* * *
Sam didn’t reappear in Angie’s life until winter of Angie’s ninth-grade year. On the surface, her transition into high school had been a smooth one: she’d made varsity soccer and had become close with the other two freshmen on the team—Mia Padilla, brown bombshell and daughter of the deputy mayor; and Lana McPherson, fearless lesbian (as she would introduce herself, superhero style), a freckle-faced white girl. Angie had sleepovers with them on Saturday nights, finished her homework Sunday afternoons, and arrived at school Monday mornings with a carefully chosen outfit and a smile on her face. She was one of only a handful of black students at Albuquerque High (the population of the city is roughly split between Hispanic and white), but Angie fit in; she would be considered popular. She couldn’t say why, then, she so often felt her chest growing tight, her breath coming too fast.
On New Year’s Eve, Angie and her girls had scored invites to a senior party, thrown by one of the goalies on their team. At some point, Lana was making out with Sandy Houston in the back seat of her car (unbeknownst to Sandy’s boyfriend), and Mia was inside playing beer pong. Angie had joined in the game for a while, but she didn’t want to end up too drunk—she’d promised her mom she wouldn’t drink to begin with, and each sip had given her a spike of guilt. Half buzzed, she wandered outside into the cold January night, grateful for the protection of her red puffy coat, which she wore everywhere like a suit of armor.
In the corner of the yard was an old cottonwood. Angie, in childhood, had been a masterful tree climber. She hoisted herself up and scaled as high as she could. She watched her breath on the air, the branches clinging to their dried brown leaves, the old swing set in the corner of the yard showing off its metal to the moonlight. She wondered about the people who’d built this house—it was one of those historic adobes that must have been more than a hundred years old.
“Yo!”
Angie looked down to see the figure of a tall, skinny boy standing below her. She lifted her hand to wave. And then he was—rather clumsily—pulling himself onto the lowest branch.
“Remember me?”
Of course she did. The face looking up at her was Sam’s. A laugh of surprise escaped her lips.
“Wanna come any closer?” he asked.
“No.”
“Okay, then, I guess this is where I risk my life for you.”
Angie watched as he managed to make it up to the branch just below hers.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“My boy Leo’s stepsister is on your team, I think. Jana?”
“Oh, right … but what are you doing here, like in this tree, though?”
Sam shrugged. “Looking for you.”
“Aren’t you freezing?” Angie asked. He was wearing only a hoodie.
“Yup.”
He scaled the final branch, wedging himself beside her. “Wanna warm me up?”
She raised her eyebrows, but as he reached out his hand she took it between her own, rubbing them together.
“You still play soccer?” she asked.
“Yeah. At El Dorado.”
Angie nodded. They sat in silence for a long moment before Sam said, “Let’s play a game?”
“Um, okay.”
“It’s called the opposite game. My dad does it with his creative writing class.”
“Okay.”
“Say something, like anything.”
“I don’t know.”
“Just pick something you see.”
“The moon.”
“Okay, so I have to say the opposite of the moon. A pebble. Now you say what’s the opposite of a pebble.”
“… A mountain?”
“Okay, the opposite of a mountain is a crater,” Sam said.
“The opposite of a crater is a comet,” Angie answered.
“The opposite of a comet is … the night sky, but not the stars. Just the black parts in between.”
Angie laughed. “Okay, the opposite of the dark part of the night … has to be sunlight.”
“The opposite of the sunlight is … the bottom of the ocean.”
“Nice. The opposite of the bottom of the ocean is the dirt on the ground.”
“The opposite of dirt is chocolate.”
“The opposite of chocolate is a brussels sprout,” Angie said.
“The opposite of a brussels sprout is … mmm, something good,” Sam said, and leaned toward Angie, tentatively brushing his lips against her lips.
“A kiss,” he said in a whisper.
“The opposite of a brussels sprout is not a kiss. That one doesn’t even make sense!”
