Mayor Cabrera wasn't calming down, but he wasn't feeling as crazy. It wasn't late. It was 11:30. He hadn't eaten dinner. He wrote that the night was an evil time but not when he was with her because then he wanted the night to last forever. Mayor Cabrera felt that Dana was his oasis and he wrote that down too and then he rested his pen. He didn't need to worry if everything in the letter made sense because he wasn't going to send it. It wasn't really a letter. He picked the papers up and gazed at them, as if they held a landscape rather than a frenzy of words, listening to the sand brushing against the high basement windows. He didn't ball the pages up. He folded them in half and then filed them down in the empty garbage can in the shadow of the big table.
The sun was a sour note lingering in his temples. He got his headache about this time, like clockwork, about an hour after his breakfast of jerky and pretzels and coffee. It was like a visitor, the headache, a companion. It might have been brought on by the arid glare, but it also had something to do with lack of whisky. The gas station owner had brought none at all, and that had been an error, but he would've been out by now anyway. He could only have brought a bottle or two. He'd get past it. He was glad he'd at least brought sunglasses. He'd never used them before, had always considered them womanly, like sandals or scarves, but he'd never been in this much glinting late-winter sun and he'd never quit whisky.
The gas station owner hadn't moved in a week. He'd found water gurgling down a cliff face and had stayed with it as long as he could, burning up seven of the forty days he was going to stay in the desert, but now the trickle had petered out altogether. He had come across a roofless hunters' cabin two mornings after leaving Lofte and had found a jar of sweet pickles in a cabinet. The day after that he'd crossed some kind of old fire road, free of tire tracks but still edged with shin-high berms. But then this spotâhe knew it would be the last easy place. There would be narrow canyons with puddles hidden in their troughs. There would be cacti with moist flesh. Rain, with any luck. The desert was asking him to bow out now. He was being tempted, like someone from a Bible desert. Tempted to give up his journey.
He wasn't going to bow out. In the morning he would leave here and wander not in the direction of the basin towns and not in the direction of Albuquerque. He would wander toward nothing. He would find some other water, and some other water after that, or he would not.
He'd killed and eaten a crow, and that was the only action he'd taken so far that felt right, that felt like real engagement. He'd leveled his pistol and intentionally winged the stupid bird. Then he'd gotten a grasp and broken its neck and plucked it and cleaned it in the pure trickle and roasted it over his fire. It was more work than it was worth, but it felt right. It was an action that had startled the desert, that had announced his presence.
He looked out from his half-assed grotto, which gave him shade mostly when he didn't need it, late in the day, and the far-off mountains appeared to be crumbling. The mountains he could barely see, veiled in the blue dust of distanceâthat's where he would survive or perish, where he would find himself in a type of straightforward peril men had found themselves in since the beginning of time.
He had decided maybe it wasn't a great idea to have Gee keep coming up to the clinic room. Something was wrong and he wasn't interested in figuring out whose fault it was because it was probably his. He hadn't told Gee any of this and had been avoiding her calls. He wasn't sure how to proceed. Everything was his fault. Doctor Raymond had come in that morning to flash his penlight in Soren's eyes as he did every week and then listen to his chest and declare with astonishment, as he did every week, that Soren still didn't need a tracheotomy. Soren's father had asked him exactly what he was looking for with the light and when the doctor said he was watching for any changes, Soren's father cut him off and said there weren't any damn changes and that was obvious and if it was really necessary to keep shining a bright light in the kid's eyes and making useless checkmarks on a useless clipboard then could the doctor come do that when Soren's father wasn't around?
“But you're always around,” said the doctor.
“I didn't say it would be easy,” said Soren's father.
Now Soren's father felt bad about that. He wasn't upset at the doctor. He was upset because he saw he had to face Soren's situation alone. It was one of those things. There were four walls where Soren's father lived and a wasteland out the window, and Soren's father had to figure out how to do the time alone. He had to make peace with the beeps and cycling hums of the machines that monitored Soren. He had to make peace with the clinic food, which he now knew was terrible. He had to make peace with his son's sallow, sinking face. He did not need to be leading on some woman
who was too good for him anyway. He wasn't with the living. He wasn't with the living and he wasn't where his son was.
He took magazines into his hands and he remembered to brush his teeth and clip his nails, and he reminded himself that Soren, if and when he woke up, would need him. He saw Gee's weird roadrunners in his mind's eye. On vigil nights, he closed the blinds tight and flipped off the lamp. He did not want to offer the remaining vigilers any encouragement. Before, when his son had been healthy, Soren's father had been happy and the vigilers had been miserable, and now these people were using his son to try and find peace. There were a few left who refused to quit. They didn't want Soren to wake up. They didn't want anybody to be happy.
Something was wrong with her body. Her body was against her, betrayed. No one had forced her to get married. No one had forced her into a job where she never met new people. No one had forced her out to New Mexico. Dannie had to get this period to arrive and get out of her sweatpants and out of her condo. If she could get through this period she could leave Arn behind and make hopeful new plans. Her back was aching. Her hands and feet were tender. She could lie still for hours without falling asleep. She'd been eating nothing but dry sopapilla. It was hard to open the honey jar and tedious to keep dipping the bread. She could make it as far as the balcony, where she could breathe fresh air and keep an eye on the heavens, but every time Dannie came inside she smelled bacon. That smell was never going to leave. It was in the furniture, in her hair.
Dannie managed to make an appointment. She showered and put on jeans and a flannel shirt. She made it down her condo stairs and over to her car. It had rained all yesterday and there was no way to tell. No puddles or sog. The desert was dry and the sky was how it always was, close and distracted. Dannie looked at herself in the rearview. She was stuck smack in the middle of her life. Her hormones were brawling. Dannie kept her eyes on the road, kept the car between the lines.
