Chapter Two

The Secret Sister
Chapter Two
Katie
November 1989

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

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