Just a bunch of writing...

Chapter Six-Sam-May 1990

2009-07-03T21:58:00.001-07:00

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.

Chapter Five

2008-10-06T00:17:00.001-07:00

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.”

Chapter Four

2008-06-28T23:30:00.001-07:00

The Secret Sister
Chapter Four
Sophie
June 1984

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

Chapter Three

2008-06-28T23:29:00.001-07:00

The Secret Sister
Chapter Three
Sam
December 1989

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

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

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

Chapter Two

2008-06-28T23:28:00.001-07:00

The Secret Sister
Chapter Two
Katie
November 1989

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

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

Chapter One

2008-06-28T23:27:00.001-07:00

Chapter One

-Sophie-

November 1983

She waited out the last minutes of another workweek leaning back on a makeshift wooden bench in a cramped, metal-roofed smoke shack set off a good ways from the building she had just walked out of. She sat in the corner farthest from the open doorway listening to the wind whistle and creep outside, and watching it stir dust and uproot tumbleweeds from the desert floor much like a small child would tear apart a playroom in a middle of a fit. Storm clouds the color of burned charcoal brushed the mountaintops in the distance and swirled their way inwards toward the valley center faster than Sophie had seen them do in a long, long time. The smell of old cigarette smoke and too-strong coffee had been overwhelming when she opened the door closed off since afternoon break so Sophie left it to shake and shudder in the wind as if trying to make up its mind whether to slam back closed or not. She could feel the air harden and chill as she sat there in those few moments with her head leaned back against the thin plywood wall and her body still and quiet.
It was a second away from snowing when just that morning it had been warm, shirtsleeve weather really. Sophie hadn’t even bothered with her winter coat, just an oversized grey thermal shirt and her red and black plaid flannel jacket still new and stiff in the sleeves and back. She bought it a week or so ago to stave off cold from the airy concrete building where she spent most of her days. Eight hours of breaking apart once dangerous munitions and turning them into mostly inert piles of metal scrap, cardboard casings and dusty bags of explosive powder could get quite chilly, especially in the late afternoon once the sun settled behind the mountains and blanketed the valley in deep purple shadow.
A few others trailed toward the shack a while after her, their steel-toe leather boots crunching the rocks that had settled down into the two worn foot tracks of the dusty path. She picked a smoke out of her pack of Marlboros with fingernails she had neatly polished pink the night before but had since chipped and taken on a grayish-green tint from the dusty rounds of the same color. She couldn’t say why she had even bothered in the first place except that she hoped for the chance that Loren would see them. She stood to grab a matchbook sitting on the old burnt orange formica table littered with ashtrays and playing cards that stood in the opposite corner. She lit her cigarette and flipped the book back on the table then looked down at the floor as people made their way in, stomping their feet on the thin plywood floor and taking their places alongside the usual people.
“This will sputter out quick,” Joe Miller said to no one in particular. He liked to do that—talk when no one was listening. With yellowed fingers he tapped out a Marlboro Red from a pack he kept in his tee shirt pocket. “The clouds are moving too quick for it to last long.”
He sat down near Sophie and grasped his cigarette with the tips of his thumb and index finger and took a drag like he was breathing in through a straw. He closed his eyes and let the smoke all back out again, leaning the back of his head against the wall. His salt and pepper hair stood straight up, thick with something like the Brylcreem her father used to wear in his own deep cherry red hair. Joe’s tee shirt clung tight against his gut resting in his lap like a tight, hardened ball. Sophie flicked her ashes into the tray sitting on the bench between them and noticed that one drag had burned through nearly half his cigarette.
The feel in the smoke shack was much like the feel of the entire ammunition depot and small town that it surrounded—a quiet, almost tense familiarity—that Sophie thought just about everyone who worked here or lived here had to feel. People in this town knew the very insides of each other, the pieces of which they were constructed, and that feeling was an unsettling one for Sophie. This made her the same girl she had always been, never changing and static, no matter how much her insides liquefied and reestablished themselves differently. Like Joe Miller was known as the man who could never stop talking about absolutely nothing, Sophie was known as the silent girl, the girl who never talked unless she absolutely had to speak. The girl whom most assumed was quiet on the inside because she was quiet on the outside. She would never be anything different here. She had already been established. Already set in stone.
The workday was over now, at least it would be in a minute or two, as soon as someone in the smoke shack or the others waiting by the gate to the parking lot said “Let’s go.” The weekend stretched out empty and endless before her. She snuffed her cigarette out while Joe lit another and everyone eyed their watches and waited for someone to make a move.
The previous weekend in the mess of her garage she found an old pair of men’s Levi jeans, soft and frayed and washed a million times. She liked to think they had been her father’s but who knew really? Who could tell in all that stuff bunched together and piled up with no discernable lines dictating where one part of the mess, one part of her life’s history, stopped and another began? These jeans could have been Jake’s or Lonnie’s or another of her mother’s boyfriends who came in and out after her father was gone. Now though, they were hers. That morning, she rolled the legs to rest low on her boot tops and cinched the waist with a leather belt. She never felt denim so soft and she had trouble throughout the day not concentrating on how smooth it felt against her legs. She rubbed the material now with her rough palms, the friction numbing the skin as she ran her hands over the tops of her thighs.
Lisa Bryan and Denise Dupree stood near the doorway whispering about her as they passed a shared cigarette between them. They did that a lot, whispered about people. Today their target was Sophie. She could tell by the sideways looks they gave her as they looked over their shoulders in her direction then turned back around. Even dressed down in oversized sweatshirts, jeans, and steel-toed boots, they had made certain to keep their long hair feathered back and hairsprayed into a thin ponytail and their eye shadow neat and lipstick applied. Those were just the kind of women they were. Polished.
