WHEN WE LIVED in Yuma, I had the great sense of being on the edge of things. I felt that if I stood with my back to the east, all of civilization—all of our history, all our losses and debts—would be behind me. Though of course that was not true.
After my radio job in Ottawa disappeared, the way they often do, I had to take the first thing I could find. I ended up producing for a low-wattage oldies station in Watertown, New York. It was a mostly disagreeable little place that I nonetheless managed, mostly through an exercise of will, to find charming in pockets. The house I had us living in was right next to a playground, which my daughter Candace, who was around three then, loved. I found a teenage girl named Jennifer—the cheery daughter of the woman who answered phones at the station—to babysit for me. There was a nice enough bar nearby, Milton’s. And sometimes, when I drove around town or walked home from the bar, I would catch a glimpse of the river, or the void in the night where I knew the river was, and I’d even find myself thinking that Watertown was pretty.
Shona would join me there most weekends. We had worked together at a station in Ottawa, back when radio jobs were more plentiful. Before automation, before centralization. She’d been married to an ad salesman there, or attached anyway, but things didn’t work out, and she and I became close in the aftermath. Eventually she’d tired of being a radio journalist, so she got her certification as a yoga instructor and had been doing that for a few years by the time I moved to Watertown. She said it was a thing that travelled well, because anywhere you were likely to find yourself, you’d find people who were overtired and stressed and needed what yoga offered. Grounding, she said.
She was still in Ottawa, but could do the drive in under two hours. Apparently, she found that an acceptable price to pay for my company. “I like driving,” she’d say. “Gives me time to spend with myself.”
When she’d come, generally on a Friday, I’d get Jennifer to watch Candace so that Shona and I could be grown-ups and go to dinner. Usually, we’d wind up at Milton’s. One thing I admired about Shona was the fact that her dedication to wellness and groundedness did not interfere with her great thirst. It meant that we could have a few rounds, careen home, put Jennifer in a cab, and afterwards still open up a bottle of something hard before falling onto the bed.
On nights like those, inevitably, we’d talk about the future. We avoided doing so in the sober daylight hours—it was an unspoken policy of ours—but on those nights, things loosened up, and we became free dreamers, big planners, lovers of a grand tomorrow.
“What if we’d met ten years earlier?” she asked me once.
“You wouldn’t have liked me then,” I said.
“I didn’t really like Dan either, but I stuck with him. I could have been Candace’s mom.”
“Oh, who knows. Would you have wanted that?” I asked, and looked over at the silhouette of her face against the light leaking in under the bedroom door. I had put a nightlight in the hallway for Candace, who sometimes got up and wandered around in the dark.
“Your baby? Your babies? I think so.”
“You’d be a good mom. Candace is crazy about you.”
“So’s her dad,” she said, and flipped herself over on top of me, laughing.
Candace was always a sound sleeper, so Shona and me, we’d have ourselves a party until we couldn’t sustain it any longer, and then we’d give in to sleep, or something deeper. Hours later, with the dim, dirty light of a Watertown morning peeking around the curtains, we’d wake up and have to make some sense of Saturday morning. And then on Saturday night we’d do it all again.
It was costing me something near a fortune. Every visit meant two dinners plus drinks, and two nights of babysitting. It was exhausting, too. But I loved it and wouldn’t have dreamed of going without it.
Overall, though, I felt a bit like I was spinning my wheels in Watertown. The summer was fine and warm, and while there wasn’t much to do, it was a pleasant enough place to do nothing. But as it got colder, I could feel something clamping down on us: a tightness, a way of life that was small and too contained.
I began thinking that as long as I was working in the States, we might as well find somewhere nicer to be, or warmer anyway. Maybe California.
***
While scouring an online job board, I came across the opening in Yuma. It wasn’t California, but the Arizona desert seemed close enough. It seemed to possess an edge, a frontier feeling. I needed that. In Watertown, there were no edges—just the slow, slumping shape of your life going flat in the middle. Not horribly, and perhaps not even all that sadly. But eventually I think you wake up in a place like Watertown and say to yourself, Why didn’t I go to Yuma? And all the answers you could come up with would feel pretty unsatisfactory.
“What do you think of Yuma?” I asked Shona one wild night in November, as we lay all twisted together in that cold bed.
“I think of Gary Cooper,” Shona said.
“You’re thinking of High Noon,” I said. “Somebody else was in 3:10 to Yuma.”
“Then they remade it with what’s his name.”
“The Australian guy.”
“Crowe,” she said. “Russell Crowe.”
“Right. And Batman. Christian Bale.”
“Why do you want to know about Yuma?” she asked.
“I’m thinking of going there. Moving there.”
“Sure you are.”
“No, I mean it. There’s an opening at a station there, and I’m sick of this cold. And winter hasn’t even hit yet.”
“What do I think,” she said, narrowing her eyes and pushing her lips out into a pout. “I think you can’t just keep jumping around, Russ, is what I think. Candace needs a home.”
“Maybe, sure, yes,” I said. “But what I figure is I find her one now, before she starts school. Kids her age, they adapt. They’re very good at it.”
Shona got up then and stretched her arms above her head. I could just make her out in the dark, wearing nothing but her black underwear. She walked across the room and opened the door, went into the bathroom. I closed my eyes and listened to my own breathing and the whine of the pipes as she ran water.
When she came back, she sat on the side of the bed near me and she put her hand on my chest. “I can’t tell if you’re serious,” she said.
“I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“And you’re asking me to come?”
“Yes. I expect people do yoga in Yuma, too.”
“Of course they do.”
“So?”
I know that Shona, at that point in her life, was feeling a lot like I was: without vista, without a chance to see things. Hemmed in by a lot of small stuff. I didn’t think then that it was cowardly to drop your life and take up a new one, in a new place, so long as you weren’t hurting anyone. I couldn’t see what might be holding me and Candace to Watertown, or Shona to Ottawa. Yes, everything was fine enough—but why couldn’t it be even better?
I thought we owed it to ourselves to try.
“Give me time, Russ. I need to think about this. To figure out what’s best for me.”
“I understand,” I said, though I didn’t. Not then.
We got up the next morning to find that the snow had begun. The sense I had then, that the winter would not end until April or May, sealed things for me, though I did not and would not say that to Shona.
The snow was still flying when she left us on Sunday afternoon, and the roads looked awful. I bundled Candace up in her snowsuit and we went out in our small driveway to dig out Shona’s car. Shona had only a pair of high-heeled boots with her, and wore a small leather coat with one of her big, luxurious scarves elaborately wrapped around her neck and shoulders. She looked lovely, though cold, and I had to be aware of the chance that I wouldn’t see her again.
“You don’t have snows on this car,” I said.
“All-seasons. They’re good. I’m good.”
“All-seasons aren’t for all seasons. It’s a bad name. I need you to get home safe, Shon,” I said. “I need you to go easy and take your time.”
“Yes, baby,” she said, in a way that was sweet, but also, I knew, making a little fun of me, of the parental me, the worrier, the protector.
“Can you let me know when you get there?” I said. “Call or text?”
I put my hands on her face then, and I thought about those invisible signals, the ones that carry words, carry sounds, pass through our clothing and bodies, through walls and features of the landscape.
“I will,” she said, and nodded, then kissed me. She stooped, kissed and hugged Candace, who’d been standing by my feet, and then she stood and kissed me again, harder, more desperately, like a person who is starving. After that, she climbed into her car, and was gone.
***
The long and short of it is that I gave my notice and gathered our few things, and by the New Year we were in Yuma, my little girl and I.
The drive gave us the chance to see the Grand Canyon. Candace didn’t quite seem to believe it was real—as though it were a thing I’d dreamed up and shown her, and after we turned our backs it would dissolve. I held her in my arms and we stood near the lip of it, the ground falling away from us, the sky set to swallow us. Everything wild.
I told her, “For now you’ll have to take my word for it, but that’s one of the most amazing things you’ll ever see.”
“It’s pretty,” she said—fearing, I could tell, that my feelings would be hurt if she did not praise the sight. She is, at times, as sensitive as her mother was.
Of the desert she said, over and over again, “Where’s the trees?”
“In this part of the world, they’re cactuses. But you don’t say cactuses, you say cacti.”
“Prickles!”
When we got to Yuma, I took a little suite in a motel among the RV parks and minigolf courses on the edge of town. Candace had her side of the room and I had mine, a counter and a lattice divider running half the length of the room in between. I sat on the bed and watched college football while running my hands over the keyboard of a laptop, looking for a place for us to rent.
