“Something happen at work today?” she asked, but she already knew the answer.
“Things ain't gonna work out at the mine,” Del said.
“So let's go home.” She felt the baby squirming. Maybe now it could be born in Greeley, in the same hospital she and Del had been born in. Her mother would knit a hat. Mano would paint its portrait. Sister would coo at the wrinkled newborn, fill its ears with whispered blessings.
Del shrugged, pointed toward the mountains with his palms up, as if he was offering her some gift. “This is as good a home as any.”
Del was so close that Ruth could feel the warmth of him on her shoulder. She stepped away, and they watched Charley, alone, head for the edges of the trailer park, back toward the scrub sage foothills of the Shoshones. Ruth felt sadness settle, again, all around her. There wasn't a single tree within walking distance for Charley and the girls to climb, no ancient catalpa with its June blossoms, no bean pods to throw at one another.
“I got a new job. Trucking company. They're picking me up tonight.”
“Driving trucks?”
“Reno, first, then down to San Francisco tomorrow. From there, they say they got at least two weeks of routes. Long-haul.”
Ruth sat back down in the chair. She kicked her shoes off with a strength she hadn't expected and her left shoe flew gracefully, almost with purpose, landing in the scrub sagebrush just past the area she had cleared as a front yard. Ruth thought she saw a tarantula skittering across the patch of light brown dirt that, having been liberated of its anchoring vegetation, puffed up around them, but in February, it seemed unlikely.
“You're going to leave us here and go off yourself?” she said. She felt unbearably heavy. She looked at her shoe in the sagebrush. She left it go. “To drive a truck?”
“Look in the want ads. There's no jobs but at the mine.”
“But the kids, and the baby coming.” Ruth's arms had gone dead. It would take a lot, she thought, to move her arms right now. The whole of her body felt defeated, all her energy sucked dry. And something else, something cool like the desert evening. Relief, maybe. And something even more, a longing for her own solitary long-haul route. Jealousy, certainly.
“Look, I'm not leaving you, Ruth. It's a job, is all. I'll send the paychecks.”
Ruth dropped her chin and closed her eyes, and the relief of not seeing in that moment made her wish all her other senses could be so easily blocked, that she could make herself stop hearing, stop feeling through some series of actions as simple as blinking.
“Unless you got any better ideas,” Del said.
Charley and the girls had returned from their wanderings, had gathered around the porch, straining to hear every word without being caught listening. Charley stood close to his sisters, as though he wanted to try to catch the bad news before it hit them, soften the delivery.
“Guess not,” Ruth said. “Guess it sounds like this all works out real well for you. All that roaming, and then you drop in to see the family once every two weeks.”
Del shook his head. “You'll get over it, Ruthie. You'll see. It's for the best.”
“Not my best.”
“I gotta pack,” Del said, and he disappeared into the trailer.
“Daddy's leaving?” Nancy said, and when Ruth nodded, the girls sat down at her feet. Brenda leaned her head against Ruth's leg. Nancy kept her back straight. Too fragile for contact, she needed only proximity.
Charley took her hand, pointed it above the tallest peak of the Shoshones, the trailing shadow of the sunset drama spread in all directions. “Look, Ma,” he said, wiping the tears off her cheek, “those are cirrus clouds, and they're all pink and purple. I think they're the happiest clouds, don't you? Birthday-streamer clouds.” He stroked Ruth's cheek with the back of his hand. It was the most tender anyone had been with her for ages.
“Thanks, buddy,” she said, finally, drawing him close to her in an awkward hug, stroking Nancy's hair with her fingers, feeling Brenda warm against her shin.
Babies weren't the only thing that could upend an entire world. The world changed fast or slow for a million reasons. There weren't always nine months of knowing what was coming. There wasn't always time to prepare.
