Chapter Six-Sam-May 1990

The Secret Sister
Chapter Six
Sam
May 1990


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

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

Chapter Five

The Secret Sister
Chapter Five
Katie Shaw
July 1990

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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