Before we’d left, I’d been in touch with the manager of STAR 100.9, who’d been kind of non-committal about her desire to meet with me. “I’m coming to Yuma anyway,” I’d said on the phone, “so I’d appreciate a chance to sit down and tell you why I’m right for your station.”
“Why don’t you get in touch when you arrive here?” she’d said.
I got the uneasy sense that there was no longer an opening, or at least not an opening for me. But I bullied ahead anyway, thinking my enthusiasm might translate into good things for Candace and me.
It only took a few days to find a house. It was a two-bedroom place with a kitchen the size of a closet and a scrubby little yard. Dogs roamed freely and howled all night and the Interstate zoomed past my bedroom window. I put down first and last rent, and started to furnish it with finds from the Goodwill. After a couple of nights on the floor I found a futon for Candace, and for me an old oak bed frame, thick and dramatic, into which I dropped a Craigslist mattress. Life rolled on.
The station manager—her name was Wendy Farquhar—continued to deflect, and I figured I’d better find something temporary in case this radio business took too long in coming together. I presented myself at the jobs office downtown, gave them my old road-construction credentials, and found myself on a crew a few days later. Meanwhile, Candace was being watched by a mom in the neighbourhood, a woman named Felicia, who had two of her own and another in her care. Paying her, plus the rent, plus the new furniture and things, on top of the gas and food and motels for the trip down, had me scratching the bottom of the barrel and needing that first road-crew cheque pretty badly.
The heat was like nothing else. I can’t describe it to you. I lost ten pounds my first week with the crew. We were on a stretch of I-8 to the east of the city, just over the hills, where agricultural land hugged the river on the one side, and the other was pure, parched Sonoran waste. I stood all day in that godless sun with a shovel in my hand, or a rake, bent over steaming asphalt, or holding a flag. My skin baked and my feet roasted in my old steel-toes.
At the end of the day, I’d drive under the limit and take in the sight of the light dyeing everything pink and blue, the rock and the sand, the fields of citrus. I’d park at the house and find Candace playing with the other children in a yard nearby while Felicia sat watching and chatting in Spanish with another woman, who may have been her sister. I’d fetch Candace, and if anything bad had happened that day, Felicia would tell me, but usually I’d just wave and she’d smile and wave, too. Then Candace and I would go inside, and I’d get her some juice and open myself a beer. I’d have a quick shower. We’d debate what to have for dinner but usually just open a can of spaghetti, then watch some TV together. At bedtime we’d read a book or two, then she’d lie in the dark and talk to her unicorn awhile before drifting off, whereupon I would watch some more TV, and maybe chat with Shona on the phone. And that was life. It wasn’t a bad one.
A seam of sadness still ran through it, though.
I rattled around feeling like I was waiting for the last piece to fall into place. At first I assumed that last piece was the radio job, but as the days passed I was more and more certain that I wasn’t going to find myself in the employ of STAR 100.9. That disappointed me, but it didn’t tarnish things so completely. The truth was, I didn’t mind working the roads. What was actually missing, of course, was Shona’s company.
The feeling was made harder by our telephone calls. Her voice soothed me, but it also made me desperate for her skin, her smell, her eyes. I wanted to feel her presence, not just to know how she was getting on in Ottawa.
“Shon, is this enough for you?” I asked her one night.
“It’s what we have.”
“You remember what I asked you?”
“I’m not forgetting it. I know the invitation’s open.”
“It is. It is open. I hope you’ll think about it some more.”
“I could hardly think about it more, babe.”
“But no decision yet.”
“It’s a complicated thing, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is.”
***
I got high one night with my new neighbours, Joe and Mercedes. They lived two doors down, in a little house with an enormous cactus out front. I’d see them around a lot because Joe was a programmer who worked from home and Mercedes was home-schooling their two, Annabel and Sonny. Annabel and Candace sometimes played together, which was how I got to talking with Joe.
Joe said I ought to come over for a drink one night, so I did. I put Candace down to sleep and cracked her window and then slipped out. When I got to their house, Joe and Mercedes were on their front step, drinking wine and laughing. “The Canadian!” Joe said.
I had the sense pretty quickly that he was the kind to watch you eat an apple and then tell you that you were doing it wrong because you didn’t eat the core. I wasn’t far off—but he was all right. Kind of funny about his cynicism. He made me laugh.
“Good evening, Joe,” I said.
He introduced me to Mercedes, who I’d seen around but hadn’t yet spoken to. She was dark-haired and her face was lined and her cool, green eyes were sad but not unfriendly. Mercedes, I’d learn, was the optimistic one, the one who’d invite their kids to paint giant sunshines on their bedroom walls and then smile at the messy results.
She said, “Is your little one sleeping?”
I said yes, and pointed to the glow of her nightlight in the window.
“She’s a sweet little girl,” Mercedes said.
“Thank you,” I said. “She’s everything to me.”
They both smiled at this, and were silent. I felt that they were thinking of their children, of how important Sonny and Annabel were to their lives.
“Yours are asleep?” I asked.
“I think so,” Mercedes said. “They were tired. We don’t enforce a bedtime. We let them decide when they’re ready for bed. We find that way they don’t resent it. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what they want.”
“We believe in self-direction,” said Joe.
“And it works? I just imagine my girl would try to stay up all night.”
“She’d get used to it,” Joe said, smiling.
I nodded and tried to seem open to such ideas, but thought to myself that it wasn’t a thing I’d ever do. Maybe it was common sense, or maybe it was an old, rusty idea to which I was welded, but I thought kids needed a bedtime. I still do.
Something about Mercedes and Joe backed up this idea I’d had about Yuma being on the edge of things. They were experimenting with everything. They felt like old rules didn’t apply to them. It inspired in me a mix of envy and pity that I would never have expressed to them.
“You need a drink,” Joe said. “What can we get you? Beer? Wine? Something more exotic?”
“I’d take a beer, Joe,” I said.
He nodded and bounded up the steps and into the house, letting the screen door slap behind him.
“Tell me something about Canada,” Mercedes said. “We’ve never been.”
“There are a lot more trees than there are here,” I said, and smiled.
“And snow?”
“In winter. Where I’m from, the winters are long and hard. Lots of snow.”
“I guess you just get used to it,” she said. “I can’t imagine it.”
“It’s just life there,” I said. “It can be fun.”
Joe banged back out the door and handed me a bottle I didn’t recognize. “Drink local,” he said.
I don’t think Joe was yet forty, but he had some miles on him. His bushy, greying hair stuck out from beneath a weathered tweed flat cap, his quick brown eyes set deep in his lined, tanned face. He had a grey goatee that drew attention to his mouth, which always looked on the verge of saying something.
The night seemed very dark then, though warm and soft. We huddled beneath the lamp on the front step of their small home and talked about our children because it was something we had in common.
“I hope you won’t mind me asking,” Mercedes said, “but where is Candace’s mother?”
“That’s a story,” I said. “Well, she had some trouble soon after Candace was born, and we couldn’t find any way to help her. She went away for a while and then tried to come back, but it wasn’t any good. And our families agreed, you know, that it would be best if I took care of Candace. And a judge agreed that that was true.”
“Oh, Russ, I’m sorry I asked.”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s what happened. I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t know where she is now, but I hope she’s better. I hope we did the right thing for her.”
Things were quiet for a few moments after that. Finally Joe broke the silence to talk about computers. Mercedes asked if there was anyone new in my life. “I think so,” I said.
Joe got me another beer. Then he said, “Do you mind if we smoke, Russ?” I said no, of course I didn’t mind, so he took a small tin and a pack of papers from the pocket of his New York Yankees sweatshirt and rolled quickly and expertly. He was an artist, a practised one. He looked me in the eyes while his fingers worked mechanically, producing the smoothest, tightest joint I had ever seen.
Mercedes asked if I ever got high.
“I have no policy against it,” I said.
So we passed the thing around while we sat quietly, listening to the dogs bark and to the cars whoosh by on the highway. The night had had a pretty, sweet scent to it, but that was pushed aside by the strong smell of our smoking.
Joe held the fumes for a long time, then let them slowly out, and laughed. Mercedes giggled.
“Our small reward,” he said.
“There isn’t much left to us, is there?”
“Are you happy, Russ?” Mercedes asked.
“I don’t know. I’m getting close, maybe,” I said. “I believe it’s possible to be happy. That marks a bit of a change for me.”
