Chapter One

Chapter One

-Sophie-

November 1983


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