Chapter Five

The Secret Sister
Chapter Five
Katie Shaw
July 1990

A letter came from Sam, the first one since he left, on the 6th of July. Katie found it on the kitchen table, open and waiting for her to read:

July 1, 1990
Mom,
I know you are probably ready to kill me, if you haven’t thought me already dead. I apologize for leaving the way I did. I had to because it got to be too much. I hope you understand. I felt weird calling collect after all this time. Seems impolite to ask you to pay for something like that.
I’m good, better than good. I’m changed in lots of ways. I know it’s been only a few months, eight to be exact, but I don’t feel like I am the same person that left town. I’ve been a couple places. Started out in Reno, went down highway 99 through the Central Valley (and may very well end up there again) and met a guy, Eckhart, who brought me down here to Yucca Valley to deliver propane. I live with him and his sister, Rory. I have a cat too, Stella, who has been with me the whole trip. I am not lonely because of her.
Yucca Valley is super brown, and right now, super hot. It isn’t like the desert up there and I’d never seen Joshua trees before, but here they are everywhere and I really like the look of them. There is a Marine base down here and of all people I saw Brian Olin. He was here on some sort of training. We crossed paths and he told me everyone there was saying I was dead. So I really thought I’d write a letter so as not to worry anyone. It was weird seeing him and made me miss home. I’ll come back soon for a visit, I promise. I don’t have a phone and don’t make a lot of money so I don’t know when I’d make it up there. I don’t know about calling collect, like I said. I just feel like there is enough to worry about there without that extra expense. I thought a letter might work for now. You can write me at this address anytime.
Love you, mom,
Sam
She’d heard Sam had been seen in California, but half-wondered if it was the kind of sighting where someone just thought they had seen him, the way people seemed see Elvis Presley everywhere. But there was the letter, scrawled through in Sam’s sloppy hand, proof he existed still in this world somewhere. And it soothed the worry long enough to allow anger and a certain devastation to punctuate through: he mentioned not one word to her or about her. She folded the letter, slid it into its envelope, and made note of the postmark. Soon she’d tend to Sebastian, who would wake up just in time to distract her. He had impeccable timing in doing just that and today she was grateful for it.
* * *
Sam had a cat named Stella, a friend named Eckhart who had a sister named Rory. Neither of these people (nor the cat) had faces Katie could picture, forms she could recollect. She knew what a Joshua Tree looked like, but couldn’t imagine a browner place than the one in which she lived. She thought one day this week she might walk to the library and look up where the town exactly laid on a map, just because she was curious. For months Sam had been gone and suddenly here he was again on the page of a hastily written letter. And he’d decided to forget her, like she never mattered at all. His letter was to their mother, he’d let people and even a cat into his life and according to him, he was better than good because of it. He’d changed, he said, because he left. Left her.
Her thoughts were still easily consumed by the letter a day later as she sat in Noe’s truck and the three of them made their way to Reno and back for a quick doctor’s appointment and some shopping. They’d left early enough that morning so the heat wasn’t too awful, but got sidetracked in Sears and started back for town later than they meant. On the way the heat hurt it was so intense.
They drove around the last bend of highway before the lake would appear with the town sitting snug behind it, signifying the last twenty minutes of the two hour drive. When they did arrive at the lake, the pale brown sand and blue sky reflected the July sun so bright that Katie had to squint. She felt her eyes would burn up in her head if she didn’t. The wind blowing in through the open truck windows made the heat worse instead of better because it sucked the sweat off her face, neck and hairline before any of it had a chance to cool her. She decided just then she’d give about give anything for the truck to have an air conditioner.
They’d tucked Sebastian’s car seat between them. His chest moved up and down with the even, full breaths he took as he slept. Every few minutes she ran a wet cloth over his bare arms, legs and face and it left his black hair shiny and dripping. She’d been so nervous to take him in the heat, but she had no one to watch him. They planned to get back to town as fast as they could, skipping lunch in Reno and figuring they could eat late at the Silver Streak, the casino in town, where they would have the swamp coolers going. She couldn’t wait to get Sebastian inside and under them. She pulled back the tabs of his diaper to let it lay open because she didn’t know what else to do to keep him cool.
At least he wasn’t crying. The drive in the hot truck had made him sleepy and still. When he slept she didn’t have to think much about anything except to make sure he stayed breathing and it was still a relief to her when he slipped into slumber. He didn’t appear uncomfortable at all. He may even have enjoyed the mix of cool and heat interchangeably consuming his body, she couldn’t say for sure. He was an adaptable and mellow baby, and didn’t seem to mind anything as long as he was fed.

Noe drove with his left arm resting on the curve of the window frame and the tips of two fingers guiding the steering wheel. His right arm hung loosely at his side and his hand curled into a sort of hook that rested limply on the seat next to him. His loose white tank top slapped against his chest in rough, tiny waves. Slouching a little, he curved his back against the stiff seat and crooked his head side to side as if his neck were tense. His hair stood and whipped around in the wind. From her angle she could see his half-closed eyes behind his sunglasses. He would sometimes close them just for a quick moment then open them wide as if he were trying to stay awake. She watched him do that for a long time, and if he noticed he didn’t say so.
