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"Well I don't know all this about theology, but I'll tell you, I do feel, I guess, that somewhere behind all this"- he gestures outward at the scenery; they are passing the housing development this side of the golf course, half-wood half-brick one-and-a-half-stories in little flat bulldozed yards containing tricycles and spindly three-year-old trees, the un-grandest landscape in the world - "there's something that wants me to find it."
- John Updike, Rabbit, Run
Gatwood, Kim thinks, standing dizzily on what must be an exit ramp with the vague plain of the Northeast Heights stretched out before her. The meeting. She was already late when she left. But her phone is in her purse and her purse is in the car and when she turns to see if she can reach it a bolt of pain shoots down her right arm, fixing her in place. And yet it's Gatwood she thinks of calling first: the words are already tumbling over each other in her head— I’m so sorry but something’s happened, I'm not going to be able to make it, I can recommend— Kim looks around. She doesn't recognise the area where she’s crashed. The last thing she knew she was, what, passing through Uptown? Gatwood's files drift and scatter like birds. She turns to see two vehicles pulling up and a profound exhaustion comes over her at the thought of having to explain herself.
“You okay, ma'am?”
“Uh,” Kim says, staring at the crumpled car she still owes twenty-eight hundred dollars on, feeling light-headed, wondering if her arm is really broken. “I… no.”
“You call 911 already?”
“Oh. Yeah. No.”
“Let's get you away from the car, now,” says the driver, and she steps back before he can touch her arm. "You're okay. Take it easy. Let’s go and sit down.”
“I need to call someone,” Kim says, although she's not sure who.
“Did she put it in park?” someone else is asking.
“How you doing there, ma'am? You hurt?”
“I think my arm's broken,” Kim says. She sits down in the dirt, unable to stand any longer. People are moving around her, talking. Someone drapes something soft and heavy around her shoulders. A bitter wind whips up Gatwood's files again; she can see them fluttering down the slope and compulsively wonders how much work that was, how many hours is she going to have to make up, how many more all-nighters to account for the reams of paperwork now strewn across the sagebrush—
“Ma'am, do you know where you are?”
“No,” Kim says. Jesus. Driving while impaired. They could absolutely get her for that if a cop thinks to look into what happened. And she doesn't remember anything since turning right on Lomas. And she's slept maybe five, six—
“They’re sending an ambulance.”
“Could you call—” Kim says, and then starts to shiver. She has never felt so disoriented, so shaken, in her life. “Uh. My phone, it’s— there's somebody I need to talk to.”
Jimmy picks up after the fifth ring. His voice is smooth from the tequila he wanted her to drink and gritty underneath with residual irritation, and— “Hey, what’s up?”— he sounds so far away that Kim’s mouth opens and shuts uselessly, like nothing she could possibly say could relate him to where she is now.
“Kim?”
“Hey,” Kim chokes out. She tries to make some more words fit together, but the more Jimmy talks at her, asks her what’s happened, implores her to say something, the more distant from him she feels.
They are very nice to her at the hospital. They give her a blanket, because she's freezing, and a saline drip, because she's dehydrated, and another IV full of painkillers, because the bone of her upper arm is broken almost clean through; the doctor's mouth is pursed in a "what can you do?" look when he shows her the X-ray, and Kim stares at the little black line and thinks, eight weeks, eight weeks in this cast, my right hand, my right hand, I won't be able to do anything—
She doesn't cry, though. She doesn't make a sound when they set the fracture, even though it hurts so much that everything briefly disappears in a cloud of red sparks. She just sits there, feeling a little strange from the pain relief, letting the nurse wrap cold clinging plaster bandages around her useless arm. The lights are hurting her eyes; she wishes it were darker. She wishes they could infuse sleep into her like they're doing with the saline.
Jimmy, too, is very good to her. He handles her like he's afraid she'll shatter. His hand supports her elbow as they walk out of the ER with her clothes in a bag; there was no chance of getting her blouse back on over the cast and they had to cut her jacket off of her with the trauma shears anyway, so they found her a set of scrubs and Jimmy put his jacket over her shoulders. He makes sure she has all her post-discharge instructions before they leave. He keeps looking over at her, worried little glances, as if he's afraid she's going to break down.
