Jack said to her: ‘If you leave, don’t come back. I won’t be here.’ Like he could read her mind. He wore skinny leg jeans which were stretched at the knees, and when he talked, he hitched his jeans a little higher on his slim hips. A smooth pebble of fear sank through Mara when Jack said these words, but the next moment he was smiling.

Outside, the sky was a sort of grey that bled into orange and pale pink around the edges. It was late afternoon. The horizon would be washed out soon, colourless, and then black. But for a few minutes, the sharp contours of the Sandia Mountains were lit up with their own aurora streaming down like tears.

Mara watched the mountains transforming in the sunset, the sheer granite face receding into shadow as if its eyes were closing to the world. ‘You ever watch the sky and feel thirsty?’ she said to Jack. ‘So thirsty you know nothing will quench it?’

‘You’re a crack-baby,’ he said, one of his favourite phrases. ‘You need to put some clothes on. I want to go eat.’ He pulled a singlet over his head. It was late autumn. Everything was fading away there in the high desert. The leaves, the grass, the sky.

These days, Mara and Jack had sex while the baby slept in the next room, the door ajar in case he woke. They had to time everything around an unpredictable schedule of naps. Jack wanted Mara to make noises like the girls he watched on his laptop. ‘Louder,’ he’d command, and she’d acquiesce as quietly as possible, like she was a doll, not a woman whose breasts leaked milk when she bent forward. ‘Louder,’ he’d say again. ‘Tell me that it hurts.’ And she would look away to the corners of the room, training her ears on the sounds beyond the doorway.

Jack’s sexual preferences were all there in his search history. Mara trawled through his laptop when he fell asleep or went out with his buddies. She checked everything he did. Lately, when he was in the shower, she’d pretend she wanted to lie on the bed reading. Once she was sure he was under the stream of water, she would drag his jeans off the bathroom floor, slide her hand into his back pocket and take out his phone.

Mara was lying in bed still. She could hear Jack in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. Maybe they’d made love, or maybe it was something else. Her feelings for him were like a vapour she couldn’t pierce. Things were shifting, part of a larger weather pattern. Jack was messaging some girl. He’d been doing it for months – the whole time Mara was pregnant. When she first found the messages, a vein of ice had moved upwards from her stomach into her chest, fanning out like glaciers coming apart. She’d intended to confront him that evening, but her throat was cold, her tongue a lump of meat that made it hard to breathe. She said nothing, and the silence swelled inside her. It made her feel high at times, like she was rising into the air and might burst.

She had decided to watch Jack, to figure out why she should stay with him, or why she couldn’t bring herself to leave – which were not the same thing. She was frozen in the moment before deciding, half indecision, half despair. She kept hoping fatherhood would transform Jack, would make him say: Yes, this is who I want to be.

Mara rose from the bed and went to rinse off in the shower. The baby was asleep, but if he woke, she’d have no time to get ready. It would be wet wipes and dry shampoo another day in a row – and hoping Jack didn’t lose his mind while he waited, rocking the baby. Activities of daily living as damage control – and every day unravelling into the next, the night not even a border between past and future, because she was awake in the dark to watch dawn approaching through every lighter shade of black: charcoal, blue-black, grey. And, finally, the sky white as a sheet of paper, briefly blank before the rising yellow day.

Jack was always getting into something. He could land a straight job and act the part of a real adult for a few months, fooling everyone but Mara. They shared a car, and she took him to work most days, driving there like it was a game to roll through every amber, taking corners tight and fast because he was never ready on time. It was work to keep him in a job.

The latest thing was that Jack had trained to be a peer support counsellor at a suicide prevention hotline. The more serious phone calls were diverted to psychologists with bachelor’s degrees, and Jack took the ones who just wanted to talk, the regulars who’d call up every night. Some of them were veterans, others had been homeless but were getting back on track, accessing resources, keeping up with phone payments. All of them were lonely. Jack had a disarming manner, so he was good at this job. In grocery stores and on the street, he’d stop to chat to anyone, squaring his shoulders and planting his feet. In the moment of conversation, he was fully engaged – like a politician, but real, without the polish. He was the sort of person you’d want to talk to if you called a suicide prevention hotline. He would find a way to make you laugh, have you agreeing to build some new skill – slacklining or public speaking. But he was like this because he carried nothing with him – no burden of the past, not even his own.

