Chapter Three... yeah, seven months later or something. Whatever, lots of changes. Sue me.

The Secret Sister
Chapter Three
Sam
December 1989


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

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

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

Chapter Two of The Secret Sister

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.
AButton your coat,@ Noe said, nudging her. AHurry.@ He rolled the window down and Katie fumbled the large brown buttons between her fingers, pulling the coat closed over her pregnant stomach.
AHey,@ Raymond said as he leaned into the truck and rested his elbows on the half-rolled down window. AWe=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.
AI 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.@
AYou can=t stay?@
ANah. 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.
AIt doesn’t kick as much as it used to,@ she whispered. AI 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.
AYou=re sure? It=s not just sleeping a lot?@
AI 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. AIt=s almost December though,@ he finally said. AThanksgiving=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.
AThat’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. AWe do have to figure things out, Noe. Before it comes. We have to figure out what we=re going to do.@
AI know,@ he replied. His body tensed around her quickly, as fast a pulse. AI just don=t want to do it right now. Not tonight.@
AI think I should go to Dr. Lowell.@
AKatie, Lynn works there. You said yourself she would tell your mother. You’ve told me that a million times.@
AMaybe 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.
AI 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.
AOkay,@ Katie said quietly. AWe’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.
AThis is just hard, Katie.@
AI 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.
AYour 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.
AI’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. AI=m twenty,@ she recalled him saying. AShe’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.
AI 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. AI 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.
APut 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.
ALeave the meat out,@ her mother yelled over the television. AWe can have spaghetti tonight.@
AThere=s no meat, just coffee and apples and cereal.@
AJesus, Katie. I bought hamburger. Open your eyes.@
Katie walked into the dining room and waved the empty bag. ANo meat, mother.@
AThen 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.@
AMust 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.
AWhat are your plans tonight, Katie?@ Her mother asked, her voice tired. Katie rolled her eyes. Her mother knew what her plans were.
AI=m going out with Noe.@
Her mother sighed. AAs usual.@
AYes, Mom. As usual.@
AYou 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.@
AI 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.
AWe have rules now,@ she said, her voice muffled because she was biting her thumb nail down deep into the quick. ANew 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.
AI made a face at you today, Sam,@ Katie said, peeking around the entryway from the kitchen.
AReally,@ Sam replied. AI didn’t see you.@ He shrugged off his black leather jacket and threw it on the recliner.
AFor Chrissakes, Sam. Could you at least throw it on your bed?@ Their mother said as she stood up. ABoth 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.
AFuck!@ 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. AWhat 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.
AAre 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.
AI don=t know, maybe.@
AI 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.
AMaybe I’ll see you out there. See how the night shapes up.@
AOkay.@
“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.
AKindergarten,@ April repeated. AIt 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.
* * *
ASee,@ she would say to Sam reaching out this baby out to him. AThis 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. AThis was why,@ she whispered over and over in front of her mirror. AThis 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.
AWhere 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.”
AKatie, don’t give me that shit. How could you not know where he is?@
AI don=t know,@ Katie shrugged. AI 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.
AHe 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. ADon=t you even care?@
Katie tried to consider the question, but couldn’t even begin to answer it. Did she care?
AI 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.
AWhat is going on!@ her mother yelled as she walked out of the room and down the hall. AWhat 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.”
AHealthy,@ 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.
AI knew it,@ Nicole McCuller, Mr. McCuller’s 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. AI 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.
APlease 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.
ADo you think I would have put him in jail? Is that why you did this?@
Katie didn’t answer.
AOh, Katie,@ her mother had said a little breathlessly. AHe 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.