There is an unpleasant, brackish tinge of guilt to his expression, and Kim's too dazed to really feel much in response to it, but if she could she would feel vexed: you didn't do this to me. I did. I did. I took a stupid risk and this is what happened. Now Jimmy can’t work, and she can’t work, and their bright little fantasy— solo practitioners, together— is looking like a child’s crayon-and-craft-paper confection, bleeding ink and coming apart where it’s glued. Old voices hum in her mouth, vibrating her back teeth: did you really think this was going to work?
People often ask Kim what brought her to Albuquerque, and the trick is to smile brightly and not think of the time her stepfather smashed one of her mom’s Corningware casserole dishes against the kitchen wall, leaving a hole in the plasterboard that they covered up with a calendar (for a month she stared at it and couldn’t look at the thing, a picture of a kitten wearing a bow and January 1981 underneath, without hearing the crash).
Because it’s not there, she refuses to say.
The place where she grew up was not a bad place, not in its bones. The mute land never did her any harm. Not her, though it had left her stepfather bankrupt after a few bad harvests, which was usually the thing he was mad about, or at least the reason her mom gave. It had done far worse to her grandparents back in the thirties and they never got mad; rather, it made them into quiet, bruised people who tended to expect the worst. She had heard Grandpa Meyer say that her stepfather was a damn fool to leave behind a steady city job to start a farm, but she never repeated that statement at home; it just sat in the back of her mind like a grenade whenever Mom and Carl started fighting.
The land was harder still to her father’s ancestors, who had come to America with almost nothing and tried to establish themselves in little sod-houses cut into the prairie. None of the communities they built lasted for more than a decade; they had been lied to about the frequency of the rains, Dad said, and now nothing was left of them but gravestones and their atomized descendants. Dad seemed restless with the land too. When she was very young, he had a job that he wasn't allowed to talk about, a very important job but a secret one, and then he gave that up and took to driving trucks so that they'd barely see him but for one day out of every two weeks, and then not long after that he and Mom got divorced. Kim was never quite sure whether the distance was the cause or effect of the separation.
Dad kept the house, though, a little wooden house in the dead centre of a square cornfield. A knurled cottonwood held fast the soil. There was a small barn where he’d work on his car. You could see for miles in any direction, but in summer the road would quickly narrow to a thread where it curved and then vanish under the height of the corn. Kim remembers it cutting her. The thin leaves were like blades; she would inch between the tall stalks with her shoulders tucked in, trying not to get cut. Sunburn. The roar of insects. The sky was a huge, harsh plane, impossibly blue, humming with the threat of electricity.
She liked to ride in the cab with Dad sometimes, on days when she didn’t have school and he was only shuttling back and forth between Denver and Kansas City. He taught her how to use the CB radio, and the other drivers would fawn over her. (Mom was never happy about it— said it wasn’t right for a girl to be around all those men— and maybe she had a point, Kim thought when she was older, pumping gas at rest stops on her way west, keeping her head down whenever she felt eyes on her. Then again, there were a lot of things that Mom believed weren’t suitable for a woman to do.)
Thanks to Dad, Kim learnt to drive in seventh grade, and having her permit meant having friends and hangers-on who always needed a ride somewhere, and so she spent a lot of time driving, to and from school, for friends who needed to be dropped off at church, at the lake where they swam, at the feed store. She learnt to differentiate hundreds of miles of identical road. By the time she was sixteen, she would drive to the Colorado line every so often and get out and stand there as if at the lip of a diving board, just until she felt like she could breathe easily again.
The night Carl broke that casserole dish happened shortly after she’d received a stack of college prospectuses in the mail. He only got as angry as he did because Mom for once had taken Kim’s side and asked him what was wrong with her looking at options for the future— after all, the SAT was still a year away, and with her grades she could afford to think about a real four-year college, couldn’t she?
“Who’s paying for it?” Carl repeated. “Me? Am I paying for it? Is that the plan?”
“We can worry about that when—”
“Is that the plan, Linda?”