The lake’s surface near the shore bubbled brown with rotting plants and algae that had floated up from the bottom and been pushed by the waves toward land. A little further down the highway, as soon as it began to run exactly parallel with the shoreline, they caught the deep, ripe scent of the lake it had every summer it turned over. It wasn’t a good smell but was a familiar one. It meant summer. For about a month every year, usually spanning parts of July and August, it seeped in through Katie’s windows at night and clung to her clothes when she went outside in the early mornings and hot afternoons. It remained until the lake lapped up all the brown, dead plant life onto the rocky shore and it dried into something white and stiff like paper mache. The smell disappeared then and it was forgotten by all until the next summer when the cycle repeated all over again.
She’d begged her mother once to take her swimming one Sunday when she was small, maybe seven or eight, even though her mother had groaned repeatedly the entire morning over and over in a half-sleep for Katie to leave her alone. Being bold that day, not caring that the lake was turning over and would be impossible to swim in due to the smell and the brown muck that floated on its surface, she pressed on, insistent and bossy. Things she usually never was back then except for on that particular day. When Katie walked in her mother’s room already dressed in her blue bathing suit that Sunday and asked once again to go yet again, she noticed her mother had not moved from the bed or even out of the sprawled out position she had been in the entire morning.
“Please, mom?”
Her mother groaned, turned over and finally faced her. She looked clownish with her makeup streaked red, white and blue all over her face.
“Go away, Katie. I’m sleeping.”
“We never do anything, mom. We just sit inside and wait for you to wake up. Please, mom,” Katie pleaded again as she sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed near her mother’s feet. “Please, just once.”

Her mother finally sat up and rubbed her face. She squinted at the clock. “Is it even afternoon yet?”
“It’s almost two o’clock!”
Her mother paused and looked at Katie then nodded at Sam who had turned up and stood silently in the doorway of the bedroom. “Do you want to go too, then?”
Sam nodded. “I don’t want to swim though. I’ll just watch.”
Her mother swung her feet over the side of the bed and rested them on the floor. She closed her eyes a minute. She wore only a black bra and matching panties whose waistband cut deep into her soft middle. She swayed side to side before catching herself by planting her hands firmly on the mattress.
“You had better swim, Katie,” she finally said, standing up and pulling on a pair of jeans. “I’m not going to drive all the way out there just to have you cry about the smell and the scum when I told you all along you wouldn’t want to swim in it. I’ve got things to do.”
“I won’t cry about it. I want to swim. I’ll swim.”
After driving down the highway and turning off onto the long asphalt road leading to a parking lot situated just above shore near the boat launch and metal dock, Katie and Sam’s mother parked her car and sighed before turning off the engine. When Katie and Sam got out of the car and walked down to the shore, Katie stood there a long time, looking down at the water lapping at her feet. It did smell, and the water was thick with a layer of brown froth.
“It looks like diarrhea,” Sam said as he walked up beside her. “That’s really nasty.”
He hadn’t worn his swimsuit, just a pair of cutoff shorts and a white tee shirt with faded red sleeves. His skin, so deep brown it almost looked dirty, gleamed with sweat. He wiped at his forehead and shrugged as if to say, “Good luck with that.”
She turned toward her mother who leaned against the car parked in one of the farthest stalls away from shore, arms crossed against her chest. The mountains shaded the beach and when Katie looked up she could see the highway above them busy with cars and diesel trucks. She tried to keep watching them so she could stall, trying to take some sort of interest in what she watched. She knew she was going to get in trouble if she didn’t swim. Her mother would never take her out here again and she would use this experience as justification. She had to swim.
“Go!” her mother yelled. “Swim!” She made a pushing motion with her arms before she crossed them again.
“Okay, I will, don’t be pushy!” Katie yelled back at her. She rubbed her hands against the front of her bathing suit. “It just looks really bad,” she said softly.
Her mother stepped to the edge of the asphalt parking lot. “Right now, Katie. You get in there and swim. I swear to God, girl, I’ll go down there myself and throw you in. I knew you would do this! You always do stupid shit like this!”
Katie pushed at the wet sand with her toes. The brown film that covered it felt slimy against the soles of her feet. She bit her lip so she wouldn’t be tempted to sob and curl up in her mother’s lap and find a way to get out of it. To have her mother be the one to let her out of it. She turned to her mother again, and again her mother pushed her away. Her mother just didn’t allow for things like that.
Finally she stepped in the cold water and walked in until the water touched her knees. She struggled to keep her balance on the sharp rocks’ slick surfaces and forced herself to wade in deeper. Her hands and legs shook with the effort to keep standing and she held her chin up high so as to not look down. She fought the almost consistent urge to turn and run back up the shore and face the temper and castigation of her mother until realized rather suddenly Sam was standing next to her. He had shed his shirt and shoes and waded in after her in the same cut off denim shorts he wore nearly everyday.
“Look,” he said. “The water is gross for just a little while, see? Look out that way. If we can get past this part, the rest will be clear. You just won’t be able to touch, probably.”

Sam went first, using his hands to slowly push the brown film away from both of them as he waded deeper into the water. Katie followed. She could see her legs in the clear green water Sam left as a sort of path. Then he dipped down and swam toward three buoys lined up in the distance. Katie followed and the surface turned from dark brown to dark green and then cleared. Soon after, they reached the buoys and clung to them.
“It really wasn’t all that bad,” Sam said after they rested a minute and caught their breath.
Katie nodded. “You just have to get past the nasty part.”
Their mother waited in the car for them while they swam until early evening, keeping close to the buoys. No boats or other people bothered them and everything felt very private and soothing and calm, especially the sound of the rushing highway on the cliffs above them. It seemed then to Katie that the whole world belonged only to them. When they finally got out of the water, their mother was fast asleep in the back seat of the car, curled up and still wearing her sunglasses. Katie opened the door and tapped the bottom of her mom’s bare foot and until stirred.
