Chapter Six-Sam-May 1990

The Secret Sister
Chapter Six
Sam
May 1990


Sam grew up thinking he’d always be surrounded by smooth blue-purple mountains, breathing an arid climate, and living amongst sagebrush rooted firmly in a grey dirt floor. He figured he’d die still watching the ever-present Nevada wind break tumbleweeds loose and push them along until they became lodged somewhere under a trailer or against a dry, brittle elm tree and therefore become unmovable. Because he began his life enclosed in a valley, curled up and still as if in a womb, he just assumed he would remain that way—floating and safe in the same place he’d always been. Even when he took off that November and hid out in Reno for those couple of months, he never pictured a future place, a place he might go and stay for good. Instead his mind always put him back in the town where he left Katie and his mother. The place he left his other self. His former self.
But now, five months later and living in Yucca Valley, California, a town both very similar and very different than the place he had come from, he barely thought about where he’d been. Never even saw himself there at all anymore. Never thought about a future. Barely thought about the past. He sat centered in his present. Pressed down into this new place, these new people. This new Sam. The sagebrush dotting the memories stored away in his mind were replaced by Joshua trees and their limbs like dancers’, frozen still in the yards of the houses in town, punctuating the empty land between them. They scattered like displaced citizens of an obliterated city, left alone to observe an alien world still able to move around them. Sam willed them unstuck sometimes and craved the ability to see what could happen if they were released from their forever pose, if they would dance away, far away, or remain where they were. Content. He never once thought about the sagebrush of his past in this way, who sat low and dead to the ground, no desire to move. No desire for anything. Even if they were given a chance he knew they wouldn’t take it. They sat where they were stuck. And that was that.
Yucca Valley’s hills, pale bleached brown, rocky and staggered, sat squat against the earth as if crouching to peer down at the town they encircled. How easily they now replaced those smooth bluish mountain memories of his past, as if someone had merely glued them on top. The two main highways that cut through Yucca Valley did the same—rolled out in his memory over the other two highways that ran through where he came from. But instead of a slow, deliberate pace of a smattering of cars and diesel trucks making their way through his hometown, the traffic in Yucca Valley was quick and crowded, the highway wide, and Palm Springs barely a half hour away if you needed it. The highways where he had been went nowhere for a long while.
Sam could see the similarities between where he’d been and where he was now easily enough: desert towns in the middle of valleys, corralled in by mountains and hillsides, with roads to take anyone anywhere they wanted to be. If he had a choice in the matter he’d have picked a place that in no way resembled where he had just been, but he didn’t have a say in the entire matter. And for that he was grateful, because in the several months since setting foot in this town, he’d had nothing but great luck and had reached a very obvious conclusion: This place was nothing like where he’d been. The two towns might as well be on different planets for all he was concerned. Where one place sat heavy and still in a dark corner of his memory, the other glittered like something magic right before his eyes.
Yucca Valley’s main street was lined with fast food restaurants that never bothered with his old town. One after the other they stood in soldier formation, signs bright, aggressive, and fighting for attention. Taco Bell. McDonalds. Burger King. Small boutiques and stores he’d only seen catalogs for filled in the spaces between them. A large movie theatre sat off the road behind a large expanse of parking lot with multiple screens and showings advertised on the marquee above its front entrance. The first time he went inside he purposefully made it a point not to stare, but couldn’t help but notice the plush deep burgundy carpet in the lobby and padded walls inside the individual theatres that helped insulate the sound. In fact, the whole place appeared to have been built just to be a movie theatre. The small theatre at home was housed in a long narrow dome that had once been used for storage, if he recalled correctly, with ribbed sheet metal tacked onto its outside walls and curved roof. Inside it, someone had painted a messy mural of cartoonish zoo animals and palm leaves on the long thin walls adjacent to the screen and you could hear cars start up and take off outside as clearly as if you were standing right next to them.
He hadn’t meant to be here in this town full of restaurants, stores, and a real movie theatre that played more than one movie on more than one screen. He hadn’t meant to find this town that housed more than one grocery store and zero casinos. But here he was, smack dab in the middle of one. Lucky. Imbedded somewhere he felt allowed him a place to exist rightfully. Happily.
* * *
One late May afternoon when the sun still sat high in the sky above the town, scorching it with what Eckhart said was just the beginning of five months of straight heat, Sam pulled up to the Yucca Valley bowling alley an hour after work and a quick shower. He’d already sweated through the clean tee shirt he’d pulled on just minutes before. Rory sat in his passenger side, fluffing her shaggy black bangs in his rearview mirror, one pale leg tucked under the other. Her acid-washed cut off shorts had crept up dangerously high, showing the flesh of her high upper inner thighs as she leaned closer to him to watch herself apply her shiny wet lip gloss once finding her hair in satisfactory condition. He waited for her, politely, leaning back just enough from her to not appear obvious that he was doing so. Because this is what they did. She pushed for his attention. He, as subtly as possible, refused to give it and tried as hard as he could to remain polite but indifferent. She was Sam’s roommate. And Eckhart’s sister. Especially Eckhart’s sister.
Inside they were greeted by the familiar rush of cold air blowing down from the swamp cooler vents, the slight scent of oil that greased the lanes, and the bland mustiness resulting from the cashier and rental shoes area. The crash of pins from the Tuesday night mixed league he had joined with Rory and Eckhart earlier that spring had already started as people lined the lanes for their warm-ups. The league’s participants held shiny multicolored balls in their hands and smiles on their faces, reaching across the spectrum of age, clothing and hairstyles. Some teams wore matching silkscreened tee shirts, but most kept their own clothes, their own identities. Nearly all the men drank beer from pitchers while the women grouped together to hug, smile, and gossip. This place could have been a bowling alley anywhere in the country, the world maybe. Nothing about it stood out, even the white walls and the brunt orange and red sunset design stretched along the back wall above the pin drop were as generic a décor Sam could imagine in a bowling alley.