“Good for you,” she said, and leaned forward to pat my arm, then handed me the joint.
“I have something else for us,” Joe said. “Just give me a few minutes.”
“Okay,” I said. “What the hell.” It was getting late, but I was enjoying myself. I’d feel it the next day, but I could muddle through and then maybe I could let Candace watch TV while I fell asleep in the early evening.
After a few quiet minutes Joe came back out with a bottle and three small glasses. Tapatio, said the bottle. It was tequila. Joe poured the drinks, doled them out, then lifted his glass high. “Death or glory,” he said, downing it in one jerk of his head.
“Death or glory,” said Mercedes, and she tipped her glass back.
“Death is gory,” I said, and gulped mine down. It was smooth fire in my gullet. Joe immediately began pouring more.
Just before the third shot, I heard what I knew right away to be Candace’s voice, in the way all parents know in such moments. She was crying terribly, sobs followed by a shriek, and then she was saying, “Daddy! Daddy!”
My heart left my chest. My face must have been something to see, because Mercedes didn’t have to ask. She said, “Oh, Russ, go, go go.”
I tore across the lawn, dodging the cactus, in through the front door, then right around the bend to Candace’s room. I threw on the light and saw she was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her face red, eyes wet. She was breathing hard. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” she said, then huffed and huffed and sobbed on my shoulder as I picked her up.
“I know,” I said, “I know. You’re okay. I’m here. You’re okay.”
I walked over to the switch and put the light back out and lay her down, then climbed into bed with her. She curled into me. After a time, her choppy breathing smoothed out, her sobbing slowed.
I felt awful that she’d found herself alone. I was angry with myself for that. Alone or cold: those are the two states that I can’t stand to think of her suffering. It kicks me in the stomach to think of it. I did not promise her it wouldn’t happen again, because it’s important to be realistic about such things. But I promised myself I’d try harder.
I lay listening to her breathe, and to the traffic, and the dogs. She slept, finally, without me ever knowing what it was that set her off. I drifted off, too.
In the morning, I woke in a panic and had to call in to say I’d be late.
“It’s my daughter,” I said.
***
Candace had always been a good sleeper, quick to go off and hard to wake, but that seemed to be gone. The next night, she again awoke frantic, and would fight sleep in the evenings that followed with a screaming desperation which frightened and frustrated me.
It wasn’t until one evening, many weeks later, that she finally fell quietly asleep: in the back seat, as we went to pick a few things up at the store.
So began a period when, every night after dinner, I’d take her for a drive. We’d eat and I’d wash up, then maybe read a book with her or watch something, and then I’d put her in her PJs and we’d get into the car and go. She would start pointing out things she saw, or asking me questions about the things we passed, then she’d grow quiet, and soon, usually by the time we hit the limits of Yuma, she’d drift off.
It felt fragile to me, her sleep, so I’d drive around awhile longer. A lot of nights I’d head for a turnoff I’d found up in the hills, east of the city. Just a little spot where you can duck off the highway, a gravel patch that peeks from between some hills, back toward the city. I’d pull off and park there, and I’d listen to the radio softly.
I still believe in radio, in the waves that float through our lives, available for capture. A way to communicate, a way to pass information, a way to feel a part of human enterprise. Words and music. Everywhere I go I am aware that I am passing through radio signals, and that they are passing through me. I’m happy they’re there, and that they’re free.
What I found, sitting up there and scanning the dial, were signals rising up from Mexico. I do not speak Spanish, nor understand it, but I found these stations mesmerizing and, in a way, comforting. A world right there, next to me, that I did not know but which beat on anyway. It was the narcocorrido songs that caught my attention most: earnest, dramatic songs about the drug wars. Folk heroes. They seemed cut out of time, or as if I’d found myself in some pocket of the past. Parked up there, with a partial view of Yuma’s twinkling lights, and the soft night air, Candace would sleep in her car seat, and I would sit and listen to that music, trying to imagine an outlaw’s life.
***
A month passed, six weeks. I was beginning to despair a bit where Shona was concerned, thinking I’d misread her desire to be with me, but then she told me one night that she’d decided to come see us. It both surprised and pleased me.
“You mean that?” I said.
“Are you happy?” she asked.
“Jesus, Shon, I’m. Yes. When?”
“Second week of March,” she said.
It wasn’t so far off. Just a few weeks. I wanted to tidy up my life ahead of her arrival, so I cleaned the house top to bottom. I hung photos on the walls. I bought new cutlery. Got a haircut. Took Candace to a little salon and got her all cleaned up. I went to a mall and bought two new shirts for me and some new clothes for Candace. I put wine in the fridge, clean linen on the beds, and flowers in a pickle jar on the kitchen table.
Her trip took her through Los Angeles, with a connection to Yuma in a tiny prop plane that skimmed over the mountains. Candace and I waited in the small airport late that afternoon, me nervously watching every face coming through the gate. When I saw Shona, and she saw me, her eyes lit up and a small smile crept across her face—a smile like relief and mischief rolled together. We walked toward one another quickly. She looked good. Weary but healthy. I put my arms around her and my face over her shoulder and into her abundant hair. Her voice in my ear, saying to me, “I told you. I told you I’d come.”
“Yes, you did.” I pressed against her and I felt her back’s long curve, felt her breathing.
Candace squealed a bit, standing at our feet. She tugged on Shona’s jeans.
“She’s been looking forward to this,” I said. “She’s made you gifts.” They were scraps of paper she’d cut out into shapes like hearts and glued together, with crayon scrawls on them. They were welcome hearts, Candace said, and she carried them in a little Hello Kitty satchel she wore everywhere.
“I’ll give them to you in the car,” Candace said.
“Sounds good,” Shona said, and knelt down for a hug. When she stood up again she looked right at me and she seemed almost giddy. “Yuma!”
“Yuma,” I said. “Welcome. We’re glad you’re here.”
“Well,” she said, “show me Yuma.”
I drove slowly down 32nd, past the airbase. It appeared busy. Silver contrails sutured the sky. The sand all around was a deep golden amber. The desert stretched out and disappeared, and the hills shimmered like blue smoke. I thought Yuma was showing its best aspect to Shona, and I hoped it was making an impression on her. In the passenger seat she smiled through her green-framed sunglasses.
That night I did not drive Candace around, but simply put her down to bed, and she chatted with her unicorns and bears for a long while. From her bedroom, Candace’s voice was lazy and soft. I imagined sleep as a swimming pool, and my baby girl crouched on the edge, her toes curled over the lip, reluctant to slip in. Finally, finally, she was quiet. I hoped that meant she was over her sleeping troubles—that perhaps she’d been missing Shona, too, and insomnia was her way of expressing it.
Shona and I stood in the kitchen, slouched against the counters, talking in low tones. I kept moving in close, hooking a finger into the belt loops of her jeans. I did not wish to let her go. When we were sure Candace was asleep, we devoured one another, then fell into a deep, dumb sleep.
In the middle of the night, my lover woke and went to the kitchen. I heard the fridge door open. I got up, too, pulled on my jeans, and followed her. She was standing in front of the sink, drinking a bottle of beer.
“What’s up?” I said.
“I was thirsty,” she said, tilting the bottle and giving an impish little shrug. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Maybe the time change,” I said.
She had on blue underwear and my plaid shirt, open, her navel winking out at me. Her hair was a riot. She held the bottle out to me. “Sip?”
“I’ll take my own,” I said, opening the fridge and grabbing one.
She turned and looked at her dim reflection in the window over the sink. Outside, lights winked, windows glowed, lives were lived. A dog barking somewhere, and the persistent buzz of traffic on the Interstate. I placed my beer on the counter, moved in behind Shona, and wrapped one arm around her shoulders and the other around her waist. I looked at our reflection. She smiled.
“Look at that,” I said. “We fit.”
“We fit,” she said, and leaned her head back. I squeezed a little tighter and she pushed back into me. Her warmth and her smell nearly knocked me down. My shirt hung down below her hips but I held her bare stomach. It was hot to the touch. I was so happy in that moment. I have trouble capturing it. I wanted to make everything last forever.
I thought to myself, here is the woman—what took you so long to find her? Here is the one who will give you a home, the one who will save you from drift, from aimlessness. Here is the woman who will know you and see your value, who will show it to you. Here she is, Russ, and you’d best not fuck this up.
“Come back to bed,” I said.
“Will it be worth my while?” she asked.
“I believe it will,” I said. And I believe it was.
