her towel to her face, leaning back. When she was able, she stood and wiped down the mirror of the medicine cabinet and had to sit again. Her body seemed so bendable, like all her muscles and ligaments had softened and loosened from her bones. It was even harder to get up again this time. She had to force it.
She let herself feel each stroke of the worn, soft towel as she moved it up and down against her skin, finally letting it drop to her feet once she was dry. She felt nearly drunk, and almost completely exhausted. She brushed her wet, red hair, letting it stick flat to her back when she was finished. Stick clear down to her waist where it ended in natural curls hanging loose over the small of her back. She set her brush on the sink and closed her eyes, bending forward clasping the sink with both hands so that the weight of the baby pulled her lower back toward the floor, stretching it loose. She couldn’t believe how tired she was. She thought about just staying home, curling up in bed, and sleeping until she couldn’t anymore. That was when the door opened and Sam stepped in.
She hadn’t locked the door. Never thought once of doing so because the house had been so quiet. She just didn’t think.
What she would have given to have that moment back, just to have hesitated a second as the water was warming, before she began undressing, just to have turned around and pressed the lock into place. How easy would that have been? Instead this happened: Sam walked in then immediately walked out, slamming the door so hard it rattled, leaving a sort of stunned silence. Katie hadn’t even thought to move from her pitched-forward position. She looked at herself in the mirror, looked to the door and then back at herself again. It was as if it never happened. The bathroom was still and quiet, just as it had been before. The only noise in the house came from the music playing from her mother’s room.
Sam started his car and drove away again. She heard the gravel kick out from underneath his tires. She continued to watch her reflection in the mirror as it grew clear and more distinct as the steam dissipated and the bathroom cooled. She moved eventually but it took effort. Her head was heavy and continued to be as she made her way down the hall and locked herself in her room to dress. Sam had seen everything.
* * *
The pits sat fifteen miles west of town near the highway leading off to California. Deep, uneven, and crater-like, they had been carved into the earth who knows how long ago. For all Katie knew, they had always been, since the beginning of time, just there, twenty feet or more below the desert floor, no hint that they existed until you happened upon them. Someone could easily drive right past them and never know they lay just beyond their vehicle, even in bright daylight. The pits would remain hidden from view, tucked behind sagebrush and small rolling hills of sand. It was a perfect place for parties.
The one radio station they could get from Reno that wasn’t country music played heavy metal in between gaps of crackling static. Noe snapped open a can of beer and gulped it down, and beyond that the ride there remained quiet. And for that Katie was thankful. Her hair, still damp, lay flat in stubborn protest, even as she absentmindedly combed her fingers over her scalp, trying to give the roots some sort of lift. She did not mention Sam.
The distance between the highway they traveled and the mountains jutting up like dull, rounded teeth against the stone dark sky lay punctuated by amber lights illuminating mobile homes sitting acres apart. She watched each one pass like slow-moving dots suspended in space and wondered what she had become to Sam now, and what seeing her hunched forward, nearly nine months pregnant (if not more), with a full round belly, would do to the already brittle world of Sam and Katie.
Katie allowed herself to think something she had never let surface before, not in all this time she’d known she would have a baby: Noe would never be permanent, even if they got married and lived together until one of them died. Thick, tingling guilt made its way down the center of her body. Not permanent in the way Sam had always been permanent. It would never compare. They were bonded, melded close, their parts indistinguishable. And for the first time she felt the magnitude of the choice she made the second she opened her legs and let Noe inside of her, crafting a baby down the line that would indeed be as permanent in her life as Sam was. No such thing as just the two of them now.
Even the distance, the avoidance, and the people between them, it was as if underneath it all there was still parts close to fitting together in some way, just waiting for the mess of life to wane, to blend together once again, seamlessly, like they had never once been apart. This child knotted up inside her would inevitably be the thick ribbon always between them, so they would never quite touch again. That moment in the bathroom, that quick split-second of recognition of a bundled baby inside her body, was all Sam needed to slip out and away from her.