But its newness to Sam trumped its banality. He walked in a place he’d only walked in for a few months’ time, still getting used to its angles, noises, and details. The people inside it were fresh, their faces still unattached to names and histories. As he and Rory walked the length of the alleys, Rory saying hello to people she knew as they passed and Sam nodding as to not seem rude, he thought, People are different here. They made eye contact with him. They acknowledged. And they knew nothing about him. This bowling alley was not his hometown’s bowling alley. He could be anyone because here he was no one and the idea he could actually start over as an entirely different person in all this generic-ness held an incredible amount of appeal. He was a blank slate for someone to draw a person on and get to know without the intimate knowledge of everything that came before he did fluttering behind him like a clumsy moth.
They found Eckhart at one of the farthest lanes lacing up one of his shoes after having pulled up a thin, bare and nearly hairless leg to his chest, propping his foot on the edge of the white plastic swivel chair. Callie, their fourth team member, stood poised near the ball return with her ball tucked to her chest, waiting to take her second turn of the frame. Sam opened up his bag, pulled the ball Eckhart had helped him pick one weekend in Palm Desert out by its three drilled holes and set it in the rack behind Callie. She finished her approach, let her ball go, watched it travel the lane then studied the two pins that remained. She turned and startled when she saw Sam.
“Sam, I didn’t see you,” she smiled, showing a mouth even with wide straight teeth inside full pink lips. She ducked around him to sit, resting her hand on his hip as she passed. When he first met her months ago, that type of touch from her excited him because he perceived it as interest on her part, but now he knew she mainly just liked to feel others on her fingertips and always had her hands on someone. Rory thought it was because Callie was deaf and she had read somewhere that when someone loses a sense, like hearing, they rely on another sense more heavily and as a result that relied upon sense sharpens and intensifies.
There was no way to tell if Callie understood how Sam craved the electric shock her touch elicited in him when their bodies collided that way, but he liked the idea of her heightened sense of touch possibly picking up those silent cues he sent. Because while she couldn’t hear his voice, he thought it amazing the potential for her to hear in his body a noise more amplified than any single spoken word he could utter.
Sam followed Callie back to the horseshoe-shaped seating behind the scoring podium and dug the bowling shoes from his bag before sitting between her and Rory. Eckhart took Callie’s place on the lane, readying himself for his shot, his lean body taut in a smooth line, standing as still as a tree. Rory had already laced her shoes up, tucking her feet underneath her. She was so petite she could just fold herself up like that, leaving room to spare on the same sized seat that Sam overfilled. He wondered what living in a world made just a slight bit bigger than what fit you would entail. He thought it might make him feel perpetually like a child.
“How are you, Miss Callie?” Rory said, reaching across Sam to tap her thigh then balancing her elbow on his knee so Callie could see her while they talked.
Callie shrugged, keeping a close eye on Rory’s lips. “Not bad. Another Tuesday, I guess. You?”
Rory knew Callie from the pharmacy where they both worked and Sam was able to get her whole story through the bits and pieces Rory would present every now and then. From what Sam gathered, when Callie was six she caught an infection that almost killed her and resulted in her deafness. Because of her age when she went deaf and resulting speech therapy and school in Palm Springs her parents put her in afterward (Callie’s father owned the pharmacy they worked in and Rory said they had plenty of money to send her to the best schools for that sort of thing), she spoke almost normally (just a twinge of a thick tongue sound remained in her voice when she spoke), used sign language, and read lips. If you wanted to talk to her, Rory said after she initially introduced Sam to her, you just had to tap her. But Sam didn’t really talk to her unless she talked to him first, so he never actually ever had to touch her. He wasn’t so sure he’d be able to handle the sort of shock he thought it might cause if he were the one to initiate body contact.
Eckhart finally made his approach, letting his ball loose so that it curved quickly down the lane, hitting the pocket so hard the pins flew off the lane floor and against the back flap that trapped them so they could be reset. Eckhart could bowl. And the entire place knew it. He was one of those people others stopped what they were doing to watch play, to study the trajectory of his ball, the way it moved, curved, and crushed the pins. They liked to ask him questions after league was over for the night, stopping the four of them on the way out to their cars, keeping them there talking until the place took on an eerie silence as it quickly emptied.
Warm up wrapped up soon after Sam and Rory had gotten in a few practice throws, and Callie took the first shot of the night. Her long, lean body moved gracefully under the slightly oversized teal tee shirt she wore and her tanned legs rippled with lean muscle definition. She stood nearly a head taller than Rory and was pale blonde with cream colored skin and dark brown eyes, all features that Sam thought could be just different variation of the same color tone, one just darker or lighter than the others. Nothing about her really stood out as a defining feature, not like Rory with her black hair and crazy blue eyes, and in many ways watching the two together was like watching two opposites react: short vs. tall, light vs. dark, young vs. old. Not that Callie was old, nor was Rory very young. They were probably close to the same age, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. Callie just took on a much older presence compared to Rory and when together Callie seemed more like a babysitter than a peer. She was easily someone who had an infinite number of years and wisdom compared to someone (Rory) who was still very new and fresh in her ideas and experience.