“You and I look like twins,” Joe poked Sophie’s shoulder with a fat finger. When he smiled he flashed bright white teeth Sophie was sure should be yellowed and dull the way he smoked. She was too busy processing this sudden discovery and trying to figure out why this was (dentures? caps?) to realize what he had said to her until she heard Lisa and Denise snorting back laughter in the corner.
“You know?” Joe said, trying to lean in and make eye contact with her. “The jackets?”
He touched her sleeve. She looked down. Their jackets matched exactly. The same red and black plaid pattern. The same stiff arms and back that told everyone else that they were new, told everyone just how hard Sophie had tried to blend in, to establish herself in this place, since before working at the base she would have never dreamed of wearing a man’s flannel jacket bought at the Variety Store on Main Street.
“I went in the variety store the day they got these suckers in,” Joe continued. “Great buy. I think I got two or three myself. You?” Sophie shrugged. Denise and Lisa stared wide-eyed at the two of them now, sitting there, talking about the jackets they bought at the variety store in town as if they couldn’t believe their luck at hearing such a conversation. Sophie could almost hear them later, sitting in Sal’s Bar laughing about her, her jacket, and her twin Joe, because there was nothing else that they could think to laugh about. Jesus, Sophie thought. Jesus.
“I just don’t see any reason to fight the streets and the crowds up in Reno when you can get nearly the same thing in town for nearly the same price.” Joe snuffed out his second cigarette. “It’s important to shop local anyway, I think, or else the whole town will shrivel up and blow away.”
Outside the door, just past Denise and Lisa giggling like fools at her and Joe the jacket twins, lone snowflakes swirled around in the wind before tumbling violently to the earth and disappearing. Sophie focused on them instead of this whole thing. If she could only smoke outside instead of in here, she thought. Then she could wander off free in the desert somewhere and be alone. Not sitting there in a flannel jacket she couldn’t even drive to Reno to buy, closed in, and screaming inside. Yes, I am here. I am forever here.
Then someone said let’s go, and they were gone. Only Sophie remained, watching out the door, making sure everyone, especially Denise and Lisa, had slipped into their cars and drove away before she stepped out of the smoke shack and did the same thing.
* * *
In memories of being in this place, three people stuck out most clearly in Sophie’s mind. They were Brandon and Dicky Durbin, identical twins three years older than she was, and Lisa Bryan. The twins lived next door to her at the top of town crowded into a small A-frame house with their mom, grandparents and a much older sister who had a baby she let crawl loose on a small patch of lawn just outside their front door. Sophie remembered Lisa as a bossy, pretty girl who lived a couple of blocks down in a brown house with a darker brown trim. Her father kept the lawn in front neat. Even in winter when the grass dried to an almost colorless brown, he tended to stray leaves from the two tall elm trees and swept the stone walkway that split them apart. He made sure Lisa stayed that neat as well since he was the only one there to raise her after her mother was killed in a car accident just past the lake on her way out of town somewhere, and he wanted to make sure people knew he was a good father. Her dresses and play clothes were always ironed and donated to the thrift store at the slightest hint of a stain. Her hair was always pulled into even pigtails and her face was always clean. Brandon and Dicky Durbin hated her, they said. And because Sophie wanted to play with them, she hated her too.
During summer mornings before it got too hot to do much of anything, Brandon and Dicky knocked on the door of the same old pink railroad house she lived in still now and took her out in the desert with them, leading her along the barbwire fence that housed ammunition bunkers behind it. They let her scout lizards with them because she was pretty decent at it. She could hear them rustle in the sagebrush before Brandon and Dicky could so they liked to have her lead the way. When she stopped, they stopped, when she pointed they looked. She felt important then, and needed, like without her they’d never be able to manage.
Brandon was quick-witted with a smart mouth, and Sophie liked him more than Dicky, who was a little slower physically and more careful with his words. Both had rust colored hair and deep brown freckles that appeared to her to be as round and wide as pencil erasers. She thought that it might be possible that they were her own brothers since she too had red hair, though it was a brighter, truer red, and they didn’t have a father. She never told them that though, just thought it. She didn’t have brothers or sisters then, like she did now with Katie and Sam, and she was a lonely girl.
When Lisa came around, even if she walked up the street alone, and she was nearly always alone, Brandon would shout, “Run!” and they would run. This almost always made Lisa either mad, or sad, and either way she would cry deep gulping sobs but never run back home. She made them watch her suffering. Sophie stood in between the twins, wherever they happened to be, gleeful since she was the chosen one, the one picked to chase lizards and wander the desert, and Lisa was not.
Then things changed. Dicky became Ricky and at fourteen Brandon drowned in a river in California where they were visiting family. Lisa got popular, crueler, Sophie’s Dad left, and suddenly here they were, almost twenty years later. Sophie didn’t know what had become of Ricky. She only knew he joined the military after high school. She didn’t know what had become of her father either, just that he was long gone one day and no one knew it for at least two. But she and Lisa were still here and their fates had been sealed. Sophie was silent, Lisa could laugh about it, and there was absolutely no go-between.
Many of the cars and pick-up trucks coming home from the Army Depot slowed down and turned into the parking lot hugging the brick bank sitting at the southwest corner of the only stoplight in town. The drivers, most of them all people Sophie knew the names of, stepped out and stood in circles, blowing air into their hands, warming them, and laughing with one another. Their already chapped, dry cheeks grew redder in the wind. Sophie drove her way past them, slowing up for the long line of cars threading their way up Main Street in front of her. Her flannel jacket sat crumpled up in the back seat of her old yellow Mercury station wagon, and she couldn’t help but pay attention to the other jackets worn by those standing outside the bank. There were none Sophie recognized from the racks of the Variety Store and this made her feel like a fool.
Outside of the Fast Gas across the street from the bank, where Sophie pulled up to get a soda, something she normally did when she got off work, the kid who worked the pumps, Steve Nichols, sat on the curb picking rocks from the creases of his shoe soles with black-crusted fingernails. As she approached he stretched his legs out, crossed them at the ankles and lit a cigarette. The smoke whipped away from his mouth when he exhaled. He nodded at her as she walked by as he usually did when she came around. She nodded back and smiled just a little bit.
