NINETEEN

I made it all the way to California before I turned around. Another ocean on another coast: the buildings, the light, the sea itself, everything was strange and wrong, bleached by the light in a way that seemed dirty. I’d arrived in LA the night before on a bus from Nogales; the hour was too late to find a place to stay, so I’d slept on a hard bench in the station, then in the morning found my way on a series of city buses to the pier in Santa Monica. I was twenty pounds underweight, my jeans and T-shirt stiff with grime; my beard, flecked with equal parts red and gray, climbed halfway up my cheeks. I’d traded the duffel bag for a backpack in New Mexico, where I’d briefly worked crating artichokes, a vegetable I’d never eaten. It was March, still winter back home. The air around the Santa Monica pier smelled of flowers and the sea. On the concrete path that edged the shore, grown men and women were roller-skating, something I thought only children did. Other people were walking, so I did too, down the shore to Venice, past the weight-lifting cages and T-shirt stands and head shops, and farther still, until I found myself on a section of beach that looked like nobody ever went there, beneath the airport glide path. I slept that night under an empty lifeguard station, listening to the heavy roar of the planes that flew so low I could feel the air compress around me as they passed; in the morning I walked back north and found a little coffee shop where I ate a buttered roll and washed up in the men’s room. My face in the chipped mirror was one I hardly recognized. A feeling of finality washed over me; I’d gone as far as I could, and it wasn’t enough. “Go home,” I said to my reflection. “It’s over. Go home, Joe.” I stepped back into the restaurant and asked the counterman if he knew where the nearest freeway on-ramp was, and he told me, with an impatient wave of his hand, that I was practically standing on it. Go out the back door, he said, walk another two blocks, and that’s the 10. Take you all the way to Florida.

I arrived in town on April Fool’s Day, in the cab of a logging truck that had brought me up from Portland. The driver let me out on Main Street, near the boarded-up bulk of the Lakeland Inn, before zooming off; clenching the collar of my threadbare jean jacket against the wind, I hiked up to the pay phone to call the lodge.

I had been gone a little over four years-four years, five months, and an odd number of days-and I knew I should have felt something, joy or sadness or maybe just relief. But the truth is, all I felt was tired. There was no other place for me to go, no spot on earth for me but the one I was finally in, even if that would be taken from me soon enough. I wondered how long it would take before I was arrested, who would see me first and make the call. But even this question aroused in me little more than a passing curiosity, as if I were thinking of another person entirely, some unlucky soul I had heard about on the television news in Albuquerque or over a pitcher of beer in a taproom in Omaha. As I stood in the booth, breathing on my bare hands for warmth and listening to the phone in the lodge ringing for the twentieth, unanswered time, a VW Squareback coasted by me. The driver, a youngish woman I didn’t recognize-Shellie Wister, though I didn’t know that then-turned her head to give me a long, appraising look as she passed. For an instant I felt my stomach twist with fear, then thought how stupid this was. For all anybody could tell from the window of a moving car, I was just some vagrant, using the telephone.

The only thing to do was walk. I stepped from the booth and looked at the sky, a churning bulk of gray. The ground was bare, but that meant nothing; I had left in snow, and unless I missed my guess, I would be returning in it too.

I arrived at the camp in darkness, half frozen. For the last five miles I had walked with my fingers in my mouth. Only a single light glowed from the living room. The weather had held off, but you could taste snow in the air. I tried the front door but it was locked, so I went around back to the kitchen, where we had always hidden a key on a nail, and let myself in.

I should have been hungry, but the cold had taken my appetite away; it was all I could do to get a fire going and huddle on the sofa with a blanket around me. Eventually I slept, and awoke to a sweep of headlights across the ceiling. The sound of the front door squeaking open on its hinges, and voices murmuring in the hall: one was my father’s, the other I knew but couldn’t place. I watched from the sofa as the two men made their way into the darkened room and fumbled for the light switch.

“Joey, Jesus Christ!”

My father, backlighted in the golden glow of the lamp, stood before me. My first impression was that he had become old, an old man. His face had yellowed like newspaper; his hair was nearly gone. He stood oddly, leaning slightly to one side, supporting his weight on a silver cane, which, at the instant I saw it, he dropped with a slap on the hard plank floor. The last of his strength seemed to be leaving him at just that moment.

“Joey, Joey, my God.”

I rose and put my arms around him. “It’s all right, Dad. I’m home.”

“Joey, Joey.”

“I tried to call. I got no answer.”

“We were at the hospital.” The voice was the second man’s; I’d almost forgotten he was there. I brought the image into focus: Paul Kagan.

“The hospital.” I looked at Paul. “What’s wrong? Is he all right?”

My father shook his head. “It’s not me. It’s Lucy.”

“Lucy? What’s wrong?”

“When did you come back?” my father said. “You should have told me, Joey.”

“Dad, what are you talking about? What’s at the hospital?”

“Your daughter, Joey.” He looked me firmly in the eye. “Lucy wouldn’t tell me, but I knew. Your daughter was born last night.”

And so a family story was made: how I had returned the previous summer, unknown, under cover of darkness, to be with Lucy; and how eight months later, knowing the child we had conceived on that visit was about to be born, I had come home to claim her, and face the music of my life. A story in which I was in one way a hero, and another way not; but a story nevertheless, built foursquare on the moment when my father looked me in the eye and told me Kate was mine, and I didn’t say a word, my silence saying yes. I never learned if he knew the truth, and even in the final weeks of his life I didn’t find the courage to ask him. But my heart tells me he did not; one thing my father never could do was lie. He might have had an easier life if this had been possible, but it simply wasn’t.

We brought Lucy and Kate home two days later. Lucy had gone into labor early on the morning of the first day of her thirty-fifth week, and when my father couldn’t get Paul Kagan on the phone, he had somehow driven her down to Farmington. By the time they arrived her labor had stopped, but they admitted her anyway, and when her contractions returned the following evening, my father was there. These were the old days, when a man at a birth (except for the doctor-always a man) was as rare as a comet in a June sky, so when I say my father was present, I mean sitting just outside the room, probably hankering hard for a cigarette nobody would let him smoke. One Joe Crosby in place of another: he told me he’d been glad to do it and knew I would have been there if I could.

Lucy was very weak, and the day we brought her home the snow, which had held itself at bay, arrived: a heavy spring storm, flakes the size of pennies that fell from an absolutely windless sky, so that the only sound to be heard was just that: the sound of falling snow. The power failed the next evening, a beautiful, sudden dimming that seemed to freeze time, taking the furnace and phones with it, and then the cold slid in behind the snow, a heart-stopping plunge that set a record for the month of April when, on the second day, the temperature hit minus twenty-two. Lucy’s early labor had been caused by high blood pressure, and the drugs they’d given her to keep her from seizing left her ill and exhausted, almost unable to talk. I nailed blankets over the windows and filled the hearth with wood, and when Kate wasn’t feeding I took her with me to the big room by the fireplace, where I held her against my bare chest under piles of old quilts. I didn’t know a thing about babies, but it turned out I didn’t need to. It happened like this: She was another man’s child, and then she wasn’t. I held my little five-pound Kate against my skin, each one of my senses tuned to the little puffs of air that moved from her chest as she breathed and slept, and as the days slid by, taking all my loneliness with them, that’s what she became: my Kate.