“Done?” she said. Katie nodded. “You smell,” her mother squished up her nose and sat up to get in the front seat. “Take off your suits and wrap yourselves up in a dry towel.”
Katie peeled off her wet swim suit to expose the skin underneath covered with brown residue. She laughed with a sort of mock-grimace as she wrapped a thick towel around her naked body. Sam shrugged out of his shorts and underwear, grabbed a towel from his mother’s outstretched arm and did the same.
* * *
Since he has forgotten her, she will forget him. She will play fair. She wipes the letter and its contents clear from her mind. She lets it loose, lets it slip out the truck window and up, out, away.
* * *
They drove the piece of highway that cut into the tall, eroded mountain rock high above the exact shore she and Sam had been that day out in the brown water of the lake. What must have been thousands and millions of years before, Lake Lahotan created all those gulfs and grooves patterned into the rock as it shifted, evaporated, and shrunk in size. Katie liked to think about how her surroundings, the very place in which she stood at that very minute (or rode if she wanted to get technical) would have looked all those years ago under deep, green, dark water. Muted and dulled and blurry. It took some doing but imagining the valley without the highway, the town, and the base wasn’t all that hard if she tried, especially if she replaced those present day imagines with strange prehistoric creatures instead. She saw one once during a school field trip. A long fish fossilized within a rock, his teeth bared and bones exposed, his resting place in the side of a mountain just 50 or so miles away from town. She imagined this skeleton flushed out with shiny scaly skin, fins, its eyes darting quickly through the water, diving into the black depths, and hiding in the tall, stringy plants growing up from the sandy bottom.

She reached her head out the window, her red bangs whipping around and stinging her forehead. The cliff walls with their surfaces dimpled with the caves and crevices the lake left behind seemed to be leaning over her like a large, fat man sitting with his upper body hunched forward and his head down as if examining something near his feet. Noe slowed the truck once it hit the shade the rock provided and the air cooled considerably. Katie ducked back in out of the wind.
Taking advantage of the reduced speed, she tried to read the graffiti scrawled on the various boulders and sides of brown rock but couldn’t make much of anything. It had been a tradition for the locals to take spray paint out to the cliffs in the middle of the night to make their mark and the results spread out for nearly a mile stretch. Some of the most recent, as evidenced by the fresh neon pink spray paint, stood out to her the best. Seniors Rule! 1990 4-ever. Billy and Karen 1990. Karen Mitchell was the girl. Billy Williams the boy. Karen had been one of Sam’s girls once. Now she was with Billy, a tall gangly guy who Katie had a locker next to for all of high school because their names were close alphabetically.
Further down the mountainside came Tony + Rachel ‘68. Class of ‘72. Roger Ingalls Class of ’76. A dulled out mural of the past. Eventually it would all be painted over (much like Karen and Billy had painted over other names that had long since faded away into nothing recognizable), by future couples wanting to immortalize their unions, or classes advertising their years of graduation, or people wanting to show the world that they existed somewhere on this earth, too. Eventually, Tony and Rachel of ’68, Roger Ingalls of ’64, and Billy and Karen would disappear forever—replaced… just as Katie replaced the long ago fish whose bones now rested in the rock out in the middle of the desert somewhere.
If Katie really thought about it, the lake was just as temporary as the graffiti and Ichthyosaur creature she saw all that time ago. All that remained now was this slice of blue about twenty miles long and even that would probably be gone someday from all the ranching and farming taking the river water that fed into it from the north side. She remembered her elderly Kindergarten teacher telling her class once how when she was a girl the lake nearly reached the highway in places. Now it sat far below and away. Katie hated the idea of something so massive and solid and immovable being so fragile and impermanent. It left her certain that at any second something could fall out of the sky or come up through the ground and annihilate any trace of her. When all around her big things had been dying and disappearing for years, and she was just this small little person in the middle of all of it, the thought that was she was inevitably temporary left her feeling very exposed and breathless.
Sebastian jerked his arms and legs and made a sucking noise with his mouth. Katie dipped the cloth into the small bucket of water on the floorboard that she clasped her bare feet around to keep from spilling over. She gently rubbed him down then held her own hair up to press the cloth against her neck. Only another ten minutes to town.
Noe nudged her shoulder with one of his squat, fat fingers. “I said , so every month about this time then?” Katie hadn’t heard him the first time over the rushing air and truck engine.
Katie nodded.
“I’ll have to tell Frank. It’ll use a lot of my vacation up but I guess that’s okay.”
“I just don’t know how to drive in Reno. It would just be so much.” Katie shrugged, biting her lip apologetically. She knew how much Noe hated taking off work.
Noe shrugged. “It’s what we have to do, we’ll just do it.”

He slowed as they entered the small grouping of houses and restaurants and gift shops perched on the hills above the lake that made a sort of town there. The silence pressed her ears deaf like two fingers. Noe looked up and down the roads as he passed them finally flicking the turn signal to make a left.
“Where are you going?”
“That house has a sign on it. I think it’s for rent.”
“Noe,” Katie began weakly but didn’t finish.
He stopped at a small white house with a bright blue trim around its roof, windows and front door. It looked like there hadn’t been anyone living in it for months. Sagebrush speckled the front yard and long dry brown foxtails grew out from under them tall and thick.
“There isn’t any kind of lawn,” Katie said.