In the morning, she was in a light mood. She sat at the kitchen table looking at her phone.
“Know what they call people from here?” she asked.
“No, what?”
“Yumans. Isn’t that hilarious?”
“I hadn’t heard that. We’re surrounded by Yumans.”
“They’re everywhere!” she said, and then laughed. I laughed, too.
Candace, who was eating Cheerios, looked up and said, “Who is everywhere?” and seemed annoyed when we kept laughing.
We drove out into the desert that afternoon, just to have a look, then had dinner at a Mexican place downtown. I put Candace to bed and we watched a movie, but didn’t make it to the end. Shona fell asleep on my shoulder and we had a quiet night, but made love in the morning and showered together before my little girl woke up. It was beginning to feel as though Shona had come to stay, but I was careful not to bring it up—I didn’t want to hear otherwise.
***
Once the week began and I was back to work, Shona took it on herself to get to know Yuma a bit. I was hopeful that her aim was to become familiar with the place where she’d be living. She’d get up with me and drive me to the site—still out east of town—and then take my car for the day. She found a yoga studio called the Sea of Tranquility. She bought herself boots and jeans and cowboy shirts at a Western-wear shop. She went for a hike in the hills. She and Candace would come out at the end of the day to pick me up, then we’d go home and cook dinner together. Candace loved all this, the feeling of family, I guess you’d say, and just how much more lively the house was with Shona in it.
Toward the end of the week, with Shona’s return to Ottawa the elephant in the room, my baby girl asked, out of the blue, “Sho-sho, do you live with us now?”
“Not yet,” Shona said, her eyes on me. “I need to talk to your dad about that.”
“Okay,” I said, “let’s talk about it.”
“Okay,” she said, “let’s.” She wore a funny grin that seemed to express excitement over the idea, while also gently mocking my serious tone. A dimple grew in her left cheek.
“We’d love you to. I think you know that,” I said. “I know there are questions to answer, things to work out. But it’s been so good having you here. I’d like this to go on.”
“Me too, Russ,” she said. “I think this is what I want.”
I became all tensed up—my eyes, my throat, my chest. I was happy she’d said that, happy she’d been feeling about the week the same way I had. “Okay,” I said, “okay. Where do we start?”
She stood and held her arms out. I stood and moved into her and we hugged.
“I guess we just. Just start,” she said.
And that’s what we did. She extended her stay into April, and we went on living that life. She started to have some say in small things, like the colour of the placemats I bought, and the decision to put Candace in swimming lessons down at the Y. It seemed like she was taking her first, early steps into what would become our home.
What she hadn’t told me was that she’d been having trouble sleeping since she arrived. Spent the nights lying awake next to me and trying not to toss too much. Perhaps it was the decision to stay: trying to make it, and then, having made it, experiencing some doubts. I missed it all, was oblivious. I assumed her lack of rest was due to the early mornings, getting me to the job site so she could have the car. Shona’s more of a night person than a morning one. But I should have known it meant something when the skin beneath her eyes darkened. I think I chose not to.
She flew back to Ottawa, to settle things was how she put it, and figured she’d be gone a month before joining us in a more permanent way. We drove her to the airport in the early morning of a Saturday, stood by the fence, and waved as her little plane lifted away.
We spoke each night after she left, but not until Candace and I had done our driving routine, which was once again proving necessary. I’d sit in the driver’s seat, listening to the narcocorridos as winged things clicked against the windshield, until my girl’s breathing slowed. When we got back to the house, I’d tuck her into bed and then dial Shona’s phone. Sometimes we’d talk an hour, and sometimes we’d chat five minutes, but hearing her—telling her I missed her, hearing her tell me the same—I’d feel good about what lay ahead for us.
***
By the time Shona returned, in May, it was beginning to get well and truly hot. She shipped me a couple of boxes of her things, then arrived with two overloaded suitcases. She’d stored everything else in her sister’s basement in Ottawa.
“It was kind of great to pare down,” she told me. “Who needs all that stuff?”
We had a little party—for its own sake, I suppose, but also to celebrate Shona’s decision to stay. Joe and Mercedes came. They were something like friends to me now, and I wanted to share my happiness with them. Their little ones played with Candace in my tiny yard while the four of us sat laughing and drinking in lawn chairs. The sky went dusky and I plugged in a string of lights I’d hung along the fence. “Fancy!” said Shona.
I cooked chicken and corn on a little hibachi atop the picnic table, and we ate on paper plates. Shona had bought a tray of cupcakes at the Walmart. The kids raced around, kicked a ball, walked dolls through the dry grass and sand. Then it got late, and though I was wobbly, I felt the tug of responsibility to get Candace to bed.
Shona knew, she could see it in the way I was watching my daughter through the little kitchen window as I put the paper plates in the trash and scrubbed the things I’d used to cook the chicken. She read me so well. “Can I get Candace ready for bed?” she asked. “I’d like to do that.”
“She’d love that.”
“Will she make a fuss over Sonny and Annie still being up?” I’d already explained to her about the approach Joe and Mercedes took to bedtime for their kids.
“I think having you get her ready will offset that,” I said.
Shona kissed me quickly on the mouth and gave me a look with her hazel eyes that seemed to hold a promise in it. She then called Candace in, had her say goodnight to her friends, and took her by the hand and led her into the bathroom. As they walked by me, my daughter gave me a conspiratorial look. It was a look that said, Look how I have captured her for you. She loved Shona. I could see that. And what wasn’t to love?
They were talking. I could not hear what they were saying, but there was laughing, and some serious conversation, too. After they moved into my little girl’s bedroom and a nightshirt was slipped over Candace’s head, Shona began to read to her. I could hear the easy, measured tones of a storybook in her voice.
“Sho-sho read the paper-princess story,” Candace said, when I went in to kiss her goodnight.
“Did she like it? Did she do a good job?”
“Yes,” they both said.
The room was warm. It was full of them. The light came from a lamp with a pink shade, made everything feel close and safe. We all smiled. Things felt so good, like they lined up the way I had hoped they would. It seemed Candace felt safe, felt she was home—and because she felt it, I felt it, too. Something was taking root in the desert, the accidental charge of life suddenly visiting us. I meant to capture it, to harness and hold it.
Shona sat on the side of the bed. I stood over her, smelled the fruity heat of her head. I couldn’t see her face but I could still feel the smile there. Candace’s eyes were so narrow they were almost shut, and her breathing was slow.
“How do you like having Shona tuck you in?” I asked.
“Can she do it tomorrow?”
“I guess I have my answer,” I said, and we laughed.
We kissed Candace goodnight and switched out her light. She was asleep before we closed her door, I think. Then we rejoined our friends in the yard. Sonny had fallen asleep in Mercedes’s lap. Annabel sat cross-legged at Joe’s feet, telling him a story about a queen who lived up among the stars, which were beginning to make themselves visible over our heads. The light turned a deep blue and soon Annabel was asleep, too. We adults got high and laughed quietly. Tears came to my eyes as I inventoried my luck.
***
We’re always making decisions, and then following through on them, without ever truly believing in their wisdom or suitability. It might be that’s where Shona found herself: she was content, primarily, just to have a path to follow for a time. I don’t quite know. She’s never said so to me. She seemed happy enough. But maybe that’s what I wanted to see. Piecing together things now, I am able to imagine that she couldn’t quell some yearning, or doubt, or small, nagging objections. There was something she missed—something that wasn’t in Yuma.
Meanwhile, I had got it in my head that we were on the edge of a new period of our lives, one that felt to me open, bright, and thrilling. Those were days of gorgeous desert sunrises, the new light over the east throwing its spectacular neon arms through the window, the smell of coffee, the sound of the dogs as they were roused. Shona had lucked into work leading classes at the Sea of Tranquility. It was just three of them a week, but she also got on the odd shift waiting tables at the Red Lobster. It had been so long since I’d even thought about the radio job that I began to see myself only as a labourer on road crews. It no longer felt like a temporary thing, and that was all right. I had Candace, I had Shona, and our little house, and friends to share a drink and a smoke.
Happiness was a recognizable thing. I looked at Shona as a source of it—or rather, I looked at the life we had, and would have, as a thing that might invite happiness in a more reliable way. And there was Candace, whose thoughts and actions fascinated and excited me even as they nudged me toward a sadness at the thought that she’d one day up and leave, to start her own life without me.