Mara wasn’t working right now. In fact, she had given her job to Jack. That was the whole joke of it – Mara, who had genuinely cared about what happened to each caller after they talked, who had stood alone in the icy carpark after her shift, unlocking her car and half-expecting a certain male caller to materialise at her shoulder. When she realised she was pregnant, she had gone to her boss and said: ‘I know someone who could step in for me. A friend of mine.’ She didn’t plan to refer to Jack as a friend instead of her boyfriend. But there it was – the lie was in the air like a blue thread of smoke, snaking from one point to another, and now Jack had her job. Jack who smoked and drank and shoplifted, who’d carried drugs, and gone AWOL from the Marines – that Jack, telling everyone he was clean, saying things like: ‘Focus on where you are right now. Nothing else. What can you see, hear, taste, feel?’

Her name was Rose. The girl Jack was messaging. Perhaps more than messaging. Rose was blonde and had a nose like Nicole Kidman. Mara was sure she’d paid for that perfect nose. Maybe Rose was Jack’s type. Mara checked Rose’s social media profiles daily, then deleted the search history. Rose was one of those girls who uploaded precise details of their exercise regime like they were doing everyone else a favour. She worked in a sports bar, but it seemed she was studying business, or planned to start her own business. She was definitely involved in a health-shake MLM at one point.

Mara was studying Rose’s latest social media post while drinking coffee. It had become a bad habit, the first place she went when alone. Rose had shared a photo of her lunch that day and tagged the location as Billie Jean’s Blue Corn Dreams. The photo showed a table for two, a blue corn burrito on the table, and someone’s legs angling out from under the table – stonewash jeans, sneakers. The shoes caught Mara’s eye. She had cleaned Jack’s grey sneakers when he came in from mountain biking. They were his sneakers in the corner of the photo, his long legs stretching out.

Mara had dropped Jack at work that morning. He’d been wearing a white polo shirt, black slacks, and black Oxfords, which she’d found for him at a second-hand clothing store before his interview for her old job. While she was examining the photo, a phone call came through. She let it go to voicemail, then listened to the message. It was the New Mexico Bureau of Vital Records. She deleted the message before the voice could continue. They had called before, requesting name information for the baby’s birth certificate, but nothing could be done without Jack’s signature. The real issue was that Mara wouldn’t go along with Jack this time, so he was turning the disagreement into something more, refusing to meet her in the middle.

Mara returned to Rose’s photo. Maybe it was taken weeks ago. Maybe it wasn’t even Jack in the photo. She tried to remember when she’d last seen him wearing the grey sneakers. If she could push through the fugue state of broken sleep – grasp onto a clear image of him in the sneakers – she might know what to do next.

Jack could draw and loved visiting art galleries. He would become quiet in those wide, white spaces, standing reverently before the haloed frames on the gallery walls. Jack talked about becoming a tattoo artist, but he didn’t have the patience to develop his talent. Once, they went away for the weekend to a town in the Jemez Mountains that had more art galleries than residents. Jack bought a postcard and some adhesive tape in a gift-shop. The tape had little snowmen on it. It was nearly Christmas. The air moved like a sheet of glassine paper, carrying the feeling of the coming snow.

Later, Jack had sketched Mara’s face on a yellow legal pad at the motel. Mara had been in the bath. Their apartment only had a shower stall, so she had remained in the motel bath-tub a long time, emptying and re-filling the tub, letting the steaming water run over her feet and circle slowly towards her shoulders, her neck. When she came out of the bathroom, wearing a towel around her head and nothing else, she glanced over Jack’s shoulder to see what he’d created. Jack had cut his sketch of Mara’s face apart and taped her features at odd angles onto the postcard, so that she hovered distorted – luminous as a harvest moon – over the Jemez Mountains featured on the postcard. The back of the postcard was blank.

He handed the postcard to her and said, ‘Happy Anniversary. I got you the next best thing to an Ellsworth Kelly.’ Mara had laughed then, and tucked the card into her bag so that the motel staff wouldn’t see it. She loved him like she loved the postcard. Everything about him was wrong, and yet she couldn’t imagine being with anyone else. All her broken parts were matched in him. He called her beautiful as if it was her name. He said it loudly, so that people turned to see her, to see if it was true.