“Callie looks good tonight, doesn’t she?” Rory leaned into Sam to speak, her eyes bright and pale against her even paler skin. “Her game, I mean. She was pretty crappy last week.”
Sam nodded, distracted as he watched as Callie lined up for her second shot, an easy spare. He would follow her after this shot and he hoped she would touch him again. Rory sighed and Sam could feel her tense up next to him, probably irritated in his interest in Callie. So he smiled, patted her bare leg with his hand and stood to take his own shot after watching Callie pick up the pin. They crossed paths and she smiled and reached her hand up for a high-five. He obliged, returning her smile and feeling like a fool for the swooning he felt as a result.
Sam had long given up on impressing anyone with his bowling skills. He was by far the worst bowler on the team. He tried hard, took advice given, but was mainly there because he liked to be locked into the crowd, involved, and part of something. So he bowled as best as he was able, rarely scoring above a 130 most times in a single game. And that was good. That was enough.
Rory was much better. She and Eckhart had grown up bowling and her stance, approach, and delivery were liquid and easy even when throwing the ball down the lane straight and hard, the strength involved surprising Sam when he first saw it. Rory was so small he hadn’t expected that kind of power to come out of her tiny body the way it had. He liked Rory best when he watched her bowl. She was so smooth, so confident, so real, that he was sure if she were like that in every other aspect of her life… just letting herself be instead of the self-conscious and over-doing it type she typically was otherwise, he thought she would border on beautiful. But normally she was just too much—too emotional, too scattered, too desperate.
Rory contrasted so much with Eckhart, Sam sometimes thought it impossible that they were actually related, let alone siblings born only a year apart. Eckhart was Yucca Valley Bowl’s rock star whether or not he ever even had a ball in hand, and as Sam was finding out, he was pretty much a rock star everywhere he went.
And yet. What Sam found so interesting was that Eckhart bowled with an utter lack of desire. He was desire-less. Or at least that was as close of a label as Sam could manage. Eckhart was good, seamlessly and flawlessly good and yet really didn’t appear to have any real aspiration to be better. No real will to compete. It wasn’t indifference on Eckhart’s part, Sam had given up on that hypothesis months ago. Instead, Eckhart lived in the moment--existed, approached the lane and let his plain shining black ball go, fluid and even in his delivery, so it crushed the pins in a flash. Then he’d move on, take his seat again, without even a look back to admire. Not even a check of the score. Eckhart bowled in the exact same manner he lived his life. In the present.
* * *

From the second Sam left Reno that January and into the third day of wandering the winter highways of Northern and Central California, he had no idea where he was going until he ended up at a coffee shop in Fresno alongside highway 99. Here he met Eckhart and Rory Clinton and realized he’d ended up at the exact place he should have. They were his next step, shown as clearly to him as if God himself had broke open the sky, picked Sam up and set him down in the exact spot where their lives would intersect. They were supposed to find him. The entire occurrence was predetermined. Fated.
That morning, a deep dense fog had settled into the valley and he awoke to it in the back of his car with Stella on his chest curled into a tight ball. Diesel trucks pressed into the parking spots on each side of him, and he couldn’t see much farther than their front tires when he sat up to check things out. The sun had just risen and in the air hung a smell unlike anything he’d noticed before. Wet air, thick, sharp and almost dank; he could taste it as readily as he could smell it.
He fed Stella from a half-empty rolled up bag of dry food and pulled her litter box out from under his car, leaving it on the floor of the front passenger seat for her to use while he walked to the rest stop bathroom. He brushed his teeth, smoothed his hair with his palms, took note of the beard taking shape in his reflection, and urinated. He paid more attention to the fog on the way back to the car, its texture, its way of making the world around him feel so silent and insulated and wondered how long it would take to burn off. He read flyers taped to the rest stop walls with pictures of women and children and the word “missing” above their smiling faces. He wondered if there was a poster out there somewhere for him that claimed him to be the same way. Missing. Did men even go missing really? Or did they not just advertise?
Then the first of what Sam would later feel was a series of events that led him to meeting Rory and Eckhart and later becoming their roommate in their three bedroom rental house in Yucca Valley, California occurred: he had a quick and sudden craving for bacon.
He was an hour or so north of Fresno, he imagined, based on the road sign he had seen last night just before turning off into the rest stop, and thought he might like to stop in the city for a bit time to see what a place like Fresno could consist of. The central valley of California wasn’t all that cold, especially for it being just a few days after Christmas, and he knew once the fog was gone the day would be pleasant and bright. He could eat his bacon and find a park somewhere. He’d hang out with Stella since he knew she’d just sit there by him and not get scared. She was more like a dog than a cat that way. Over the past couple of days, she stayed perched on his lap when he took her places outside the car, not at all skittish the way cats can be, and just the afternoon previous they sat together in Redding on a bench in a naked park full of bare trees and dead grass, watching the world be the world.