On all counts, I continued to view happiness as a thing that blesses us intermittently—a periodic dusting of gold down over our lives—and not as a thing to which we are entitled at all hours, every day. I did not believe it possible to banish sadness completely from one’s life, nor did I think it desirable to do so. Sadness, I thought, was a reasonable and healthy response to a frequently sad world. I still think that.
Shona saw things a bit differently, I can tell you now. She once told me that anything that doesn’t make you happy can and should be jettisoned from your life; that she could be happy from the moment she woke up until she fell asleep again, and that her dreams should be pleasant, too. And every day that this wasn’t the case frustrated and upset her, made her look for things to change, in order to bring about a perfect state.
It was for this reason, I think, that her sadness came dressed like anger. Whereas mine, when it came, was more of a sloped-shouldered resignation. I could not tell you, given our approaches, which of us was better prepared for all of life’s tiny assaults.
***
One Saturday, we found ourselves in the car before dawn. Candace was wrapped in a blanket and strapped into her seat in the back. Shona, in denim and fleece, dozed in the passenger seat, her head resting on the window, padded only by a balled-up nylon jacket.
We were following Mercedes and Joe and their kids out to the Imperial Sand Dunes. Joe said there was nothing like them. After an hour’s drive, he said, we could walk on the surface of the moon.
The plan was to time a hike so that we could have a picnic breakfast and watch the sun come up over the dunes, then be back in our cars and headed home before the day’s heat really hit. We crossed over into California on Interstate 8, then followed Mercedes and Joe’s aging Chevy Tahoe north. Outside the car there was nothing. The world was confined to my high beams: a small, concentrated spray of light on the straight road, barren space just to either side. There were no businesses, no houses. It was blacktop and empty sand and nothing more.
We came to another highway and followed it west. Before long I could see the Tahoe’s lights flashing staccato as Joe tapped the brakes. He pulled off the highway, onto the flat, sandy shoulder, and into a space marked by nothing but the tracks of vehicles that had been there before. He shut off his engine. There was nothing else around. No cars, no buildings, no people.
The dunes ran in a sandy gash from the northwest to the southeast, from the Salton Sea to Mexico, a shifting ocean of sand, hillocks, and swales remade daily by the wind. At the southern end they were cut by Interstate 8 and crosshatched by a stretch of border fence. There, white SUVs patrolled and recreational off-roaders blazed. The area from where we had come, toward the northern end, off 78, was closed to off-road traffic. It was, as Joe promised, an alluringly desolate and lunar place.
We were nearing the lip of day when we stopped. The light was just beginning to seep above the horizon, back over the way we’d come. Shona woke when I stopped the car. I opened the back door and spoke gently to Candace, to wake her.
Mercedes was putting on a backpack while Joe let Annabel and Sonny out of their seats. Their faces were sleepy. Sonny held a little plush cat by the paw, dangling it. “We’d better leave Kit-Kit here,” Joe said to him, “so we don’t lose him.”
“He can protect the truck,” Sonny said in his small, eager voice.
“That’s right.”
The air was dry and cool. Only a small breeze swept us, but you could hear it clearly, raking over the sand.
Joe approached, a sort of backpack-cooler over his shoulders. “How was the drive?” he asked me. “Did Candace sleep?”
“They both did,” I said, and Shona laughed. “It was great.”
“There’s kind of a trail from here,” Joe said. “If we follow that for twenty minutes we should find a nice spot to stop and eat.” Then he turned to his kids. “Everybody hungry?”
They nodded slowly. Annabel shyly slipped behind Mercedes’s legs.
The trail, such as it was, was a narrow, dusty line somewhat beaten by shoe prints. We walked single file. Mercedes took the lead, then Joe. The three children followed, intermingling in a way that made me happy to see. Then Shona and me.
Five minutes in and our shoes were filled with sand. It was remarkable, the way our feet would sink in only so far, then find something like firm ground. It was like walking on an enormous beach, I suppose, above the waterline, except there was no water. I could feel the effort in the muscles of my calves and hips. I walked with my head down.
We paused and I had a chance to look up, back to the east. The faint pre-dawn light was leaking over the waves and dips of sand. There were no artificial lights, no signs of life, no vegetation save the odd lonely bush.
“Just ahead,” Mercedes said. “There’s a kind of a slope over that way. We can put a blanket down and eat.”
The spot she indicated was inclined toward the east, forming a natural theatre from which we might watch the day begin. The sand was cool and chalky. Mercedes pulled a rolled-up blanket from her pack and laid it out, and Joe slipped his pack off and unzipped it. The kids sat on their knees as he handed them juice boxes.
We whispered when we spoke. I’m not sure why, except to say that it felt as though some degree of reverence was appropriate. When someone’s voice rose, usually one of the kids’, the sand had a way of swallowing the sound. Like snow does, I thought.
Mercedes then handed out egg sandwiches and fried potato patties while Joe distributed the contents of a coffee Thermos. The sky lightened perceptibly as we sat and ate.
“You have to admire that landscape,” Joe said, indicating it with his plastic cup of coffee.
“It’s such a strange and beautiful place, isn’t it?” said Shona.
The kids were standing, twirling on their feet in the sand, corkscrewing themselves downward, filling their shoes.
“There’s more coffee if you want it,” Mercedes said.
It was a nice moment, sitting there anticipating the sun. Every once in a while the wind gave the smallest gust and kicked grains of sand against our cheeks. The smell was something I have trouble describing, something between charcoal and warm pavement. A grand moment was coming and we didn’t want to miss it. But neither was there any particular hurry. We were at rest, among easy company. The only sounds were of a bit of wind, our sparse chatter, the voices of our children.
An orange wedge suddenly appeared above a tall ridge of dunes.
Joe stood. “Welcome to Saturday,” he said.
Molten smudges of light began pouring over the horizon and running toward us, and the wedge quickly became a ball. It was an incredible sight. It looked like the beginning of the world. Or the end of it, I suppose.
I swallowed my coffee and stood next to Joe, one hand on my hip. Shona stood, too, and put her arms around my waist. “God,” she said. “I’m no morning person, but Jesus.”
“How do you feel now about being woken up so early?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, “totally worth it.”
The sun lit us up as it sprung up over the sand. I could feel the air getting warmer immediately. Everything was on fire. A cauldron from the earth’s heart had been tipped and its contents were flowing toward us. We were of the morning. And then we were in it. The day breaking over the world was enormous.
“Candace,” I said, “are you watching? Do you see the sun coming up?”
I wanted to share it with her, hoped maybe to create some memory: that time we watched the sun come up over the Imperial Sand Dunes.
She did not answer me.
“Candace?”
Nothing. I don’t know if it requires having a child of your own to imagine my terror. I suspect it does. Think of it: your child there, and then gone.
“Candace,” I said again, trying to moderate the panic I knew had crept into my voice. I turned fully around and saw only Annabel and Sonny. “Where is Candace?” I said, not at all calmly, though I knew I ought not alarm them.
Shona’s antennae picked up all this, and she said, “Oh Jesus. Candace! Candace!”
“She can’t have gone anywhere,” said Joe. “There’s nowhere to go around here. Look. There’s nowhere.”
He was right, but there was also no Candace. We fanned out and began turning in circles, all of us except the other children, who stood with their hands to their mouths and their shoulders balled up, afraid.
I looked at Annabel and Sonny. “Did you see her?” I asked.
They shook her tiny heads no, their eyes growing wider with fear.
“Candace, baby, where have you gone to?” said Mercedes.
I could not imagine where she could be. There were no trees, no rocks—nothing, as Joe had said, to hide behind. Had the sand swallowed her up? Had something silently carried her off? I felt my body go cold, my limbs and digits taking on a numb rigidity at precisely the moment I needed them to be most agile.
“Candace!” I shouted. “Candace!”
I broke into a run, away from the blanket, away from the rising sun, which I could feel on my back and shoulders. It was the only direction to go, since I had not seen her in front of us, and the trail was clear in both directions. I ran west into the nothingness, my knees high, the sand pulling me downward. Shona ran behind me, calling to Candace, calling to me.
I stopped running a moment, just to breathe, and had an instant of strange clarity. I could see beyond my own life, to a time when we no longer existed, a time when all we were and all we’d had was lost, when all that was left was the air and light encircling us. I don’t know what brought it on, except that strange landscape, and the thought of my daughter being gone.
I snapped back to the immediate world when Shona called my name again. I turned and saw she’d fallen and was reaching down to her right ankle. She had misstepped, found something beneath the surface of the sand, and turned her ankle over.
“Shon,” I said.
