“Why?” Margaret asks.
He loves her but she is as incomprehensible to him as he is to her.
He takes a job managing claims for his father-in-law’s insurance company. He does all his own fieldwork, driving around the state, interviewing people, taking pictures of damaged houses and cars. His photographs are his art: fascinated close-ups of blistered paint, scarred wood, crumpled metal, smashed glass. He builds a darkroom in the garage and makes black-and-white prints. He loves the closeness of the darkroom, its chemical smell.
Margaret complains that his photographs are taking over the house. She’s tired of coming home and finding wet prints draped all over everything. No matter how meticulous he is, now matter how careful to protect the furniture, she complains. “I can’t stand it. The mess, the smell.”
Margaret wants to start a family. They have a lot of sex, more than Sam ever counted on. He knows he should enjoy this, and pretends to, but after a while it starts to feel like punishment.
The fertility doctor is Margaret’s idea. Sam thinks the treatments are a waste of resources. All that money to make more babies when there are so many already. “Why not adopt?” he says. Margaret says, “Because you never know what you’re getting.” He wants to say, “When do you ever?” But he goes along. They cash in their savings and he learns to give the shots. He tries to do this as well as it can be done (he’s like this about everything), with the least pain to Margaret. He tries to give the best shots ever given.
When the treatments don’t work, Margaret blames him. She accuses him of not wanting a child enough. In fact, he has come around to thinking that having a child — his own — would be a good thing. Someone who might share his natural curiosity, his interests. Someone who might want to learn what he can teach. Someone to make him feel useful.
He misses North Carolina, even though he couldn’t breathe there. He misses all the things that triggered his asthma — grass, shade trees, flowering bushes.
He misses his family. His mother can’t travel but his sister visits from time to time. Her visits remind him what it’s like to be with someone who still loves him. He shows her around Bisbee, all the coffee shops and art galleries. He drives her to the desert and points out plants she doesn’t know: saguaro, cat-claw, ocotillo, jumping cholla. There are snakes and lizards and roadrunners on the highway. Everything is exotic and bright, suffused with light. “Like the bottom of the ocean,” Addie says.
In the end, the surprise is not that Margaret leaves — he assumes when she moves to Tucson to take care of her mother that she isn’t coming back. The surprise is that he stays. He has become a creature of the desert, his lungs accustomed to dry air, his eyes to long views.
He has been living alone for years when Addie shows up in the late spring of 2008. He is thrilled for company, if only to have someone to cook for. He takes out his vegetarian recipes — he has a folder assembled especially for Addie’s visits. Breakfast pancakes with bourbon and vanilla and nutmeg. Lentil loaf. Carrot soup. Spanakopita. He wishes she could stay long enough to try them all.
On her last night, he makes portobello burgers and a pitcher of his famous blue margaritas. It’s a cool night, so quiet you can almost hear the moon lighting the sky. A waxing gibbous moon. They’re wearing sweatshirts, sitting by the grill.
“I need to tell you something,” Addie says. Her voice is hushed, serious.
“What’s wrong?” he says. “Is it Claree?”
“Nothing’s wrong. This is something I should have told you a long time ago. I’m telling you now because — well, just in case. I wanted you to hear it from me first.” She sips her margarita, sets the glass down. “I have a child, Sam. Had him, and gave him up. He’s grown now. He turned eighteen in September.”
“A child?”
“Yeah.”
“Born—”
“Right before you moved out here.”
“But—” Sam has a strange urge to consult a calendar. He glances at his iridescent wristwatch — nine forty-four. Time means nothing.
A child.
There has to be a right thing to say. He wishes he could think of it.
He has no memory, not even a hint of a memory, of Addie expecting a child. How could she have gone through an entire pregnancy, had a baby and given him up without her family ever suspecting?
How could anyone be so alone for so long?
But he knows the answer to that question.
“Have you told Claree?”
“No. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
“A boy. A nephew.”
“Yeah.” She smiles, her face reflecting moonlight. “Congratulations. You’re an uncle, Sam.”
Making him sound important. Big and important as a country.
Rich, Part Two
What makes Addie feel rich is, of all things, the doorbell. Not one of those lit-up plastic buttons that chimes or buzzes when you press it; she and William have a real bell forged from steel, its clapper a small steel ball. A simple, beautiful thing, weighty and substantial, like the door itself, which is solid oak. First-time visitors don’t always understand the pull for the bell. They hesitate, tug timidly at first, and the bell responds with a gentle tinkle that could just as easily be one of the wind chimes catching a ruffle of breeze, or a glass of iced tea clinking on a neighbor’s porch. Addie is attuned to all these sounds. If there’s a person at the door, the bell will ring a second time; the visitor will pull harder, too hard usually, making a bright metallic clang, loud as a window breaking.
This will set off the birds — two green-wing singing finches who live in a cage that occupies an entire wall of the dining room. They answer every sound with one of their own. Certain loud sounds — the bell when it’s pulled too hard, sirens, the vacuum cleaner, the coffee grinder — can send them into a frenzied chorus. When Addie plays records (she still has a turntable; she and William can’t part with their record collections), the birds sing along, trilling and turning their heads.
The doorbell was made by an elderly blacksmith in the Village of Yesteryear at the State Fair. Addie and William go every fall. They marvel at the bloated pumpkins and miraculously decorated cakes. They sit on bleachers in barns that smell of shit and sawdust and watch the measuring and judging of farm animals. They amble through the midway, whacking moles, pitching coins, every now and then winning some misshapen stuffed animal that they give away to a grateful stranger. They watch children on rides — wide-eyed, open-mouthed little ones spinning around and around in teacups, teenagers screaming as the Scrambler slings them and the Zipper flips them upside down.
On a clear day, Addie can sometimes coax William onto the Ferris wheel. She holds his hand. She loves his knobby, stained knuckles. She loves him for riding with her even though he’s afraid of heights (a mural painter who spends his days on scaffolding!). She loves knowing that she will love him all her life.
It’s a rich life. Richer than she thought possible.
Still, there’s something, someone, missing. There’s a hole in her that, on dark days, she worries she could cave into.
“Everybody has holes,” William says.
“I’m the holeyest,” she says. “I am the holey of holeys.”
“Yes, you are,” he says, and bows. His hair is thinning at the crown; she can see a tiny circle of bare scalp, pink and smooth. It makes her love him even more. If only that love were enough.