Kim did not say there are scholarships or I can get a job. She stared at her plate, carefully cutting her green beans into halves and quarters.
“Who’s going to pay for it? And let me ask you this—” he turned to Kim, who froze— “every single one of those colleges is out of state. Why’s that?”
“The other brochures haven’t come yet,” Kim lied.
“Do you even know how much more it costs to go to college out of state? What exactly do you want to do with yourself that’s so important you can’t possibly do it here?”
Kim kept her gaze fixed to the tablecloth, tracing the big looping laminated flowers with her eyes.
“That’s my question. Where do you get off thinking you’re so much better than everyone else?”
“Leave her alone, Carl,” Mom said.
“No, I want to hear it. Where does she get off thinking—”
Kim took the opportunity to push her chair back, grab her purse, and slip out through the kitchen door just before Carl threw something heavy and ceramic at her back.
She was friends with a boy named Daniel whose father ran the town gas station, and when she picked him up she didn’t tell him about the fight. It was comforting to let people believe that everything was all right at home. They drove out onto his family’s land and passed a beer back and forth in silence, suspended between the frozen fields and the Milky Way.
There followed a few years that Kim doesn’t care to think about. They were notable only for their blank uniformity. After high school she worked at the gas station, took classes at a community college two hours away, and kept living with Mom and Carl because she could afford either rent or tuition but not both, and in her spare time she saw Daniel more and more because it meant not being home. They were twenty the first time he asked her to marry him. The way he actually put it, lying next to her one night in August, was “should we get married?”
“No!” Kim said, feeling as if someone had drenched her in ice water. “I—I mean— now?”
Daniel was good-natured enough not to take it personally, but she could tell that she had hurt him.
“Well, we don’t have to,” he said. “It’s just… we see each other every day already, and we love each other, and I always kinda thought there’d come a time, you know?”
Kim had gone stiff all over, thinking of her parents’ wedding picture, Mom at nineteen on the courthouse steps. But Daniel continued.
“It’s like, what are we waiting for?”
I don’t know, Kim thought, watching the ceiling fan spin, but there’s something. Most days, she felt like an insect beating its wings against glass, trying hopelessly to get out.
When Grandma Meyer died, a few months after Kim had earned her last college credit at the age of twenty-six and turned down Daniel's proposal for the second time and a few weeks before Thanksgiving, it was Kim’s job to go through all the things she left. Mom came with her but mostly stood on the back porch, smoking. The little house was full to the rafters. Stacks of newspapers in the attic. Boxes of canned goods. Drawers full of kitchen utensils that Kim couldn’t identify. Baby clothes.
Kim tried her best to organise it all. Everything insurance-related went into one box, which soon overflowed. Bank statements and the envelopes they’d come in filled another. There was a whole folder of printed sheets from a bank in Wichita, corresponding to a savings account opened in 1947. For all that she and Grandpa had scrimped and saved throughout their lives, the balance was paltry.
“Mom?” she called through the open door. “Did Grandma have a second savings account?”
“What?”
“It’s just…” Kim started, running her finger down the column of transactions. Every month, near the middle of the month, money was paid in, and a few days later, a smaller sum was withdrawn. The incoming sum was always the same, but the withdrawals were all slightly different.
“You know she handed all that stuff over to Jay when her sight got too bad,” Mom called. “I never had anything to do with it.”
Kim stared at the sheet. March 14th, $51 in; March 16th, $27.65 out. April 11th, $51 in; April 19th, $19.83 out. Perhaps Grandma had kept trying to put away more money than she could afford to. Perhaps that was what this was supposed to look like.
“What the hell is this?” she demanded, when her cousin Jay answered his door, rubbing his eyes even though it was half past two in the afternoon. He squinted at the paper.
"Grandma Meyer's bank statement?" he offered, guilelessly.
“This,” Kim said, tapping the sheet so hard with her forefinger she nearly punched a hole in it. She stepped around Jay into the trailer. “These withdrawals. Explain.”
He stood still in the slatted light. “I don't know what you're talking about.”
“Jay?” came a female voice from another room.
“So help me, Jay, I will take this to the police,” Kim said, almost shaking with rage.