In the morning, they had driven south through the valley back to the city. Jack wasn’t feeling well, so Mara had been at the wheel. The Jemez Mountains had become smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror. Jack was asleep. If she had turned the car around and driven north, he wouldn’t have realised until it was too late.

Mara paced from the kitchen to the bedroom. She stopped in the kitchen and took out a cup, then stood at the sink with the water running. The cup filled and overflowed, cooling her hands. She walked to the sliding door which led to a sliver of balcony. The door was coming off its runner, so she used her shoulder to steady the glass as it opened. The apartment was small, yet it opened into the sky, if viewed from a certain angle near the balcony. Far away, the precipitous face of the mountains cut through the horizon, but in between there was blank space: white-blue sky, squat beige homes in the pueblo style, and utilitarian apartment blocks in every shade of concrete. The bleached hues of a desert city that might blow away, grain by grain, into the surrounding sands. Today, however, the sky was draped in grey – reams of cloud unspooled almost to the rooftops – and nothing seemed to move.

Robin started to cry, so Mara sat down with him on a bench on the balcony. She lifted her shirt and held him to her breast, feeling his velvet-soft hair, the shape of his skull, which was a copy of Jack’s head – the architecture of bones replicated in miniature. It was a shape she would recognise by touch alone, or by the shadow made on a wall at night, when she held him upright after feeding, and he looked around, and around, as if the room might be revolving towards some new sight when his back was turned.

‘It might snow soon, Robin. I think these clouds are nimbostratus,’ Mara said, speaking out to the air. She had read it was important for adults to talk to babies, to expose them to as many words as possible. Beyond money or social standing, this, it turned out, was what marked an ineradicable line between rich and poor: vocabulary. It still felt odd, to narrate the day, not expecting a reply in words.

Robin’s eyes were fixed on her face in an expression that perfectly merged innocence, vulnerability, and wisdom: only a baby could master this expression, and only for a year or so. But in that year, the mother knew the baby was not of this world, or of her body, and in fact the baby knew more than her. A hundred times a day he asked her to be still, to stop for a moment, and this was a language too: the language of Time, who lay in her arms, who fed from her breast, who refused to be put down for long hour-minutes, and then: sleep, suddenly sleep, never enough of it – only to wake into it all again, to find a month had passed like this, but where were the days? How were the days? Whole lifetimes surely might not hurt the way this love hurt, the knowledge of time passing, and her being left behind one day – a remote planet on an interminable path around its beloved star.

A shiver went through Robin and along the length of Mara’s arm. The wind was picking up. Mara found herself unable to breathe deeply, to soften against the cold bench and the colder air. As she fed Robin, he moved his hands gently, absent-mindedly, across her stomach, as if to soothe her. She started to bounce her knees, then stopped abruptly, hoping Robin would sleep. It was close to 5 pm. Jack would need to be picked up soon.

Once Robin was asleep, Mara placed him in his baby-seat to be carried to the car. She went to the corner of the bedroom, where she and Jack kept their clothes – her own clothes in neatly folded piles atop an old papasan, and Jack’s clothes on the floor, wherever he had dropped them. Shoes were scattered under his clothing, the laces still tied.

Before Robin had arrived, Mara had folded Jack’s clothes, but lately she couldn’t pick up the mess. She would pause above the first crumpled pair of jeans, then straighten up, and walk down the hallway away from the bedroom. Now, she lifted everything from the floor in a hurry, dumping it on top of her own clothes, scanning the shoes.

Jack stood at the entrance to the carpark, away from the glass façade of the office. Seeing him was like satisfying a terrible craving. He was there, waiting for her, knowing she would come.

‘Where have you two been?’ Jack said, a smile lingering at the edges of his mouth. He closed his car door and leaned across to kiss Mara. At this proximity, the precise angle of his eyes above his cheekbones seemed to have been created by a blade in clay. He was a sort of god to her, once. She had watched him sleeping, had seen the space of vulnerability in the rise and fall of his broad chest. Briefly, he was hers. She loved him most in the dark, when he pulled her towards him and whispered: You were too far away, expecting nothing, not even sex. And then he would wake, would go to the toilet with the door wide open, would take her to children’s movies on dates, would glance sideways at any woman with a certain hip-to-waist ratio.

