Andrea took a moment to swallow and breathe and compose her face before heading to the driver’s seat. If Lucia detected dread or fear or resistance, she’d go underground. In that way, Andrea thought, she’s just like me.
They spent the first night in Wallace, Idaho, an old silver-mining town. (“What’s a brothel?” Lucia asked. “Well, now it’s a coffee shop,” Andrea answered. “I’ll tell you in the car.”) At the Stardust Motel, Lucia hopped into the spaceship parked by the sign, posed for pictures, and then they went to their room and ordered bad cheese pizza that still tasted good. Lucia sprawled on a double bed all her own, gorging herself on pizza and cable television. Andrea muted the commercials. Family vacation. If only.
As they rose higher into the Rockies, snow appeared and thickened. Cellular service went out for long stretches. The temperature dropped. Beatriz blasted the heat and muttered, “Caralho!”
“I know what that means,” Lucia warned triumphantly.
“Is it too cold?” Andrea asked. “Should we turn back?” Beatriz shot her a look. “Kidding,” she muttered.
A river ran alongside the highway for a long while, dark water coursing beneath marshmallowy snowcapped rocks and banks.
Was this the way he’d driven? Andrea wondered. What the fuck was he thinking?
Those had been strange days. When she woke up alone that morning, she had known in her gut. That note—Ryan never left notes like that. “Love you”? No way. He was a person who came and went and sent a postcard later. Always already gone. She’d sat with the note for a minute. She reflexively made a full French-press pot of coffee, and drank her half while the rest grew cold and bitter and overextracted. She poured the remains over the porch railing and watched the grounds hit the dirt, looking like dirt. Then she went about her day: fed the animals, walked the dog, went to work. Kept resting a hand on her abdomen so she could feel the baby’s movements inside and out. At Artifacts, Ted noticed this and asked if the critter was kicking yet, and she said no because she did not want to be touched. She called the house once, no one answered, she left a message. Before she went home, she stopped for groceries to give him extra time to get back, just in case; when she arrived, the house was as she’d left it, the note still on the table, Bullet frantic with relief. The answering machine was blinking. She sat and listened to the messages—one her own voice, checking for him; three from Ryan, sounding wired and impatient and apologetic at once. Eastern Washington? There was no reason for him to be out there. The baby turned inside her and she remembered last night: the kick, his hand on her abdomen, his withdrawal. “Oh, please don’t be a cliché,” she said aloud. She made half a box of spaghetti and ate the entire thing out of the saucepan. She changed into pajamas and watched an X-Files rerun with Bullet on the couch. Meena called and she let the machine answer. She got into bed early and read for five minutes before her eyes began to blur and she turned off the light.
Andrea had been half-asleep when the fourth call came. She recognized that she was now supposed to run to the phone and grab it, out of her mind with worry, or livid; the script of such a thing dictated that she scold, or beg, or jubilate. But she had no desire to scold or beg or jubilate. Fuck the script. Eyes closed, she turned her head to better hear his voice coming through the tiny speaker in the living room, scratchy and plaintive as a four-track recording. Soon Ryan stopped talking and with a click, the house went quiet again. Just the gentle hum of the refrigerator, Bullet’s fluttery dream whimpers, the sound of her own breath. A peace came over her. The only thing she had to do was take care of herself and the baby. Let the rest happen. I will just wait, she thought. I will wait and let him reveal himself.
And now, to think this was where he had been. How did he pull off such a drive in that decrepit old van?
“Mom.” Lucia tapped her shoulder. “Can I see your phone?”
Andrea said no, they had to save the battery. Instead, they played Twenty Questions. Lucia went first. She thought for a minute. “Okay. Ready.”
“Who are you?” Beatriz said.
“You can’t just ask that!” Andrea said.