She closed her eyes and relived those few seconds for the thousandth time. She saw him. He saw her. His vision stopped suddenly on her stomach and stayed there. Angry. Hurt. Maybe betrayed. All these things mixed up together in his stunned, pale face. Before he slammed the door shut she knew it was over. They had been broken apart.
Tension drained out of her limbs and she surrendered to the inevitability of Sam as a familiar stranger, a brother who came over for Thanksgiving or something, a friend. Let it be what it would be. It would never be what it was.
* * *
“It would be nice if brothers and sisters could get married,” Sam said as he grunted up a large boulder they’d found sitting in the middle of the desert during one of their adventures.
“But they can’t. It’s illegal, Sam,” Katie said from down below, shielding her eyes from the afternoon sun as she watched him squat down at the edge of rock and run his hand over it. “Besides, that’s gross.”
“I know it’s gross, Katie. I’m just saying it would be nice. Then I could marry you and we could live together in a big, huge house.”
“Well, what about Sophie?”
“Well then, I would just marry her too.”
“You’re much too young for me, Sam,” Sophie said winking down at Katie. The sun illuminated her red hair like a fiery halo. “I would just adopt you instead.”
“Fine with me,” Sam replied. “As long as we all stay together, I don’t care.”
Sophie took Katie’s hand to boost her up onto the rock which provided a sort of staircase of toeholds for Katie to stick her feet in.
“Careful, kid,” Sophie said. “I need you back unbroken.”
Sophie fiddled with the camera case she had slung over her shoulder for most of the hike through the desert while Katie slipped her hand through Sam’s for leverage. They looked down at her, waiting for her to get ready. The desert behind her bloomed bright with the yellow, orange and green explosions of spring.
“Smile.” Sophie instructed.
They did, slinging their arms over one another’s shoulders.
“You two are my final photography project ever. After this month, no more school for me, ever. Poor Sam,” Sophie twisted a few knobs on the camera and studied it, biting her lip. “You’ll just be getting started.”
She snapped a few pictures then helped them off the rock.
“Remember, we’re pretty close to the testing range so don’t kick any metal things,” she said as they made their way back to her car way off in the distance. “You don’t want to blow us up.”
* * *
Noe wandered off as he normally did whenever they got to a party. Katie pulled his tailgate down and sat on it, letting the warmth of the fire burning inside the circle of trucks heat her bare face and hands. Armed with cups of beer and cigarettes, people, mostly high schoolers, stood around the fire or sat on tailgates. A Motley Crue album blared out from someone’s truck, drowning their voices into a dull sort of roar. Girls who didn’t know what else to do stood in pairs and talked only to each other, looking shyly at the small groups of people gathered near them. The Sophomores. The Freshmen. Dressed up a little too much, trying a little too hard, they were being broken in much like Katie had been broken in three years before. The guys watched these girls the most, especially the guys already out of high school. Not really their fault, Katie thought, because the girls watched them back.
Even though Katie didn’t talk much, especially now, and even though she didn’t hang out with many people these days except Noe, she loved the feeling of being pressed into groups of people. She loved the buzz the noise generated, the squeals of laughter, the shouting. Even as the crowd got drunker and two sophomore guys, Mike Cooley and Seth Davis starting fighting in a clumsy, stumbling way, and several girls started crying because of it until it was broken up, Katie let herself be immersed like settling into a deep warm blanket. It kept her head full enough not to think of much else.
April sat next to her a little while later and pressed a cup of beer in her hand. She was Raymond’s girlfriend, the mother of his son. Katie knew her a little bit. She was older than Katie but not much. She had had her son young, when she was still in high school and now he was in Kindergarten. When April told her this she shook her head like she couldn’t believe it.
“Kindergarten,” April repeated. “It seems unbelievable that kid’s already five years old.”
April lit a cigarette and smoked it. She looked bored. Her metal bracelets clinked together when she moved her hand to take a drag. Her lips were glossy and wet looking and she wore Raymond’s shiny brown San Francisco Giants jacket. Katie’s eyes stung from the smoke from the fire and wiped her eyes until someone walked by, pressed her palm to Katie’s knee and asked if she was crying.
