Robin and I pulled our small, contented world closer around us. I told her more stories about old Phoenix and learned about some of her adventures. I took her to the old cemetery just west of the Black Canyon Freeway, and, under the canopy of its old trees, we left flowers on the graves of my grandparents and the parents I never knew. We took the rough brush from the car-meant to wipe off snow-and used it to scrub the dust from the headstones. We sat in the grass, and she leaned her head on my shoulder. Lindsey called every four or five days and talked to each of us. She talked to Robin far longer. Our talks were unbearably light considering the deep-soul talks that had been our sustenance for years. What was she listening to? Carrie Newcomer, Heather Nova, and Dar Williams. What was she reading? Marcus Aurelius and Camus.
When Robin and I emerged from our research at the State Archives that day, it had been raining and a very faint rainbow was visible behind the downtown towers.
Lindsey loved rainbows. She seemed to bring them out. I had seen more Arizona rainbows since I had met her than I had seen in my entire life. She would call me to the window to watch them, where we lingered while she painted the scene with her words, her arm around my waist. The summer of her pregnancy, the monsoon season was poised to be the new strange normal. When I had been a boy, the summer rainstorms had come into the city regularly from mid-July through early September. The lightning and thunder were spectacular. The rain constituted the majority of the precious seven inches a year that made the Sonoran Desert lush and unique in all the world.
When I moved back, I found a metropolitan area that had become a 2,500-square-mile concrete block. The summers were becoming hotter and longer, and the monsoons strange and unpredictable. In this strange new normal-all that most of this city of newcomers knew-the big thunderheads stayed beyond the mountains, as if they were gods surveying the mess that man had made of their timeless Salt River Valley. And when the storms rolled in, they were often violent. One storm two years before had been so savage that it knocked the telephone poles on Third Avenue straight down and ripped off some roofs. The meteorologists talked about microbursts and the collision of the weather front with superheated concrete, especially in places like Sky Harbor airport. I thought about how those storm gods might be releasing their kindled anger.
But while last summer had been hot and scary with the broken gasoline line, the monsoons had been as before. In addition to the obligatory dust storms and dramatic nighttime lightning shows, several times a week we had gotten real rain. And real rainbows.
One afternoon I had come home early and found Lindsey and Robin together in the upstairs apartment. Lindsey stood at the window as the clouds moved away and the room lightened.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s a double rainbow.”
It was: twins soaring all the way through the boiling sky toward Camelback Mountain.
“It’s a good sign,” Robin said.
An hour later, Lindsey started bleeding.
What is the dark matter that controls our fates, that brings catastrophes upon us suddenly? We are fools to even consider it. And what of the losses that we can never fully purge, never grieve away? Never make right. Never atone for. Never even hold a funeral or let our friends know what has collapsed us. Our child was gone without ever having breathed this fated atmosphere, without even a name.
My wife was only saved from bleeding to death by a procedure that meant she could never have children of her own. It was just another moment on a planet of tragedies, but it was our tragedy, our world knocked off its axis, taking with it all the tomorrows we had so vainly believed in. Later, when she was awake, Lindsey had demanded to know what had happened to her child. That was how she phrased it, “my child.” The doctor was not delicate: the fetus had been disposed of in the hospital incinerator. That was the way it was. Lindsey had nodded once and stared ahead dry-eyed.
I looked back on those three months with Lindsey as golden. But the complexion of the time was more complicated than that, as any historian would tell you, more shaded, nuanced. Someday when I could bear it, I might see it with greater clarity. We had grown closer together than ever, and yet mysteriously also drawn apart, as if making room for someone. Lindsey became very dependent on Robin, and now it was clear that having lost her job and facing the worst recession since the Depression, Robin embraced being needed. They denied that they were going shopping for baby things. “I don’t want to jinx it,” Lindsey said. The poetic watchfulness in her that had first so attracted me became something more. She worried. She was acutely aware of changes in her body, even as the doctor reassured her. A few days before the miscarriage, she had said, “Something doesn’t feel right,” and the doc reassured her again.
But she would never be set at ease. These were the first days when I had seen her grow suddenly angry with me over seemingly like small things. But, in her mind, nothing was small. Although the breach was quickly healed, this was a new side of my love. And me? I probably did a hundred things wrong. Maybe the worst, that day when she first saw the blood in her panties, was to say, like a towering ass, “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Now I was lost in the past as the rainbow faded over the Chase Tower. Robin lightly touched my shoulder. “Just be with me in this moment, David.”
I nodded and we started to walk to the car.
She said, “It’s all we really have.”
20
We carried the copied case files home and laid them out on the big desk in the study. I was tempted to give Robin the trial transcript, but didn’t want her to get bored. She was excited by this historical sleuthing. So I divided the work, taking the transcript myself and giving her a small stack of police and arson reports.
It was tempting to look back on 1940 as a more innocent time, and that’s probably true. Wars always change nations, coarsen them; Woodrow Wilson had known that on the eve of World War I. And the Arizona and America of 1940 had yet to go into World War II, much less the Cold War, and our current imperial adventures. Advanced communications consisted of dial telephones – the police radio system was only eight years old. Social networking was done at barber and beauty shops, the railroad depot, and the American Legion hall. But human nature persists in all its darkness, and even the little town of Phoenix had its share of violent crime back then. It also had a disproportionate amount of corruption.
The city commissioners themselves were said to control some of the local rackets. The Mafia was beginning to discover Phoenix, a town where cops and judges could be bought, where the banks could be used to launder money. On the outside, it was just a sunny farm town, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of citrus groves and fields. My grandfather’s dental practice was downtown. But Phoenix was also segregated, this place that had been settled by plenty of ex-Confederates. The relatively large black population, which came west with the cotton crop, went to separate schools. The Mexican-Americans were set off in their barrios. The main places everyone mingled were in the produce warehouses along the railroad tracks and in the red-light district on the east side. That was also the scene of Phoenix’s worst race riot, when soldiers went on a rampage during World War II. The official death count was three, but probably was much higher. It was history the chamber of commerce didn’t want you to know.