Lucia giggled. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
Eastern Montana. The horses stood close together in their corrals and fields, thick-furred and plush. In Billings, oil refinery smokestacks shot flames. They dutifully visited the dinosaurs in Glendale and crossed into the Badlands, its corrugated buttes the color of blood and flesh and bone. They pulled off at a scenic overlook and got out of the car, zipping their coats to their chins against the wind. “Oh my god, look behind us,” Beatriz said. An idling semitruck pulled away to reveal a bull bison standing at the edge of the parking area nibbling the brown grass. He was horned and mountainous, shaggy flanks like a landscape. Lucia asked for Beatriz’s phone so she could take a picture. She moved toward the bison as if magnetically pulled, and when Andrea realized she wasn’t stopping, she had to run over and grab her arm. “But he’s eating. He’s not scared,” Lucia protested. “I just wanted to get a little closer.”
The kid had no sense of danger yet. That was the problem.
A night in Belfield at the Trapper’s Inn. In nearby pastures and backyards, small derricks swung back and forth like strange little toys. “What are those?” Lucia asked. “They’re funny.”
“They look like oil things,” Beatriz said.
“In North Dakota?” Andrea scoffed. “That would be weird.”
The land settled into snow-dusted fields flecked with beige stubble and a flatness that outdid even Nebraska. The occasional boulder heap in a field was the only topography. The view was one-eighth land and seven-eighths sky.
The light was different here on the plains, clear and thin where Oregon in late autumn was gray and muted. November had always made Andrea a little sad, dimmed her. But this was a particular winter light she recognized from childhood.
Forests filled in around them when they crossed into Minnesota. They finally drove into Bemidji in a cobalt-blue twilight, the land white, the trees black, the scattered houses’ windows incandescent gold.
Andrea clutched the wheel tighter. Beatriz read the directions aloud. Otherwise, they were all three silent.
“Left here.” A dark bait shop, a motel with vacancy, a gas station in a cold pool of light. The trees a black torn edge along the sky. The road darkened as they left the town behind.
“Right at the stop sign.”
Lucia sat forward in the back, seat belt taut against her chest. In the rearview mirror Andrea saw how she looked out the window, eyes wide and scanning, as if she’d see him emerge from the woods. Was Lucia nervous? She looked a little nervous, her lips tight enough to draw in the shadow of her dimple.
“Do you want to check in at the hotel first, Luz?” Andrea asked the mirror.
Luz’s eyes darted to meet hers. “No,” she said decisively.
Oh. She was excited.
Beatriz set her hand on Andrea’s neck and rubbed the nape. Andrea leaned into it. Hold me up, she thought, and she did. But what about Beatriz?
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” Beatriz said. “We’re almost there. Left.”
The road they turned onto was packed snow over gravel, narrow, barely two cars wide, a pale stripe through woods and modest fields, marshes with frosted cattails. Andrea flicked on the brights. Living in a city, she had almost forgotten about brights.
“Here,” Beatriz said. “On the left.”
Click-click, click-click, the needless blinker. A black mailbox with stick-on numbers, mounted on a wooden post. The driveway, narrow and flat, curved through trees and then opened on a clearing with a little cabin. The shades were down, but a glow filtered around them. He was home.
Andrea killed the ignition. The heat died but the car was still warm. “Well,” she said, not moving to unbuckle her seat belt. “Here we are.”
The light came on over the front door.
The Wait
RYAN TRIED
TO LOOK AROUND HIS HOUSE AS IF HE’D NEVER seen it before. If this were the first time he’d crossed the doorway, what would he think about the man who lived here?
It would take them three days. He’d done it in just over one. I’ll text you as we get near, Andrea had said on the phone.
I don’t text. I don’t have a cell phone, he’d said.
Of course you don’t, she’d said. And I thought I was a Luddite for not joining Facebook. Well, we leave Saturday so we’ll be there Monday evening. Should I, like, call when we’re close?
Just call if something goes awry, he said. I’ll be here.
Very nineties.
I guess that’s fitting.
“This might have been worth mentioning sooner,” Kelly said grimly. “What else are you not telling me?”
“You have a whole life that precedes me,” he countered. “I don’t need to know everything.”