A sign shaped like a donut and sitting high above the freeway drew Sam’s attention to a nearby exit. Stan’s Coffee Shop. He pulled off and into the parking lot outside the front door so he could see his car through the long tall row of windows that ran the length of the building. He slipped out of the door, locking the car and not disturbing Stella where she slept on the passenger seat. And so continued the series of events he would look back on as important. Moments out of the ordinary, actions out of character that would eventually confront him later as being completely beyond his actual control. He smoothed his tee shirt and tucked it in his jeans. Something he almost never did when walking into a public place. When he went inside he made his way right to the counter and sat down near the center of the long row of swivel chairs attached to the floor firmly by their bases. Sitting at the counter was something he hardly ever did if he could help it (especially since most of the booths in the place were empty and he much preferred booths). He ordered a side of bacon as planned but didn’t touch it for several minutes after the waitress set it in front of him. It smelled perfect, a bit like maple syrup, and he was hungrier than he’d been since he left Reno, but instead he sat and watched the people in the kitchen smile and laugh at each other, acting together as if they’d known each other forever. If he’d been asked to explain why he just didn’t eat, he wouldn’t be able to say why. Just that he didn’t. He waited a good twenty minutes before even touching the plate, letting the bacon cool and lose its crispness, even though hot bacon was easily one of his favorite things to eat. When it cooled, it dulled in flavor and he hated that. But not today. Today he watched the cooks in the kitchen and read a copy of the Fresno Bee someone had left on the counter before leaving. He was in no hurry.
Most times over the past few days when he ran inside somewhere to grab something to eat he felt anxious because Stella remained in the car, and he didn’t want her nervous or cold. His perspective was different today; it was winter, the air was cool, and she was fine. A good traveler. For the first time since he left Reno, he didn’t rush. He didn’t hurry back because he knew she really wasn’t waiting for him. She was out in the parking lot, sleeping on the seat in a slice of sunlight.
In his bedroom in Rory and Eckhart’s house several months later, he often thought about how when he finally started eating his side of bacon, he realized he wanted coffee as well, so he motioned for the waitress. This was especially strange since he didn’t particularly like coffee that much. He’d drink it sometimes if he really felt like it, but never did he empty a cup. But this time he did. Quickly in fact. Then he motioned for the waitress to fill it again. Between the watching and the reading, the eating and the drinking, he stayed almost an hour before Rory and Eckhart somehow ended up at his side. As if beckoned.
They’d been in Portland visiting their parents, driving because Rory refused to fly. Not fear, she insisted as she slipped her fork into a pile of corn beef hash she’d ordered in the middle of their introductions. (“Hi, I’m Rory and this is my brother Eckhart.”) She didn’t fly due to the boredom she felt while stuck in a plane suspended above the earth. There’s a lot of see on a drive that you can’t see from a plane, she told him. Finer details in the scope of life as opposed to a bird’s eye view of a greater landscape. She didn’t see the appeal of seeing something muted by distance. She wanted to be close up, she said, absorbing it.
“Why be above a mountain when you can be beneath it?” She said.
Sam didn’t tell her he’d never been on a plane.
As they spoke of trivial things like where they were headed (Yucca Valley, they’d said. No idea, he’d replied) Sam noticed for the first time how the coffee shop was swathed in almost pure yellow. Rory commented that she felt like she was inside a bladder, just seconds after he’d noticed the color palate himself, and he felt like she could nearly read his mind. Yellow booths, yellow painted walls, yellow curtains framing windows letting in yellow winter light. Yellow. A color he figured he would always associate with Rory and Eckhart Clinton forever, no matter what happened, no matter how their paths would eventually untangle.
Rory talked to Sam first because she sat closest to him at the counter and as he would later find out was the least shy of the two. He’d known almost instantly they were brother and sister but waited for something concrete said in order to assume. The features that made Rory quite pretty--blue eyes, black hair, and pale skin, transposed onto Eckhart in the exact same way but gave him a dangerous, almost criminal look. Sam found it incredible how they each did different things with the same features; Rory had her black hair cut into a short and blunt style with a thick shag of bangs hanging high above two thin sharply arched eyebrows. Her light eyes contrasted against the dark framing of her hair and her thick short lashes seemed to contain them, rendering them nearly transparent in all that blackness. Her skin had some trouble areas, spotty around the chin and forehead, but overall seemed china smooth and very pale. Her teeth fit straight and wide in her mouth and her smile was easy, effortless.
Eckhart slicked his hair back to show a deep widow’s peak and a creased forehead. He was much taller than Rory, nearly a head and shoulder’s worth, and had flat wide hips that he swiveled on as he walked to the bathroom at least twice during the time the three of them sat talking. His eyebrows arched in a thicker, more male version of Rory’s, and dark eyelashes framed his eyes the exact same way as they did hers, and gave them the same transparency and light. When they spoke to Sam in that first meeting, something about the all the citrus orchards north of town, all he saw were four pairs of identical eyes, blinking back at him in the exact same way.
And for the first little while they made small talk just like they had about the citrus trees and flatness of the valley. They talked the way strangers are always forced to talk in restaurants. They asked where he’d been (Reno, he’d said) and for how long (not long). They asked if he’d be around the rest of the day. He said he would be. So they paid their checks and walked with him awhile up and down the grid of streets that made up Fresno, just like the hometown Sam felt he’d left behind years ago. Palm trees lined the sidewalks and some fog still hung around in patches in the still fairly early morning. They stopped in a park to smoke a joint with Rory and Eckhart so cavalier about it, Sam thought it could have just been tobacco and they laughed at the way he looked around so worried.
“You have to relax, Sam,” Rory smiled and plucked the joint from his fingers, pressing her hip into his as she did. “People around here have way more to worry about than a couple of people wandering around a park smoking weed.”
Sam spent the rest of the day with them, pleasantly stoned and wandering. And after they’d prodded him to explain how he’d ended up in Fresno with absolutely no destination in mind, and after he’d given them the most honest answer he could (“I couldn’t be where I was even just a minute more.”), Eckhart and Rory grew quiet, looked at each other the same way Sam and Katie did back when they could read each others’ minds.
