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.
DANNIE
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, zip — one 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 yes — it’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 Arn — there was no way around it — but 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.