AFTER A FEW DAYS, Ruth moved Del's empty chair away from the family table. She taught Charley how to keep the handles of the pot turned sideways to avoid spills and burns. She told her kids that after school was all-they-could-watch TV so long as they behaved, so long as they could fend for themselves. During the after-school hours, when she was at work, she imagined the trailer on fire, imagined tarantula bites, imagined poking Del's two eyes with her fingers when he next came by for a weekend. Evenings, she reread the nursing school brochure, as though she'd find new instructions printed there, not just what but how and should. She wished a dead ancestor would lean down from the heavens and tell her whether she was fooling herself.
Sometimes the kids came with her to work, spent their days in Allen's one-room trailer on the outskirts of Berlin. Every time they went, Charley tapped the handmade sign on Allen's door that read: Ranger Station. The trailer was full of machines and panels Ruth thought must be for radio broadcasting, for all of Allen's lonely, conspiracy-minded midnight transmissions.
“Del called in last night,” Allen said, “with some theories about mind control.”
Ruth rolled her eyes. “If he calls back,” she said, “tell him to send the rent.” Del didn't call her from his long-haul routes. Apparently, he prioritized the aliens.
Allen had been washing his clothes more often. Last week, he'd trimmed his beard. Ruth kept just enough distance to discourage him. She was, after all, still married.
“You getting by all right, Ruth?” Allen's brow furrowed. He looked worried, and Ruth felt compelled by the sorrow she saw behind it.
Ruth shrugged, nodded. Allen meant well, but beyond loyal friendship, beyond this job, what did he really have to offer?
A WEEK PASSED. RUTH was sweeping the fossil pavilion at the end of the day when she felt her belly contract and harden, felt the heat in her arms and legs drain inward, concentrate into the boulder her womb had become. She tried to lean on the broom, to stay upright, but couldn't manage it. She dropped into a squat and linked her elbows around the bends of her knees. She closed her eyes, blowing out hard, emptying all her air, waiting for this wave of pain to pass. The broom slapped the floor, the sharp initial sound softening into gentle echoes that intertwined with the rhythm of her panting. The effect was not unlike radio static. Her left hand gripped the ichthyosaur's fossilized eye socket.
“Allen,” she said. It came out as a whisper. She grunted, trying to force her voice back into her throat, trying to muster a shout. She thought of her kids, at home in the trailer in Gabbs, felt relief they weren't with her. She staggered herself out of the pavilion, into the gathering dusk. “Allen!”
And then she was alone in the throes of another contraction. Her ears were full of the tidal rushings of her own blood, of her amniotic fluids, all her salty marine internals muting the outside world. She was inside her own head now, focused. The pain moved from her womb to her lower back. She felt the baby flip inside her. This she had not felt before, not with the others. She tried to morph her screams into a level, steady keening. She imagined her breath catching her pain, imagined the way both breath and pain would leave her, diffuse into the air around her, the way she would have to breathe them both back into herself.
She felt the baby turn again, and the pain moved back into her belly. Her pelvic muscles felt alive, as though each fiber was moving individually and at cross-purposes to the others, like a writhing pile of mating snakes. She was overwhelmed by her desire to bear down, to push into the earth's gravity. The baby would not wait for safety. Ruth wanted, more than anything, her sisters, but she wanted also, just a little bit, Del.
Ruth caught the sliver of new m
oon surrounded by wispy, long clouds. Ruth tried to name them. Cirrus? Cumulus? She couldn't pin them down, and if the angels were gossiping with her dead ancestors about her current predicament, she didn't want to know. The stars were coming in bright against the darkening skyline but seemed in motion, as if they were being drawn in real time by frantic Spirograph. Bad enough the other children had to be from Vegas. This baby would be from nowhere, a ghost-town baby, born on top of a fossil. She could not take back any of the decisions that had led her here. This is where she found herself, so this is where her baby would be born.
Allen came in then, stopped still with shock. He gagged, then bent forward as he sat down on a bench, his head in his hands.
“We have to get you to a hospital.” He didn't look up. His concern was directed toward his boots.
“There's no time.” Ruth wriggled out of her nylons and dropped into a squat. She rested her forehead against the beam of the fossil pavilion. The pressure was somehow soothing, and it allowed her to balance without using her hands.