A cream colored LTD with Ohio plates pulled into one of the pump stalls just after she walked inside the store. With a Pepsi in one hand and a Snickers bar in the other, Sophie watched Steve Nichols flick his cigarette to the ground, approach the car and bend to look into the driver’s side window. Long and lean and young, and just a year or two out of high school, he chewed tobacco and smoked cigarettes at the same time sometimes. A pack of Pall Malls and a can of Copenhagen were usually tucked into the front pocket of his grey mechanic’s shirt. Steve Nichols himself came from Ohio, moving here a few years back when his dad took an important job at the base. This was nothing Sophie had ever really heard Steve Nichols say himself. It was more what she’d heard around town, picking up the various bits of conversation about him.
He slid the gas nozzle into the car’s tank and washed its windshield by hand with broad, sweeping strokes. Sophie wondered what Ohio might be like because she had never been there, never been in any other state besides Nevada, unless she counted California where she had driven to Lone Pine a couple of times with her father so they could camp and go rock hunting. She paid the lady at the counter for the Pepsi and as she walked back to her car, Steve squatted next to the driver’s side window of the LTD smiling at the man inside. Sophie imagined that they were talking about Ohio. Maybe Steve was asking the man where about he lived, or maybe if he had heard of Steve’s hometown. It was that commonality that Sophie liked observing then; that being from the same place and meeting up somewhere else just so they could talk about where they came from.
* * *
Sophie had been in the hills, practically on top of them once, with her father and mother before they divorced. She was small then, maybe only nine or ten. Her father had been searching the hills for arrowheads and any other interesting rock, old scratched up faded glass bottles, or bit of rusted metal that resembled anything, because to Sophie’s father, each and every one of these things was valuable history to be collected and cherished. These trips over the years yielded them an amazing amount of old soda and beer cans, glass Pepsi bottles, countless obsidian arrowheads of different shapes, sizes and thicknesses, old shirts and tennis shoes discarded along the way for who knows what reason, and even a girls’ charm bracelet, its color faded out by the sun and snow, but its charms still distinguishable; a baby stroller, a daisy, a kitty and so on.
That day her family stopped at a grouping of rocks set out on a hilltop so they could have lunch. Her mother had her dark chestnut hair tucked under a red paisley patterned handkerchief and wore tennis shoes to match. Her dark indigo jeans were rolled up to just below her knees and her legs below were pale white and smooth, gleaming almost under the bright day. She handed Sophie a thermos filled with water and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich which had been squished almost flat. The late morning weather was warm and steady with a slight breeze lifting the smell of sagebrush, pine and juniper around her as she sat on the smooth, hard dirt in the shade of the rock grouping and ate her sandwich quietly. Her mother stretched out on one of the rocks above her and drank beer from an amber colored bottle.
This day was the first day Sophie had ever been shown the valley. Most times before on trips like these, they had worked their way into the hills so far that it was easy to believe they had entered a place where no people had ever been. But because this time her mother had come along, they stayed close to town, probably only about a half hour up and away. That way, they could get back home faster and easier and that was better for everyone.
After lunch, her father, tall and red bearded, led her to the edge of the hill, so that if she took another step she would tumble down its steep incline. He held her by the belt loop of her cutoff denim shorts to steady her and told her to look down. She saw the lake first, sitting directly below her. Jutting into the valley from the north, Sophie finally got to see just how far it stretched out over the valley floor and how expansive it seemed even from up as high as they were. The water glittered from within its confines of sand and sagebrush and matched the color of the sky, a bright deep blue, and pressed close to the purple mountains standing behind it. A small river fed into the lake at its north end, and it snaked up through land scattered with houses from the reservation just up the highway from town before disappearing from view in a deep gash between two other mountains in the distance.
“Look there. Look at town,” her father said softly, bending to her ear with his hand still securely on her.
The town stood south of the lake, its streets separated into sections like a grid; fifteen streets running east to west and ten streets running north to south. She saw the park, delicate and green, sitting at its most eastern edge. She nudged her father, smiled up at him and pointed down at it.
“Look,” she said. “I see the park.”
The Depot where Sophie’s father worked surrounded the small town on three sides and hugged it close. She had seen the underground magazines with their dirt, sagebrush-speckled roofs and the buildings with their thick, gray concrete sides all of her life. They stood behind barbwire fences next to the highway and at the edges of town. Some even sat across the street from her house. However, she had never been this far above them. She had always been close, eye level, never seeing past the first few. Now she was amazed at how far they lined up and stretched out, identical and uniform. They went for miles, almost to the other side of the valley where more purple mountains waited.
As she stood perched on the edge of a hill with her father next to her and her mother behind her in her red handkerchief and tennis shoes, Sophie felt almost outside herself, detached in a way, as if her feet were not quite grounded on the rocky hillside. Instead it was as if she were hovering just above it. She felt that if her father’s hand was not on her she would float away, up out of the valley where she lived and into the sky. The gentle touch of his hand to her hip felt heavy because that was what kept her there on that mountain, grounded in the present.
“Now look where I tell you to,” her father said, bringing her back into the reality of the warm spring day and her life as a little girl with her parents up on a hillside. “And you’ll be able to see our house.”
“Ha,” her mother spat out from the rocks behind them. “Our house.”
Sophie heard the slight howl of an empty beer bottle coming so close to their heads that Sophie could feel the rush of air as it flung past them and over the edge of the hill. The bottle clinked and clattered for a good while as it rolled down, and the rest of the world was silent the entire time until it settled somewhere down below, Sophie never sure if it broke or not. When she turned back, her mother had her arm raised up in the air as if still in mid-throw for a split second. Then she dropped it down to open another bottle.
“This is why I can’t stand for you to come,” her father said, not looking back but forward instead, toward town. His jaw flexed and tensed like he was biting on something small and difficult to take hold of. “Because you’re a stupid bitch the entire time.”