“Well, of course there isn’t. We’re right down by the lake. Look at the view though.” Noe reached over and opened the glove compartment and came out with a pen. He wrote down the phone number advertised on the sign posted in the front yard on the palm of his hand. Katie looked down the road to where the lake sat calm and deep sapphire blue.
“It’s so far out of town, Noe.” Katie said as he opened the door of the truck and stepped out.
“It’s barely ten minutes,” Noe replied as he stepped up to one of the windows and looked inside, cupping his hands around his face.

“Yeah, for someone who has a car!” Katie sat back hard against the seat, shaking the truck with the force of her movement. She crossed her arms against her chest and stared straight ahead at where the lake swallowed the horizon.
“The kitchen is huge in here,” Noe continued as he walked along the side of the house to another window. “I think it’s at least a three bedroom.” Katie didn’t reply. Noe disappeared around the corner of the house.
Katie didn’t know much about her husband. What she did know came from the snippets of their daily life, the random collecting of memories and moments that she sort of pieced together in an attempt to make the whole of him present and real. She knew he got excited easily about a lot of different, random things, like this house for rent sitting out at the lake. He worked hard and would probably have a mechanic’s job and a five dollar raise to show for it soon. Every day when he got home he threw his son up in the air and caught him until the baby screamed with delight and grabbed Noe’s cheeks and hair. He liked sex a lot because they had it daily no matter what and in all sorts of ways. Ways she wasn’t even sure she knew existed until he guided her into place and showed her. She knew that he had gotten her pregnant again.
That day they had been to see the doctor their insurance plan made them go to. He had told her in a very calm, fatherly voice that she was seven weeks along and let them hear the baby’s heartbeat. The thud-thud-thud sound the Doppler machine made reverberated the walls of the small exam room. When the doctor reached over to talk to him, Sebastian grabbed his cheeks just like he grabbed Noe’s cheeks and shook his legs with excitement. He was very kind, the doctor, and very gentle with her when he performed her pelvic examination because she said she had never really been through this kind of thing except after she had Sebastian.
The doctor sat on a short stool and wheeled himself over to the places he needed to be with his long legs guiding him. His pant legs hung a slight bit too short and showed his socks every time he moved. He gave her a prescription for vitamins and they made an appointment with the receptionist out front after that. Then they were on their way again, back home.

For most of the drive back to town, Katie felt good and honest because she was doing for this baby what she hadn’t done for Sebastian. She hated thinking backward to all that time she hadn’t seen a doctor, and just let him develop without anyone there to see if he was growing the right way. While she waited for Noe to finish looking at a house she knew she would refuse to live in, she lifted Sebastian’s small hand and held it in her fingers, rubbing the palm lightly. Still he slept.
For the days and months after his birth whenever someone, either a doctor or a person passing in the street called him healthy, her throat knotted and most times she heaved a great sigh. She didn’t deserve for him to be such a wonderful, intact, and beautiful baby. It was hard for her to believe sometimes that he was developing the way he should be and thriving just like any other baby. She kept waiting for someone to say something was wrong with him and it was her fault because she had given birth to him on her bed and not seen a doctor once. But no one had done it yet.
A little bit later, Noe stepped back in the truck and they started off again, both quiet. Noe kept lifting his hand to look at the number written on it and Katie tried to ignore him thinking instead about how badly she wanted a strawberry milkshake and some French fries to dip into it. Cold and hot, salty and sweet, all mixed up in her mouth. The valley opened up, the lake slipped past them and ended, and the highway led straight for the square mile of town. But before it quite reached, the main entrance of the base greeted them on the right side of the highway right past a set of railroad tracks. Katie turned to check the security booth and barely caught sight of the guard leaning over into a window of a car that had stopped there. Beyond him lay trees and buildings and a concrete street and she only saw it a moment before they were past it all.
* * *
At the intersection of two highways that crossed in the middle of town like a plus sign, the Silver Mint Casino sat like it mattered, proud and illuminated against the backdrop of old bars, run down shops, and empty buildings. What once seemed to Katie like the only place in town exciting and significant because it lit up bright and was the biggest building in town now seemed tired with its faded paint and a solitary string of chasing lights burnt out in places along its run of the building.
The letters on the marquee above the entrance facing the parking lot alternated between blue and red except for a few places where they didn’t have the appropriately colored letter. Then the color repeated like a stutter. Happy 4th!!! Wednesday night buffet. All you can eat $3.99. Senior Citizens Welcome. They’d recently spent some money to replace the old painted Silver Mint sign that had been hoisted and braced high above the marquee. Now The Silver Mint was spelled out in bold blue neon. Katie imagined the owners were trying to give the outside a more modern touch but couldn’t imagine a sign looking more out of place standing against the old brick building and outdated marquee sign; however, it was a minimal effort because it could be. No one in town cared what it looked like and besides that, it was the only casino for probably for at least fifty miles in every direction anyway. It really didn’t have to impress people.
From the parking lot, Katie could see inside even with the front doors tinted dark. Part of the circular bar jutted into view and a few people hunched over the two blackjack tables, considering the cards they were dealt. The asphalt parking lot, already full of cars and pickup trucks because it was payday at the base and five o’clock Friday, burned hot under the July sun. A couple people crossed Main Street to get to Foley’s Bar, holding beers and laughing. Katie and Noe could only watch. They were eighteen and twenty and couldn’t exactly go inside… well she couldn’t anyway. Noe had been inside plenty of times because he had older friends like Raymond who knew the owners and the cops and neither cared when it came right down to it. Not about Noe anyway. He was friends with everyone.