“Hey, hey, hey, whoa,” he said. The mention of the police had animated him. “Come on. What is it you're accusing me of? Dipping into Grandma's savings? Hell, there were barely enough for her to live on to begin with—”
“That's exactly my point,” Kim said. She had never felt so repulsed as she did staring down this man. “Every month. She gave you access, and you waited until her Social Security went through and then you took what you wanted.”
Jay set his jaw. “Prove it.”
Kim swallowed. He'd had legitimate access to the accounts. Grandma Meyer had sanctioned it. There was no record of who exactly had made the withdrawals. It would be very hard to prove he'd done something wrong.
“I’m not the one who has to prove it,” she said. “Believe me, Jay, I'm not the one you should be worried about here.”
“Okay, I think this conversation is over,” Jay said, stepping towards her so that she was forced to back towards the door. “If you're threatening me in my own home, this conversation is over.”
Kim knew better than to tell anyone. Aunt Joan wouldn’t believe her, Mom would accuse her of making trouble, and Dad would shrug and tell her Jay was just living up to expectations. As she sat outside in her truck, smoking through the open window, she stared at Jay’s house and felt an unspeakable frustration: is this really all you want to do with your life? Is this really all you want?
Jay still came to Thanksgiving dinner that year. Everyone did, even Dad, because Aunt Joan who’d always liked him tended to talk about what a shame it was that he didn’t have anywhere else to go. It was the only time her parents talked any more. They all politely pretended that Jay wasn’t tweaking, even though he couldn’t stop sniffing and bouncing his leg under the table and all he wanted to talk about was his friend who worked on an Air Force base that housed nuclear missiles, and how there were secret maps showing where the Russians had their nukes pointed, some of which locations were just a few tens of miles away.
“But they’re not Communists any more, are they?” Aunt Joan said. “Even Gorbachev’s not a Communist any more.”
“What difference does it make?” said Jay. “Someone over in Moscow decides to push the button, doesn’t matter who, doesn’t matter why, and that’s it. We’re toast. I reckon you’d just— fwoosh.” His hand described a person burning to ashes. "Right, Uncle Allen?”
“That would depend on the characteristics of your shelter,” Dad said. The room she slept in at his house had a copy of an old nuclear attack survival pamphlet lurking in the nightstand like a Gideon Bible: To protect yourself at the time of a nuclear explosion, you must understand NOW the hazards you would face. Kim had read it when she was just old enough for it to give her nightmares.
“Can we talk about something else, please?” Mom said.
“I’d like to hear about Kim’s new job,” Aunt Joan offered, not noticing as Kim stared at her and gave a frantic little shake of her head. “It sounds awfully exciting.”
Had Daniel said something to Jay? Had Jay told Aunt Joan out of spite?
“Kim?” Mom asked. “What’s this about a job?”
“It’s not a job, exactly,” Kim said, trapped, pressing the top of her foot against the crossbar of the table until it hurt. “It’s a work-study program. Law school.”
“Law school?” Carl repeated, as if it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.
“Our Kim,” said Aunt Joan, “a lawyer!”
“Yeah, Daniel said I could take her shifts at the gas station,” Jay said, reaching for the potatoes.
“This is the first I’m hearing of this,” Mom said, eyeing Kim from the head of the table, her knife and fork suspended halfway to her plate.
“It’s in Albuquerque,” Kim said, too loudly. “New Mexico.”
Kim imagined the silence that followed filling the room like floodwater, lapping at their ankles, floating the dishes off the table, closing over their mouths.
“Excuse me,” she said, and went outside to smoke.
Dad emerged a minute later. “Now, you should have known that your mother doesn’t like being surprised,” he said. Kim shrugged, shook her head, and offered him a light.
“You know, I might not even get it,” she said. “There’s still the interviews. I just…”
“Just wanted to make a change?”
“I’m done here, Dad.”
“I know some people in Albuquerque,” he said, after a minute. “Can’t tell you how I know ‘em, but they’re good folks. They’ll help you settle in.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “Ever since your mother married that asshole, excuse my language, I’ve been hoping you’d end up somewhere better.”