‘Sorry we kept you waiting,’ Mara replied. She glanced up at her reflection in the rear-view mirror, her eyes ringed by days-old eyeliner. Her dark hair was bundled into a knot at the nape of her neck, because it really was one vast knot, and it might be days before she could disentangle the mess carefully with conditioner in the shower.

Jack was studying something on his phone. Mara’s gaze moved from Jack’s hands down to his shoes. He was wearing the Oxfords. Seeing this, Mara wasn’t sure what she felt anymore. She wanted further proof – specifically, to hear him say he did or didn’t love her. But if she had to ask him for this proof – well, in the asking (the painful asking) it would seem she had her answer, coming from her own voice, the rising inflection and the acute angles of shame.

Mara drove slowly along the streets near the office building. She matched her breathing to the progress of the car, focusing on the street signs, the evening traffic. While they were inside the car, she felt safe. It was the three of them, nobody else.

‘Hey, can we stop by the taco truck on Marquette?’ Jack asked.

‘Sure,’ Mara said. She tried to relax her face.

‘The little man is down for the count.’ Jack looked back at Robin for a moment. ‘I might need some cash for dinner. I’m all out until Thursday.’ He started typing a message on his phone, avoiding Mara’s gaze. She tried to see the message through her peripheral vision, but at that moment Jack sank lower into his seat and raised his knee, so all she could see was the screen reflecting the sky outside, dusk across a blue-black sheen.

A memory of Jack crossed through Mara’s mind – an image from the long night and day when Robin was born, slotting smoothly into place over the present. Mara had gone into labour around 2 am, waking to twisting pain in organs she’d never been conscious of before. Jack had driven her to the birthing centre at 6 am, rubbing her back while steering the car. Around midday, Jack went to buy tea at a café across the road. ‘It’ll help you keep your energy up, baby,’ he’d said, before leaving her alone in the birthing room. Mara had avoided caffeine the whole pregnancy, but she figured that rule didn’t apply once labour started. Jack returned carrying a chai for each of them. He placed Mara’s chai on a bookshelf, and sat down on a couch to drink his own, elbows on his knees, hollow-eyed and watching Mara as if she were at the opposite end of a football field. For a long time, Mara was too nauseated to think about eating or drinking. She got in and out of the bath-tub, unsure if it was doing anything to help the contractions. The midwife kept telling her to hold off on pushing, and Mara felt nervous energy ballooning inside her. When she finally gave up on the bath and reached for the chai, the cup was empty. She had turned to look at Jack then, to signal What the fuck? with her eyes – a look that wouldn’t be possible when she was on all fours with contractions. But Jack had settled back into the couch, his arms folded, his baseball cap pulled down over his eyes – asleep, despite the caffeine.

Mara stopped beside the taco truck and passed Jack her bank card. She wanted to ask him where he’d been all day, but already he was outside, walking towards the taco truck. Then she could hear his voice beyond the windows, placing the order. Robin was in a deep sleep, and Mara kept the engine idling, watching him in the rear-view mirror.

After a minute or two, the owner of the truck came into view – a bony man of about forty, with teeth that could have been cut from an ad for teeth whitening. He had the look of a perpetual teenager, like he’d never grown into his body. He placed a box of tacos on the counter, but Jack ignored it and started to chat. The heating in the car seemed to have two settings – placebo effect, or suffocating humidity – so Mara opened her window a crack, while the warmth circulated at her feet. She kicked her boots off and let her body relax into the seat. Condensation filled the car, flowing out the window like pale smoke. In the cold beyond the car, everything was still – except for Jack, loud and gregarious, settling in as if talking to an old friend.

‘Yeah, like I hear the thing is exposure to dirt,’ Jack said. ‘You’ve gotta be in it and around it. Forget the probiotics and digestive enzymes. What we’re really not getting is dirt.’ Mara stared at Jack’s profile as he talked, willing him to finish his conversation. Before long, Robin would wake, wanting to be fed, and she wouldn’t be able to eat.

‘Well, I’m thinking with my little guy – did I tell you we had the baby?’ Jack nodded in the direction of the car, and the owner of the taco truck glanced over. ‘Yeah, so –’

The owner said something, smiling, with his too-large teeth shining whitely out from the truck into the grey air. Jack listened for a moment, leaning his elbow onto the counter, and angling his body away from Mara’s view.