“Come along with us,” Eckhart offered with a straight calm face and a practical voice. Rory nodded in agreement, grabbing hold of Sam’s pinky finger tight in her fist.
“Yes, please.”
“You don’t have any plans in mind,” Eckhart continued, “or any place to go, and you could stay with us. We need a roommate.” He laid out a plan, a simple one about how he could get Sam a job with the propane company where he worked, get him started in something that could make him decent money and give him a chance to excel eventually in a company.
“But why would you do that for me? You don’t even know me.” Sam remembered saying at some point.
“Why wouldn’t I do that for you?” Eckhart replied. And that was that.
But it was more than just a lack of options that led Sam to following Rory and Eckhart’s Ford Bronco six hours into another desert. Sam liked them, liked that he got to spend the day with two people who saw the world in a neat, unique way, people who would rather be below the mountains, slowly passing them by rather than above them, missing all the details in their hurry to get somewhere else. He liked that they’d grown up in large city. They were a bit older than he was. But he liked thinking that overall, while he was stuck where he had been stuck so long, they were making their way to the exact point where all three of them would intersect somehow. All this time, all these years, led to a chance meeting in a coffee shop, a day of conversation, walking, and weed, and suddenly though not that suddenly because it seemed destined, here he was. Following their Bronco as they led him to Yucca Valley and let him move into their spare room.
* * *
In the crisp moment right before fall turns to winter, Sam cracked open the side door to Sophie’s garage and found her hanging by a dirty orange extension cord from a wooden beam so brown and rich, someone might wonder if it had been recently oiled. Her toes pointed downward in a delicate arch, the way a ballerina’s might, suspended a few inches from the floor as if in the middle of a small leap. Her head fell to the side, accommodating the knot she’d made in the cord that pressed into the left side of her neck. If her eyes held any light of life it would appear she was casting a shy glance away but now they stared off blankly, slit half open and dry. Her face, usually oval and pale, was now thick with purple congestion, half-hidden by her hair tumbling loose in deep, unruly fire hued waves down past her fingers, stiffened and curled into her swollen, black-crimson palms.
Over her thin turned-down lips, an artificial, violent red line of lipstick had been painted on exact and surrounded the dark violet tip of her tongue fallen loose from her mouth. Sam had never once seen her in makeup, especially not garish, especially not red. This detail, draping over her as if some sort of costume, suddenly rendered her a stranger. An unfamiliar. So impossible it could be Sophie, Sam thought for days afterward there had been a huge mix-up.
“Sophie?” he whispered, peeking around the door at her, just as Katie rounded the front end of the garage, kicking at the dirt, head down, distracted. He slammed the door shut but clenched the knob so tightly his hand shook with the effort.
“Go to the house,” Sam found himself screaming. “House. Now!” Shrill, little girl screaming. Katie’s head snapped up as if her hair had been pulled from behind. Her red, Sophie hair.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Back! Go! Now!” He had his hands on her shoulders now, spinning her around and pushing her harder than he meant to. “Hurry!” She stumbled ahead of him in slow motion, her long legs awkward and splayed out like a newborn deer’s. The chiming and cracking together of the gravel underneath their feet filled his head like a white noise as they ran toward Sophie’s pink house, a staccato song played to the deep painful thud of his heartbeat.
“Sam?” Katie was crying now, panicked as she fumbled the front gate latch between her fingers, pushing it in against its frame instead of having the sense to pull it out toward her. He was panicked too. He was crying too. The world moved and sounded and felt like it was underwater and he was pushing against a strong current in order to move anywhere. He shut the front door and locked it, pushed Katie down into the couch because she was just standing there wide-eyed and slouched. Turned in on herself like a toothless mouth.
“Just sit here,” Sam commanded. “Stay here.”
She did.
He ran to the kitchen for a phone, glancing out the window above the sink at the long wall of the garage where just beyond it Sophie swung with her bowed feet and grotesque red lips.
In the calmest voice he could, he explained to the operator: “My sister’s hung herself. She’d dead.”
Over his shoulder, in the bright sun of the deep fall morning, Katie howled a guttural growl, a hard moaning sigh of a growl, and then fell quiet and still on the couch, hands politely tucked together. Staring straight ahead at nothing, Katie lengthened her posture, curved her back, then closed her eyes to it all. And Sam. He stood as far away from her as he could, the phone cord lax, his fingertips barely keeping it from falling at his feet.
* * *
One summer night after a Friday night full of pot and a hot back and forth between sleep and wakefulness, Sam found himself in the middle of a shaking room. The earth, all of a sudden uneven and shifting, rolled hard beneath his bed and the cement foundation of the house and the world around him felt full of deep, crashing noise. A shaving cream can and a bottle of aspirin tipped over on his dresser, his bed scooted at a narrow angle away from the wall, and curtains swayed in the open windows. He sat up, clutching futilely at his sheets, legs spread and body tense, as if waiting for a fall.
The earth quieted soon after and for what seemed like for minutes later, he sat still and waited for more, waited for something else to happen. Stella, curled at the edge of the bed, lifted her head sleepy-eyed and looked at him plainly as if wondering what had possessed him to shake the earth. Outside the world was cracking purple light that contrasted against the deep blue of the still present night and shadows crossed his bed in a myriad of muted and blurry patterns. Not quite even dawn yet. Outside, he sensed the world moving again, people unfreezing from the locking of their bodies in the rocking of the world. Startling back to life. Checking the damage, checking with each other for verification that they hadn’t just dreamt the earth was rolling below them.