They gathered their things soon after, giving up on the rest of the afternoon. Her mother ignored her father. Her father ignored both of them for the most part, as he often did when bothered. Sophie didn’t talk at all during the ride back to town since she knew better by now that one word could set either of them off. Instead she thought of a moment a hundred years down the road, when someone might find that same amber colored bottle, faded from years of sunlight and scratched from rocks and sand and wind, and wonder about the story behind it.
* * *
Sophie saw Katie and Sam on the other side of Main Street as she slipped out of the entrance to the Fast Gas. They walked close together with their arms brushing and legs moving in and out in perfect synchronization. Like soldiers, Sophie thought. They each bent their heads and pushed forward against the wind to cross the street, seemingly ignoring the cars who had slowed and stopped for them. They were shy kids, and doing something like waving or even acknowledging the driver with a nod of a head or a smile, while considerate, scared them into being rude. Sophie waited for them to hop onto the curb in front of the gas station and jog to meet her at her car. Katie held her deep dark red hair flat against the nape of her neck with one hand to keep the cold wind from blowing it back in her face. But because it was long and straight and thick with each strand separate and smooth and so easily tangled together, it whipped and twirled together with no sense of reason and managed to stand straight up, no matter how hard she tried to flatten it down and control it. Sophie knew it would be matted and uncomfortable and impossible to pull a brush through because she had the exact same hair, the same length, the same texture, their father’s hair dominant despite their different mothers.
With her legs so skinny and long, Katie walked in a very clumsy manner, almost like a newborn colt trying to take its first steps. She remained encased in a girl’s body even at twelve with a flat chest and no hint of hips or a waist with stick-shaped, bony arms and an unremarkable face that carried a light smattering of freckles across her upturned nose and broad cheekbones. Still she stood an inch or two taller than Sam, who in terms of physical development remained even further behind at thirteen. He was the smallest child in his class, the most gentle, the softest spoken, and the most mercilessly teased. She thought he might stay a boy forever, like Peter Pan, and that eventually even Katie would pass him by and into adulthood, leaving him small and overwhelmed in the world.
“Hey guys,” Sophie opened the driver’s side door with a jerk and let them slide inside her car. They tumbled in, feet scrambling against the cracked vinyl seats. Finally they settled, each sitting with their hands in their laps and legs crossed at the ankles.
“What are you guys up to?” Sophie asked, stepping into the car after them.
“Nothing,” Sam replied, pushing his blue-framed glasses up his nose. “Mom has a visitor so we have to stay gone >til nine.”
“Visitor, huh?”
Sam nodded and unzipped his gray sweat jacket. His glasses fogged up in the warm air lingering in the car from before she went inside the store and he took them off and wiped them. Underneath a thick pile of long, wavy chestnut hair, Sam’s heart shaped face poked through, showcasing clean, translucent skin that was very much like a woman’s and very much unlike a teenage boy’s. Even his eyes had not yet taken on that familiar intensity that belongs to those about to become men. They remained doe-like and liquid with a thick ring of black eyelashes surrounding them. Sophie imagined he would probably maintain this softness after he was grown, if there ever would be a time when he would be grown, and that he would be beautiful.
A few stray snowflakes started to fall outside. The wind whisked them up and around so it took a long time for them to reach the ground. Sam turned toward the passenger side window and watched them. He seemed to focus on one when it was still high up in the air and then watched it drift to the earth. His head moved up, then left, then right, then down. Then he did the same thing again. Sam didn’t like talking about his mother’s visitors.
“Some start to the weekend, huh?” Sophie said as she watched Sam at the window. She pulled the car into reverse but didn’t move.
“Yeah,” Sam replied. “Stupid weather.” It had been like that way all week. Not a hint of sunshine, not a hint of warmth. Just cold wind and snow flurries. This day though was by far the worst. With the mass of swirling clouds above them, there almost no chance that it wouldn’t snow. It absolutely just about had to in order to justify all this to-do.
“Well, do you want to come to my house tonight, then? I’ll make you dinner.”
“You’re actually going to make us something?” Sam turned and gave her a small sad smile, his cheeks burning bright pink. Katie giggled then and tucked her chin deep into the neck of her coat.
“Okay, okay, I’ll buy you dinner.” Sam and Katie giggled. “But only if you can handle another night of Jolly Molly food.” This would the third time that week they had been at her house well into the night and the third time they would drive to the Jolly Molly and order hamburgers and shakes for dinner.
“Maybe your mom will let you spend the night since it’s Friday. Then we can go and rent a movie.”
“You’ll know she’ll let us.”
“She doesn’t care what we do.” Then it was quiet except for the radio crackling through the old dashboard speakers.
“Well, we still have to ask,” Sophie finally eased her car out of the parking stall. “She’ll worry.” She glanced out at Steve as she passed. Still stooped down into the window of the LTD, and talking to the man inside it, he grasped firmly to the half rolled-up window like he didn’t want to let go of it.
* * *
Lydia married Sophie’s father barely a month after he and Sophie’s mother divorced. Sophie was 12 by then, growing tall, developing breasts and hips. Later she would remember the time as being a strange one. Strange in the way that she felt like her body wasn’t really hers even though she was the one walking around in it. There were times where she would stop suddenly in the middle of what she had been doing and promptly forget what that had exactly been. “What was I doing?” She would think, shutting down like she had lost battery power. It seemed a mistake that she was buried somewhere inside this body and that she shouldn’t be somewhere else, or someone else entirely. She would then study her hands and her feet. She would examine her trunk, feeling the new curve to her once straight waist. Her once harsh ribs were now softened with a thin layer of fat she’d never had before but which she was horribly self-conscious of. All hers. This is me, she would think. This is who I am. She oftentimes had to do just about everything she could manage to avoid that feeling of nonexistence, that sense of being buried in deep somewhere she did not belong.
