Every month or so, Bill and I took the three-hour drive east along the Columbia River, then south from Biggs, through Wasco and on to Condon. About twenty miles from town, the land and sky open up to rolling hills speckled with sagebrush, fields of powder soil, wheat and mountains in the distance.
In the year after the child-wanting in me set in, going back to Condon was like a relief valve. It didn’t make sense that I looked forward to going to the place that had ignited my confusion about motherhood. But as we got closer to town, my jaw relaxed and the tightness in my chest eased.
Between Bill’s siblings and mine, we now had twelve nieces and nephews. I’d held each of the five on my side from the first months of their lives, and the connection since that first holding ran deep. Going to Condon meant time with them. These weekends were full of hard playing and child holding. And a chance to show my parents that I’d chosen the right man in Bill, that I was happy in my life, that these kids were enough. It was a chance to show myself this too.
On one of the drives home, I felt a surge of love for this land as wide open as the view in front of us. I said to Bill, “This place has the best skies. The best sunsets. No trees or buildings in the way. The sunsets here are more beautiful than anywhere.”
These were the sunsets of my memory, from before I left this place intent on being a girl from somewhere else.
Bill smiled his knowing smile. “I know a place that has sunsets that will blow your mind. Better than here even.”
A sharpness came up in me. “Why do you have to say there’s something better?” Picking a fight. The skies here flowed from pink to orange to darkest purple.
“Jackie,” Bill said, slow and careful, stepping back from the edge in my voice. “I’m just saying I’d like to show you this other place.”
I was trying to tell him something that was a feeling, not a truth. Why couldn’t he see the beauty here?
When we left Condon after a weekend, waved goodbye to my family standing on the porch, my sadness about leaving melded into a surge of longing. My questions started.
“Are you sure you don’t want kids?”
“Are you still sure?”
“How can you be so sure?”
As though this could wear away his not wanting.
His answers never changed.
“Yes.”
And “Yes.”
And “I just am.”
I couldn’t understand. He loved our nieces and nephews. He could play and chase and goof, stick a grape up his nose and get it stuck and make them laugh so hard they almost wet their pants. He could pick up a child with me (you take the hands, I take the legs) and swing one-two-three. How could a man like this not want a child of his own?
Bill took me to his place of better sunsets. We drove in his black Saab, pulling our small tent trailer to the desert of southern Utah. Capitol Reef, Zion, Bryce, Arches.
Sometimes when Bill was driving, I watched him. His profile: strong nose, curls curving the back of his head, this angle of him. Even here, I asked, “Are you still sure?” As though he would suddenly be struck with something new, something that hadn’t struck him for all of his more than forty years. That he would slap his forehead and say, Oh, wait a minute, I was wrong, I do want children.
But he didn’t say that. His shoulders slumped, curved in, the weight and pressure of my wanting wore on him. “I’m still sure,” he said. He sounded tired.
I looked at the land around us. Here too, the skies were wide open. But this was another place. Canyons carved by glaciers and floods. A great basin once underwater. Uplifts formed by thrusts and folds and colliding plates.
There were no faults in Bill’s story. When a pregnant woman was in the room, his eyes never followed her like mine did. He never said how gorgeous she was with her round belly, her secret smile. When an infant was passed, he never held out his arms. I’d never seen him hold a baby. He didn’t question a new father about what it was to like to be a new father.
We hiked early in the mornings, before the big heat, hiked in the scent of sand and creosote, cottonwood seed floating in the air. We hiked sand drifts that had petrified to hardened dune, no trail visible except for cairns that marked the way on the slickrock. Slick. Rock. Solid, yet slippery from the fine sand dusting it.
We returned to camp in the afternoon, sated from sun and hike. Found a shower, had a nap, made love.
There, as at home, sex never mixed with the possibility of a pregnancy. Maybe because it wasn’t an option. Maybe because of the birth control pills I’d been taking for years.
I found pleasure and peace in being alone with Bill and in the complex conversations we had about everything. My child-wanting had carved a wariness in him, and a distance between us that came from this one stunning difference in our wants. In the deserts of Utah, far enough away from the hopes of family, my longing stepped back and gave me room to breathe.
Late in the afternoons we took walks up dry washes. I touched my hands on canyon walls powdered with sandstone dust. Layers of time marked in sediment like earthy sunsets: green, white, orange, brown, red, lavender.
Ancient erosion wore away grain of sand by grain of sand, and made formations: arched bridges, elephants, kings with crowns, three women in a row. Always a new shape to be found.
One evening in Bryce, we sat on the rim of the canyon and watched another sunset, the last we would have after our days in the desert. We sat with bent knees, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, our hands behind us, flat on the sandy earth. The air cooled as the sun went down.
The sky went brilliant and brilliant and brilliant again. Bill put his arms around me. The desert would become my favorite place. We would come back again and again. I felt different here, free of the wanting. This gave me a clear view of the ways Bill met me. All of him: generous, vulnerable, honest. I wanted this to be enough.