She sat kind of crumpled in the dust, lit from behind, her head haloed by the sun. She was taking these sorts of hiccupy breaths and her hair was strung across her face.
“Baby,” I said, “I can’t help you right now. Stay put there. You’re fine.” And she looked at me quizzically, her cheeks reddened with pain, and likely her vision gone a bit soft. “I have to find her,” I said.
And I did not help Shona to her feet.
The moment didn’t need to be a significant one. I see that now. I might even have seen it then. But I chose to make it significant. Willed it to be so. Made of it an opportunity to plainly display the order of things, the hierarchy I planned to defend and reinforce in my life.
Shona, I’d said with my eyes and with my actions, you are wonderful, but you will never be anything close in importance as my little girl. And if that isn’t acceptable to you, you can rest there in the dust eternally, for all I care.
And in the hurt way in which she looked at me before I turned my shoulders away from her, I saw that Shona understood all of this, as clearly as if I’d spoken it.
I continued on toward my own long shadow, calling my daughter’s name. Wandered for many more minutes. I turned back, only once, to see that Shona had gotten to her feet, unsteadily.
I kept walking toward the west until I came to a small ridge. There was a dark space beyond it, a cool depression that I hadn’t seen until I was right atop it. It was perhaps twenty feet across, and nearly as deep. Just a little hole in the dunes, caused by who knows what.
And down there, in the bowl of sand, sat Candace. She lay curled in the bottom of it, untouched by the sun.
“Candace, baby!” I shouted.
“Hi, Daddy.”
I heard the voices of the others calling my name now.
“Here,” I called. “She’s here!”
I slid on my heels and my palms down the side of the bowl and then crawled over to her. I grabbed her and pulled her into my chest.
“Candace, baby, are you okay? What are you doing? We’ve been calling you.”
“I didn’t hear you.”
“My God, I thought you were lost.”
“I was just here,” she said.
The others appeared at the rim, looking down at us.
“She’s all right?” Joe asked.
“She’s okay,” I said.
Mercedes said, “Oh, thank God.”
“Look, Dad,” Candace said, indicating the walls around us, “it’s like a fort.” She was not in the least bit distressed.
“You scared the wits out of me, baby. Don’t you wander off like that.”
“I wanted to see how far the sun got,” she said.
“Come on out,” I said.
With some effort, and some help, we climbed out of that depression and back up to where the sun was.
Shona was hobbled. She held her right heel off the ground and was putting her weight on her left.
“Sorry, Shon,” I said, nodding at it. I was apologizing, at least partially, for something other than her physical injury. We both felt that.
“I understand,” she said. “I’ll be okay.”
Because what else was there to say?
She put her arm over my shoulder and I helped her walk slowly back toward the blanket. There, I helped Joe and Mercedes gather the breakfast things, and then we went back up the trail to the cars.
We were different people, suddenly. The children, even Candace, carried on as though nothing had happened. But Mercedes, I could see, was a bit shaken by what had occurred. She watched her two with an extra bit of alertness.
As we walked, Joe said to me, “Bit of a scare, huh, Russ? You okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “All’s well.”
Shona grunted a bit as she put weight on her foot.
We drove back east. The rim of the world was aflame. The road was on fire. The hood was on fire. I squinted and pulled down the sunshade, before finally putting my faith in geometry—in the road’s straightness across the earth’s gently curved face.
Candace peppered us with questions such as “Where are the animals?” and “What’s under the sand?” I tried my best to address them with short answers, in order to preserve the overriding silence, which I felt was the only thing keeping Shona from beginning an uncomfortable conversation.
Shona rode with her right foot up on the dash, looking out the window at the brightening world.
When Candace’s questions tapered off and then stopped altogether, I felt a tightness, a hesitation. Quietly panicking, I sped up and passed Mercedes and Joe. It was an act of aggression and desperation, and I was sorry for it even as I executed it. It was as if I were attempting to speed away from what had happened, as though if enough distance was traversed in a short enough period of time I could reverse the events of the morning thus far.
I turned on the radio and found a classic rock station from California, its signal cascading over the dunes and the tarmac and into the rising sun. On came the opening salvo of “Seven Wonders” by Fleetwood Mac. It came over me like unearned relief. I turned it up, way up. We looked out our respective windows—Candace, Shona, and me—and were overwhelmed by the song’s shimmering cocaine opulence, its incandescent beauty. A certain time, a certain place, cooed Stevie Nicks. I have trouble conveying just how at odds the song was with the mood within the car, but I relied on it to buy me a few more minutes of non-conversation.
When it was over, a commercial began and Shona reached for the knob. She turned the sound down and said to me, “I didn’t know you liked Fleetwood Mac.”
“I believe that everybody, somewhere within themselves, loves Fleetwood Mac,” I said.
I wondered then what made me the person I was. I felt unhooked from almost everything I had ever known.
Once home, Shona took some painkillers and sat on the couch with a bag of frozen peas on her ankle, sipping tea and checking her phone.
“Anything I can get you?” I asked her.
“I’m fine, Russ,” she said. There was a flatness to her that I couldn’t miss.
She had an evening shift at the Red Lobster, which I welcomed. I thought it would give us a bit of time to pull back from a precipice. I helped her wrap the ankle up tight so she could walk on it. She popped a couple of Advils and pulled her stockings over the bandage.
“You sure you’ll be okay?” I asked her.
“Sure. Just have a bottle of wine waiting for when I’m done,” she said.
“You bet I will,” I said.
***
It was nearly midnight when she got back. I’d had a quiet afternoon and evening with Candace. We’d had hot dogs for dinner, and when I put her to bed, she went down quickly. Then I turned on the TV, flicked around, grew bored, and switched it off. I opened some wine, lay in the dark with the bedroom window open, and finished the bottle, just thinking, just talking to myself. I dozed off, woke, dozed some more.
Shona stood in the bedroom doorway. “Russ?” she said.
I started awake but tried to pretend I hadn’t been asleep.
“Just lying here, baby,” I said. “How’d it go? How’s the ankle?”
“I got through it,” she said. “I’m gonna hop in the shower now.”
I lay a little longer in the dark, listening to the running water and the usual outside hum of traffic and dogs, then walked to the kitchen and took a wineglass off the shelf for Shona. I opened another three-dollar bottle of California red, filled her glass to the brim, sipped a bit off, and carried it to the bathroom. I knocked gently, too gently for Shona to hear it in the shower, and pushed the door open.
“Hey there,” I said, so that I wouldn’t startle her.
“Hey, hey,” she said.
I pushed the shower curtain aside and poked my head in. She was slick and red, the water running in a hundred different streams all down her body. I looked down at her ankle, which was red and puffy and would turn purple and black the next day. Then I looked back at her face. She frowned theatrically. I handed her the wine.
“Thank you,” she said, and took a big gulp, then handed it back to me. “Just gotta wash my hair.”
I put the glass on the counter and walked out, back to the bedroom.
She came out many minutes later, wrapped in a towel. “I just had one of those moments, you know,” she said. “When you kind of don’t know how you got here?”
I was lying on the bed in the dark again.“Got here?”
She switched on the little bedside lamp. “Like, Yuma. What am I doing here?” And she laughed, to show me she wasn’t sad or angry.
“You’re with me.”
“Right. I know. Life’s funny.”
“That hurts a bit,” I said.
“You’re just not the kind of man I ever pictured myself with.”
“I’m not supposed to find that hurtful?”
“It just is. It’s a thing that is. You don’t have to think of it as hurtful, unless you want to. And you seem to want to.”
I poured myself more wine. She did the same, after downing the rest of her glass. I was beginning to recognize the parameters of the conversation, its scale, its shape. It wasn’t just about her ankle. Or about Yuma.
She sat on the bed, cross-legged, and ran a towel over her hair. She smelled like a tropical greenhouse.
“Maybe I just see us differently than you do,” I said.
“I think that’s obvious, baby. We don’t see the world just the same way. You’re stern so much of the time, like you don’t trust happiness.”
“The truth is I’m not even sure I know what it is,” I said.
“It means feeling good, you sweet fool.”
“Things that don’t feel good can also be good for you. That’s something I believe. Responsibilities.”
“But too many of those things?”
“How do you know how many is too many? How do you know when something isn’t going to be good for you, which things to keep working for?”
Those were real questions I asked myself from time to time.
“It’s okay to try things out, Russ. To see where they go. It’s okay to be unsure, then try anyway, then decide it isn’t the thing you need. Why wouldn’t we do the things that make us happiest?”