“Nosy bitch,” April muttered out of earshot of the girl, one of Sam’s old girls named Christine, and offered Katie her cigarette. “Mind your own damn business.” Katie took the cigarette from April and smoked a little bit of it without inhaling. The cup of beer sat in between her knees and she picked it up every so often when someone asked why she wasn’t drinking. Then she would pretend to take a sip but kept her tongue on the lip of the cup. It was a technique she had gotten quite good at over the past few months.
She watched Noe move in and out of groups with his runaway hair and the old gray sweater he wore all the time. He talked sometimes when someone asked him a question, but mainly he listened. People didn’t press him for more because they knew what he was like and they knew that he was quiet. They were the same way with Katie because she was quiet too. Noe came back to her when April had staggered off to go pee somewhere. His black eyes glittered and he slipped his body between her legs and hugged her head close to his chest. She could feel his chin on the top of her head. When he moved away from her she smiled at him and dug her cold hands into her coat pockets.
And so the night went just like so many before.
When people asked her where Sam was she shrugged. Said she didn’t know. Then she stopped talking and they walked away. The hours melted away, the party waned a little bit, and soon a few trucks left, leaving gaps so that the orange light from the fire illuminated the pit walls, freshly dimpled with footsteps from people climbing them in need of some privacy or a bathroom.
Eventually, April sat back down next to her and lit another cigarette. She swayed, drunk and happy. Finally, April turned to Katie and looked at her with eyes soft with something like sympathy. One corner of her mouth turned up at the edge just the slightest bit, as if to say “Oh honey, you aren’t fooling anyone.” Katie had to turn away. April just sat there and swayed then reached to scratch Katie’s back and a comforting way.
Katie tried to find Noe so she could ask to go, but couldn’t. She imagined he was out in the desert, getting high with Raymond. So there wasn’t much else to do but let April just watch her and scratch her back. Give up. She didn’t know what April saw, or if she saw anything really. But it was very possible that April could tell underneath Katie’s coat and sweatshirt a baby was growing inside her. And maybe she sensed the feeling of horror bubbling up inside Katie as she wondered exactly how she had ended up sitting on a tailgate at a party, seventeen, pregnant, and pretending to drink beer and be just as she was just a few months ago.
Except now Katie didn’t care what April, or anyone thought. It was a timid act of confidence to fling her full cup of flat beer into the fire and struggle to her feet, her legs buzzing from sitting in one spot too long. Everything hurt and stretched inside and she just wanted to go away and not give one damn at all what people thought. She wanted some sense of what it was like to be normal again. Or at least as close to it as possible.
* * *
“See,” she would say to Sam reaching out this baby out to him. “This was why I was the way I was. This was why!” She promised herself she would say these words in the most heartfelt way she could with just enough love and kindness not to sound cheesy or dramatic. Sam hated that kind of stuff. She even practiced the words when she was alone. “This was why,” she whispered over and over in front of her mirror. “This was why.”
Then Sam would forgive her for keeping her silence. Keeping her distance. He would hold the baby in his arms and kiss it. They would name the baby after him. It didn’t matter if it were a boy or a girl.
* * *
Her mother woke her up early the next morning out of dream where she was flying over town with a baby clutching its arms around her neck, holding on for dear life as she howled with laughter and darted in and out of clouds.
“What the hell is going on?” Her mom screamed, slapping at her knee with a newspaper. Katie struggled awake and as soon as she did, she saw her mom standing over her, fire-eyed. Katie jerked awake and sat up straight in her bed, instinctively pulling her covers up and tucking them in her armpits.
Oh shit. This is it. It’s over.
“Well?” Her mother implored, hands on hips, hair rumpled and flattened on one side from her pillow.
“Well, what?”
“Where the fuck is Sam?”
“Sam?”
“Sam!”
“What do you mean?” Katie said dumbly, confused and groggy.
“Don’t play stupid, Katie.” Her mother flung the newspaper she had knotted in her fist down on the bed next to Katie’s hip. “You know where he went.”