She breathed into her body's gathering, bearing down in her womb, trying to maneuver her rib cage lower, pulling her neck downward until it felt there was nothing at all between her chest and her chin. She tried to relax. She'd done this three times already. If she were in the hospital, she'd have a nurse to coach her. Here in the desert, she'd have to be her own nurse. At the peak of the contraction she reached her right hand up and into herself, screaming her wild misery into the night but willing her hand to be gentle, gentle, as she pulled, lightly, lightly, down on her child's shoulder. The head cleared and the rest of the child dropped. Ruth held it with both hands, pushing her forehead into the beam so that she would not fall, would not lose her grip. Behind her, she heard a tremendous flopping thump.
The boy was blue, wrapped in his own umbilical. Ruth made short work of unwrapping it, of clearing the clotted white mucus from the baby's nose and mouth. She turned to ask Allen for his ranger's shirt, for anything to wrap the child in, but Allen was still crumpled in a full faint. She took off her own state park sweater, wrapped her baby tight against the chill. When she heard his indignant, hungry cries, she put her back against the beam and started crying herself, shivering on the cool desert ground. The baby rooted against her belly as she waited to deliver the placenta. Beyond his newborn head, she could see the full glory of Orion's Belt. Something in the center of the constellation was flashing on and off, or maybe it was distant lightning from a threatening storm, or it was just the way she saw everything differently through her tears.
She wanted to call Sister. I'm naming this one after St. Christopher, she'd say. Because I miss you. And to protect him from lightning.
Charley would be taking charge of things in the trailer, she thought, calming the missing-mother panic of his sisters with tales of constellation aliens, spaceship abductions, and lenticular pancakes. Her sweet, awkward firstborn forever scanning the sky for signs of life and omens, trying to show everyone around him all the potential it contained, to teach them to see what he saw. Baby Chris was squalling now with healthy lungs, the tiny fingers of one hand wrapped tightly around her index finger, his other hand stretched out, pointing toward the ichthyosaur. She turned his head toward the window so that he, too, could look toward the stars.
“Someday, you'll see how bright they are,” she whispered.
It was possible, Ruth thought, that being from nowhere might somehow allow this baby to belong everywhere, to call anywhere home.
Allen crawled beside her. He reached toward the baby, but then pulled his hand away. “We're going to have to get you a raise.”
Ruth laughed, shivered, tightened her arms around the bundle of baby on her chest. “I'll take it.”
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, RUTH rocked a sleeping Chris on the porch while the other three slept inside. She worried St. Christopher between her thumb and forefinger. She had one blanket over her shoulders and one on her lap. The night air was headed toward frost. It still carried the fragrant sage scent, but the dusty tones had shifted to something deeper, prehistoric. Del had come home for just two days to meet his new son, dance the girls around the kitchen, give Charley a UFO-shaped key chain.
As Del drove away, his return unspecified, Ruth realized she didn't miss Del so much as she missed his hands—hands that could button a child's coat, fix a dinner, warm her shoulders with their warmth and their weight. Any man had hands. Allen had hands, but they came with strings attached, and she wanted the strings less than she wanted the hands. Ruth had saved enough to get in the Falcon and drive, job be damned and Del, back to Colorado, but she hadn't left Gabbs. The Falcon's tires were threadbare but roadworthy, and Ruth had decided to drive them toward her first nursing class instead of retreating back home. The creamed corn money added up either way.
That night, when she waddled into the kitchen to count it, the creamed corn can was gone. Ruth felt everything in the hot center of herself twisting—gut, throat, heart. She reached for the countertop, heaving her weight just in time, and vomited into the chipped porcelain sink. She imagined Del in Vegas, turning her creamed corn money into slot tokens and lost potential. She imagined him in a liquor store, turning her creamed corn money into a happy solo buzz.
What now, St. Christopher?
The silence was infuriating. She needed spiritual guidance that had some volume. She checked on her children, their sleeping bodies illuminated by moonlight, and then she swaddled Chris tight and drove down to the pay phone.