She parked in front of a low building made of mirrors and found the mirror that was the door. She signed in on a clipboard and then had to fill out paperwork. The other women in the waiting room were nondescript. They were nondescript to Dannie because they were just like her. They were in their thirties, trim and savvy. Except when it came to becoming thirty-five, thirty-seven, thirty-nine years old; they didn't know how that had happened. When it came to knowing where their youths had gone, they weren't savvy at all. Here they were, flipping through magazines, meekly awaiting verdicts.
The doctor was that perfect doctor age, about forty-five. He spoke to Dannie in an exam room. He wore a suit without a tie, no scrubs or lab coat. He weighed Dannie and took her blood pressure. There didn't seem to be any nurses anywhere. The doctor's hands were big and smooth as silk on Dannie's arm.
“You look like someone,” he said. He was puzzled, not happily.
“I don't think we've ever met.”
The doctor tapped his forehead with his knuckle. “Are you a chef? Do you work at a restaurant?”
Dannie shook her head.
“I'm telling you, you remind me of someone.”
The doctor left her in the exam room. There was an empty hat rack in the corner. There weren't any diagrams on the walls, no drawings of organs, just a photograph of sheep on a hillside.
After a while a woman came in, another doctor, and Dannie learned that she was married to the male doctor. She had stringy hair and pointy-toed shoes. She was the one who gave Dannie her exam. Afterward, she had Dannie drink a bunch of water and pee in a cup, and then Dannie was back in the waiting room. It was a different bunch of women, but they might as well have been the same.
After a time, the male doctor opened the waiting room door and waved her back and she followed him to the same exam room. Dannie saw how the office worked. The wife performed the exams and the husband handled the bedside stuff.
“I thought of it,” he said. “You know the talent show on TV with the Australian guy?”
“I know
of
it.”
The doctor motioned for Dannie to sit. “They had a girl on it who throws footballs through tires. This prim thing with manners, and she stands twenty yards away and zip, zip, zipâone after the next.”
“I've never thrown a football in my life.”
“You're not from Texas. This girl was from Texas.” The doctor drew his hand behind his head daintily, and then whipped his arm forward. He held the pose. “They kept her around because she was an attractive female who could throw footballs.”
“Mystery solved,” said Dannie.
The doctor set the file flat on the desk. He made sure it wasn't too close to his soda. “So, you're pregnant.”
Dannie looked at him.
“In my opinion, the answer to whether or not you're likely to get pregnant is yesâit's overwhelmingly likely, a hundred percent likely. You can quit waiting on that period.”
Dannie didn't know how to feel. She felt stupid. She was a woman who'd been having sex with no birth control and then her period had been late. Her mind had not allowed itself to consider the obvious. Nothing could happen until you stopped hoping for it. She'd met Arn after she'd decided not to try and meet anyone. She'd gotten pregnant when she'd deemed herself unable. Her womb was not a cobwebby corner in the rafters.
The doctor had a lot of literature for Dannie. She was in a fog. He gave her many phone numbers. He gave her his card. It had his name on it and his wife's. Her name was Marney. The husband and wife would no longer be her doctors. Their duties ended with conception. There were a bunch of foods Dannie was encouraged to eat and a bunch she needed to avoid. There were exercise programs. Dannie looked at the photograph of sheep and it looked different. The sheep looked like they'd been through an ordeal. They looked dumb with gratitude. Dannie was passing back through
the waiting room, all those other women. She was out of the building. She was in her car.
She didn't know where to drive. She wasn't going home. When the lights were green she went on through. When they were red, she got into a turning lane. She headed mostly south. It was the middle of the afternoon. She went down past the factories and the scattered, one-story neighborhoods and took a ramp onto an interstate. There was a dairy farm with a complicated irrigation system and then a flurry of signs for a taxidermy museum. She was down into the featureless desert. There weren't mountains down here and there had never been towns.
Dannie felt something unfamiliar and she hoped it was joy. Joy wouldn't feel this complicated, though, this unfinished. People were going to want to help Dannie. They were going to judge her. She was going to be an open book. She had so much to learn. She was about to start a twenty-four-hour-a-day job that was going to last many, many years. Dannie wanted to tell her friends. She would be let back into their good graces because she had a story to tell. That's what was required when you forsook people and disappeared into the wilderness: a story. They would support her. But she wasn't going to tell them until she was ready. Dannie didn't want a bunch of fluttering attention just yet. She had to think things over. She had cards in her hand but the game she was playing was wholly unfamiliar. She was still heading south, the only car on the road. Albuquerque had disappeared from her rearview. The Owl Café was supposed to be down here. Maybe she'd stop and get a greasy burger. She adjusted her visor and opened the window a crack.
Arn. What about Arn now? He
had
held up his end of the bargain, not that he'd known a bargain was ever in place. He was an unwitting donor. He lived like he didn't want to ever be wise and now he was none the wiser. He wasn't ready to become a father. Not even close. He would have a whole different life a few years from now, and Dannie had no right to ruin that life by telling him about this pregnancy. Their time together had been mutually beneficial. She'd given him a fling with an older woman and he'd saved her from the world of sperm banks and adoption. At a
sperm bank they had contributions from a bunch of tall guys with college degrees, as if the world wasn't crawling with six-foot college graduates who were complete assholes. Dannie's child was going to look like Arnâthere was no way around itâbut Dannie was an adult and that meant dealing with difficult circumstances. The child might have Arn's temperament, and that would please Dannie but also make her miss him. She'd be ready for that. She'd handle missing him. She would miss the way his eyes could appear uninterested while his touch was full of passion. She would miss his voice, would miss the way he never cried but always seemed not far from it. People cried too much. Dannie was a mother now. Her crying didn't mean anything anymore. She was a mother and she was going to have to miss all sorts of things.