Her mother led her into Sam’s room so Katie could see that he had stripped the bed and pulled all his clothes out of the closet and dresser, leaving them bare-naked. Katie stood in the middle of the room, looking around at it like it was the first time she had seen it.
“Where did he go?” Her mother finally asked. “You need to tell me where he went. Katie, I mean it. You need to tell me right now.”
She stood with her head crooked to the side and her mouth twisted into a sort of crazy half-smile. Her bathrobe gaped open and Katie could see the curves of her sagging breasts and her pale stomach underneath her faded flannel nightgown.
“I don’t know where he is.”
“Katie, don’t give me that shit. How could you not know where he is?”
“I don’t know,” Katie shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Katie sat down hard on his bed and didn’t say anything as her mother opened his desk drawers and slammed them shut only to open them again.
“He must have left some sort of note. Something. What is he thinking?” Her mother crouched down and looked under the bed. Then she looked up at Katie. Her eyes were dark, her pupils big. “Don’t you even care?”
Katie tried to consider the question, but couldn’t even begin to answer it. Did she care?
“I don’t know,” she answered numbly. “I just don’t know.
Katie didn’t know what else to say. She knew last night in the deepest sense that all this was over. Everything that had once been would never be again. Everything was over.
“I just don’t know.”
Her mother sat crouched on the floor, silent so long Katie almost forgot she was there at all. All she could picture was Sam stumbling in sometime during the night as she slept, as her mother slept, and taking the necessary precautions to just disappear.
Her mother stood, leaned over Katie and clutched her chin in her strong bony fingers and held her face up to meet hers. Katie didn’t even have the desire nor strength to fight it. Let it be what it would be.
Her mother searched her for an answer, but Katie returned nothing but a blank stare, so blank she could feel it deep down. Her snatched her hand away and slapped the top of Sam’s dresser with it and the loud noise startled Katie and made her jump.
“What is going on!” her mother yelled as she walked out of the room and down the hall. “What is going on with you two!”
Katie sat with her arms to her sides clutching the mattress with tight fists. Nothing of Sam remained in this room. How easily he had vanished. How easily he had taken everything that had been anything to him and whisked it away without even a single hint of noise or other indication of his plans. He just disappeared.
Katie dropped her head down low to her chest. She could clearly see the outline of her abdomen underneath her baggy sweatshirt. She shuffled up the hall and curled back up into bed and stared at her wall. She didn’t know what else to do besides just stare out at nothing and try to think about anything but where Sam could be right at that instant. Raymond’s, Las Vegas, New Mexico. Who knew? All she could tell was that in the very deepest part of her she knew he was gone.
* * *
One of the paramedics from high school had been in Sam’s grade and always was a quiet, shy boy with a passion for stockcar racing. Now he was heavier than when Katie had last seen him, stuffed into a white button-up shirt and faded navy slacks. The same deep acne scars pitted his cheeks and the thin lips, always just a little bit open, always showing just the very tips of his top teeth, rested low on his face, leaving little room for his weak chin. Even when he was a little boy, his mouth had been like that. He never breathed through his nose, only through his mouth. When he talked he forever sounded congested.
He spoke to her softly now, coaxing her out of her bed where she had curled up into the corner space between the wall and her headboard.
“Come on, Katie. We need to get you checked out to make sure you’re okay.”
How could I possibly be okay? So much blood had soaked into her sheets between them, leaving a grotesque, slimy mess. She knew that if she uncovered herself everyone would see the mess she had made of herself; blood all over her legs, between her legs. She was naked and shivering and just wanted people to leave.
“Please,” she whispered. “Just leave me here.”
“Katie,” her mother pleaded from the doorway where she stood with the other paramedic, an older man with a pot belly stretching his shirt open enough that she could see the white undershirt beneath it. He held her baby wrapped tightly in a white blanket. It cried and cried. “Please.”