Sam hadn’t been aware he wasn’t totally asleep most of the night until he had the presence of mind to feel a sense of sleepiness underneath the adrenaline the earthquake had jolted into his system. He heard Rory’s bed squeak from behind the thin wall separating their bedrooms. He could feel the padding sound of her feet hitting the floor as distinctly has he felt the rumblings of the earth underneath him just moments before. She opened her bedroom door.
“Eck?” She whispered into the hall, as if there were a question someone could have slept through all that. But to Sam’s surprise, Eck didn’t respond. Rory’s door opened wider, Sam heard the squeak of its hinges, its bottom rubbing against the thick carpet. “Eck? Are you there? Are you okay?”
Faster than Sam realized, he was on his feet and headed for the door. He opened it to a scared Rory with her hand on Eckhart’s doorknob, ready to open it. Eckhart had bookshelves, tall, open, heavy bookshelves across the room from his bed, but his room was cramped, and they could have fallen. On him. He had his hand on Rory’s shoulder suddenly, as if in some way ready to give her his support. But the room was intact, shelves straight up and still stuffed full of books and papers and magazines. But Eckhart’s bed was empty, its sheets pulled tight against the mattress, made neatly. Rory craned her neck back to look at him.
“Where is he?”
They sat on Eckhart’s bed for awhile, waiting. He’d left his wallet, left the keys, left the car. The clothes he’d been wearing that night set crumpled on the old plaid lawn chair sitting in front of the closet. The window they watched grew brighter with day, changing from a muted orange pink to bright yellow, and the warmth already began to radiate through the closed blind.
“He must have went on a walk right?” Rory reasoned. Sometimes Eckhart did that, couldn’t sleep and went out walking. “That’s not out of the question, right?”
Sam shook his head. “He’ll probably be back any minute.” Rory nodded, distracted, not fully hearing Sam. Their thighs pressed together in the V-shape of Eckhart’s mattress their combined weight caused. It was as if it was forcing them together, pressing them against one another. Rory yawned.
“I had just gotten to sleep.”
“I’m not sure I was asleep.”
Rory lay on her side then, her head resting on flat mattress and tucked her hands into the space between her thighs as she drew them up to her chest. Her toes tickled his hip. He didn’t mean to look, but did anyway, at the tiny triangle of purple panties that showed when her long tee shirt crept just a little too far up her back. He could even see the slight indentation of the crack of her ass. Olivia, the woman from New Years’ Eve, had been the last woman he’d had sex with, the last woman he kissed. He hadn’t seen that part of a woman’s body this close in a long time and he longed to touch it just then, just place one index finger, even just the tip of it, on that slight shadow, that tiny indentation. But he didn’t. This was Eckhart’s sister.
“What if he was walking, and like a tree fell on him or something? Why isn’t he back yet? He’d know we were waiting for him, right? He’d know this right?” Rory’s voice was small, sort of pleading.
“I don’t think that was a strong enough quake to do anything like that, Rory,” Sam said, patting the top of her foot. Her delicate toes glittered with pink polish, and he grazed one with his fingertip instead of doing it to anything else that might get everyone in trouble.
“What if something happens to him?” Rory sighed, struggling then to sit up against the pull of the angle of the mattress slipping her down closer to him. She was just the tiniest thing, Sam thought then, small as a child.
“He’s going to be fine,” Sam reassured her, wanting to stand and give her the space of the bed, and wanting to stay and wait with her until Eckhart came back to assume responsibility.
“What if he’s fine now, but not fine later? What if something happens later? What would I do?”
“He’s probably just out walking, Rory. He’s probably on his way back right now.”
“Now he’s out walking, but next time? Anything. Anything could happen. And he’s all I have.”
Sam slid behind her then, and lay her back on her side, pressing his chest against her back, bending his hips and legs with hers, tucking her into him like a doll, protecting her. She caved back into him, relaxing into his body, as if molding to him. She relaxed as if relieved, as if she’d been hoping for this. He sighed something like resignation.
Eckhart opened the front door minutes later, and Rory started and detangled herself from Sam as quickly as she could. She padded down the hall, walking with all her weight on her heels, her tiny body swimming in her old AC/DC concert tee shirt. Sam followed, knowing that no matter where Eckhart had been it didn’t matter. His absence here had suddenly changed things. He did the best he could to mask a sudden and unexpected surge of anger in his throat.
“Where were you?” Rory slapped Eckhart’s chest, probably harder than she meant to, but maybe not. “You’re a motherfucker, you know that?” Eckhart laughed, probably surprised, and backed up into the front door he had just closed.
“I’m sorry! I just, I was walking. I was out of the way and had to walk back. I tried to be fast.”
“I thought a tree fell on you, you piece of shit.”
Eckhart laughed again, but his eyes sparkled with agitation, darting back and forth between Sam and Rory as if cornered. “No, no tree. It was fine. I couldn’t sleep. I’m sorry.”
Rory relaxed, let him by and Eckhart sat hard on the grey dirty sectional and stared intently out the back sliding glass door directly in front of him. Rory joined him, tucking her feet under her the way Rory did. It’s like the moment on Eckhart’s bed had never happened. Rory didn’t even look at him.
“Man, sis, man,” Eckhart sighed. Sam wandered into the kitchen, drew a glass of water from the tap, and leaned against the counter. He thought of Cammie. Beautiful Cammie. She popped into his head just like that, a sharp image against the white noise of confusion suddenly gathered when he’d wrapped his body around Rory’s and just stayed there.
“What, Eck?” Rory yawned. “What’s up with you?”
