The Fates Will Find Their Way (5 page)

6

I
t’s possible that, in Arizona, Nora Lindell’s hair turned a burnt yellow. Her skin became a caramel color she’d never seen before. She aged quickly. She waited tables. She worked hard. She rented a trailer.

Nights, she sat in a folding chair set up on the dirt patch outside her home. She looked up at the sky and thought things like, “Tonight the sky is Arizona.” Some nights, she might even have thought of us. She wondered which of us had graduated, which hadn’t. She wondered who’d gotten into what schools. She thought about Trey Stephens, maybe, and whether he’d taken another girl to prom after all. Of course she thought of her father, her sister, but we didn’t worry about that.

Most nights, she leaned back, closed her eyes, tried to imagine the things inside her. She could call them babies, because that’s what they were. She could even call them daughters, because that’s also what they were. Still, it seemed most right to leave them as heartbeats for now, nothing else struck true in Nora’s brain. And, after all, heartbeats was how she saw them sitting there under that gaudy Arizona sky, her eyelids shut tight, her head turned upward, her eyes turned inward, southward, to look squarely at the things that were sharing that folding chair, sharing her body. What she saw was two heartbeats, red and bloody and tiny, tiny. Two little heartbeats perfectly and eerily syncopated. One heartbeat and then another.

What she saw clear as day were those two little heartbeat babies, and they each had exactly one arm and one hand, locked together at the fingers. Imagine something monstrous. Little red chimeras joined at the palm, floating there, not one thought in the world of anything other than themselves. Beastly organisms, selfish for existing in the first place. Sisters, she might have called them, and so defined them by each other and not by her. Because, more than anything, what Nora was sure of was that though they lived in her body, though she alone housed them while they grew, those babies didn’t belong to her. They couldn’t. She was still a child herself, after all. Still freckled and pig-tailed and awkward.

W
e liked to imagine that she’d picked Arizona for the Grand Canyon and the warmth. Maybe she’d thought it was possible to live in it, in the canyon. But she never admitted that to anyone, not once she got there and saw how wrong her fantasy had been. The walls of Jack Boyd’s bedroom were decorated with postcards of the Southwest. Postcards his father had sent while traveling with his fourth wife. We imagined Nora just beyond the postcards’ borders. Always out of reach. These were the details of Arizona she now lived among. Open spaces; wood carvings and chalk drawings; gaping holes in the earth; grotesque protrusions upward out of the rock; and turquoise. Turquoise especially. The turquoise was everywhere, and if anyone asked, she would have told them she’d gotten that right at least. The water was turquoise, the sky was turquoise, the jewelry was turquoise. And the people were so used to it they didn’t even see it. The color was so common it was imperceptible. This was exactly what she wanted—to be in a place so unlike the one where she’d been born. Scorched earth, turquoise sky. Extremes.

She picked up waiting tables easily. She was good at it. The manager had said, “Have you waited tables before?” And Nora had shaken her head.

“Then why should I hire you?”

“I’m a blank slate,” Nora said. “Teach me and I’ll do exactly what you say.”

“I like that,” the woman had said. A woman just like you’d expect in a place like this. Tan, wrinkled, two parts chain smoker, one part beauty queen. She was soft somewhere deep down. She was a mother—of her own children, of course; but maybe also of Nora. Someone to guide her, show her how to live.

“You can start tomorrow,” the woman had said.

“You should know I’m pregnant.”

“Who isn’t?”

B
ut probably there was nothing friendly between the manager and Nora. Nothing unfriendly, either, but also nothing motherly as Nora might have hoped that first day. The cooks, though, would have been different. They would have taken to Nora immediately, and she almost immediately to them. At first they might have made her nervous, made her blush at the things they said and the way they said them. But soon the banter became something to go to work for, something to help pass the time.

They would have liked that she was pregnant, asking daily about the baby. When the bump grew, they might have asked to touch it. Of course she would let them.

“Babies,” she had to remind them more than once. To the Mexican cook, she said
bambinos. Dos.

“A baby having babies,” he liked to say.

“Yes, yes,” she said, already so much older and calmer than she should be. Already a woman, too much a woman. Seventeen, but also not seventeen. Our age, and yet a decade advanced.

S
he fell for the Mexican. The old man. She fell for the words he taught her, for the baby blanket he’d asked his sister to knit for him as a gift for Nora. She fell for his arthritis and his dark skin and the way he asked first about the babies and then about her. She fell, perhaps, too, for his food, for the cow tongue and the goat belly he brought her for lunch. But mostly, mostly she fell for the absence of sex.

He touched her cheek. She liked this. He held her hand. She liked this too. But even after she began spending nights with him, they did not have sex. Clothed in pajamas, they faced the window of his rancher and held each other. She in front, he in back. He held on to the babies and she held on to him.

A month before she gave birth, he asked her to marry him. For the first time, she was nervous.

“Why?” she said. “Why marry me?”