It felt good for Katie to stand up after they parked and she stretched, raising her arms high above her head. She leaned into the truck to put a new diaper and a clean dry shirt on Sebastian that she pulled from the diaper bag. She left his legs and feet bare because she knew no one would mind if they were. Sebastian stirred and opened his eyes and reached to wrap his arms around her neck when she lifted his solid, heavy body from the truck seat and swung him to her hip. She slammed the door shut and leaned down to the side mirror to smooth her red windblown bangs against her forehead and brush her ponytail free of the knots it had accumulated from the drive. Noe walked around to meet her and they walked in the casino holding hands because anywhere they went they held hands.
Inside the clanging sounds of slot machines and the blast of cold air from the vent above the door greeted them and they paused a moment just to feel everything. The bar to their left was full of people and the bartender rushed back and forth between them grabbing change from the register and beer from the cooler underneath the bar. Noe nodded at some people he knew but he didn’t walk over to say hi. Katie recognized everyone but knew no one so she put her head down and moved toward the coffee shop trailing just a little behind Noe while Sebastian looked at the machines and the lights and reached for them all.
The hostess sat them near the back in a cramped booth but it was better than waiting around for a bigger table to clear. They took their menus and Katie cleared the silverware out of Sebastian’s reach and waited for the waitress to bring a high chair over so she could set him in it. Then the waitress, a girl who had been in Sam’s grade, came back and asked them what they wanted.
“A strawberry milkshake and fries,” Katie replied.
“Shouldn’t you get some meat?” Noe asked. “Wouldn’t that be healthier?”
Katie reconsidered. “I’ll have a hamburger too, please.” The waitress took the menu from her outstretched hand and looked toward Noe.
“Chocolate milkshake extra thick and a double bacon cheeseburger with ranch for the fries.”
The waitress nodded, wrote everything down, and glanced at the baby.
“He’s sure getting big,” she said as she walked off. Katie noticed what was probably a small baby bump hid underneath her apron as she turned away. It’s bound to happen sometime, Katie thought. Always does, one way or the other.
* * *
Katie and Noe got married two weeks before Christmas at the Justice of the Peace on Main Street. Her mother had to sign permission due to the fact that she was a minor and before Katie even knew it she was Noe’s wife. Afterward they drove to the VFW for a reception her mother put together the week or so before. Katie wore a pale pink dress her mother picked out for her at an outlet store in Reno and early that morning Raymond’s girlfriend April came over to french-braid her hair and curl her bangs down over her forehead. The deep red color of her hair framed her face and contrasted with her pale skin in a way that made her look very soft and pretty and Katie was pleased by that. When April applied her makeup Katie relaxed almost totally with the quiet, wispy motions April made against her face with all the different brushes. The constant tickle and gliding of something that soft on her skin demanded her full attention and let her disappear into the movement and let go of herself utterly and totally as if in a trance or meditation. When April finished Katie re-emerged as if pulled up from underwater.
Noe and Katie walked in the front doors of the VFW to find just a few people there waiting. Someone, her mother most likely, had set a table aside and covered it with a white tablecloth and tied pink balloons to shiny weights situated at each end. They sat down there, held hands under the table, and watched some people come in and order drinks while others set neatly wrapped presents on another table by the door. Noe kept pulling his hand back from hers so he could wipe his palm on his pants.
Some of the people, mostly her mother’s friends, wandered over to where Katie’s mother sat holding Sebastian. They peeked underneath the blanket and cooed and clicked their tongues at him. Then they smiled kindly at Katie’s mother and made room for the next person to see. Their smiles were ones of comfort, like Katie had died instead of just marrying the man whose baby she delivered on her bed. Her mother returned their smiles and soft words, occasionally checked to make sure her salt and pepper hair remained in place, and pressed Sebastian’s tiny body tight into the crook of her elbow.
Most of Noe’s family sat at one of the long tables sitting perpendicular to the VFW’s back wood paneled wall. His father, still and silent, wore indigo jeans, a dark brown corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows, and a cowboy hat that hid his grey spiky hair. He sat next to Noe’s brother, John, whose eyes had already glazed over and turned pink from the glass of amber alcohol in front of him. His sister Inez, who was older than both boys, had her four year old daughter on her lap who tugged at her shiny midnight blue dress which was tight across her chest and too short for her long, skinny brown legs. Inez chewed a piece of gum hard and fast and held tight to her daughter with thick hands while the girl looked out into the crowd of people with liquid brown eyes wide as planets. Noe’s mother wasn’t there because she had a stroke and died when Noe was very young.
Max, April and Raymond’s son stood near Inez and her daughter like he wanted to play but was too shy to ask. He was the color of pale coffee with deep brown curly hair cut close to his scalp. His body stood lean and lanky like Raymond’s did, but his face resembled April’s more with his soft apple face and full, nearly red lips. Even the same dimples April had burrowed into each of her cheeks had made their way onto his. Katie watched him for awhile after he gave up on the little girl paying any attention to him and instead loped and played with anyone who would have him. She hoped someday Sebastian would be that beautiful.
Later into the night when everyone had relaxed into the party, Michelle Ball, who had been in her Anatomy class that fall, staggered in with a work friend of Noe’s, a man a good five years out of high school. She was a tiny girl, barely five feet tall, and clung to the much taller man, tripping over his feet as they walked. By then the room had become crowded with faces she recognized but had probably never talked to once. But this wasn’t really unexpected. Everyone knew that unless a couple had their wedding in the private ballroom at the Silver Mint or at the Waterfront restaurant out at the lake, basically anyone who wanted could wander in, and when people knew of a wedding in town that is what they did whether they were invited or not. That’s why most weddings never served food (Noe’s and Katie’s had only a tiny cake baked by one of her mother’s friends) and it was always a cash bar. Michelle and most of the others had probably only come because she and Noe were a novelty, spicy news in a tiny town. They wanted to see the next chapter unfold.