I realized then that she’d been seeing my willingness to pull up stakes—Ottawa, Watertown, Yuma—as an indication that I approached life as she did. She thought that I had been exchanging one life for another, in order to be happy.
But the truth was I wanted constancy. To always to have my people in my life. Candace. Shona. In changing my surroundings, I was only trying to find the right venue for us to begin our efforts in earnest. I wanted to find the one permanent place.
I sighed and shifted, tilted my head back, squeezed my eyes shut a moment.
“I’m close to drunk,” I said. “Join me?”
“I’m getting there,” she said, taking another gulp.
I was glad to hear it, though the wine wasn’t delivering me the sense of ease I’d hoped it would. I was on edge, and I knew she sensed that. I hoped more wine would loosen us up.
Everything changes. I forget that from time to time. I had certainly forgotten it with respect to Shona. I’d let myself believe we’d arrived at a lovely, endless plateau. I was lulled into believing we’d left change behind us.
She was looking at the bottom of her glass. “Russ,” she said. “What a day.”
“Truth. Can we forget it?”
“No. But we can maybe improve the ending a bit.”
“What do you want, Shona?” I sat up and put my face close to hers. “Tell me what you want, baby.”
She drained her glass, then looked at me and smiled. “I want you to fuck me like I deserve it,” she said.
“You do.”
“Then fuck me like you deserve it.”
She shed her towel and moved on top of me.
We were not young, but we were not dead. Our skin still invited touch. She was furious. I was on fire.
It reminded me of the first time we were together, when our recklessness imperfectly reflected our bodies’ desperation, expressed our lurking suspicions that we’d already become old before we’d even had a chance to feel young, that we’d already known our allotments of tenderness, of sweetness, of moist, red lust. It was obvious to me then, that first time, that she saw me as I saw myself in infrequent, optimistic, usually drunken moments. I’d found my best reflection, and she was beautiful. I never wanted it to end.
This time, the desperation had a different quality. For me, it was one of trying to claw something back. For her, it was one of finality, of fighting for breath, of emerging, of finding a way out from beneath a weight. We bit and pulled and struggled. I didn’t know if it was to be our last time—not with certainty, though the fear was there. I was always concerned that she’d wise up and move past me, but now it was more immediate, sadder and angrier and more frantic. I was fighting for her.
***
As it happened, it wasn’t our last time. We entwined like that almost nightly for two weeks. When we weren’t in bed, we got along amiably, though I became aware that we spoke in different terms, avoiding all talk of the future, using words to place a small buffer between our lives. The basic truth of us had been altered, and I knew that Shona, in her heart, was bound for elsewhere.
The days grew hotter and the nights more still, and the stars seemed to burn more intensely. The mounting heat and the breathless evenings rubbed up against the new, strange distance that had crept between us to create something spiky, something that threatened to combust. It was, for those weeks, our bodies which burned. There was a permanent sheen on my brow, and the dry air made her hair feel brittle. But that did not prevent me from wanting to sink my hands deep into it, my face, my nose.
Our daytime selves, though, were going to have to be reckoned with sooner or later. We both knew it. The wide-awake versions of us, with so many practical concerns in mind and so many sober hours to contend with, would be the ones making the decisions. And Shona’s daytime self seemed, to me, completely resigned to the end of whatever it was we had.
There was no descent into acrimony—a small thing of which I am nonetheless proud. I have never sought to turn love to hate with anyone I’ve ever known, including Candace’s mother. I just never saw that as desirable. I understand, of course, that people don’t just look at the one they love and say, One day I’ll hate her. Love runs its course, and then they find something much different residing in their heart.
My heart remained steady, and I think Shona’s did, too; at least, I believe it did not do a complete reversal. She still felt tenderness toward me, still had access to that place in her heart she’d once put me. But now she knew what she was up against. She would never be the only girl in my heart, would never represent my sole concern. Most of us would like to think of ourselves as someone’s sole concern, I think that’s normal. And I expect it scared her, showed her all at once just how vulnerable she was. Her reaction was to pull back, to protect herself.
None of this was said aloud. There was no explicit conversation about us drifting apart. She did not tell me, Russ, I’m having doubts. Instead, it was in the set of her shoulders, in the avoided instances of contact. There were no more hands on my back as I stood in the kitchen, no pecks on the cheek. I noticed such things because they had once been so abundant.
What I should have done was pushed. I see that now. I don’t know if it would have swayed her, but at least I’d have tried.
***
The end came on a Monday evening. We’d put Candace to bed and were sitting on chairs in the kitchen, talking about what we’d have for dinner the rest of the week. It was such a regular conversation. Just a man and a woman discussing groceries. Then there was a lull.
“Russ, I don’t think I can keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
She put her elbows on the table and put her head in her hands. “I’m sorry. I wanted us to work. But if I’m being honest, it’s not. It’s just not working for me. And I don’t believe it will.”
“So. You’re, uh. You’re going? You’re going to leave?”
“It can’t seem sudden to you, babe,” she said, lifting her eyes to me. “It hasn’t felt right, has it?”
“I figured growing pains.”
“Baby.”
“I had dreams of marrying you.”
“You’re going to be okay. Do you hear me? I promise you’re going to be okay. You’ll always have her.”
I cried then. Shona took me to bed and we lay there and held one another, which was strange and comforting and painful at once.
In the morning, she simply left. She kissed Candace on the forehead and me on the mouth, touched my face, and was gone in the taxi before I could even get my bearings. She flew out of Yuma, and I doubt she will ever return there. From what I understand, she stayed in Ottawa for a time before heading to Toronto, where she waits tables when she isn’t teaching yoga. I do not know if she is attached. I do not believe she has any children.
Why do we have so much trouble knowing what we want? Or keeping it once we do know?
I had once believed—sincerely and fervently—that I wanted Yuma as a home, but it began looking quite different to me in the wake of Shona’s departure. A place still on the edge, yes, but maybe too much so. Too barren, too open, too spare. It was a desert town full of itinerants and dogs. It was a place to be, but not a place to stay. It just wasn’t a home of any kind, not for me; and though I was glad Candace could say, later in her life, I lived in Arizona, it wasn’t the home I wanted for her either.
I did not sleep well after Shona flew away. Yuma had become a venue of loss for me, and I was done with it. I needed only to settle the question of where to be next. And because I could come up with no new answers, I fell back on an old one.
***
When Candace was a baby and her mother and I were still together, we lived in eastern Ontario, in rural idyll. There was a station in Kemptville where I kept things running as best as possible with limited resources. We did farm reports and played Top 40 music, ran syndicated programming overnight from seven to five. My commute into town took me ten minutes, down a few gravel roads and a two-lane highway that snaked along next to the South Branch of the Rideau River. We had a staff of six. The office administrator also handled ad accounts. The custodian hosted the noon show.
I returned each evening to our two treed acres and the slumping ranch-style house thereupon, to my wife and our baby. On spring nights the peepers sent up a chorus from the fields and wetlands, and in the fall we’d wake at first light to the sound of the hunters’ rifles. It was a small, not unenjoyable life.
But it hadn’t been enough to hold off the things lurking in our margins. Our marriage exploded, and then my wife went away, and I found myself bringing up Candace by myself. It was a hard few years, I’ll admit.
Yet despite all that, for me eastern Ontario retained an Edenic quality, as sheltered and quiet and desirable. There was an honesty about the place and the people there. A straightforwardness. I still had friends there, and contacts. I was still well thought of. People were eager to help me resettle, to beat life into some sort of shape that might aid me and nurture Candace. It felt for all the world that a second crack at a life there would be a good thing.
So Kemptville was where we began anew. In the back of my mind, of course, I knew that I was trying to resettle not only into an old place, but into the person I had once been, before Yuma, before Shona. Such is a faulty premise upon which to build a life, but I didn’t see any other choice.
I was hired on at the Home Hardware, in the yard and working the contractors’ counter. I also made some overtures to my old employers at the station. If anything opens up, they said, and I believe they were sincere.
For a few months, we rented a damp and sour townhouse on the edge of town. Then I put some money down on a bungalow in the country, at the edge of what had been a pine plantation. The house occupied a corner lot where two concessions met. Behind, to the east, lay empty fields gone to hay. Regularly spaced rows of mast-straight red pines ran to the south. In among them had grown thickets of cedar and some maple. It was August, sweet-smelling and hot, by the time we moved in. Candace was due to begin kindergarten in September. We had a month to make a home, just the two of us.