“For the girls,” he said. “For all three of you. Let me give you what I have.” His sister had died. He’d been made head cook. His house was empty.

“What will change?” she said.

“Nothing will change. Crying babies, constant noises. We will not change.” He overarticulated when he spoke. “I will give you your own bedroom.” He looked down when he said this and blushed, because he did not like to talk about sex either and did not like the implication of her question.

She laughed then, laughed at him and with him. She put his hands on either side of her face and made his fingers pinch the skin. “Silly old man,” she said. “Inheriting three silly young girls. I will marry you.”

She left the restaurant and they moved her few belongings to the rancher. She insisted that the folding chair come with her, the one she’d first sat in under the Arizona sky.

“It is crap,” he said, offended that she didn’t think he could offer her better.

“My crap, though,” she said.

“Americans and their crap,” he said.

She set the folding chair up outside, in back by the swimming pool so that people driving by couldn’t see it. She’d grown up with swimming pools, but she didn’t tell him about that. She didn’t want him to know he wasn’t giving her something special. We’d all grown up with swimming pools. And we’d grown up with Nora Lindell. And sometimes, but only sometimes, she thought about this. When the babies kicked, especially, she thought about Trey Stephens and the way he ran his hands up and down her legs. Maybe she wished they were kicking him. She thought about Sissy only when the Mexican wasn’t around. It was almost impossible to imagine her pale, fragile sister when there was someone so old and dark in the same room. It was almost impossible in fact to imagine another life, a different life, when he was there. And, after all, that’s what she had married him for.

F
ourteen years after Nora Lindell went missing, Jack Boyd claimed he saw her again, this time in the Phoenix airport. (This was five years after Sissy Lindell had confirmed to Danny Hatchet that there was definitely no family in Arizona; five years after she allegedly crawled into the backseat of his Nissan.) Jack said Nora looked older, just as he did. She had twins, he said, girls, maybe thirteen years old. This time he didn’t talk to her.

He stopped at an airport pay phone, and the only person he could think to call was his mother.

“It’s not her,” Mrs. Boyd said.

“I’m watching her right now,” he said. “It’s Nora clear as day.”

“That girl is dead,” said Mrs. Boyd. “She died years ago and everyone knows it.”

“There are three of them. One my age and two girls who look just like Sissy. Just like Nora and Sissy.” He couldn’t help laughing. “Goddamn twins.”

Mrs. Boyd didn’t believe it of course, but she couldn’t help making the usual round of phone calls. Eighteen years of phone-tree etiquette had engrained it in her. She picked up the phone and started with the second mother on her list—Mrs. Hatchet, after all, was dead.

“Twins,” she said to Mrs. Epstein. “Can you imagine?”

O
ur mothers tried, but we were the ones who really could imagine it. We were the ones who could picture those twins as if they were ours. We gave them the best of Nora. We gave them her hair—red, just as Jack Boyd had described. We gave them her poreless skin and her overabundance of freckles. We kept them slim, just as Nora and Sissy had been. Here and there, though, we added or subtracted a few inches. Paul Epstein kept them short, rounded their noses to look more like his mother’s than like Nora’s or Sissy’s. Winston Rutherford would have given them well-defined chins. “The chin is a sign of character,” he said to Maggie Frasier when he finally married her. He pointed to his own chin. “You can’t fake that.” He would have said this to Nora Lindell if she’d ever given him the chance. Drew Price, still not convinced Mr. Price wasn’t his real father, no doubt had the twins closing in on six feet tall.

Jack Boyd didn’t have the luxury of fantasy since, he insisted, he’d seen them for himself. But perhaps the real reason he couldn’t imagine them as his own was because he could see too much of the man he suspected was the real father. Something he didn’t admit for years, something he probably should have kept to himself, was that those two little red-haired girls had the undeniable and aggressive look of Trey Stephens. A savageness and confidence that, among us, only the public schooler had ever displayed. Those girls belonged to Trey, Jack Boyd finally confessed, some time after
Epstein v. Stephens
came to an end.

Jack was crying when he told us. We were drunk. Our wives were in the kitchen. Our daughters were huddled together in bedrooms on second and third stories. We were allowed, this once, to smoke our cigars inside in the basement. Jack put his hand on Paul Epstein’s back. “Maybe if he’d known about his own girls, he wouldn’t have touched yours,” he said. We looked in other directions, trying hard to pretend we didn’t know what he was talking about; trying hard to believe those twins weren’t real, that Nora wasn’t real anymore, that none of it was real—not even Paul’s pain, and especially not the things that had happened to his daughter.

Nora Lindell was gone. And, with Trey Stephens in jail, he was gone, too, in a way. By this time, we’d already lost Minka Dinnerman and Mr. Lindell as well (a car crash and cancer, respectively). It seemed, some days, that life was nothing more than a tally of the people who’d left us behind.

