John Brandon - A Million Heavens

“I know of it.”

The doctor motioned for Dannie to sit. “They had a girl on it who throws footballs through tires. This prim thing with manners, and she stands twenty yards away and zip, zip, zip — one after the next.”

“I’ve never thrown a football in my life.”

“You’re not from Texas. This girl was from Texas.” The doctor drew his hand behind his head daintily, and then whipped his arm forward. He held the pose. “They kept her around because she was an attractive female who could throw footballs.”

“Mystery solved,” said Dannie.

The doctor set the file flat on the desk. He made sure it wasn’t too close to his soda. “So, you’re pregnant.”

Dannie looked at him.

“In my opinion, the answer to whether or not you’re likely to get pregnant is yes — it’s overwhelmingly likely, a hundred percent likely. You can quit waiting on that period.”

Dannie didn’t know how to feel. She felt stupid. She was a woman who’d been having sex with no birth control and then her period had been late. Her mind had not allowed itself to consider the obvious. Nothing could happen until you stopped hoping for it. She’d met Arn after she’d decided not to try and meet anyone. She’d gotten pregnant when she’d deemed herself unable. Her womb was not a cobwebby corner in the rafters.

The doctor had a lot of literature for Dannie. She was in a fog. He gave her many phone numbers. He gave her his card. It had his name on it and his wife’s. Her name was Marney. The husband and wife would no longer be her doctors. Their duties ended with conception. There were a bunch of foods Dannie was encouraged to eat and a bunch she needed to avoid. There were exercise programs. Dannie looked at the photograph of sheep and it looked different. The sheep looked like they’d been through an ordeal. They looked dumb with gratitude. Dannie was passing back through the waiting room, all those other women. She was out of the building. She was in her car.

She didn’t know where to drive. She wasn’t going home. When the lights were green she went on through. When they were red, she got into a turning lane. She headed mostly south. It was the middle of the afternoon. She went down past the factories and the scattered, one-story neighborhoods and took a ramp onto an interstate. There was a dairy farm with a complicated irrigation system and then a flurry of signs for a taxidermy museum. She was down into the featureless desert. There weren’t mountains down here and there had never been towns.

Dannie felt something unfamiliar and she hoped it was joy. Joy wouldn’t feel this complicated, though, this unfinished. People were going to want to help Dannie. They were going to judge her. She was going to be an open book. She had so much to learn. She was about to start a twenty-four-hour-a-day job that was going to last many, many years. Dannie wanted to tell her friends. She would be let back into their good graces because she had a story to tell. That’s what was required when you forsook people and disappeared into the wilderness: a story. They would support her. But she wasn’t going to tell them until she was ready. Dannie didn’t want a bunch of fluttering attention just yet. She had to think things over. She had cards in her hand but the game she was playing was wholly unfamiliar. She was still heading south, the only car on the road. Albuquerque had disappeared from her rearview. The Owl Café was supposed to be down here. Maybe she’d stop and get a greasy burger. She adjusted her visor and opened the window a crack.

Arn. What about Arn now? He had held up his end of the bargain, not that he’d known a bargain was ever in place. He was an unwitting donor. He lived like he didn’t want to ever be wise and now he was none the wiser. He wasn’t ready to become a father. Not even close. He would have a whole different life a few years from now, and Dannie had no right to ruin that life by telling him about this pregnancy. Their time together had been mutually beneficial. She’d given him a fling with an older woman and he’d saved her from the world of sperm banks and adoption. At a sperm bank they had contributions from a bunch of tall guys with college degrees, as if the world wasn’t crawling with six-foot college graduates who were complete assholes. Dannie’s child was going to look like Arn — there was no way around it — but Dannie was an adult and that meant dealing with difficult circumstances. The child might have Arn’s temperament, and that would please Dannie but also make her miss him. She’d be ready for that. She’d handle missing him. She would miss the way his eyes could appear uninterested while his touch was full of passion. She would miss his voice, would miss the way he never cried but always seemed not far from it. People cried too much. Dannie was a mother now. Her crying didn’t mean anything anymore. She was a mother and she was going to have to miss all sorts of things.

Dannie saw the billboard for the Owl Café and then she saw the exit and blew past it. She wanted to be in her car. There was something way out ahead of her on the horizon, either low clouds or lofty mountain peaks. They were as far off as her eyes could see, in another state or another country.

He walked his sister-in-law out to his car and she lowered herself down into the passenger seat without any help. Mayor Cabrera got them going north on the old Turquoise Trail. His sister-in-law was wearing an actual outfit, a blouse and pants that matched and a coat and shoes that went together. She’d made some effort with her hair. Mayor Cabrera could tell by the way his sister-in-law looked around at the scenery that she hadn’t been up this way in a long time. She placed her hand on the dashboard, bracing herself, and Mayor Cabrera slowed down. When they were young, she’d have been egging him to go faster. She and Tam and Mayor Cabrera had spent so many hours in a car, in his old El Camino. They’d burned a whole summer chasing around the state to sites where aliens had been spotted.

At the cemetery they walked at a measured pace, browsing the tombstones. Some of these people had lived in the Old West, Mayor Cabrera thought. The Old West had not been so long ago. Mayor Cabrera asked how his sister-in-law’s chickens were doing, which was a way of asking if she was worried about the wolf. She said she couldn’t bring the chickens in at night because of the mess they’d make. She hoped there were enough of them to look out for one another, or at least raise enough racket to wake her. She seemed resigned to leave her chickens to fate, which Mayor Cabrera decided to take as a sign of sanity. She seemed a little embarrassed about the chickens, in general. If she could be embarrassed, she was rejoining the human race.

They came to the tombstone they were looking for. Mayor Cabrera had decided not to put dates on his wife’s stone. He didn’t want her hemmed in that way. There was an engraving on the stone of verbena, her favorite flower. There was a weed the landscaping crew had missed, leaning against the stone like a drunk against an alley wall. Mayor Cabrera reached down and plucked it.

His sister-in-law’s cheeks looked blanched, out in the chilly breeze. “Things have never felt real,” she said, “without her here to see them.”

Mayor Cabrera knew what she meant. The moment he was in now didn’t seem all that real. “We used to be the best people we knew,” he said. “We walked around with that. The knowledge that we were fun and tough.”

His sister-in-law’s lips became a hard line and then she said, “I remember. I remember how I was.”

The sun found its way out of the clouds and Mayor Cabrera saw that they were standing in the shade. He hadn’t visited his wife’s grave in forever but the feeling was nonetheless familiar, the uncertainty about what to feel, about whether he was there for himself or Tam, whether that mattered. Maybe it was good to feel confused. Maybe some people didn’t feel anything at the cemetery, and that had to be worse.