“Healthy,” the paramedic said, looking down at her baby, touching its face with a short, fat finger. His shiny gray hair gleamed under her bedroom light. Her mother’s bare arms and the front of her nightgown were covered in blotches of deep red where she had held the baby against her, pressing it close while they had waited for the ambulance to come. Even now her mother’s breath came fast and uneven. She asked if she could ride along in the ambulance. The paramedic said she could.
“Hear that, Katie?” The young paramedic, Jeff, sat on the bed and rested a hand on her knee. “A healthy baby boy. Everything’s just fine. You want to be healthy for him too, don’t you?”
“A baby boy?” Katie repeated, more as a question, making sure she had heard right.
“Yes. You have a son.”
“A son.”
“Yes. Now let’s get you out of here and get you both to the hospital, okay? You had a lot of bleeding. We need to make sure you’re okay.”
Katie finally let him help her toward the edge of the bed. She closed her eyes and tried to ignore all the blood she was sliding her body over. Her legs felt so numb and useless, so she counted on him to almost pull her across.
He guided her on the stretcher crowding the middle of the room, so out of place among her most personal and private things, and covered her with a gray wool blanket that had sat folded at her feet. Somehow she had torn off her clothes in the middle of everything, and felt mortified that people she had seen around her entire life had to see her like this, naked and bloody, her body torn and sagged like it had been blown apart from the inside. Everything about her exposed to them. The entire story.
Jeff tucked the grey blanket up around her neck, leaving every bit of her body up to her neck covered as he snapped various buckles in place to keep her secure.
“There’s going to be a lot of people outside with all the scanners around town,” Jeff said, keeping his same, soft tone with her. “People want to know what’s going on. Just close your eyes. We’ll be fast.”
Katie nodded. Her mother tucked a stray strand of red hair behind Katie’s ear and kissed her forehead, her eyes bright with tears.
“It’s okay, honey. They’ll take care of you.” Her voice trembled as if she couldn’t quite catch her breath. Katie imagined it would be pretty difficult to be able to, after practically breaking her bedroom door down only to see Katie sprawled out on her bed with a baby half hanging out of her.
“Where’s Sam, Mom? Has he come back yet?”
Her mother shook her head. “No, honey. I don’t where he went.”
As promised, many of their neighbors stood huddled outside watching. The sidewalk made a rough ride for her, jarring her body, making it ache. Instead of closing her eyes, Katie watched as they rolled past the different rocks embedded in the concrete her father had once laid, now loose in the cracked, old sidewalk. The ambulance lights flashed bright, making her feel like throwing up or bursting off the stretcher and running away. She couldn’t decide which.
When they put her in the ambulance and they settled her in for the short ride to the hospital, her mother squatted near her head then kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her hair. Her makeup streaked across her face from crying. The neighbors’ faces watched them through the open ambulance doors. They spread out as if there were a thousand of them, all pressed in close behind their fences.
“I knew it,” Nicole McCullers, Mr. McCullers’ wife, said to one of the women who lived across the street right before the Jeff shut the doors. Her arms were crossed against her chest. Her lips were stained a deep red, leaving her face a thick opaque white against them. “I knew she was pregnant. She wasn’t fooling anyone.”
* * *
Katie dreamt of the baby’s hair, wild and black like Noe’s, barely contained by the white cotton cap she saw the nurse pull over his head as she drifted in and out of consciousness throughout the night, groggy from pain medicine and whatever else they gave her. Dr. Lowell, on call in the ER, had sewn her up when she arrived, and said that she had torn herself pretty good. A nurse commented later that he had done a tremendous job, considering. He told her how very lucky she was to have a healthy baby keeping it hidden the way she had.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he said, resting his hand on her shoulder. “We would have found a way to work it out.”
Katie just shook her head and wandered off again, keeping her eyes focused on Dr. Lowell’s wild brown beard and ruddy cheeks until she closed them once again.
Noe was at her bedside that afternoon, dressed in his work clothes, holding the baby in the crook of his arm as naturally as if he had held a thousand babies before this one. He kissed the baby on his forehead very softly, looking down at him like he couldn’t believe he existed.
“Look at him,” Noe said to no one in particular. “Just look at him.”