“Come on, Ryan. You know where I stand on the important stuff.” Kelly was thirty-four and didn’t want kids, which was a pleasant distinction between her and most of the available female stock up here. She had a doctorate from Arizona State but she’d grown up in Fargo and was tough as nails. She never wore makeup or sunscreen, so she had a few extra lines that crinkled around her eyes, and even in October the faint pale outline of her tank-top tan dipped across her collarbone and shoulders.
Ryan had thought the two of them might be onto something. But when Kelly’s pickup coughed to life and growled out of the driveway this time, he knew that was the last he’d see of her for a while. Possibly ever. Possibly just a while. It was impossible to avoid someone here, the options were limited, and after a long enough cooling-off period he’d probably start to look good to her again.
It was Sunday night. They’d be here tomorrow. He vacuumed and swept again. He sat at the table and wrote Kelly a short, sweet letter to drop in the mail tomorrow or the next day. It had never failed him, the letter, especially if he put a little drawing on the envelope. By the time she received it and thought about it, they’d probably have come and gone. Who would these people be, anyway? Who was this kid? His sole input had been genetic—she’d known only Andrea, and Portland, her whole life, and that’s what would determine her. What kind of kid came out of there? Portland was a place he barely thought of anymore, and spoke of even less. He’d been in Bemidji long enough that no one asked, and besides, Where did you come from? wasn’t a question people asked much. In Portland people always asked because the answer was never “Here.”
Every now and then he’d come across some rapturous piece online about the fantastical wonderland of Portland—it seemed the New York Times discovered it anew every three months. They cited Powell’s Books, Forest Park, the obvious, but also a million restaurants and cafés he’d never heard of that were now established staples. And the neighborhoods they cited as shopping and dining meccas, arts districts—Alberta Street? North Mississippi Avenue? It was another city they described. He wondered about his old haunts, his old apartment. The Portland in his head was sticky dark bars, cafés that were really diners, damp junkies, the big old craftsman houses he and his friends could never afford to live in now, the stretch of gray months where you had to turn on the lights at noon. He’d appreciated it most upon leaving and returning—descending toward hills nearly black with evergreens, or crossing the Columbia River, or driving in at night when the neon and streetlights seeped color into the mist. It had been a great place to escape and a great place to come home to, but a hard place to stay. Anyone not in a band seemed to go nowhere else. Andrea practically had moss growing on her back.
Yet everything in Portland, no matter how fixed it appeared, seemed to split apart so effortlessly. A high erosion rate. The roots ran shallow. Even Andrea and her beloved queer community were as bad as or worse than anyone—they clung so fiercely to each other, and yet they’d cheat or fall out and entire friend networks would break into pieces. The band had felt like home; Andrea had briefly felt like home; he had lost, or given up, both of them.
Now he had a real one. Ryan’s house had been used as a hunting cabin for several years before he moved in as a renter, and a year later he’d persuaded the absentee owner to sell it to him. It was one story, built in the 1940s, with split-log siding painted dark brown and forest-green trim. It came with dirty rust-colored carpet and bunks in the lone bedroom and a harvest-gold refrigerator with yellowing shelves. The garage floor had been piebald with auburn deer bloodstains. Friends came over to help him clean and fix it up. People here knew how to fix and build the way his Northwest friends knew their way around a guitar. A different DIY culture, a different basic knowledge.
To his surprise, living out in the woods suited him. He learned all the trees’ names and developed allegiances with and animosities toward various birds. Noticed tracks and where the deer bedded down. Winter was the best—it was the longest, hardest season, but also the most clean and beautiful, and no mosquitoes. He had come to love how when snow fell it absorbed all sound, the air cottony with it; how in the morning, the trees cast blue zebra-stripes of shadows across the white; how the hard-packed snow squeaked underfoot. Ryan hadn’t intended to settle down in Bemidji so long, but he had grown deeply attached to this patch of land. And his friends were loyal and smart. They got each other through rough patches. The long-term small-town weirdos were a different species from the urban kind he’d known; each lived against the grain in their own way, with little expectation of reward for their idiosyncrasies, grateful to find like-minded people of any stripe.