Why is it that I do this sort of thing, she thought as she stopped cold on the sidewalk just down the street from her father’s house one Friday just before Halloween. This was one of those times, those moments of drifting up and away, out, forward and somewhere else. It became so easy to stand still and examine herself like she would a stranger since in many ways she was a stranger. Could it possibly be normal doing this, she thought, or am I losing my fucking mind? There seemed a thin thread of difference between the two just then, normal versus not normal, until she reoriented and gathered herself by looking around at the things that were familiar; the blue shady mountains, the trees shedding their leaves, the dying brittle grass that came each fall with the town settling into another season cycle, then she moved again, walked again, and repeated the word fuck over and over in her mind. Just because she could.
Lydia had called three weeks ago and invited her over for Halloween, promising three days of popcorn, costumes and scary movies. Her mother held steadfast against letting Sophie go, wanting her there to keep her company and to hand candy out to the neighborhood kids, but finally let her because Sophie had begged everyday since she got the phone call. Sophie figured that she just must have finally broken her down because after asking for probably the six-thousandth time to go, her mother finally just put her hands over her ears and yelled, “Fine. Go!” at the top of her lungs. And so she went.
Her father and Lydia lived in a small bright yellow house with a large picture window in the front that looked out on the wide black asphalt street separating it from the high school. The house had been Lydia’s alone until her father moved in after moving out of Sophie and her mom’s pink house across town. When she approached, her father squatted down to measure the yard. She could tell by the forms he had set that he was planning to pour a walkway leading up from the street to the front door. He had finished the driveway the weekend before. This she knew after driving by with her mother and seeing him out on his hands and knees floating the surface. Now it sat new and dry and perfectly cured. Her father loved concrete. She thought that if given the chance, he might forever pave a yard bits at a time until it became completely layered over.
“This walkway will be special, Soph,” he said with his eyes glittering as she kneeled next to him in the sandy yard where mainly weeds only grew. The sand, fine and pale, was there she assumed, because the lake about fifteen miles south had once covered this very area. Only that was millions of years ago, probably, and all that was left of it now was the shifting drifts of what used to be solid rock but had since been beaten and weighed down into loose, light bits of nothing—bits of nothing that could be caught up in a gust of wind, taken away and forgotten because more sand would come and take its place.
Her father spread his arms wide with his palms down like he was smoothing something. “I’m going to figure out which rocks I want and I’m going to cut them so they’re level and smooth and then polish them. Then I’ll lay them out face up in the concrete so when people walk up they have something to look at.”
“That’s nice, Dad,” Sophie replied, wondering how this could seem like such a fresh idea since it would match the sidewalk at her mother’s house almost exactly, the one he made way back when that carried people from the street in to the door. Except this sidewalk not yet created would be new. It would not be cracked and dusty and old. It would not be uneven. She stood, kicking at a weed near her foot.
“So, school’s good then?” Her dad asked, leaning back on his heels and shading his eyes from the sun as he turned to look up at her. He always asked this, and always asked it just that way. It left her no real other way to answer him except yes, it’s fine.
“Yes, it’s fine.”
“Good.”
He reached up to her hand and clasped the end of her fingers in a claw grip, shaking her arm ever so slightly as she kept it loose at her side. The gesture made her gasp just slightly, the recognition made her swoon.
“Lydia’s waiting for you. You better get inside. She has all kinds of plans.”
Sophie smiled down at him until he dropped her hand, releasing her. She took the path he had made, wondering what rocks he would pick to guide someone up the path. This walk would be new, she thought as she walked up the step then, leaving her father alone with his grand plans, but it would not be so special. It could never be the first. Never be the only.
That night after dinner Sophie sat at the kitchen table near her father with rocks of different shapes, sizes and colors arranged in neat even rows in front of them on pink bath towels. At their feet stood stacks of boxes full of rocks and near the wall old coffee cans had been stacked up on each other, all full as well. Her father held a large, square magnifying glass in one hand and picked up the rocks with the other and turned them to different angles to catch the light from the flood lamp he had set up behind his shoulder. A cigarette hung from his raw, chapped lips leaving the air smoky and grey. A few of the rocks glittered under the light but most appeared dull and resolute, refusing to accommodate Sophie’s wishes for the sparkly insides and polished outsides that sometimes came with viewing her father’s collection of rocks. It wasn’t until later, long after he disappeared, that she understood how much his choice of rocks to examine at his dining room table matched his tendency to withdraw or be sullen or even, on occasion, to be angry or spirited, or downright friendly even. When he was happy and satisfied with things he took out what he had already primed and polished and cut, spread them out and let them shine, and reflected on his accomplishments. He talked to anyone who listened about how he had went through the process of turning a regular rock found here or there in whatever part of the country into a work of art, a thing of beauty. He held the rocks cupped in his rough hands as gently as he would a newborn.
When he wasn’t feeling good, when he was mean or quiet or some mix in between, he was more likely to have fresh, raw rocks out, still dirt encrusted, still plain and spare. He’d search the coffee cans and boxes for one he thought he remembered picking up somewhere, and soon he would have every rock imaginable strewn about with nothing to show for it. He’d fret over the rocks he managed to take out and display, wonder out loud just why he had picked them up in the first place, then grumble about them being worthless. He’d toss them aside, letting them fall to the floor around him until soon the carpet was littered with grey geodes of various sizes and shapes and he’d leave them there until he felt like cleaning them up, or until Sophie’s mom (back when he was home) or even Lydia, Sophie imagined, got sick of them being there and picked all the mess up themselves.
This day he must have felt pretty neutral since he had all sorts of them on the table. Or maybe he had simply set himself to work to find a good blend of rocks to decorate the concrete outside with. All Sophie knew then was that his red beard twitched sometimes but otherwise he was quiet and his cigarette made the room still and smoky. And he let her sit and watch him and touch the rocks and do what she needed to do with them. That patience from him was never commonplace so Sophie took advantage whenever she could.
