He glanced at Carly. “I was thinking we could go for a walk,” he said to me. He looked fitter, slimmer in the face. He wore a dark green sweater I didn’t recognize. This baffled me, that he’d bought a sweater. I said, “I’ll get dressed.”
Out on the sidewalk, Sam said, “Which way?”
“Doesn’t matter.” We started out on our old route toward the river.
Neither of us spoke. My fingers were cold. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my coat. “What’s with the nunchucks?” I said.
“You never told me whether she had a boy or a girl.”
We were quiet again, the only sounds our shoes on the sidewalk, and occasional cars driving by. “You could have gotten something neutral,” I said.
He shrugged. I remembered that easy Sam shrug. “Those are cool, right?”
“Yeah. They’re cool.” We turned a corner and I pulled a dying leaf from a low-hanging branch. “What did she tell you?”
“Everything, I think.”
I ripped segments off the leaf and let them fall papery to the ground. “Everything.”
Sam nodded to the leaf. “Bigtooth maple.”
“I know,” I said. “I remember.” I spliced the stem with my thumbnail and we went on quietly. Finally I said, “I’m not going to have it.”
“She says you haven’t made the appointment yet.”
“I keep thinking things might change.”
“And you haven’t told him?”
“It’s stupid. I know.” We came upon the river. Midway across the bridge we stopped and leaned on the rail.
“She says you’re saving his stuff.”
“Not saving it.” I let the last shred of the leaf flutter to the water. “I love him. I go to make the appointment and I can’t. I’m sitting there with the phone and my fucking calendar, you know? Like I’m having my teeth cleaned. It isn’t the baby. Maybe it’s just… I don’t want us reduced to an appointment. We were more than that.”
He sighed and dipped his head between his big hands.
“Sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t.
Sam rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. His face was red. “You never thought that about us?”
“That was different.”
“Why?”
I turned back toward the water. He turned and faced the water, too. “I still think about it,” he said. “Ours.”
I felt ambushed, suddenly, though of course I had been all along. “I don’t, Sam. Don’t you get that? I don’t think about it. I never have. I’m all fucked up. You never got that.”
He laughed a laugh with an edge to it, a laugh I’d rarely heard from him and only toward the end. “I get that,” he said. “Believe me. That’s not why I came. I told Carly I’d talk to you.” He looked up. “But I know you, Nat. I know what you’re capable of. What you’re not.” His hands were trembling at the rail. “Look at you. You don’t even want to be happy. We were good together. We were happy. Ours was the right one and you couldn’t stand it. And now. This guy?”
“You don’t even know him.”
“I don’t have to.”
He was right and I should have told him as much. Instead I said, “We should get back.”
He nodded once and turned. We walked back without speaking, him always a few steps ahead of me. A couple times his back straightened and he inhaled sharply as if he wanted to say something. But he never did. In front of my apartment he said, “I’m going to catch a bus. Let your sister know, will you?”
I said, “Wait, Sam. Will you wait a second?” I brought my keys out of my pocket and unlocked my car.
It had been glossy when they printed it out but it had gone satin, somehow. The edges of the quarter sheet had curled in on themselves. He took it from my hand. “What’s this?”
“They gave it to me.” I pointed where the heavy woman had pointed, the white brackets, the dark space. “There,” I said.
He opened his mouth a little. “You kept this?”
“Yeah,” I said. It was true, though not in the way I let him believe.
He held it delicately, smoothing a curled corner with his thumb. He said nothing for a long time; then he ran his finger along the bottom edge. “What do these numbers mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t ask.” He held it a while longer, closer to him. When he tried to give it back I gestured for him to keep it. It seemed he would, at first. But then, suddenly, he thrust it back at me and said, “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“I thought you’d want it.”
He looked at it again, disgusted, as though he could see everything wrong with me in the image. “It’s a piece of paper,” he said finally. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“I thought—”
“Is that what this is about?” He laughed that hard-edged laugh again. “It is. You’re gonna have this baby as some kind of memento. The centerpiece to your little shrine up there? Jesus, Nat. You are fucked up.”
“I love him.”
He slipped the ultrasound into his coat pocket. “You don’t love people,” he said. “You love what they do to you.”
When I went inside, Carly was at the window. She’d been watching us. “Jesus,” I said. “What were you thinking?”
She put her finger to her lips and said, “Shh.” She gestured to the bedroom.
“Fine,” I said. I walked into the kitchen, retrieved a pack of cigarettes from on top of the fridge, and went out to the fire escape. My hands were shaking.
Carly followed me outside. “What are you doing? You promised.”
I lit a cigarette and took a drag. “Why the fuck would you bring him here?”
“I was worried about you.”
I exhaled. “The fuck you were. You’re coming over here, dressing the Miracle like—”
“You promised,” she said again.
“Get out.”
“What?”
“Leave. Take her with you. Don’t come back.”
She began to cry. “Listen to yourself—”
“You listen. Do you know what you’re saying? Have a baby? Look at me.” I was shouting. “Look at my life. Why would you want anyone to have a life like ours?”
She wiped her eyes, sending out little sooty shooting stars of mascara. “You don’t even sound like you.”
“I don’t sound like you,” I said. I was crying now, too. A car alarm sounded somewhere. Beyond its wailing was downtown, the lights of the casinos crisp in the cold, the Truckee running through. Sam was on a bus, homebound. And beyond that, somewhere, was Ezra, his impossible laugh, his half breaths, his index finger looped around my big toe. Here was my sister, pulling me to her.
“I’ve got too much of her in me,” I said. “I can feel it.”
Carly took a deep breath of cold air. “Me, too,” she said into my hair. She sounded surprised. “Me, too.”
She held me that way for some time. When she let me go she touched the soft places under my eyes with the cuff of her sweater. She nodded to my cigarettes. “Give me one of those, would you?”
We leaned against the building and smoked in silence. Once, Carly turned and cupped her hands against my bedroom window. “Look at this,” she said.
Inside, the Miracle was splayed out on my bed, asleep. Her wings and headband had been cast off, and the nunchucks Sam bought her were on the floor. She was sleepmoist, and the wild wispy hairs around her face curled in the dampness. We watched her stretch triumphantly, her brawny hands curled in fists.
THE DIGGINGS
for Captain John Sutter
There were stories in the territory, stories that could turn a sane man sour and a sour man worse. Three Frenchmen in Coloma dug up a stump to make way for a road and panned two thousand dollars in flakes from the hole. Above the Feather River a Michigander lawyer staked his mule for the night and when he pulled it in the morning a vein winked up at him. Down on the Tuolumne a Hoosier survived a gunfight and found his fortune in the hole the bullet drilled in the rock above his shoulder. In Rough and Ready a man called Bennager Raspberry, aiming to free a ramrod jammed in his musket, fired at random into the exposed roots of a manzanita bush. There he found five thousand dollars in gold, free and pure. Near Carson Creek a Massachusetts man died of isthmus sickness, and mourners shoveled up a seven-pound nugget while digging his grave.