“He’s beautiful.” Her mother replied, leaning over Noe and sliding the tip of her finger along the baby’s cheek.
Babies weren’t born in town anymore unless they absolutely needed to be. Normally people had to drive to Reno to give birth or to another town along the way able to accommodate. But still, the hospital had some things; an incubator, stocking caps, and gowns. In case of an emergency.
Katie was put in a room far away from the main section of the hospital where she was less likely to be bothered. A nurse came in late that morning with a few bags of baby clothes a few people had dropped off for her. A while later, she came back in with diapers and bottles and even a few cans of formula, bought from the Safeway store.
“Nicole McCullers dropped this by.” The nurse set them under the lip of her bed.
“She really didn’t need to do that,” Katie’s mother said. “Really hon, if she brings anything else by, please tell her it’s not needed.”
The nurse just nodded, checked Katie’s IV level and left the room.
Noe and Katie had a chance to be alone once.
“People congratulated me at work today on my new son. That was the first I had heard.” He sat back with his jaw tight and his arms crossed against his chest. “I felt like a damn fool.”
“I’m sorry,” Katie said. “It just happened so fast. And the night, it just slipped away.”
“It’s fine. I just wish it would have been different.”
“Me too.”
“What’s up with Sam? Where is he?”
Katie shrugged and looked out the window like she had most of the day, waiting for his yellow station wagon to pull into a space outside. “He’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Just gone. Gone yesterday morning. I don’t know where.”
Noe’s father arrived later that day, quiet as a ghost and a cowboy hat held politely in one deeply creased brown hand. One of the nurses pulled in an extra chair from the hallway and closed the door again to give them privacy. Noe and his father sat together, sat similarly. Noe’s father held his hat on his lap. He also had hair that stood wild on his head only his was grey, almost white. The opening of his thin plaid shirt held pearlescent snaps instead of buttons. Deep lines around the mouth and eyes remained as if carved in his face no matter the expression he made, though he didn’t make many. If he had to say something he spoke very softly. Katie noticed the similarities between Noe and his father and saw the potential for them in her own baby. How something so simple could be passed down so profoundly. She wondered what she had mixed into this child. When she looked at him she saw nothing of her. He was all Noe. He was all Noe’s father. She couldn’t decide if this disappointed, or relieved her.
Her mother sat in the corner. She had left sometime when Katie slept and changed her clothes. Her face was swollen and puffy under the eyes and she sat back in a way that was both hesitant and observant, like Noe’s father was just as fascinating to her as he was to Katie.
Katie remembered being in the emergency room and clutching at her mother’s arms in a sudden state of panic.
“Please don’t put him in jail. Please. Please.” She had said this over and over to her mother, looking up at her face, pleading. Her mother tried to hush her as Dr. Lowell examined her then began to sew her up.
“Mom, please. It’s not his fault. This isn’t his fault. He’s a boy, just barely a man.” Katie sobbed.
Finally her mother bent down to her and put her hand on her forehead. Katie had closed her eyes because her mother had felt like a mother just then, sweet and calming.
“Do you think I would have put him in jail? Is that why you did this?”
Katie didn’t answer.
“Oh, Katie,” her mother had said a little breathlessly. “He won’t go to jail. I would have never done that.”
Katie still wasn’t sure that was true. She only knew that Noe had to show up to work the next morning to find out that she had given birth to his son the night before. Her mother hadn’t called him.
But that afternoon, despite everything, the four of them watched the new baby squirm and cry, each movement new and raw. They decided to name him Henry, after Noe’s father. Henry Samuel. After Sam. At lease she had done that. Then her mother hugged Noe once. A tense hug, stiff-armed but willing. Noe turned around and raised his eyebrows at Katie, then shrugged his shoulders, letting everything go.
When Noe and his father had left, and the window turned dark enough so that the light from inside her room reflected against it, and Katie’s mother had long gone home to sleep, Katie sat up in her bed and thought about Sam. It was then that she finally cried, because after all this Sam was the one she had lost. He was the one that was gone. He was the one who was missing.