CONTESTABLE -- Chapter Two: Apache Boulevard

Tempe, Arizona. January 1999.

The first thing Danny Kessler ever heard Maren say was, "Oh, Gwyneth, no."

He was nineteen years old and sitting alone in the back row of the Harkins Centerpoint, because his buddy Rudy had bailed on him at the last minute for a girl, and Danny had already paid for the ticket and wasn't about to waste five dollars on principle. The movie was Shakespeare in Love. He hadn't picked it. Rudy had picked it, for the girl, and then taken the girl somewhere else, and so here was Danny, a first-year HVAC apprentice with fiberglass still itching in the creases of his elbows, watching Gwyneth Paltrow put on a fake mustache.

And somewhere in the dark behind him and to the left, a girl's voice said, quietly but with tremendous feeling, "Oh, Gwyneth, no. Not the mustache. They'll know."

He laughed before he could stop himself. It came out of his nose.

A few minutes later, the voice was in the seat right next to him.

He didn't see her move. One second the seat was empty and the next it was full of a girl in a thrift-store cardigan with an enormous bucket of popcorn and dark hair falling out of a clip, and she leaned toward him without taking her eyes off the screen and whispered, "You laughed. Nobody else laughed. I've been doing this for forty minutes and you're the only one."

"Sorry," Danny whispered.

"Don't be sorry. It's the best thing that's happened to me all week." She held the popcorn out to him. "I'm sitting with you now. My date's a film person. He's down in row F experiencing it."

"Won't he mind?"

"He's experiencing it," she said. "He won't notice for an hour."

So Danny ate her popcorn, and for the next hour she talked through the entire movie in a whisper that got less and less like a whisper. She did all the voices. She narrated Joseph Fiennes's inner life ("I am a genius, and also my shirt is open"). She had a long, increasingly detailed theory about Judi Dench's daily routine. When Shakespeare got writer's block, she leaned over and said, "Just make it about a shipwreck. Everybody loves a shipwreck. Put a twin in it." And Danny, who had grown up in Flagstaff with a father who thought the movies were a waste of a good afternoon, and who had never in his life been interested in Elizabethan anything, laughed so hard he cried. Silently, at first. Then not.

A man in the row ahead turned around and said, "Do you mind?"

"Terribly," said the girl. "But we're working through it."

It was the usher who finally came, with a flashlight, and asked them to leave. They were halfway up the aisle, still laughing, when a young man came up out of row F to see what the noise was.

He was older than Danny. Twenty-four, maybe. Tall and neat, with a sweater tied around his shoulders in a way Danny had only ever seen in catalogs. He was holding two sodas, and his face did something complicated when he saw her.

"Maren," he said. "What are you -- where have you been?"

So that was her name. Danny filed it away.

"Hal!" She said it warmly, as if he were an old friend she'd run into at the grocery store. "Hal, this is -- what's your name?"

"Danny."

"This is Danny. I'm with Danny now. We're being thrown out. It's very romantic." She took one of the sodas out of Hal's hand, as if he'd been holding it for her all along, which, to be fair, he had. "You stay. Really. Experience the rest of it. You can tell me how it ends. I already know how it ends -- he writes Romeo and Juliet, Hal, it's not a twist."

People were turning around in their seats. The usher's flashlight swung across Hal's face, and in it Danny saw a look he would remember, on and off, for years. It wasn't anger. It was something stiller than that. It was the look of a man memorizing a room.

"You're not serious," Hal said.

"I'm never serious. It's my best quality." And she patted his arm, kindly, twice, and walked out of the theater with Danny Kessler and Hal's Diet Coke, and did not look back.

Out in the parking lot, under the orange lights, with the January air finally cool enough to breathe, Danny said, "That was kind of brutal."

"Was it?" She looked back at the theater doors for the first time, and something flickered across her face, there and gone. "He'll be fine. He's in law school. They grow a shell." She shook the soda, listening to the ice. "He was going to explain the movie to me afterward. At Denny's. He told me so on the way in. He'd planned it."

"And you didn't want that."

"I wanted," she said, "to sit with the boy in the back who laughed."

---

Her name was Maren Elise Varga, and she was eighteen years old, and she was a freshman at ASU majoring, at that moment, in Accounting, because "numbers don't have feelings, Danny, they just are, isn't that restful?" She'd been a philosophy major in the fall, and before that, for about three weeks in August, theater.

She talked faster than anyone Danny had ever met. She talked in the car and in the shower and in her sleep. She talked to dogs, to parking meters, to the guy who made the burritos at the place on University Drive, who after two weeks would start making hers before she ordered. She could make anyone laugh, about anything, at any time, and Danny figured out early that she couldn't stop doing it. It wasn't a choice for her. It was more like weather. A joke would build up inside her and it had to come out somewhere, and God help whoever was standing in the path.

He loved her by February. He knew it on a Tuesday, at the burrito place, when she reached across the table and wiped salsa off his chin with her thumb without breaking her sentence, and he thought, Oh. I'm going to do whatever this girl says for the rest of my life.