Where the hell were you, then? Kim did not ask. There was no point asking Dad where he’d been all those nights she shut herself in the closet until the yelling stopped. Somewhere better was something she was going to have to make for herself now.
It took Kim a day and a half to drive the six hundred miles to Albuquerque. Nothing prepared her for the mountains. No photograph could ever capture the sheer disruption of the horizontal plane, the massive displacement of air. She spent the night at a motel in Colorado where after dark she could see only a crevice of sky between the trees and the black peaks. In Albuquerque she ignored the address Dad had written down for her, found a cheap downtown hotel, got drunk in her narrow beige room on the tenth floor, and fell asleep with the city spread out in gold before her, thinking not there any more, not there, not there.
On the day of her job interview, Kim pulled into the garage at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill and crept past what felt like endless rows of the most expensive cars she’d seen in her life. Her eyes flickered from badge to badge: BMW, Mercedes, a flashy Camaro, was that an actual Rolls-Royce? At the time, Kim drove a ’78 Ford pickup that had cost her seven hundred and fifty dollars from a guy who knew her father, sometimes wouldn’t turn over in the cold, and had a big deep dent in the front fender, and she ended up circling the garage three times before pulling out, finding a place down the street, and walking the two blocks back.
She still made it to the interview with time to spare. This was the kind of contingency for which she soon learned to build in ten or fifteen extra minutes before every meeting. You needed to be ready to present yourself, hair all smooth, clothes unwrinkled, tights unladdered, fresh white smile, proper and professional and ready to work. No matter what.
“And you’re applying to the accelerated JD program, I see?”
Chuck McGill was one of her interviewers.
“Yes,” Kim said.
“Very ambitious.”
“Thank you,” Kim said, and then wondered if he’d meant it as a compliment. “I mean, I know it’s going to be intense. I know there’ll be a steep learning curve. But— when I found out about this opportunity, I just knew. Right away, I knew I had to take it.”
“You think law might be your vocation,” Chuck said, and Kim refused to hear the note of condescension in his voice.
“I think— you are what you make of yourself,” Kim said, holding his gaze, ignoring her racing heartbeat and the knot in her solar plexus. “That’s all. And this is what I want to make of myself.”
Even after she got the mailroom job, she didn’t park her truck in the company garage until Jimmy McGill offered to walk her out one night and didn’t take no for an answer, albeit in a sweet way, like he was reminding her that it was past eight, and she didn’t have food in the fridge at home, and her eyes were hurt and blurred from ten hours in front of a screen.
"Yeah, okay," she said.
He didn’t laugh when they reached the place where she’d parked. He just asked "this is you?" and Kim said "yep, this is me", cutting him off a little, not trying to be curt, just not wanting to let him feel like he could get away with anything here. But he didn’t. He actually looked kind of impressed.
"Is that a stick shift?"
"My dad hauls freight,” Kim said. “I was, like, thirteen when he told me I needed to learn how to drive stick."
"Wow," Jimmy said, either because she was a woman who could drive stick or because she’d just blurted out that her dad was a trucker or possibly both. Jimmy would do this a lot, react with something approaching awe to some skill or proficiency she revealed. She found it patronising until she realized that he was in love with her.
The first time Kim invited him over for dinner, which had seemed at the time less loaded than a date, he showed up late with a clutch of gas station carnations and a bootleg Mystery Science Theater 3000 videotape.
“You’re new to New Mexico," he said. "It seemed apropos."
“The Beast of Yucca Flats,” Kim read.
“You know how at the South Pole after the last supply plane leaves for the winter, they lock all the doors and watch The Thing?” Jimmy said gravely. “Both versions.”
Then there was the night they were fooling around in the living room after a bottle of cheap wine and Jimmy produced an actual mixtape from his back pocket. When he pressed play, the opening bars of “Kiss” by Prince started unspooling. Kim didn’t have much time to consider this choice— made, judging by his expression, one hundred per cent without irony— because he was gyrating his hips with a tight cadence like he had studied the choreography. She kept a straight face until he shimmied over to her and whispered “I always kind of wanted to do this,” and she busted out laughing, picturing a younger Jimmy trying this routine on some hapless college girl cocking a disinterested eyebrow at him through Aquanetted bangs.