Lydia popped popcorn in the galley kitchen just off the dining room in a large metal pot burnt nearly black. She wore only a nightshirt that stretched tight across her pregnant stomach and hung down to the middle of her thighs (almost too long even for her tall, thin frame), and a pair of white tube socks with bright yellow stripes at their tops. Lydia turned to lean against the counter, lit a cigarette and watched the two of them, the pot on the stovetop popping furiously, filling the room with a sort of white noise easy to ignore.
Beautiful in a graceful, floating way with slender legs and a smart haircut, Lydia stood out when she first moved to town to work in one of the offices at the base. She came from California somewhere and she had a husband at the time who didn’t stay in town long after they arrived. But she did. She settled in as a single, independent woman who didn’t dress like most of the women in town did in the same denim jeans and long loose blouses. Instead she opted for plaid mini-skirts, black tights and long scarves during winter that brushed past the backs of her knees. Sophie had been sure she knew of a secret shopping place somewhere that no one else in town did, or a catalog that came to her door that was not Sears or JC Penney’s. Sophie fell a bit in love with the way she seemed so easy and natural in how she carried herself and moved around in her daily life, just existing like everyone else and even as a young girl of eight or nine would seek her out at parades or Christmas tree lightings, just to see how she looked, how she moved, how she lived.
There came a time Sophie began to see her everywhere even when she wasn’t looking; at the grocery store, the bank, the post office, the park. Lydia became permanently placed in the background almost, like mountains and sagebrush. Everywhere Sophie and her parents went, she was. Suddenly, instead of Sophie seeking her out, it became almost the opposite. Lydia tried to catch her eye just to wink and smile at her when no one was paying attention, usually from across the room, or off in the distance somewhere. It was like they shared some sort of secret that these gestures acknowledged.
Up until Sophie’s father left her mother, Sophie believed that her presence somehow was only because she only wanted to see Sophie, that something about her drove Lydia closer. This feeling of being wanted around left Sophie light stepped and full of love for her. Then at the movies one night, sitting between her mother and father, Sophie turned back and saw Lydia in the back row with a man’s arms around her shoulders. Lydia waved, waggling her fingers in a feminine, playful way. Sophie returned the gesture only to have her mother slap her hand back down into her lap and hold it there.
“What in the fuck does she think she’s doing?” Her mother hissed. Her father stared straight ahead, said nothing.
So when Sophie’s dad left a month later, Sophie could do nothing up until then but expect it. The disappointment was nearly unbearable. All of Lydia’s secret glances, the touches on the shoulder as she passed, the smiles, none of that had been for Sophie and something about that fact burned deep down in her. Those secret looks and smiles. They had been for him. For them. Not her. Sophie felt used. But because she was younger then, she could never really put a word to that emotion. All she could do was feel it. It was only now, being twelve and different in mind and body could she ever have insight to realize what she felt just a couple of years before. Introspection was a new thing for her, though Sophie still wasn’t able to tell if it was a good thing or not.
At the table sitting next to her father Sophie pulled a yellowed, brittle lid off one of the coffee cans and looked inside. She picked out a rock black with gold-brown stripes the size of her fist that had been cut into an oval shape and polished smooth. It looked so odd, all shimmery and fuzzy. She loved it, thought it was the most beautiful thing she had seen. She felt she could keep looking at it and never think she had seen enough. There were so many angles to discover, to explore. She moved the rock under the light like her dad had with the others.
“That’s Tiger Eye,” her father said, looking up and snuffing his cigarette into an ashtray sitting next to him. “It’s quartz.”
“It’s so pretty,” Sophie replied. She cupped her fingers over it and the rock grew warm in her palm.
“The gold part is made when iron gets caught in the rock ????? That’s how it gets that blurry look. It’s a fairly common rock.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it.”
“It’s yours,” her father said with a slight smile. “Keep it. Find some more in those cans if you want. I have a ton of it.”
“What do you say?” Lydia chimed in from the kitchen as she removed the popcorn from the stove and dumped it into a large olive green bowl, chiding her like she could a small child who knew no better.
Her father looked her straight in the face and tilted his head with a swift jerk.
“Do no such thing.” He whispered sharply.
“Thank you,” Sophie said anyway, feeling she had to, and avoided any glance her father might have given her by studying the Tiger Eye quartz in her hand. She waited until her father lit a cigarette before she looked up again.
“Okay!” Lydia balanced the bowl of popcorn in one hand and a couple of glasses of red Kool-Aid in the other. “Girl time.”
“Go on,” her father said, shooing her away with his hand. Sophie slid out of her chair slowly, reluctant to leave his side. “Go.”
Keeping the Tiger Eye cupped in her palm, she followed Lydia into the living room wishing she listened to her father and hadn’t thanked him. But as soon as Sophie sat down on the floor in front of the bowl of popcorn, Lydia grabbed a warm blanket and wrapped Sophie up in it and she forgot all about. Lydia came with a spicy smell, like crisp fall days and pumpkin pie. The blanket smelled exactly like her. Cuddled up and warm next to Lydia, taking her in, Sophie felt special then and paid attention to. They munched on handfuls of popcorn and smiled at one another.
“Oh, wait,” Lydia said later, pulling her night shirt up over her stomach in one quick motion. “You have to see this.”
Sophie watched as Lydia’s stomach shifted and turned and pressed in different directions, like the baby inside had turned over. Then it was still. Sophie gasped. She had felt the baby kick before, but never saw it move the way it had just then, distorting the shape of Lydia’s stomach.
Her father laughed from his seat at the kitchen table at her reaction and at once Sophie felt forgiven. “You did that with your mom’s stomach too,” he said.
“I did?”
“You did.”
“You know,” Lydia said, smoothing the nightshirt back down over her belly. “Since you’ll be this baby’s big sister and all, I want to ask you for a special favor.”
“Okay,” Sophie replied, trying not to feel annoyed at the way Lydia almost always talked to her as if she were five years old.
“You don’t call me mom, you know, even though technically, by law...”
“Lydia,” Sophie’s father warned. Sophie looked back at him, not sure why he had taken such a tone.
“I would just love it if you would call me mom and not Lydia.”
“Lydia.” Her father’s tone was sharp. “Leave her alone about it. You can’t command her to call you something she doesn’t want to. She’d have done it by now.”
Sophie had never once thought about it. The last thing Lydia had ever felt like to her was a mother.
