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.

Chapter One of The Secret Sister

Chapter One

-Sophie-

March 1984


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