‘Dante. We went with that. I’m a big fan of the Inferno.’ Mara cringed into her seat. Maybe he’d played the video game. Jack didn’t read much poetry, as far as she could tell. She hadn’t read much either in a long while.

‘Yeah, so I’m thinking I’ll take him up to the mountains and let him crawl around there, get some of that good dirt into his system. Organic wasn’t even a word in our grandparents’ vocabulary.’ Jack started laughing to himself and moved forward to shake hands with the taco truck owner. As he did, Mara saw the owner’s hand reach forward, a glint of white hidden against the palm – and the old handshake of the boys who grew up on these streets: right there, a small white flash in the universe of possibility, dropping through her chest and stomach.

Jack got back into the passenger seat and placed the box of tacos on the centre console. ‘I ordered double barbacoa because I knew you’d want some of mine.’ Mara turned her head to see if the taco truck owner was visible. He was looking up the street, hands on the counter, a smile plastered to his face.

Mara tried to start the car again, forgetting it was already running, and the engine caught like a seam about to tear. Next thing, she would start laughing. Every incongruous emotion was flooding back into her cells. Drugs, real drugs, paid for with her money. Barbacoa and a side of grit or rock or god-knows-what. He was so clever. He was so stupid. She checked Robin hadn’t woken, and pulled out onto the road. The anger was a sort of rush. She wanted to speed, to enact how Jack had crossed the line, but she had to drive carefully.

Jack glanced at her. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ he asked. His head was tilted as he lifted one of the tacos to his mouth, trying to catch the salsa leaking from the tortilla.

Mara continued looking straight ahead. Thick flakes of snow were falling across the windshield now. She was brittle with fatigue, a sculpture of ice that would be gone with the first sharp rays of light.

‘It’s okay. I’m not hungry yet. Can I have my card back?’ She couldn’t look at him or her resolve might unravel. Once she would have taken her card back later, when he was asleep, searching in the dark for his wallet in the pockets of his jeans.

If you know the thing you fear, if it comes to meet you head-on – no longer some shapeless phantasm of a childhood dream, a mother’s paranoia – then it is not fear you feel moving with glacial determination along your airways, through your blood. Already you are reacting to the creature, now real, now stalking with its long, pale legs across the dreamscape of your life, which has taken on – suddenly, vividly – the colours and sounds of the past, a place you will not go again. There was a certain vertigo in letting it all go. One love was vaster than the other, one love was infinite and would drown out the other love, and that would be for the best.

‘I’ll drop you back home,’ Mara said, studying the rear-view mirror. ‘I’ll keep driving for a little while. I want to let Robin sleep.’ Jack didn’t react to hearing the name. Mara could see Robin turning his head slowly towards her voice – towards his name, spoken aloud – eyes blinking as he woke from the fog of dreams, or wherever it was that babies went in sleep. Something passed between mother and child in the air. A warning bell, which only they could hear. Robin remained quiet, and Jack didn’t turn around.

‘Are you sure you don’t want any?’ Jack held up a taco, like he cared, like he’d let Mara eat as much as she wanted if she said: Actually, I’ve changed my mind.

‘It’s okay. I can get something later,’ Mara turned into their carpark, smiling blankly as she stopped the car. She felt like a mannequin pretending to be a real human, unable to coordinate facial expressions with body movements – unable to turn her head towards Jack.

‘Okay, well, shoot me a text when you’re on the way home, baby. I might need the car.’ Jack kissed her cheek. He didn’t glance back once he left the warmth of the car, running to the steps in front of their apartment.

Mara took slow, deep breaths, feeling her limbs and fingertips soften. The car still smelt like barbacoa and corn tortillas. She turned to check on Robin. He was looking at the night beyond the window, where snow fell like white stars towards the ground.

‘Hey there, mister,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s snowing.’ Mara watched Robin. ‘It’s your first snow.’ The snow made patterns of light in the darkness, soft and sudden, then gone. In the stillness of the car, it felt as if they were in a spaceship flying through the eternal night of the cosmos. She was seeing it all again, for the first time: the snow, and her child, and the snow.

Mara started the car, heading for the highway. In the morning, the roads would be icy, impassable. If she crossed the Jemez Mountains soon, the world behind might be cut off, for a time.