“You’re right. I was looking for an excuse.”
Angie smiled. “I cried over you, you know, when I saw you in the park with that other girl.”
“I was a dumbass back then.”
“You better not break my heart again,” she teased, pulling back from him.
“I won’t.” He looked so earnest, it shocked her; she nearly lost her balance on the branch.
* * *
As much as her boyfriend, Sam became her best friend. Angie discovered that all the itchy questions, just below her surface, faded when she was with him. He told her she was beautiful, he told her she was perfect, he loved to fall asleep in the afternoons with his legs wrapped around her body and his head tucked into her neck. Sam played his dad’s vinyl records for her, read her passages from On the Road, poems by Pablo Neruda and John Ashbery. He told her about watching his father read at open-mic nights to meager crowds, about visiting Mexico with his mom when he was a kid, about his cool older cousin in Los Angeles, about his heartbreak over his parents’ divorce.
When he’d asked about her dad early on, Angie had told Sam the same thing she told anyone. “I don’t have one. He died in a car accident before I was born.”
“I’m so sorry,” he’d said.
“It’s okay,” she’d replied. And it was. Mostly. Kind of. Maybe.
Angie’s now 207 miles away from her mom and counting, the farthest she’s ever been in her life. You’d hardly be able to guess at the world’s unfathomable population, here in the empty middle of the desert—nothing but a few scattered cars passing, a billboard advertising an Indian trading post, an endless expanse of land so flat it feels like you could fall off the earth, broken by purple mountains in the distance like a mirage.
Sam leans over and reaches across Angie’s lap, pulls a CD out of the glove box. Angie feels a twist in her stomach at the smell of him—clean laundry and Old Spice deodorant, and something else, something indefinably him.
Sam fumbles with the CD player. A moment later, she recognizes the opening chords of “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The sound throws her back in time, into Sam’s dad’s apartment, shaped like a hallway, long and narrow, with chipping white paint and little paper lantern lights. Angie’s heating frozen pizza and searching the fridge for odd toppings; Sam’s laughing at one of her more failed creations: blackberries plus green olives. Sam and Angie are half-naked under the turquoise Mexican blanket on the couch, watching Drive; they’re tangled in his navy-blue bedsheets, Karen O’s voice the soundtrack to their discoveries. It couldn’t be coincidence. He must have done it on purpose. Or perhaps he’s forgotten?
Angie turns to him as Karen O cries, Wait! But Sam is still hidden behind his glasses, focused on the road.
* * *
The next track is “Beast of Burden.” Another one of her and Sam’s songs. This must be the CD she’d made him for his sixteenth birthday last summer—almost exactly a year ago. She’d worked on it for days, arranging and rearranging the song order; she’d wanted his birthday to be perfect. But when she’d been getting ready for his dinner that evening, rifling through her mom’s drawer for lipstick, she’d started searching—or maybe snooping’s the word—and discovered the photograph of her parents on the beach. The simple fact of her father’s smile began to unravel all of her carefully constructed defenses: the moment she saw his face, he became,
at once, a person. A person who looked like her. A person, who, obviously, had made her mother happy. Her grief for the beautiful boy staring back at her was breathtaking.
Literally. She felt her chest collapsing; she could not get enough air. She began to distract herself from the irretrievable image of her parents by imagining her way outside the frame of the photograph. Who else might have been there on the beach that day? She pictured a mother wearing a straw hat, bending to give her son an ice cream cone. Beside her, two boys on skateboards with long ’90s chains. A couple walking hand in hand, wearing matching mirrored aviator sunglasses that reflected palm trees. Beyond them, a lifeguard—an older man trying to stay awake in his tower, after having been up late the night before with a woman who offered a second chance at love.