“That earthquake. It was fucking amazing. It is very likely, no I would say 100% likely that I will never, ever experience an earthquake in that exact way ever again… or a climax.”
“Sorry, a what?”
“You should have felt it the way I felt it. I, it, I don’t think I’ve ever felt something so profound in my life.”
“Did you say you were in the middle of a climax?”
Eckhart wandered up the hall, his dirty and dusty bare feet slapping at the carpet. His hair was messed, clothes hastily put together in the way that his shorts did not match his shirt. He’d left the house in a hurry.
“You were coming during the earthquake?” Rory repeated when Eckhart did not respond as if shocked into stammering. “Who were you with?”
“Camille,” Eckhart said, pausing before he entered his doorway. “She felt it before me. She knew it was coming before I did.”
“Cammie?” Rory repeated, as if she hadn’t heard right. “You’ve been fucking Camille? Why didn’t either of you fuckers say anything?”
“It just happened. Tonight was the first.”
Sam didn’t know what to do, so he just did what he thought was best. He walked past them both and into his room. He shut the door with a soft click of the knob. He lay there, head blank, for what seemed hours. His room grew steady hot with the sun breaking through the morning. It was Saturday. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. He felt the rest of the house fall silent and asleep around him. Too early to start the day for anyone.
Eckhart the rock star was all Sam could think. Over and over. Repeating like some sad chant.
Later, much later, in what probably was afternoon, Sam lay sweaty in his bed, wearing only a thin pair of boxer shorts. A thin layer of sweat covered his entire body, sticking him to the sheets underneath him. The roots of his hair grew so wet it weighed like a helmet against his scalp. He wasn’t awake exactly and not quite asleep because he could hear his door open quietly and feel Rory wordlessly crawl into the crook of his body once again, tucking herself up tiny against his long limbs and torso, her body strangely cool in all the heat. And he let her.
“I’d be better to you than she would anyway,” Rory said.
But she didn’t say anything else and neither did he. And they just became this way. The day of the earthquake.
* * *
Katie and Sophie walked behind him on the wide dirt road, taking their time like girls tend to do. They chatted like excited birds about the start of school and fall television shows and Sam sometimes got lost in the conversation because he was paying attention to other things like the flash of a horny toad digging itself in under sagebrush or the way their three shadows stretched thin against the angle of the earth and the late morning sun. Brown desert dazzles the eye, Sam thought, liking the way the words sounded all scrunched together in their similarity. Behind him, Sophie and Katie talked about Mork and Mindy as if they were family members. They walked without really laboring, at least not in the same way they’d done most of that summer when they went out like this, the sting of the desert heat nearing its end on what Sophie said she considered the perfect fall day.
And it pretty much was, Sam agreed. He woke up that morning in Sophie’s small bedroom, sleeping together with Katie on her bed under a window opened sometime either during the night or earlier that morning. Sophie slept on the couch when they stayed over and he could hear her in her kitchen, frying something and banging cupboards shut in all the hectic morning noise Sam was used to hearing when they stayed here.
A cool early morning breeze flowed in, allowing the loose lazy gauze curtains to flap gently a foot or so above his head. He watched them for about an hour waiting for Katie to stir from a dead-like sleep, forearm covering her eyes, mouth gaping. Because that’s what he did during the mornings they stayed at Sophie’s. He waited for Katie to wake up. She slept better here than she did at home.
Later, after Katie stirred awake and they both had quick showers, Sophie packed her backpack while Sam and Katie watched over their matching plates of eggs and toast. She packed it carefully, neatly, with milk jugs filled with tap water, three cans of Pepsi, a half-empty rolled up bag of Ruffles, and six peanut butter sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. In case they each wanted more than one they had the option, she said.
“I’m the packing mule today,” she smiled, arranging the contents of the backpack as neatly as she could. “And I don’t want to mush the sandwiches and chips.” She frowned down at the bag, cocking her head, as if contemplating the best way to do so.
“Oh well if we do though, right?” she said, shrugging. “It’ll all still be edible and water’s more important anyway. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” they responded in their matching, girly voices that Sam had just recently become very self-conscious of. He was already eleven. When was he supposed to stop sounding so much like a child?
“Good, we’re set then.” She slung over her back then to see how it fit and it clung to her like a koala, heavy-bottomed and grey. She smiled a very plain, very pretty smile and adjusted her blue jeans that had fallen lower on her hips. Sam had recently noticed that, no matter what, Sophie nearly always wore men’s button fly Levis, sometimes even rolling them at the bottoms so they weren’t too long. Very different from the high-waist, zipper-front jeans he saw most women around town wear. Hers sat low so when she lifted her arms, Sam could see her belly button and soft pale abdomen peek out from the above the waistline. She matched her jeans with faded tee shirts of nearly every color there was or flowered blouses that fit tight in the chest and hips. She was almost always barefoot if she could help it and walked nearly everywhere that way, even on the burning hot asphalt streets in the middle of summer afternoons. And she washed them as soon as she got home, so you’d never know the difference anyway. She was never dirty. Anywhere. The only time she wore shoes were in public places or in the desert. But that was only so she didn’t get bit by a rattlesnake or kicked out of someplace. Practical reasons.
With her backpack on and her hair pulled up into a high ponytail, he thought he might like to marry a girl someday that looked just like her. Someone fresh-faced and happy just like that.
On that perfect fall day, they left her duplex house at nearly eleven, driving through a busy Saturday Main Street to the highway, turning off after the base’s main entrance and following a narrow asphalt road running along a stretch of barbed wire fence with hard plastic signs hung on them and the words “DO NOT TRESPASS” typed solemnly on their fronts.