Bemidji was a place people were from. Most had grown up here or nearby; they had stayed, or they had left briefly and then returned. With twelve thousand people and a small state university, this was the biggest town in the region. It had a dogged little food co-op and an old woolen mill and a new tattoo parlor. The stores in town hung signage in Ojibwe and English. Ryan’s friends ranged from their twenties to their seventies. For his fortieth birthday last December, they’d thrown a big party out at Bud’s place, merging it with the winter solstice party Bud usually held. There was a bonfire six feet tall and mountains of hot food in the house. Crossing that line into forty had been a relief. His twenties and thirties solidly behind him, done with, forty was like an absolution. So he’d thought.
At the barbershop on Monday, Ryan was so distracted he nearly shaved a stripe into the side of a client’s head. He closed early, at three, and went home. There was nothing more to clean. He had a cup of coffee. He had a shot of bourbon. He brushed his teeth. He forced himself to eat a banana. The house grew dim and he turned on the lights. He walked out to the end of the driveway and then back in to see what it looked like from the approach. If he was in there, you could see whatever dumb thing he was doing. Normally he never dropped the blinds, since no one could see his place from the road, but he went back inside and let them all down.
Finally, a car slowed on the road.
Headlights in the driveway.
A momentary urge to shut off all the lights, like his mom had done on Halloween when they had no candy to give. He wanted to head out the back door, to the open space of the yard and the dark sky and the waxing moon overhead.
But no. The motor went quiet. A few seconds later, he heard car doors thunk shut.
The most peculiar feeling. He imagined he was in a movie, playing the improbable role of a man meeting his . . . daughter for the first time. What kind of movie would that be? A war movie?
He flicked on the outside lights.
He pulled on his sneakers and coat and opened the front door.
Everyone
LUCIA COULD HARDLY BREATHE. IT WAS LIKE MAGIC, A LITTLE cabin back in the dark woods, with a gold glow seeping out from the edges of the windows and snow that gleamed a soft blue-white. This was where he lived.
She unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the car. The cold was sharp and bright. She inhaled deep to feel the shock of it all the way in her lungs. Her body tingled. Her mother and Beatriz emerge
d from the car now too; they told her to zip up her coat and put on her hat, but she shook her head, she didn’t feel cold at all, and now the front door was opening.
He was tall and stood in the light. Then he pulled the door shut behind him, and now he was walking toward where they stood in the shadows of the driveway. He moved into their space and the light fell behind him. She could hardly look at him and yet could not look away.
“You made it,” he said in the voice she knew from the phone. It was really him. “Hello.”
“We made it,” her mother said. “Here’s someone for you to meet.”
Lucia felt Beatriz’s hand steady on her back. “I’m Lucia,” she said.
“My god,” he said. “You really are.” He extended a hand to her and she took it. His fingers were long and rough and warm. She looked at his hand and then at his face. He looked older than the pictures on the Internet, like a real adult man now; his hair was shorter. But then he smiled. There was the dimple. “Wow,” he said.
Lucia just nodded, unable to even blink, much less talk. She had summoned him from the ether and now here he was. She had touched his hand. He had spoken to her. It was impossible and yet it was true.
“And this is Beatriz,” her mother said.
Beatriz kept her hand on Lucia’s back and extended the other to him. She flashed a quick, professional smile as he shook it.
“I’m Ryan.”
“I figured.” Beatriz stamped a foot. “It’s really cold here, isn’t it.”
“Come in,” Ryan said. “I bet you could use a drink.”
“I bet you could,” her mother said. He glanced at her uncertainly, and then she laughed and he did too.
“No comment,” he said.
In the doorway, Ryan knelt to scoop up a cat, orange and bony with X-ray eyes. Andrea couldn’t believe it. “Is that Edith Head?”
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