Evenings, I visited my folks, helped cook, loaded the dishwasher. My parents loved me, I’m sure—Stevie is, after all, a combination of their names, Steve and Marie—and I loved them, but I often felt like background noise. Mostly they talked as if I weren’t in the room. Dad talked about his jerk bosses at the cement plant, where he’d picked up shifts to help with my mom’s medical bills, and how it was a relief to have gas prices down after the Gulf War. Goddamn Saddam, he said. My mom talked about what was on sale at Bashas’, but she was tired, and she absently rested her hands where her breasts used to be. Rose was often out, either working her shifts at the Patty Melt or with her friends Angie Juarez and Beto Navarro. I knew Rose was sneaking into the motel with Angie and Beto. When I confronted her, Rose had begged me not to tell. “Please, Stevie, for me,” Rose said, as she always did when she wanted her way, which was always. So I didn’t tell. I might have been a lot of things, but a narc wasn’t one of them. I could keep a secret, and as much as a pain in the ass as Rose could be, she was my little sister. Since she was born, I’ve wanted to protect her. When my parents brought her home, a squeaking swaddled peanut, I hugged her too tight, eager and clumsy, thinking I was making her safe, and they took her away from me. Once, thinking she was cold, I covered her head to toe with blankets, nearly suffocating her, for which my father smacked me on the backside, yelling, “Don’t you touch her, you hear me? Don’t touch her.” So I didn’t much after that. At night in our shared room, I told her stories, about us flying into space and going roller-skating on the moon. She’d laugh and say, “Stevie, you can’t roller-skate on the moon,” and I’d say, “Sure you can. You’ll see.” Funny she spent most of her time in high school defending me. Five feet tall with her pipe-cleaner blond hair and fuck-you fists, bright as a welder’s spark. Baby Rose, I still call her.
Anyway, those days and nights were hardly the life I’d dreamed. In those dreams, I got on a Greyhound bus, twenty pounds lighter after a summer of drinking banana yogurt shakes, and I left behind my parents and young sister in a house behind the high school. I left this little Arizona town with its slow, shady river and headed to the sprawling streets of Phoenix and Tempe. In my dreams, I sketched drawings and wrote essays and ate lunch on urban patios. I lived in a fifteen-story dorm with a roommate named Laurel or Traci with an I, or Renée with an accent on the first e, a city girl who taught me to wear eyeliner and how to use cover-up on my mark and let me borrow her best jeans. I drank beer from kegs and lost my virginity with a boy named Dylan, or Alex, or Ryan, a smart boy, an older boy, an art major probably, who knew nothing about me but who knew enough of the world not to care about my face, who traced it and said I was beautiful not despite it but because I was. On summer vacation, I backpacked through Europe and smoked Gauloises and drank black coffee, all the things I had read in books from one library and seen on my parents’ one television and in movies at one theater. My dreams then were as real to me as the river running through town, as sure as the square charcoal between my fingers. When my mother was losing her breasts and my father was sleeping at the hospital in Flagstaff, those dreams started to slip away like air from a leaky tire.
All of which is to say, I was conscious in the moment the life I was living was not the one I had dreamed, and it brewed restlessness in me. I have wondered so often if this was true for you, that sense of living in contradiction to what you desired. What was it that drove you out at nights? That drove you into the rain that last night?
In the summer, I often climbed a ladder up to the motel’s roof, a blanket under my arm. No one ever saw me. Did you ever notice that no one ever looks up? You didn’t, either. The night I first saw you, you ran across the street and ducked into the alcove of the vacant office building. We both watched the high-schoolers gathered at the gas station. They leaned up against car hoods, snuck sips of wine coolers. We both watched the college students drift out of the Syc’s gates and cruise to the Pickaxe and the Patty Melt and Casa Verde, all the Laurels, Tracis, Reneés, Dylans, Peters, Ryans. We both saw Jerome’s tiny blanket of lights, the Milky Way as bright as tourmaline, the illuminated smoke billowing from the cement plant.
Other nights, with the same restlessness that drove me to the roof, I drove around town. I drove up and down Main through the District, past the single-story shops closed for the night. I drove out to the fairgrounds and climbed up the mountainous slag heap, the shiny pieces sharp under my hands and feet, thinking of Mordor. I drove up College Drive and through the iron gates onto the Syc’s campus, a whole other world even though it was only across the street, where even in summer young men and women walked with their arms full of books across the neatly clipped quad. I drove into the neighborhoods, parked in dark graveled cul-de-sacs. That’s where I caught sight of you one night in late summer. You were jogging toward a house with a For Sale sign. I ducked down in my seat and watched as you walked to the front door and let yourself in. As if it was your house. As if it was yours for the taking.
It was like watching in a dream. I wanted to get out and follow you, but I couldn’t move. All I could do was sit and wait. A police car pulled up, its headlights on but its blue warning lights off. I thought I was in trouble, and I slunk farther down, waiting for the officer to knock on my window. But when I peeked up, he was standing at the door, talking to someone. A man. Older, but I didn’t know him. The door closed, and the officer drove off. Soon enough, you came out, and this time you ran, leaping off the front step and stumbling on the path. You ran to the dark street. The man stepped on the porch. He watched you go. He never looked in my direction, but I could see even from a distance how he was watching you, holding on to the porch post. Like if he let go, he might fall down.
I drove to the motel that night, alight with something I didn’t understand. That secret of yours. I wanted it to be mine. I climbed onto the motel roof, and freak that I am, I touched myself, my hands on my two good breasts and inside my pants, thinking of you and the man at the house, of Tom Donahue and his seahorse scar, until my eyes rolled back and the sky washed over me. Then I crawled into bed, thinking about my drawings and paint tubes under the bed, and all the places I hadn’t been, shivering in the loneliness that swelled large and gaping in the dark.
I fell again when I was unloading groceries from the trunk and stepped in a small pothole. My ankle turned, my bags went flying, and I landed hard on my wrist. Sprained it, or at least it swelled up. Tom Donahue touched my hand that day. He picked out a splint and an ACE bandage and showed me how to wrap it. Dani Newell was working that day, too. She asked after my mother. I didn’t know yet about her father, that he was the man on the porch at the dark house. No one did. Except you.
A week later I fell again, tripped over the curb in front of the office, and I hollered so loud the guests in Room 10 came running out in their robes. At the HealthCo, Tom knelt and prodded my scraped, swollen knee.
As he pulled Bactine, Neosporin, and gauze from a shelf, I imagined him pulling me into the break room.
He would lean close—as close as you and the man on the porch must have been—and say, The truth is, I haven’t been overseas. I got fired from my last job in Phoenix, and my great-aunt lives up here. I got this scar in a fight. So you see, I’m not perfect.
It doesn’t matter, I’d say.
I’d say, Where should we go?
And he would say, Anywhere. Anywhere you want.
Other times I hadn’t fallen, but I pretended I had a sore throat or food poisoning, snatching up Sucrets and Pepto. I said I needed things for my parents: Bengay, vitamin B, glucosamine, cortisone for a rash. I told him about my mom, and he told me he was sorry, and he looked sorry, shaking his head and rubbing his jaw. Each time Tom threw in extras, or wouldn’t charge for everything, or rang in coupons I didn’t have. Each time he looked me in the eye, and each time I could feel my glowing heart, and I felt, well, almost pretty.
I felt like you must have felt walking into that house.