She started to think of all of the other beaches along the California coast, and then the ones farther south in Mexico, and on the opposite side of our country, in Florida, North Carolina, Maine. Beaches in Peru, in Spain, in South Africa, and all the people who’d populated them on a single day, seventeen years ago … As she, her parents, and the world she knew got swallowed up in the sheer magnitude of human life, Angie found she could breathe again. There are now more than seven billion people on the planet, more than one hundred and seven billion people who have lived on this earth, she told herself.
Angie remembered the opening line from the introduction to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which they’d read in her sophomore English class: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts.” She ran the numbers and calculated that, as of now, forty-seven years after the book was published, we each had about fifteen. The ghosts she’d always sensed surrounding her were anonymous, but at their helm, she could now see her father, seventeen and grinning.
Ding.
Angie picked up her phone to see a text from Sam: You on your way? Shit. She was late. How long had she been sitting there? Angie shoved the photo back into the drawer and dashed out of the house, having forgotten about the lipstick she’d been looking for in the first place.
She arrived at Sam’s clutching the CD she’d made him and put on her best smile. Mr. Stone took her and Sam to Scalo, where they sat at a table tucked into a corner, soaking bread in dishes of olive oil, candlelight dancing across the room. He let them drink from his glass of red wine big enough to stick half your face into. It made Angie’s cheeks hot and the world soft and swimmy and twinkly.
Mr. Stone talked about the Black Mountain poets, which he was in the middle of teaching, and how the kids of this generation didn’t get it because of cell phones, but that maybe we’d reinvent poetry, for the digital age.
Angie tried to focus, could feel Sam running his hand up her tights under the table, but (maybe it was the wine now?) she felt so far away, surprised they could hear her voice at all. She was staring down at a world where she was too small to see. She felt dizzy.
“What do you think?” Mr. Stone asked Sam, but before he could answer, Mr. Stone turned to Angie and told her he thought Sam had the soul of a poet. “It’s a blessing and a curse,” he said. “But you have to take it seriously. We need our artists, our writers, now more than ever.”
Sam beamed at his father.
“Not that practical types aren’t important too,” Mr. Stone went on, looking to Angie. “Like Sam’s mom, and yours. Somebody has to run the banks or everything would crumble. Somebody has to sell the art, at least in our world.”
“She used to be a photographer,” Angie blurted out. “My mom. She was really good.” Angie knew this based on the single photograph of an empty beach that hung in their hallway.
When Angie was little, Marilyn had waitressed, leaving Angie at daycare or trading babysitting with Gina, who also worked at the diner. Once Angie started elementary school, Marilyn had enrolled at the community college, juggling a class or two with her job. After five years she got her associate’s degree, and then a job working as a teller at Chase. Only a couple years later, she became the branch manager. Angie knew it wasn’t her dream job; she knew her mom did it all for her. Angie knew that even if she’d learned to be practical, deep down, her mom had a wandering-forest kind of soul, an open-desert-road kind of soul, a crashing-ocean soul. She wanted Mr. Stone, and Sam, especially Sam, to know about the girl in the picture—the girl who looked happy.
But before Angie could get any further, the waitress came up holding a piece of chocolate cake with a single candle and burst into an operatic version of “Happy Birthday.” Sam’s hair fell over his forehead, same cut as his dad’s, his cheeks pink from the wine. He looked at Angie and for a flickering moment, the hollowness in her chest filled up with him. She wished she could have stayed in the soft place where the whole world seemed to be made up of only them, but it no longer felt sure. The billions of lives lived and lost now crowded in. He blew out his candle. She couldn’t shake the vertigo.
The day after his sixteenth birthday, Sam left to visit his cousin in LA, and Angie went back into her mom’s drawer as soon as she left for work. She noticed the sealed manila envelope again, but she couldn’t figure out how to open it without getting caught. Or maybe she was afraid of what she’d find inside. Instead, she pulled out the photo and carried it into her room. She spent the morning lying on her stomach, studying her father’s face. How can you miss someone you’ve never known?
That evening, Angie and Marilyn sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast for dinner—Angie’s favorite. She was in the middle of cutting her waffle in perfect lines when she looked up and choked out the words “What was my dad like?”