“Sorry,” Kim giggled. “Please continue.”
He fiddled with his cufflinks— there’s really no sensual way to take out cufflinks, Kim thought, there can’t be— and then suddenly he had conjured an imaginary comb and mirror and was performing an outrageous pantomime of Howard Hamlin’s morning routine.
“No!”
“No?” he asked, feigning innocence, straightening the tips of his collar and setting his jaw.
“Absolutely not.”
One hand around his tie in a highly suggestive manner, Jimmy did a cruelly accurate impression of the I’ll-take-that-under-advisement look Howard sometimes got in meetings.
“Seriously,” Kim sputtered. “I’m never gonna be able to look him in the eye again.”
“Yeah? Is it— is it the tie?”
“Lose the tie.”
“Okay, losing the tie.” He couldn’t resist removing an imaginary tie pin first, but he twirled it like a lasso then draped it around Kim’s neck. She nodded in approval. Jimmy’s top two buttons were already undone and his collar skewed, and, God help her, this ridiculous peacocking was actually kind of hot. But Kim leant back, legs crossed, assuming a detached air, keeping her expression neutral. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Not yet.
He unwittingly helped her out by actually, seriously doing the James Bond finger guns, blowing smoke and everything, but then he took his time with the rest of the buttons, mouthing along to the song lyrics, and when the shirt came off he looked incredibly vulnerable for a second. Kim slid off the sofa and extended her arm, took his hand, reeled him in, and they started moving together in time, then out of time.
She thought of Daniel that night, when she and Jimmy were sprawled loose and comfortable together amid the crumpled sheets, catching their breath, laughing at some joke he’d cracked. We see each other every day, and we love each other. It’s like, what are we waiting for?
Years later, Kim clearly remembers the night she found out about her father’s cancer: the way her hands shook, the takeout meal she scraped half-eaten into the trash, how Jimmy waited in the apartment as she chain-smoked half a pack of cigarettes in the parking lot and then held her for what felt like hours when she came back inside crying. But that was back when Chuck was still alive, and Jimmy was still Jimmy, and Kim hadn’t felt the need to change any of her numbers or take her address out of the phone book.
The night her father dies is very different. She takes the phone call after accepting an award from the State Bar of New Mexico in the atrium of the Hotel Andaluz; she is looking for a quiet place on the balcony when her mother tells her. In the white noise of Mom’s voice she makes out “funeral home” and “Omaha”. So her dad left Bird City, too, in the end. He’d been in remission, this latest time, for at least a year. She wonders what could have happened to the house in the cornfields. It’s hard to imagine anyone else ever living in her father’s house.
“Well, are you coming home or not?” Mom asks her. Paige is there, catching her eye and smiling and motioning towards someone she’d like Kim to meet, and Kim tries to nod and smile and indicate that she’s busy, but she finds herself frozen, as if in a nightmare, unable to move a muscle.
“Yeah,” Kim breathes, and ends the call. If her mother told her a date, she’s already forgotten it. She feels absurdly conscious of the way her feet are rooted to the ground, the sensation of carpet under her heels.
Paige has seen her hang up, and in her expression Kim can read a thread of concern. The words come together so easily in her head— I’m sorry, it’s a family emergency, I really have to go— but the more she tries to make herself say them, the tighter her throat locks up.
“Kim? Is everything all right?”
She couldn’t keep it together, after all, but Paige is very kind to her. She takes Kim out to her car in the garage so that no one will see her breaking down, and Kim sits in the passenger seat, her head pounding, until she can speak again.
“Are you going to be all right?” Paige asks. “I’m sorry, that was stupid of me to ask, I mean… is there someone who can drive you home?”
“I can drive,” Kim says, but Paige is already shaking her head.
“Let me take you. I mean it. You shouldn’t have to be on your own right now.”
Leaning against the window, clutching the award the State Bar gave her, watching Albuquerque spread out gold before her, Kim thinks of how quiet it will be in her empty apartment. You are what you make of yourself.