“You know, honey,” Lydia rubbed her arm. “It would mean a lot me if you did, like when you call or come over or see me around. It will be a lot less confusing for the baby to hear.”
“Lydia!”
“What, Sam?” Lydia asked innocently.
The air was tense and still. Sophie’s father lit a cigarette and stomped outside, slamming the door.
“Could you do that, honey?” Lydia continued as if her father had never even been in the room.
She looked out the window where she could see her father shadowed by the back porch light.
“Um, well, yes,” she finally said. “I can do that.”
Lydia clapped her hands like an excited girl.
Later, after she had said goodnight to Lydia, (“goodnight, Mom,” Lydia had reminded) and fallen asleep in the deep bow of the old living couch she slept on, her father woke her up. His eyes were wild and biting, flashing with the light of dawn filtering through the windows.
“Don’t you ever, ever call Lydia that around your mother, do you hear me? She’s had enough rubbed in her face.”
Sophie sat up and nodded. Her father sat in the small space she provided for him.
“Lydia lies,” her father said. “She makes you think she loves you. She traps you. Don’t you dare be trapped. Ever. She’s a demon,” he stopped still, looked around, head cocked. When satisfied they were the only two awake, he patted her on the head.
“If you don’t listen to another thing I ever say in this world,” her father whispered. “Then listen to this.” He paused again, listening. “This world is mad. And what comes out of that madness are people who are not of pure heart and mind. They will destroy what’s left of you if you let them.”
“Dad. Stop.”
He held tight to her shoulders. “I don’t make sense now. But I will.”
Then he stood up and stumbled outside. She heard his pickup truck door open and close and nothing more. She stood to look out and saw he had lay back and fallen asleep in the seat. She held herself and shivered in the cold draft of air from the window.
Standing there looking down at her father sleeping so soundly, it was easy to doubt what had just happened moments before. So she tried. She curled back up on the couch just as she had been before he had woken her up and thought about her new baby brother or sister curled up the same way in Lydia’s body. A girl? A boy? Sophie thought maybe a boy, but she couldn’t be certain. What would it look like? Bright red cherry hair like she had? Pale? Tall? Here this baby was, just under the surface of Lydia’s skin, so close it was only inches away from her fingertips even though it felt buried in great thick layers and very far away. She rubbed the Tiger Eye she still had clasped in her palm, rubbed it until its polished surface was hot. Sophie could just die to see the baby then. She craved it.
* * *
There weren’t many places to go so they just drove aimlessly up and down the streets of town and looked out at the houses, avoiding Loren’s street the best she could. But she drove back by again a few moments later against her better judgment, trying to catch a glimpse of the front of his house, his car, anything, to see if he was home yet from work, or if he had been caught late. She dared not drive by the high school to check. She couldn’t bear the sight of it, or him. So she just left it alone after that and wished she had never started thinking about him in the first place.
Sophie wasn’t quite ready to go home, wasn’t really hungry, and wasn’t really anything but bored and a bit anxious. She was waiting for someone or something to jump out and bite her, she supposed. But nothing did. Even conversation between the three of them had waned, and since they had spent so much time together lately, they had covered pretty much everything there was to talk about. So everyone remained quiet. Still. Maddeningly still.
“We should go to the lake,” Sophie said as she turned down another street car on. Katie and Sam looked at each other. “It’s still a pretty place to be,” she said, anticipating a retort. “Even if it’s snowing.”
It was easy to see Sam and Katie were indecisive. So she decided for them.
“It’s not dark yet, we could just go for a couple of minutes or so. Just walk down on the beach. We could try and see how cold the water is, just dip our fingers in it. See how cold it is compared to how warm it is in the summer.”
Katie shrugged and diverted the decision to Sam, much like she always did. Sophie often wondered if she would always be like that with men. Letting them make up her mind for her. But that thought passed as she realized that it would pretty much always be Sam there doing it if anything. She couldn’t imagine anyone else.
“Okay,” Sam replied. He looked at Katie and nodded his head a little, just enough for Sophie to notice, getting Katie to agree as well with just that little gesture, a gesture not many people would notice. Sophie pictured them the way they were when they were walking across the street together, hands and arms moving in unison.
“Okay,” Katie agreed. Sophie put the car in gear and they drove slowly again toward main street, maneuvering the car around some potholes in the road.
Wind whipped the car back and forth on the highway as they drove, the steering wheel jerking in her hands with every gust. As they made their way around the first curve of the road the lake appeared beside them, steel gray with small whitecaps appearing and disappearing on its surface. Sophie let herself imagine in the silly little girl way of hers that they were leaving town for good, just the three of them going somewhere magical and clean and new. She let herself see the small houses lined up on wide streets, the base and deep purple desert mountains as if she were for the last time. What that would be like just to slip through them and by them, goodbye.
Except they wouldn’t keep going. They’d soon pull off the highway and turn onto one of the asphalt roads that led to the shore. They would be where she had been her entire life, a place where Denise and Lisa could laugh at her for buying a flannel jacket in town and she couldn’t say much about it because they were right. She had. She couldn’t leave to go anywhere else. Her head stung and tingled when she thought about it, and catching deep, regular breaths became difficult. She felt barely conscious, barely inside herself and all around her lights flashed and glittered. She had to whistle to keep breathing or else she felt like she would stop.
“Those are new,” Sam said.
The first quarter of the twenty-five mile long lake had been sectioned off by red and white buoys. Sophie had seen in the town paper the plans to do it some time ago but hadn’t been out this way to see it in real life.
“Why?” Katie asked. “What are they doing there?”
“They used to drop bombs there,” Sophie answered. “And they are trying to keep people out of there just in case.”
“Just in case what?” Katie prodded.
They are sunken and unexploded, Sophie wanted to answer, and waiting there somewhere for just the slightest touch. The tiniest bit of pressure. The buoys bobbed and dipped in the rough water, showing the part of the lake that was dangerous and active.
“In case, I don’t know, in case a few might not have gone off.”
“Oh.”
Sophie imagined the planes that dipped down during practice flights and let the rounds fall during the fifties and sixties. She had seen those planes a couple of times when she was very young but never saw them drop anything. So instead she imagined the way the water splashed and arched when the ordnance went off, and how still the water could be after they slipped through the surface and remained still, all the way to the deep bottom of the salty, alkaline water.