Katie remembered a time during her sophomore year of high school when an old man who lived out on some property in the canyon west of town died out in the mountains. He had set up a tent and a cooking stove in the middle of nowhere and had a cooler full of beer and some food, mainly chips and soup and chili. They figured he had been out there a couple of days before he decided to boil a couple of hotdogs. He ended up choking on a bite of one and they didn’t find him for awhile afterward, maybe a couple of weeks.
No one knew him. He was a quiet, isolated man, mainly ignored when he was alive, and whose family had long since moved on or passed away, there wasn’t anyone who was sure. He blended into the landscape of sagebrush and tumbleweeds, rarely made trips into town, and when he did he was indistinguishable from the rest of those wandering the grocery store or the post office. But when they had his funeral the entire town went, like they had all been best friends and family. People still talked about him to that day; how they spoke to him regularly at the gas station or remembered him from the church he had attended so many years before. He was the guy that choked on a hotdog in the mountains and wasn’t found for several weeks. Katie didn’t even know his name. He was a curiosity. And she had become him the second Sebastian slipped out of her and stained her bed sheets red.
As the night progressed and people got braver, they approached Noe and Katie and offered their congratulations. Noe took their hands and their hugs, smiled, and Katie let him take the lead. He knew more people than she did and she was proud he seemed to fit so well between them. More than one friend of his brought him a beer and before long he was buzzed and smiling, holding her close and nuzzling her as they sat at their decorated table. Michelle Ball worked her way to them.
“This is just too cool,” Michelle slurred, pulling Katie right out of her seat and into a tight hug as if they had been friends forever and always. “You guys look so cute together.”
Her breath smelled of Peach Schnapps and her thick fringe of dyed blonde bangs hung long in her heavily made up eyes. Katie smiled but Noe didn’t at all. He didn’t like Michelle and had told Katie so once when they saw her in the backyard at a party dancing with a beer in her hand. He had called her a fucking moron in his quiet voice and Katie never quite forgot it because he never talked about people like that except Michelle and it was just that one time.
When Michelle reached to pull him up out of his seat as well, Noe turned away from her and shrugged off the hand she had placed firmly on his back. She snatched it back like his body had burned her palm and staggered away without another word, clung to the same man again, and shouted loudly for a beer. Katie turned to him, a bit perplexed by his reaction, then looked back to Michelle who had dulled into quiet and stared off into nothing. Noe clenched his jaw and held Katie’s hand tighter, squeezing it until she flexed her fingers inside his grasp and he let her loose like he hadn’t even realized what he was doing.
* * *
As Noe and Katie sat under the swamp coolers of the Silver Mint and let their bodies slip down into a normal temperature again, they didn’t talk much, if at all. Katie entertained Sebastian with a straw wrapper and Noe tipped his head back and disappeared inside himself. The man could be so quiet, so still, that Katie wondered if when he sat there like that he totally emptied himself of all thought, all spirit. Where did he go?
She heard April before she saw her, and Noe stirred as soon as Raymond slid into his booth and covered the top of the seat with an arm as thick her thigh.
“Hey baby boy,” April cooed and babbled into Sebastian’s cheek as she reached around and hugged him tight from behind. “How’s your day, sweet baby?”
Ever since the wedding April had been around more and Katie liked to think of her as a friend even though she was a older and they never talked on the phone the way normal friends did. Raymond, Noe, April and Katie did things together like Katie used to see groups of families do and Katie loved every second they spent out wandering the hills, playing in the park with the kids, swimming in the lake that summer, or whatever it was that they happened to be interested in trying out. During these days, April liked to tell Katie what to expect when it came to teething, talking, walking and all the stuff babies grow into and Katie took it all in eagerly. Not because she needed the advice, necessarily (she did), but because she needed the company.
Katie slid down the booth to make room for April and Raymond gulped down a bottle of Bud Light he’d bought at the bar while they waited for the waitress to walk by so they could get menus.
“What are you up to tonight anyway, dude?” Raymond asked Noe as he set the empty bottle at the edge of the table for the waitress to pick up. “Feel like partying?”
Noe shrugged and glanced at Katie across the table. “Yeah. I’ve had a long goddamn day.”
“It was a hot fucking day,” Raymond said. “Miserable at 108-20, man. Fans didn’t help for shit. The building cooked us.”
Noe smiled. “Sorry I missed it.”
“Fuck you, dude.” Raymond said, still smiling his bright white teeth out to the rest of the world. They stood there, triumphant, in a face with full lips and high cheekbones, wide, liquid black eyes and deep milk chocolate skin. Katie would have watched Raymond every second, just to watch his face move and express itself, if she didn’t think someone would notice and think she had a crush. Because in reality, Raymond and Katie, even with all the time they spent in the same place, barely spoke to one another. And she didn’t have a crush. Not really.
Their food arrived fast considering how crowded the place was and Ray and April decided to split a plate of fries. With two hands tangled together in the middle of the table, pale fingers entwined with dark, Raymond and April finished each other’s sentences sometimes, and when they spoke of their child they smiled at each other over things only they had witnessed him do. And it bonded them in what Katie imagined was the ultimate love. The love of two parents for one another for the sake of a child.
