The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard Page B

would let them.
    “Babies,” she had to remind them more than once. To the Mexican cook, she said bambinos. Dos.
    “A baby having babies,” he liked to say.
    “Yes, yes,” she said, already so much older and calmer than she should be. Already a woman, too much a woman. Seventeen, but also not seventeen. Our age, and yet a decade advanced.
    S he fell for the Mexican. The old man. She fell for the words he taught her, for the baby blanket he’d asked his sister to knit for him as a gift for Nora. She fell for his arthritis and his dark skin and the way he asked first about the babies and then about her. She fell, perhaps, too, for his food, for the cow tongue and the goat belly he brought her for lunch. But mostly, mostly she fell for the absence of sex.
    He touched her cheek. She liked this. He held her hand. She liked this too. But even after she began spending nights with him, they did not have sex. Clothed in pajamas, they faced the window of his rancher and held each other. She in front, he in back. He held on to the babies and she held on to him.
    A month before she gave birth, he asked her to marry him. For the first time, she was nervous.
    “Why?” she said. “Why marry me?”
    “For the girls,” he said. “For all three of you. Let me give you what I have.” His sister had died. He’d been made head cook. His house was empty.
    “What will change?” she said.
    “Nothing will change. Crying babies, constant noises. We will not change.” He overarticulated when he spoke. “I will give you your own bedroom.” He looked down when he said this and blushed, because he did not like to talk about sex either and did not like the implication of her question.
    She laughed then, laughed at him and with him. She put his hands on either side of her face and made his fingers pinch the skin. “Silly old man,” she said. “Inheriting three silly young girls. I will marry you.”
    She left the restaurant and they moved her few belongings to the rancher. She insisted that the folding chair come with her, the one she’d first sat in under the Arizona sky.
    “It is crap,” he said, offended that she didn’t think he could offer her better.
    “My crap, though,” she said.
    “Americans and their crap,” he said.
    She set the folding chair up outside, in back by the swimming pool so that people driving by couldn’t see it. She’d grown up with swimming pools, but she didn’t tell him about that. She didn’t want him to know he wasn’t giving her something special. We’d all grown up with swimming pools. And we’d grown up with Nora Lindell. And sometimes, but only sometimes, she thought about this. When the babies kicked, especially, she thought about Trey Stephens and the way he ran his hands up and down her legs. Maybe she wished they were kicking him. She thought about Sissy only when the Mexican wasn’t around. It was almost impossible to imagine her pale, fragile sister when there was someone so old and dark in the same room. It was almost impossible in fact to imagine another life, a different life, when he was there. And, after all, that’s what she had married him for.
    F ourteen years after Nora Lindell went missing, Jack Boyd claimed he saw her again, this time in the Phoenix airport. (This was five years after Sissy Lindell had confirmed to Danny Hatchet that there was definitely no family in Arizona; five years after she allegedly crawled into the backseat of his Nissan.) Jack said Nora looked older, just as he did. She had twins, he said, girls, maybe thirteen years old. This time he didn’t talk to her.
    He stopped at an airport pay phone, and the only person he could think to call was his mother.
    “It’s not her,” Mrs. Boyd said.
    “I’m watching her right now,” he said. “It’s Nora clear as day.”
    “That girl is dead,” said Mrs. Boyd. “She died years ago and everyone knows it.”
    “There are three of them. One my age and two girls who look just like Sissy. Just like