Sam and Katie were quiet. Their faces matched one another’s as they stared out ahead at the highway. Sophie wondered if she was being weird and if they were scared. They got like that sometimes when Sophie got excited. They curled up and became timid. Katie had her chin tucked into her blue coat and she leaned toward Sam, not Sophie. It was almost like a choice, Sophie thought. He had more blood, similar blood. The most similar. They were half her, half her father, but all of each other. Sophie felt by herself on the driver’s side of the yellow station wagon and it made her whistle louder.
The sky was fading into an evening gray when they turned off the road and drove down the steep road that led to the shore and the small boating dock. She put the car in park then turned off the engine. They sat there for a minute in silence.
“The water looks pretty, huh?” Sophie asked, pointing at the waves lapping the shoreline in crisp sudden movements. She wondered if this was anything close to being at the ocean, and imagined that it wasn’t. The ocean had real waves, and you couldn’t see anything beyond them but horizon. Here the waves were probably meaningless and insignificant compared to the way the ocean waves beat at rocks and cliffs. She couldn’t know. She had never been to the ocean, just this lake.
The highway stretched out far above them, curving around the brown eroded cliffs. When Sophie stepped out of the car she looked up at it, she saw the graffiti-painted cliffs and diesels making their way slowly around the turns. Wind whipped her hair loose from its ponytail and the loose strands of hair poked and stung her eyes. She walked down to the shore and bent down and put her fingers in the water. It didn’t feel very cold. She looked up at the car. Sam and Katie were still sitting in it, close together, huddled up against each other. She gestured to the water.
“It isn’t cold!” She yelled. “Come and feel! It’s almost warm!” She stood up and motioned for them to join her but they stayed inside. She thought it might be because of her. She looked out at the water, toying with edge of her shirt. Then she moved over to the boat launch and walked down the cement slabs and stepped up on the metal dock that jutted out into the water next to them. She stood at the edge and looked back at Sam and Katie. They had stepped out of the car and stood behind the passenger side door as if it were some sort of barrier.
“Come feel the water, you guys. It will be educational. Like a science experiment. Summer lake water vs. winter lake water. Live at eleven.”
She bit her lip and turned around and for a minute felt awkward and exposed but then just stopped thinking all together. She’d found it easier that way. The lake water jostled the dock and moved underneath her feet just inches away through the metal grating. She couldn’t see very far down but could see green algae stuck to the metal beams that held the dock firmly above the water. It moved like human hair, gracefully, taking shape with each current that grabbed for it.
She unbuttoned her flannel shirt and opened it. She slipped it down her shoulders and she let it fall to her feet. Her exposed skin tightened into goose bumps but she wasn’t cold.
She could hear Sam yelling for her, but couldn’t really tell what he was saying. It was starting to snow; flakes hit the water and disappeared one by one. She slipped off her boots and socks and then her jeans and tee shirt, only her bra and underwear remaining, white and shiny. She stood at the edge of the dock, rubbed her hands against her bare abdomen and her heavy hips and full breasts. Her hair whipped around her face, bright red against the gray darkening sky, making the world slow down nearly to a stop. Then she dove in.
Shocked. Alive. Paralyzed. All at once everything came at her and her thoughts became sparse and punctuated. Her mouth filled with salty, alkaline water and she couldn’t see anything but dark green haze flecked with bit of even darker green than that. Plants growing up from the bottom twisted themselves around her feet as they scraped and slid over the slick, slimy rocks on the lake floor. She swam under the water toward the shore and felt the various temperatures of currents flow around her, the different levels of cold. When her body started to stiffen and cramp, she surfaced and tried to get footing as she walked toward shore. She stepped onto the wet sand and then the dry sand as she straightened her posture, like going from old to young again. Her skin appeared blue under the faded and darkening day but she was so warm she couldn’t keep from smiling while gasping for air at the same time underneath her hands cupped to her mouth. The sky and beach still seemed so bright and beautiful she wanted to cry and dance in her bare feet and numb skin.
Sam and Katie met her back at the dock. Katie wiped thick tears from her cheeks, her face down toward her feet, trying to look like she wasn’t crying.
“Why did you do that!” Sam asked, his voice trembling when he talked. His teeth were chattering together. It seemed he hadn’t even thought of being brave like most boys would have done if they were thirteen and unnerved. The snow fell harder and the wind swirled the flakes in spirals.
“It wasn’t cold!” Sophie replied, her hands still over her mouth as if hiding a bad set of teeth. “It was wonderful!”
Katie ran up the dock and plucked Sophie’s shirt from the edge as it threatened to flap its way into the water then gathered the rest of the clothes up in her arms. The wind had dried Sophie’s skin by then, leaving a dry white film on it while hair dripped water down her back. Katie handed Sophie her clothes, and set her boots down in front of her. Sticky and gritty with alkaline from the water and sand from the shore, but calm and warm, she let her teeth chatter uncontrollably and her body clench and relax, clench and relax.
“You scared us!” Katie blurted out as they were making their way back up to the car. Snow fell more heavily now and clouds moved in circles above the mountains.
“I scared you?” Sophie replied, stopping to pull her shirt on. “I didn’t want to scare you, Katie. Sam, I scared you?”
Sam nodded.
Sophie opened the car door and they got in. She started the engine and Katie turned the heater to full blast. Sophie felt calm, felt normal, but still she felt like scattering off into a million minute pieces and she knew that had to be because she was not calm, not normal. She wondered if she were wild-eyed then, driving home.
“I’m sorry,” Sophie said when they were on the highway again, headed back to town. “I’m really sorry.”
And she tried her hardest to be. She said the words because she felt like she had to. She did not want to make them feel awkward or scared. Except her body was alive and new. She did not feel sorry because of that.
Katie and Sam nodded and Katie touched her leg like it was all right. She looked down at them, pale and small with their large eyes blinking up at her. She wanted to keep them close and protect them. But then underneath that, she wanted them far away from her, out of the car, somewhere safe, all in the same thought. She felt like she might be too much for them, much like she had become too much for everyone else.