Noe and Katie ate in silence across from each other and Sebastian looked on at the four of them like a judge of the court. Katie wondered how their love looked to others. Did they look like Raymond and April with eyes all full of admiration and sweetness for one another? Did they show that mature bond that only people who had been through so much together had? Or did they look like strangers like Katie feared. Two strangers who had made a baby. Two babies. Two people who knew each other’s bodies well enough, but understood nothing about the other person’s mind, their heart, their spirit. Maybe a lot of details—a lot of trees. But not the forest.
“Are you out of your mom’s yet?” April asked in a still very polite way even though Katie hoped all the time she’d stop it. She wanted to be familiar enough to April to not need formality from her.
Katie shook her head. “We’re still looking for a place.”
“We saw one today, coming back from Reno, down the main road to the Waterfront restaurant,” Noe offered. “I’d like to be able to call on it early morning tomorrow.”
Katie blinked her eyes longer than normal and looked away. Noe hadn’t noticed, but Raymond had. He peered down his chest at her, his black eyes soft, all the way up there. It was hard not to feel like a small child in his company. She had realized a while ago that his bulk and personality took up the space of two people at least, and she liked to walk next to him when she could because he made her feel very small and dainty. As tall as she was, she could never feel dainty. Since Noe was hardly taller than she was, she spent most of her time in life sticking out. Deep pure red hair, pale skin, full hips, long limbs. Walking next to someone like Raymond muted her.
“Why’d you go to Reno on a Friday anyway, Noe? Seems odd for you to want to do that on a weekday.” April mused, almost distractedly, like she didn’t care about the answer really, just felt like asking.
Ray jumped in. “Didn’t you have to take your father up for some shit, No?”
His knowing glance to Noe and the way he jumped in to seal April off from asking any other questions showed Katie what she’d long known anyway. Noe had that sort of friend, someone to talk to, someone to tell his life to. Katie hadn’t breathed a word of this pregnancy to anyone, much like the last one, because she didn’t have anyone to tell really. No one that would care to know other than for standard gossip purposes anyway. Noe had that person sitting right there next to him. So he wouldn’t have to answer a question with a lie or omission, he had a friend who could shift focus away from him. April nodded, placated by the reason, and didn’t notice she was the only one at the table not knowing anything. She was onto the next point of conversation, holding tight to Ray’s hand, waiting for her fries.
A bit later, but not long enough for it to be unintentional, Ray brought up the house at the lake, asking general questions about the trim and paint, the garage, and trying to remember who might own it.
“I know the one,” he finally said. “But I don’t know, Noe. Seems awful far out to have Katie without a car.” He clicked his tongue against his teeth and leaned his head into his shoulder.
“We’ll get her a car soon. Gas is cheap and it’s only 10 minutes out anyway.”
“Yeah, but in the meanwhile, what’s she supposed to do? She’s out there alone. That would have to get lonely.”
Katie perked up when Noe paused and considered. Ray pretty much demanded it; however, it was less through his physical bulk and straight posture and more so with a soft voice, kind eyes, and always, from what Katie had seen, the way he expressed diplomacy and quiet leadership. He was already Noe’s crew leader and Noe heard all the time that they liked him for foreman. He was just one of those people, Katie thought then, as he helped Noe see the same point of view Katie had been trying to get him to see for weeks, who people listened to. And Katie was thankful then that he was using his gift for good and not evil.
“I need to be closer to my dad than I am,” Noe mused, more to himself than anyone at the table. His voice sounded tired as if he had thought and thought about it and found a house at the lake the only answer.
“But Katie, what if something happened…” Raymond looked pointedly at Katie. “Not saying anything would, mind you, but what if?” He turned to Noe. “She’s all the way out there. It’s puts 20 minutes on your trip. She wouldn’t even be able to get into town unless you were around. They have the ambulance crew out there and everything but,…”
“I think they get it Ray,” April smiled. “Don’t think it’s necessary to lead them through every possible disaster scenario, you know.”
“I’m just saying,” Ray shrugged, taking Katie’s line of vision into line with his. “It isn’t necessary. There’s a little trailer for rent right down the street from us. Literally can see if from my house. It’s uh, damn, who owns that trailer? Scott St. Martin owns it I think. He’d rent it out to you. I know it. It puts barely ten minutes on a trip to see your dad, Noe. It makes better sense, don’t you think?”
Katie felt like they were sitting around a conference table at a board meeting, making big plans about a company. She hoped Ray could tell she was thankful. Both he and April really seemed to try to take care of Noe and they were always nice to her. She hoped to be their close friend too someday. To have that camaraderie and connection and people on her side seemed so reassuring.
“Maybe,” Noe said. “What do you think, Katie?”
Katie nodded. “Raymond makes a lot of sense.”
Noe pursed his lips, his soft dimples showing against his brown smooth skin and Katie loved him all over again. He smiled softly at her then nudged Ray with an elbow.
“So where’s the party tonight?”
* * *
That night two weeks before Christmas when she promised to be married to Noe forever and ever, there was a point late into the reception, after the cake cutting and champagne toasting that Katie found herself way up high looking down at a girl living a life that utterly and totally could not be her own. While she floated around and above the scene and watched this young girl sit holding a boy’s hand in her pretty pink dress and French-braided hair, everything about that night seemed like it occurred a very long time ago. It was like she watched a video recorded years before acquiring many years of perspective and experience and it took her a moment to realize that this girl could actually be her. The past Katie. Katie at seventeen.