She found out she was pregnant in March.

She told him in the parking lot of a Walgreens on Apache Boulevard, sitting on the hood of his truck, by holding up the test and saying, "So. Do you want the good news or the news?"

He sat down on the curb, which was the only thing his legs seemed able to do.

"The good news," Maren said, "is that I've finally picked a major. It's mother. The news is the same as the good news." She hopped off the truck and sat down beside him on the curb, close, so their knees touched. "Danny. You can go. I mean it. I won't be mad. You're nineteen, you've got fiberglass in your elbows, you didn't sign up for this."

He looked at her. Her face was perfectly calm, and her hands were shaking so hard the little plastic test was rattling against her knee.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said.

"You're sure."

"I'm sure."

"Because I'm a lot. People say that about me. She's a lot. My own mother says it."

"I like a lot," Danny said, and meant it, and she put her head down on his shoulder in the Walgreens parking lot and laughed and cried at the same time, which he would learn was something she could do better than anybody alive.

They rented the duplex on Apache Boulevard in June.

It was the left half of a cinderblock building behind a tire shop, with one bedroom and a swamp cooler that Danny rebuilt himself the first weekend, and a landlord named Mr. Gutierrez who loved Maren on sight and gave them the first month free. Everything in it was old and slightly broken. The linoleum in the kitchen was cracked in a long zigzag, like a map of a river. The faucet ran hot when you turned it to cold.

And the kitchen was yellow.

Mr. Gutierrez had painted it himself, the summer before, for his own mother, who had lived there until she died. He'd chosen the color, he said, because it was the color of the kitchen she'd had as a girl in Hermosillo. It was a yellow that didn't apologize for anything. It was the yellow of the inside of a lemon, of a school bus on the first day, of the light in the last ten minutes before a summer sunset.

"It's horrible," Maren said, standing in the middle of it the first day with her hand on her belly.

"I can repaint it," Danny said. "Gutierrez won't care."

"Don't you dare." She turned slowly in a circle. "It's horrible and I love it. It's like living inside a laugh."

They didn't repaint it.

Jessie was born on October 4, 1999, at Tempe St. Luke's, after nineteen hours of labor during which Maren told the delivery nurse, the anesthesiologist, the resident, and at one point a confused man from the cafeteria that she was "going to sue God." Jessica Ruth Kessler weighed six pounds eleven ounces and came out frowning, as if she'd been interrupted. Maren held her and looked at her for a long time and finally said, in an awed whisper, "Danny. She's so serious. Where did we get a serious one?"

They got married at the Maricopa County courthouse in December, with Jessie asleep in a sling on Maren's chest, Walt and Danny's mother driving down from Flagstaff, and Maren's mother not coming at all. Maren wore a yellow dress. Of course she did.

It was the happiest he'd ever been. He would think that later, for a long time, and it would always be true.

It started in February.

Danny didn't see it at first, because he didn't know what he was looking at. He knew new mothers didn't sleep -- everybody told him that, every guy at work, his own mother on the phone -- so when Maren didn't sleep, he didn't think anything of it. When she was still up at three in the morning, when the baby was asleep, scrubbing the grout in the bathroom with a toothbrush, he thought it was nesting. When she started talking faster, he thought she was just happy. She was happy. She was happier than he'd ever seen her.

She was so happy it began to scare him.

She stopped sleeping almost entirely. Three hours a night, then two, then none. She took the baby on long walks at four in the morning, up and down Apache Boulevard, talking to her the whole time. She started projects and abandoned them: a quilt, a garden in the dirt behind the tire shop, a novel she wrote forty pages of in one night in a spiral notebook and then wouldn't let him read. She spent four hundred dollars they didn't have at a Target in one afternoon, on things that made no sense together -- a telescope, twelve identical pairs of socks, a fondue set. When he asked her about it, gently, she laughed and laughed and couldn't stop, and then stopped very suddenly and looked at him with eyes he didn't recognize.

"You don't see it," she said. "Do you? You really don't see it."

"See what, Mare?"

"How clear everything is." She grabbed his hands. Hers were burning hot. "Everything is so clear right now, Danny. I can see how all of it connects. I can see what needs fixing. I can see what I have to settle."

He didn't understand what she meant. He wouldn't understand for a long time.

The night of March 2nd, she left.

He woke at two in the morning and she was gone. The baby was asleep in her bassinet next to the bed. The truck keys were gone from the hook by the door, and so was the truck. There was a note on the kitchen table in Maren's huge, beautiful handwriting, on the back of a Circle K receipt.

Gone to settle something with Hal. Back by breakfast. Feed the serious one. I love you more than math.

He stood in the yellow kitchen holding the receipt and reading it over and over. Hal. He knew the name. It took him a second to place it. Row F. The two sodas. The tall neat young man with the sweater around his shoulders and that still, strange look on his face, the look of a man memorizing a room.