Marilyn’s voice stumbled for a moment, like she’d tripped on the question, and then she replied, in a tone that was slow and measured: “He was kind, and so smart, just like you. He was a runner too. He cared about history. He loved hamburgers from In-N-Out and Chinese food. He loved the ocean—” And that was as far as Marilyn got, before the tears started streaming down her face.
She said she was sorry and wiped her eyes, but the tears didn’t stop. She excused herself and went into her bedroom. Angie cleared the plates and washed the dishes and waited, but her mom didn’t come out.
* * *
The last time Angie had attempted the same question was years ago, circa eighth grade. She’d gotten a slightly different set of information then: “He loved music. He wrote beautifully. The beach was his sanctuary…” And then the same tears. She’d come, long ago, to understand that talking about her dad caused her mom pain. She shouldn’t have brought it up, she told herself.
But she couldn’t help wondering why her mom had never shown her the photograph. Lying in bed that night, she thought back to the day in preschool, when, after Marilyn had chaperoned a field trip to a goat farm, Angie’s friend Jess had asked Angie, “Are you adopted? You don’t look like your mom.”
For a panicked moment, Angie wondered if Jess was right. Before Angie could come up with an answer, Jess went on: “Where are you from, Africa? My sister’s friend was adopted from Ethiopia.” Jess pursed her lips when she said it, like she was proud of herself for the knowledge. She was a precocious girl who wore outfits that echoed her own mom’s business casual in miniature.
“I’m not adopted,” Angie finally replied, suppressing the desire to grab hold of Jess’s long hair and yank.
After school, Angie ran to her mother the moment she arrived.
“There’s my girl!” Marilyn exclaimed as Angie leapt into her arms, clinging tight.
“I wish I looked like you,” Angie said as Marilyn strapped her into the car seat.
Marilyn paused. “You do,” she said finally, and pulled a mirror from her purse. She told Angie to make a dinosaur face, and did the same. With their lower jaws stretched forward and eyes bugged out together, they did seem nearly identical. Angie dissolved in laughter.
“Besides that we both make good dinosaurs,” her mom told her. “You have the shape of my eyes, and my widow’s peak. But you also look like your dad.”
Her mom checked out
The Colors of Us and Black, White, Just Right! from the public library that day, explaining that Angie’s father was African American, which meant that Angie was too. It was special, beautiful, Marilyn said, something to be proud of. She bought Angie a black Barbie the following week—a rare gift, since they couldn’t usually afford new toys.
Still, Jess’s question left Angie with a lingering sense of uncertainty. Unlike her other fears, which she could bring to her mother to be soothed, this was something she had no words for—an anxiety that she thus learned to tuck away into the unreachable folds of her fledgling self. Sometimes, lying in bed or staring out the window on the way to school, she’d try to conjure an image of the dad who would have looked like her, but she couldn’t see him—he was too fuzzy, coming into focus only when he ended up resembling the father character on her favorite show, That’s So Raven.
Marilyn never discussed her dad with her, really, beyond the same explanation, over and over: he had died in a car accident, he loved her, was proud of her, and was looking down on her from heaven. (Did her mom even believe in heaven? They didn’t go to church.) “He gave me you, the greatest gift of all,” Marilyn would say, and Angie learned the statement was like a ribbon on a package that could not be opened.
* * *
Angie once tried to talk to her dad, when, in first grade, she’d been invited for a sleepover at the house of her friend Megan, who was a Ouija board aficionado.
“You need to think of someone who’s dead,” Megan explained. “Close your eyes and ask them something.”
“Dad?” Angie asked, feeling shy in front of her friend. “Are you there?” A wild thrill ran through her body when the planchette began moving, finally landing on YES.
“Ooouuu!” Megan exclaimed. “Ask him something else.”
Angie wasn’t sure what to say. “Um, do you miss Mom?”