Sophie parked right where the asphalt road met a dirt one and a small house sat by itself to the left of the intersection in the middle of what seemed like a hundred various types of trees. Their tops jumbled above its roof in a tangled cloud of branches and yellow-green leaves.
“This place sure looks like your mom’s house, Sophie,” Katie commented for what was probably the fifteenth time ever, like she couldn’t quite get over the similarity. “Except it’s not pink.”
“The trees, yes, lots of trees. Sorta silly in a desert, yes?” Sophie turned the engine off and Sam and Katie kicked at the gravel spilling from the dirt road onto the asphalt, casually attempting to put it back in its rightful place.
“Bonnie and Al live here,” Sophie continued. “Magnum is their dog’s name. They knew Dad.”
A woman waved from what appeared to be a kitchen window, the trees parting just barely enough for Sam to see through to it. The three of them waved back.
“Bonnie lets me take pictures of her trees,” Sophie explained. And they went on past.
Sophie and Katie’s shadows stood equally tall and they walked in such an eerily similar way, Sam wondered then if it were possible their father could have the same gait. The tall posture, the same scissor-chop of their arms against their legs as their hands brushed their hips, and the slight bounce of the feet, the result of walking mostly on their toes could not have shown up in the two of them any other way. Sam could only deduce it down to one person passing that down; their father, long lost. He looked behind him, blinded by the sun above their fire-red hair of matching tone and texture-- Sophie’s long and wild, and Katie’s fine and flyaway in the dry summer air.
Sophie’s car glimmered below them, the dirt road they traveled leading down to it like a winding tongue. Bonnie and Al’s house sat down there too. They’d know if his father had that same gait, Sam thought. Because he didn’t. His brain only housed memories of photos he’d seen here and there throughout his life of a man, long and thin, with red hair and a sometimes beard who never looked directly at a camera. This was all he had. How unfair two strangers could have more.
Sophie was going to show them boulders she liked to photograph. She usually liked to get farther into the mountains, travel out miles and miles wherever her car would let her. But today she stayed in the valley. Just a quick Sunday afternoon trip before getting ready for the week, she said. You don’t mind coming along, do you?
She told them at one point, at some point in the far past, these large, heavy-stomached rocks had rolled down Mt. Grant, the one mountain towering over the rest of the range that ran the west side of the valley. The rocks spread out over the valley floor like marbles and specked Sam’s sight as soon as the three of them had gone half the distance of the road. The greasy leftover from the sunscreen Sophie’d applied earlier felt thick with the fine road dust they kicked up as they walked and he tried to rub it away, annoyed.
“Stop it, Sam, you’ll get a burn.” Sophie came up to the side of him. “Here, let’s go to the left.”
Instinctually, he quickened his step to walk ahead of her, maintaining this odd distance he’d began to keep from people if he could at all help it. He smelled weird now. Different than normal… at least what was normal a couple of months ago. His skin, his underarms, and his crotch were musky with sweat and oil and something else he wasn’t sure about. And even though Sophie had explained without him asking about the hormones and the physical changes he was just beginning to undergo, he still wasn’t prepared to smell like he was half made of some sort of nasty animal. (Did this come from his father too? Did he smell this rotten?) But he would never say to Sophie and Katie that this was why he never quite fell into step with them. He’d tell them they were too slow instead.
They reached the outer layer of the boulder bullseye right about noon, mostly silent and at ease. Sam climbed the highest one and the girls followed him up. And they played together, the three of them, climbing up and down the odd shaped rocks, jumping from one to another, admiring the bright shiny flecks glittering in the sunlight pressed into their surfaces. They each lay on one, called out to the others, and looked up and out into the endless cloudless sky above them. Sam loved how doing something like that caused his eyes to lose focus, as if taking in that much blue was impossible.
Finally in the later part of the afternoon they sat, a bit tired and red-faced, and ate what Sophie made them. She smiled as she presented their sandwiches to them, cracked open their cans of soda, and arranged paper plates on the flat surface of the rock on which they crowded together. She put her arm around Sam’s shoulder and he reluctantly let her, knowing that deep down she didn’t mind his smell anyway. Even if it was terrible.
Before they finished their lunch, Sophie dug in her backpack for her 35mm camera. This was her newest thing. She’d been taking a photography class one week a night at the high school. They even had a darkroom she developed her own film in. She’d been so excited about the whole thing she bought a lot of equipment from the Sears catalogs nearly arranged on the coffee table of her small duplex.
Katie groaned playfully. “Again?”
Sophie smiled as she loaded a roll of film into the camera’s empty back. “Yes, again. You’re barely just ten, Katie. I have a lot left to take still, so you better get used to it.”
They smiled for her then, on top of the rock, with identical lopsided smiles. Katie looped her arm around Sam’s shoulder but Sam kept his flat against his side. Sophie snapped away, eventually jumping down off the boulder and making them sling their feet over the sides and let them dangle. She stood under them then, and they smiled down at her, her face darkened by the rock’s shadows but her teeth still gleaming as she returned their grin and let her camera dangle loose from the strap she gripped in her hand.
“I love you two more than anything,” she said. “More than anything on this earth.”
“We love you too, Sophie,” Katie reached down for her with the tip of her sneakered toe. “So much.”
And Sophie reached up to pinch it and slung the camera strap over her shoulder so she could once again, pull up her jeans, with her fingers of her other hand still clamped on tight to Katie’s foot. Not letting go for anything.