He hadn't heard Maren say that name in more than a year.

He called her friends. Nobody knew anything. He didn't know Hal's last name, didn't know where Hal lived, had no idea where to even start, and at four in the morning, with Jessie screaming on his shoulder because she wanted her mother and not a twenty-year-old man with a bottle of formula he'd made wrong, he called the only person he could think of. He called his father.

Walt Kessler drove from Flagstaff to Tempe in two hours and ten minutes, which was not legally possible, and came through the door of the duplex in his work jacket at 6:15 in the morning and took the baby out of Danny's arms without a word, and the baby stopped crying.

"Sit down," Walt said.

Danny sat down.

"Now tell me."

And Danny told him -- all of it, the not sleeping and the Target and the clear-eyed burning look -- and his father listened with the baby on his shoulder, and when Danny was done, Walt was quiet for a long time.

"Your Aunt Sally," he said finally. "My sister. Did anybody ever tell you about her?"

"She died before I was born."

"She was like this," Walt said. "Just like this. Funniest person I ever knew. Smartest. And then she'd go up, and up, and we didn't know what it was back then, nobody did. We just thought she was wild." He rocked the baby. "When Maren comes back, son, you take her to a doctor. Not tomorrow. Today. You hear me?"

Maren came back at 7:40 in the morning.

She pulled the truck into the space behind the tire shop and walked into the yellow kitchen, and she was smiling, and her eyes were bright as a pair of headlights, and there was mud on her shoes, red desert mud, and on the knees of her jeans. She looked at Walt holding the baby and said, "Oh, hi, Walt, how wonderful, you're just in time for breakfast," as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

"Mare," Danny said. "Where were you?"

"I told you. I left a note."

"What did you do?"

She thought about it. She actually seemed to think about it, standing there in the middle of the kitchen with red mud on her knees, with a little line between her eyebrows, like somebody trying to remember a dream.

"I settled it," she said.

"Settled what?"

But her face had already moved on. "Is there coffee? Walt, do you want eggs? I'm going to make eggs. I'm going to make so many eggs."

He took her to the doctor that afternoon. It took four doctors, in the end, and a locked unit on the third floor of a hospital in Mesa, and nineteen days. On the fourth day, a psychiatrist named Dr. Feldman sat Danny down in a room with a box of tissues on the table and used the words bipolar I disorder and postpartum onset, and talked to him for a long time about lithium and blood levels and triggers, and Danny understood about a quarter of it. The only thing he remembered, word for word, was what Dr. Feldman said at the end.

"Learn to watch her sleep," the doctor said. "Sleep is everything. When she stops sleeping, that's your first sign, before she knows it herself. Count the nights."

So Danny learned to count the nights.

He never did find out where she'd gone that night. He asked her once, in the hospital, and she looked at him with total, honest confusion, and said, "Gone where?" She didn't remember. Dr. Feldman said that was common. The brain on fire didn't always keep good records. And Danny looked at his wife in her paper slippers on the third floor of a hospital in Mesa, so small and so far away, and he decided it didn't matter.

He decided to let it go.

It would be the only thing, in twenty-six years, that he ever let go without asking.

She came home on a Sunday night at the end of March.

They put Jessie down at eleven, and then they stood in the yellow kitchen, the two of them, not talking. Maren's hands were very steady now, steadier than they'd ever been, and her face was a little puffy from the medication, and her eyes were her eyes again. She'd come back to herself. But there was something careful in the way she was standing, as if the floor might not hold her.

Neither of them knew what to say. They'd been through the worst thing that had ever happened to either of them, and they were twenty years old, and they didn't have the words for it. So they stood there under the light, in Mr. Gutierrez's mother's yellow kitchen, with the cracked linoleum like a river between their feet.

Then Maren went over to the old boom box on the counter, the one with the broken tape door, and put in a CD, and pressed play.

Patsy Cline. "Walkin' After Midnight."

"I'm a certified lunatic now," she said, turning around. "They gave me a bracelet and everything. So you'll have to dance with me. It's the law."

"I can't dance."

"I know. I've seen you try. That's what makes it fun."

So they danced, in their socks, badly, on the cracked linoleum, the way neither of them would ever have danced in front of anyone else. He stepped on her foot. She stepped on his on purpose. Around the second chorus she started laughing, really laughing, for the first time in a month, and then she put her face against his shoulder and kept it there.

"Danny," she said into his shirt.

"Yeah."

"If I did something bad. When I was up. Something really bad. Would you still --"

"Yes."

"You didn't let me finish."

"Still yes."

She laughed again, wetly, against his shoulder. "Good," she said. "Because I don't remember most of it."

He didn't ask. He was twenty years old, and his wife was home, and she was laughing in a yellow kitchen with her arms around his neck, and Patsy Cline was going walkin' after midnight, searchin' for you, and he didn't ask.

Twenty-six years later, in a courtroom in Flagstaff, somebody else would.