The phone rang and rang until she heard a drowsy greeting, then whispered feminine commotion, and then, finally, Sister.
“Ruth?” Sister said. “It's the middle of the night here.”
“Same here.”
“You woke everyone up.”
“It's not fourth grade. You can't rap my knuckles with a ruler.”
“Ruthie,” Sister said, “you sound crazy.”
Ruth tried to picture what nuns wore to bed, what Sister looked like in this moment. She imagined multiple layers of garments, complicated hook-and-eye fastenings.
“Can I still pray to St. Christopher if I'm stuck here in Gabbs?”
“Prayers are like the radio, Ruthie. You never know who's listening exactly, but someone always is.” There was a pause. “Can you please tell me what's happening?”
“Del stole my creamed corn money.”
“Del,” Sister said, expelling his name with her breath, almost grunting him out. Chris startled, blinked his drowsy newborn eyes, settled back into sleep. “I'm sorry, Ruth.”
Ruth slumped down onto the sidewalk under the pay phone, her back against the cinder-block wall, the desert sky stretching endless in front of her, her newborn son cradled in one arm. She felt comfortable with the immensity of the sky. She hoped Charley was right about the aliens, that Del and Allen knew more than it seemed possible they could. The more life there was, the less lonely any one person had to feel, the more hope for a connection.
“What do you think you'll do now?” Sister had turned her volume down, or there was something wrong with the line. It was hard to hear.
“I'll just have to start over.” She wasn't ready, yet, to tell Sister about the nursing school. At least it was a safer place to put the money than a creamed corn can, even if it was a longer road back to Colorado. A way to believe, again, in her own glittering future. Something, like her children, that she'd have for herself.
Chris stirred in her arms. Ruth thought about her girls' giggled secrets, about Charley's hand on her cheek. She watched the moon traverse the patterned stars, wondered which constellations Charley would map for her if he was awake, which individual shining points of light, grouped together, would make a whole story.
Early Warning Systems
IN MARCH OF 1986, Mano Reichert climbed onto the roof of her childhood home in an effort to see Halley's Comet. Though the comet was supposed to be brighter fr
om the southern hemisphere, Mano had a set of binoculars and a positive outlook. She'd been stargazing from the roof of her house since she was ten years old, the same year her then teenage sisters, Teresa and Ruth, left home within months of each other. For Mano, their especially little sister, suddenly alone, lonely, bereft, the roof was a tiny rebellion. Her parents, who loved her best when she entertained herself, were rarely curious about her location, and her sisters, who would certainly have told her it was too dangerous, had taken their opinions and their protection with them when they left.
Mano had always struggled to see the constellations by tracking stars. Instead, she could focus on the negative space and find the silhouettes that were outlined in the sky, the light of the stars a bright outline of inky blue-black beauty—her sisters in profile, the trailing seed pods of a catalpa tree, a crisscrossed map of the interstate highway system. She knew the sky shifted with the earth's orbit and rotation, but slowly, nearly imperceptibly. Mano loved anything—airplanes, satellites, comets—that flashed fast and bright across her familiar skies, helped her see them differently. In art school, Mano had learned that vision was a layered thing, something beyond physical sight. Vision required clarity. You could paint the world exactly as you saw it, but without a coherent sense of context, without intentional meaning-making, you wouldn't end up with art. For years, Mano had made half a living painting portraiture and landscapes for tourists outside Rocky Mountain National Park, an application of her talent from which she had been unable to make any meaning at all.
“I heard it's years of luck if we see it.” Ruth, Mano's oldest sister, joined her on the roof as often as she could these days. Ruth worked the night shift as a labor and delivery nurse, and when she wasn't working, she slept, her snores as rhythmic and patterned as a washing machine cycle. Ruth's enthusiasm for stargazing hinted that the romantic Ruth, the wild teenage dreamer Mano had idolized as a girl, still lived somewhere underneath the increasingly harsh practicality of Ruth's middle-aged-working-single-mother-of-four persona. “Once-in-a-lifetime sighting, once-in-a-lifetime luck.”
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