The girl stood, kissed the boy on the cheek, and made her way through the crowd out to the back of the VFW. She could feel the weight of the door against her own hands as the girl pushed it open and stumbled out onto the back steps. She could feel the girl holding her breath as if she were actually the one holding her breath. But she was above it all, looking down, and wasn’t sure how that could be possible. The girl closed her eyes and Katie closed her eyes just the same. They moved like mirror images, Katie, the girl and the far-above-it-all Katie, except one knew everything and one knew nothing at all.
The girl leaned against the railing of the steps up to the back door in her pretty pink dress and could feel the cold of the metal seep through to her skin. Katie felt what the girl felt: the sharp wind, the bitter bite of cold on her face, the blinding glare of the street lamp that lit the alleyway in a thick yellow glow. The girl (and Katie) could barely see beyond the bright yellow circle of light it provided when they opened their eyes.
What had the girl done?
She had given birth to a living, squirming, crying thing that demanded so much and was so perfectly helpless. She’d conceived this baby with Noe, who as a result of the conception of this baby was a man she was now bonded to for good, for life. This was not temporary. Sebastian was not something she could give back, rescind. She’d created a life--a person who would walk this earth just as she had walked this earth, and she was completely accountable and responsible for his existence, his safety, his everything.
The Katie who floated above a million miles away felt the fear overwhelm the girl and thought she might faint dead away on those steps.
The girl had wanted this day. Hoped for this day. Up until Sebastian’s birth she’d been terrified Noe would be sent to prison or some other horrible fate would be inflicted upon him because she had decided to become his girlfriend, let him into her body, and get her pregnant. Now they were married. Now he would live with her and her mother and their baby. And then what?
What was left to do?
Now the girl saw what Katie knew from all those million miles away with the wisdom and perspective she’d acquired with all that space and time. She’d raise this baby, live in this town, and be married to Noe, a man she did not know. She’d maybe get her GED, probably work at the base. She’d have more babies and do all the mother things that made them grow. They would live their lives, and she would help them along: she would wipe their faces, bring down their fevers, take them to the park, buy them school clothes, and take their pictures before school dances. She’d make them her entire world. She would revolve around them. Eventually, she’d watch them marry, she’d become a grandmother, a great-grandmother and she’d die right in the same place she was born.
She was done before she even started and the proof flashed before her like a series of snapshots. The girl sunk down onto the steps and buried her face in her hands and cried for what seemed like forever. And no one once stepped outside to see if she was there. Just Katie watched, sympathetic but complacent and eventually with no sudden jolt or jarring, the two of them combined into one again, in the present, on their wedding night. They stopped crying, wiped their face, picked themselves up and accepted their place in the world. Their inevitable fate.
* * *
Katie woke up about four and Noe still had not come home. She stumbled to Sam’s old room where Sebastian slept and sweated in the heat of the July night in the crib someone had given her mother when Sebastian was first born. The new baby, this pregnancy, had started just like the last one with the morning sickness beginning before sun up. So she sat on the edge of the rocking chair in the dark next to Sebastian’s bed and read Sam’s letter again and again while she waited for her stomach to calm. When it finally did, she folded the letter, set it on Sebastian’s dresser, and made it back to her room to lie down and close her eyes.
When she heard Noe’s truck tires crunch the gravel outside her window as he coasted up with his engine off so as not to wake anyone, she stirred anyway. Her room lit up blue with dawn and she knew she had been asleep at least an hour. Noe closed their bedroom door behind him, which she hated because she needed to be able to hear Sebastian, stripped himself naked, and curled up against her back, his skin cool and soft. He reached around and cupped one of her breasts with his hand, massaging it until her nipple hardened. He kissed the curve of her neck and his hand made his way down her abdomen until it reached the V of her crotch. Her stomach turned and complained with nausea just as her desire for him increased in the other, lower parts of her body. He grew hard against her almost instantly and pulled her panties down to her knees as she bent them to fit around the angle his made. She adjusted her hips slightly and he was moving inside her again, the path so familiar and easy there was no longer any type of searching. He heaved heavy and wet against the nape of her neck as he moved, the smell of beer sat like a thick fog in the room around them. He was entirely behind her and inside her and she could see no part of his body except the brown hand clasped tightly around her pale blue-lit breast.
He finished quickly, fell asleep with his limp penis still inside her until she moved her hips forward and they broke apart. She crawled over him and stood to pull her panties back up, adjust her nightgown, and open the bedroom door. The sun had brightened the room enough for her to see his face clearly as she straddled him to reach her original place in their small bed between him and the wall.
“Who are you?” She whispered. “Who are you to me?”
He pulled her down to him, his arm heavy across her chest, and he began snoring softly just seconds later and almost immediately Sebastian whimpered from Sam’s room. A half hour after gathering Sebastian up and setting him on the living room floor with a bottle, Katie threw up after barely making it to the toilet. She hadn’t had time to even close the door. Her mother shuffled out of her bedroom as soon as Katie flushed her vomit down, still disheveled from sleep.
“You’re pregnant again, aren’t you?” Her mother mumbled, squint-eyed and still tired. Sebastian sat in the hall, hands clasped to a bottle, drinking it and watching Katie wide-eyed as she unhooked her arms from the toilet.
Katie nodded and shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
Her mother shook her head. “Oh Katie,” she said, rubbing tired face with her hands so hard it contorted into some sort of caricature of itself. “Katie. You poor, poor girl. You have no idea what’s coming.”