Next door, perhaps two hundred yards away, lay a brick house, similarly nestled among the shading trees. It was owned by the Meachams, Cal and Julie. Cal I’d known a bit, once upon a time. He drove a snowplow for the township. Julie taught at the high school. Their daughter was in her teens, and in the back of my mind I flagged her as a potential babysitter, if I ever again had a need for one.
Autumn dropped suddenly, in late September, the world going rust-coloured. Candace was in the middle of a growth spurt, stretching out her limbs, taking her from the round little girl I’d known into a whippet-lean kid, with just her apple-cheeked grin to remind me of the bundle she’d only recently been. I found her a snowsuit at the Salvation Army, hoped she wouldn’t outgrow it in that first winter.
Yuma, though never all that far from my mind, was starting to feel like a distant memory. I wondered if I’d ever know anything like it again. I doubted it, if I was being honest with myself.
I thought, though, that Candace and I might have something good in Kemptville: fine lives which left us content, and not impacted by tragedy. Cal and Julie had us over from time to time for barbecues and, once winter settled in, to watch Saturday-evening hockey on their big screen, eating stews made of the game Cal had taken over the fall.
By the time the snow fell, we thought we had ourselves something like a home. But then Christmas passed, and January was hard. Mountains of snow, worse than I’d remembered, with a half-dozen snow days that shut down the school buses, sending me scrambling to make arrangements. The house was terribly drafty. In some rooms it felt as though someone had left a window open. I brought home parabolic space heaters from the hardware store, one for each room, two in the kitchen. Candace wore leggings beneath her pants, and heavy fleece pyjamas with socks. In the mornings, while I waited for the coffee maker, I stood blowing into my cupped hands and wiggling my toes in my wool socks.
One night in the middle of February, I woke around two with an acrid smell in my mouth and nose. I knew immediately what it was, and did not check to be sure. I went to Candace and I picked her up, along with the stuffed menagerie she was clutching in her arms. I gathered her to me and made my way to the front door, stuffed animals spilling to the floor as we went. I could see a glow coming from the back room, and heard a low roaring sound, and the sound and the light were creeping toward the kitchen with a dreadful sort of desire.
Candace woke in my arms and began sobbing, sensing my panic, the way children can. I grabbed our coats on our way out the door, wrapped her in hers, and put her in the car. I started the engine and turned the heat all the way up, for it was a bitterly cold night, and backed the car down the lane until it was out on the edge of the gravel road. There, I pulled my coat on and told Candace that everything was okay, everything would be fine, just please sit tight. Then I walked toward the house to see if anything could be done. But of course nothing could.
Flames had reached the roof. The living room windows were glowing orange, and something—perhaps paint cans in the garage—was popping like dried kernels. I ran through the trees and snow to the Meachams’. Their garage light, hooked up to a motion sensor, flared on, and Homer, their German shepherd, began to bark. I pounded on their front door, and when Julie Meacham answered in a robe, I said, “My house is on fire. Could you call it in?”
“Oh my God, of course,” she said. “Candace?”
“With me. She’s all right. We’re all right.”
Then I stood in the lane. Candace was behind me, in the idling car, probably needing me, needing to be reassured. But I kept on standing alone there, feeling as though I was losing my mind. It was hard to understand what was happening in front of me, even as I witnessed it. Our entire material life was now fuel. Books and clothes. Tools. Candace’s toys. I wondered what, in this life, would prove durable.
The trucks came shortly, two of them, from Kemptville. “These goddamn prefabs are made of paper,” I heard one of the firefighters say, and what I witnessed bore that out. Even as I stood in the lane, people in thick uniforms and gear racing about me, the house was completely consumed. The cedar hedge to the north of the little house caught, and it began to fizzle and pop, as did a maple in the yard whose branches hung over the roof, its limbs soon falling from it into the blaze. Embers drifted up toward the needles of the pines, and I thought it only a matter of moments before we had a forest fire on our hands.
But that never came about. After a time, I went to the car and got in the back seat with my baby. I held her and we cried together and I said, “The important thing is that you’re not hurt. You’re okay. We’re okay.” I could feel the heat on my face and her tears falling onto me.
The police put us in a motel on the other side of the highway. I lay with Candace, and she cried and asked me questions for which I had no answers. Eventually we got some sleep, though not much.
In the morning, I drove us out to the house to survey the damage. Along the way, the bare trees looked like cut crystal as the sun shone through the frost which had settled there in the night. The sky was high and bright, and the snow sparkled. Were it not for our circumstances, I’d have seen beauty in all of it.
There was still smoke rising from the ashes when I pulled into the long drive, tight against the row of cedars. Some of them had burned to their stumps. I sat there a moment, looking at the way the absence of the house changed the view of the property and the trees, the fields beyond. It was a pretty spot, I realized, one that had been profaned when the bungalow was dropped there. I tried to imagine what might rise next, if anything, and in that moment I knew I wouldn’t have the strength to rebuild. I’d let the bank and the insurance company work out what to do with it.
Candace sat in the back seat, hugging her unicorn and her Hello Kitty. She did not ask to come out of the car. In fact, she appeared to shrink when I looked at her, as though worried I’d ask her to come out with me.
“I’ll be just over there,” I said, looking back at her over my shoulder. “Will you be okay here? For a minute?”
She nodded.
Leaving the car running with the heat turned all the way up, I stepped out and pulled on my gloves. It was an arctic morning, twenty below, and the air stung my nostrils, lashed my face. I walked over to the house, stepping over ruts and tire tracks, over the tree limbs that had fallen, bare and singed. The house was a blackened heap. There were patches, less burned, where I recognized features, and in the northeast corner a part of the roof was still held up by two partial walls, burned down to the studs but resilient. The smell of burned wood, plastic, chemically treated material, was overwhelming. I held my arm over my face.
The garage, which had been a shoddy addition to the original structure, was gone altogether. The siding on the garden shed, thirty feet away from the house, was melted and disfigured. Everywhere, the water from the firefighters’ hoses had refrozen into smooth shapes, coating the ground, filigreeing the edges of scorched things.
There were objects I recognized peeking from the mess, but they were sullied, or halved, or made grotesque. I saw a coffee mug with a football helmet on it, fused to a blob of misshapen metal which used to be a Thermos. I saw bits of colour that appeared to have been toys. I saw furniture without upholstery. Cutlery, twisted and maimed.
The sheer, useless mass of it all overwhelmed me.
I kicked over a piece of blackened drywall, heavy and frozen, from what I believe was the wall separating the kitchen from the living room. There had been a bookshelf there, but I could see no trace of that. Under the Gyproc I discovered a banker’s box that had sat on the lowest shelf. Half of the box was more or less gone, scorched and then dissolved by the hoses’ water, but when I flipped the lid open, the contents were still recognizable. I took off my gloves, despite the cold, and leafed through them. There were instruction booklets and old bills, a few takeout menus. Most of the papers were swollen and stiff, but still legible. Some were frozen together.
And then, tucked between a Christmas card from a cousin and a drawing of a horse by Candace, there was a photograph.
The photo was curled and a bit stained, but otherwise pristine. In it, Shona and I stand side by side on the Painted Desert Trail, a wall of beautiful pink stone behind us, ochre dust beneath our feet. I am ducking somewhat, as though worried the camera—which I had propped up on a rock before setting the timer—would cut off my head. To my left, Shona is holding a bottle of water in her right hand, clutching it to her stomach. She is wearing denim shorts and a red T-shirt, sandals on her feet, and large, dark sunglasses on her face. I am on her right, wearing khaki shorts, a checked shirt, and sneakers. My left arm is over her shoulder. I have a kind of inadvertent smirk on my face. Shona is smiling.
When the photo was taken, I believed we wanted the same things. I believed we would have them. And I thought that was how we must have looked to the world, to anyone who cared to see: like a pair, matched, together. I thought anyone who looked at that photo would see the love and the heat coming off us like rays. But it was incomplete—like any photo is, I suppose—because it failed to show those things roiling and churning beneath the surface. Nor did it make visible those things beyond the frame, the countless, inconstant things broadcasting their signals to our too-susceptible hearts.
It hurt me, that cold morning amid the smouldering ashes, to look at that. We were two people who had made each other better for a short time. It’s difficult not to mourn such a thing.
I held the picture between my fingers. Then I stood, walked back to the car, and tucked it into the glovebox. And then I drove away with Candace. I have never been back to that spot.