7

T
hey did have sex once—Nora and the Mexican. Of course they did. It would have been impossible not to, unrealistic even. How it happened was simple, expected. He got drunk. It wasn’t sexy. She’d been expecting it, and perhaps this more than anything demanded that it happen.

They’d been married two years, a little longer than the babies had been alive. She’d lost the weight and then a little more. She talked about waiting tables again but the Mexican said no. They didn’t need the money.

She spent mornings in the backyard, cultivating what few herbs were able to grow—mint mostly, a eucalyptus tree, some other juicy thick-leafed plants. Afternoons she spent in the pool with the girls. They were naturals in the water, just as she’d been. Just as Sissy had been. Evenings she spent in the kitchen, the windows open, the babies on a towel on the linoleum floor. She wore very little these days—a dress the weight of a slip, underwear, flip-flops. The breasts she’d grown while nursing had dried up, had shrunk smaller than the ones she’d arrived with in Arizona. She preferred it this way. It made her feel like the genderless thing that she’d wished all along she could be.

The babies were easy. They were good and simple. They preferred the Mexican to Nora, which Nora didn’t mind because she, too, preferred the Mexican. Postpartum depression would have been too strong an expression, too dark, too complicated. There was no depression; there was simply a lack of connection, perhaps a lack of reality. In part, you could blame the fact that they were twins. They were so content with each other that it made sense for Nora to become more an overseer, a protector, than a mother. Most days, she was nothing more than a glorified babysitter or an affectionate but ultimately uninterested older sister.

The Mexican loved them all. It was from him that the girls would learn about love. Not that there wasn’t a tenderness to Nora. There was. A great deal of tenderness, but it was the tenderness of a hospice nurse—of one committed to caring but too familiar with pain and parting to ever truly or fully invest.

L
et’s say it was a summer night. One that was uncharacteristically hot, even for Arizona. It was like this—it had to be like this—because heat alone—isolated, confined—can make a person crazy, can turn a good thing bad, if only for a moment. And don’t forget that we like the Mexican. We like him because, like us, he loves Nora. He has cared for Nora and her two babies. So let’s say it was hot. Let’s say there was enough heat to excuse any sin, any crime, any transgression, just this once.

It was night. The babies were asleep. They’d been in their crib for several hours, fingers intermingled just as Nora had once imagined them when they were still womb-locked, body-bound. Perhaps they sucked on one another’s thumbs that night, a habit they’d taken to only recently, one that turned Nora’s stomach, though she couldn’t explain why.

The house smelled like milk. It smelled like milk every night, the way that Chuck Goodhue’s house smelled when his aunt and her new baby came to visit. Nora took refuge outdoors, poolside in her folding chair. She’d dived in just before midnight, the Mexican still not home, and she sat now with her legs stretched out before her, her wet hair hanging loose over the top of the chair, her underwear dripping wet, her tiny nipples hardened by the faintest breeze coming up through the mint garden.

She didn’t hear the Mexican come in, but she saw the light from the kitchen hit the bank of the pool. At first nothing was different. Everything was the same. But when he opened the sliding glass door and waited in its frame, she understood.

“I am a man,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

He followed her to the bedroom. He was crying. She pulled down the sheet and got in bed, then she slipped off her underpants and turned away from him.

“Take off your clothes,” she said.

“I am a monster,” he said. Even drunk, he overarticulated.

“You are a man,” she said.

It was fast, quiet.

Afterwards he turned away from her. It was Nora that held the Mexican that night. Their backs to the swimming pool, his back pressed into her chest, she held him, her hands locked tight against his stomach, just as he’d held her every night before the babies were born.

And Nora, possessing the bittersweet wisdom of premature motherhood, already knew what we could only imagine, that the Mexican would be hurt more than she by these events, would be more humiliated, more embarrassed, more ashamed. Out of pride, disgrace, or some feeling too strong to bear in the company of others, the Mexican would want to leave her.

He was crying still. She squeezed a piece of his skin between her fingers.

“I am disgusting,” he said.

She squeezed harder. “Don’t go,” she said. “Just please don’t go away from us.”

In the morning, he left her in bed alone and went to the babies. It was then—alone in bed, her body flat under a single white sheet—that she thought of Sissy, thought of Trey and her father and the three-story Tudor at the foot of the cul-de-sac. She didn’t miss anything so mundane as her clothing or the television set and obviously not the swimming pool. What she missed presented itself in fragments, in images, incoherent and incomplete: Her mattress. The dark of her bedroom. Her sister’s breath. The smell of her father’s cologne in the morning. Things anyone would have missed: A bark from down the street. Leaves changing color. Leaves falling. Leaves existing at all. In particular she missed (or at least recalled with a slight gasp) the faint blue illumination from the fish tank in Trey Stephens’ basement.

Outside she heard splashes of water. Without looking out the window, she knew what was there, could see it clear as day. The Mexican, belly up, floating. And the twins, also belly up, also floating, one on each side of him, holding on to an ear or a finger, maybe his neck. This was her life. This was her life and the Mexican would never leave them.