“Promise,” she said.

Usually her eyes reminded him of icicles. Gray-blue and bright in the light, but today they glared. Vince strummed his thumb across the top of Ava’s hand. The tendons were raised like guitar strings.

“Promise,” she repeated. “Just us.”

Vince’s mind was clouded with static and he struggled to organize his thoughts.

Her eyes remained fierce and defiant, not at all the gentle smile he knew, and they sent a clear message: there’d be no negotiating.

She wanted privacy and he could understand that. So, he agreed, “Yes. Of course.”

Her eyes gave a slight look of suspicion. “Then, it’s a deal?”

He nodded slightly, “Yes. Absolutely.”

Ava extended her right hand, straight and firm, for a shake. Instead, he took her soft hand and kissed it.

 

***

            Outside, maple trees fluttered the fresh greens of April. Morning sun lay on Ava’s face, cozy as a quilt. She sat calmly in the recliner. Vince struggled to read, words jangled off the page. He wasn’t able to ignore the thin tubing connecting the pump to a PICC line in Ava’s arm. He felt ashamed to feel gratitude for the poison pushing into her vein.

The intoxicating rhythm of the infusion pump lulled him: clackity-spin, clackity-spin, clackity-spin. It sounded exactly like the old slide projector Mrs. Ross had back at Cooper Elementary. Sometimes, on rainy days, Mrs. Ross would set up the slide carousel, dim the lights, and angle the projector toward a screen balanced on a tippy tripod. Vince especially enjoyed the transcontinental railroad slides. The dynamite and the impossible piles of gray rock. Thin men, thick mustaches, all weary worn, looking at the camera vacantly.

Vince shook his head, memory is madness. It had been at least sixty years since he’d sat in the gloom of that brown, plaster classroom. How had he remembered Mrs. Ross’ name today when yesterday he couldn’t recall the oncologist’s?

Vince put down his book and scanned the room. Puppy-brown reclining chairs placed in exacting rows. Observation-styled windows ran the length of the east and west walls. Sunshine, all day, he concluded. A glossy credenza held a carafe of cucumber-water, a pedestaled bowl filled with fresh apples and oranges, and three insulated coffee pumps: French Roast, Columbian, and a Costa Rican blend. Woven baskets offered Nature Valley Granola bars, Saltine crackers, and Nilla Wafers.

The hospital staff wore identical green scrubs. Ava’s complimentary lap blanket was green. The waiting room chairs, the fern-print wallpaper, the free, plastic-wrapped slippers, and the hand-sanitizer pumps were all shades of green.

The vomit bags were white. I guess those don’t come in green.

That morning, as they stood at the new patient check-in counter, Ava commented that the room was lovely. She said it but didn’t mean it, like saying the weather’s nice while walking to a funeral.

But the intake nurse perked up, “We don’t call it a room, we call it a suite.”

“Oh,” Ava smiled, as if she cared.

Suddenly Vince understood. All the green, the cucumber water, the slippers. It was all a manipulation. The hospital was masking the infusion room as a day-spa. He scoffed at the absurdity.

A pump beeped. Vince slid his eyes toward the sound. Sitting in another recliner was a little man wearing new blue sweatpants. A nurse was disconnecting the tubing from the man’s right arm while a young man, the son maybe, flirted with her loudly, bombarding her with his wonderfulness. His T-shirt revealed a tattooed wolf on his bicep.

Vince was annoyed. For God’s sake! Can’t you see your father needs help getting out of the chair?

Ava sat up and checked the screen of her pump. “I hoped that beeping was my machine.” She placed her left arm behind her head, “Who knew thirty minutes could last so long.”

Vince immediately forgot about the flirting son and pounced into action, “What can I get you, my dear? A hot cup of something?”

Ava pointed her chin toward the ceiling and shook her head, no. She exhaled, “Distract me.”

Vince needed to close his eyes to quiet his mind, otherwise he’d never be able to shut out the clackity-spin and the shuffling feet. After a moment he leaned close. “Do you remember when the waiter brought us that broth?”

She closed her eyes, “Remind me.”

“Siena. Remember how the afternoon sun shaded the clocktower gold? The old Italian men with their easels, painting in the square.”

“And the broth?”

“Amazing. Beyond words.”

Vince leaned across Ava’s hips and pressed the recliner button. The motor hummed. Ava’s legs lifted and her head pressed back.

“Luxury,” she whispered.

He studied his wife. Her skin looked soft and smelled of lavender lotion. She wore a pink blouse. She always looked great in pink. He studied her shape. She carried extra weight in her arms. Her belly was rounder than she liked. “Best diet I’ll ever go on,” she joked during the drive in. Vince forced himself to laugh. He patted his small belly, “Maybe I’ll join you.”

Vince rubbed his hands over his face until his skin warmed. “There weren’t any menus at the restaurant. The owner greeted us, brought us to a table facing the square and asked, ‘Shall I feed you?’ We were charmed. The owner pointed to the kitchen and said, ‘My daughter. Best chef in Italy.’ We smiled and chuckled at his boast. A father’s love. But then we considered the possibility. Maybe this meal would stagger the mind and palate. We became a little giddy.

“Soon the owner returned, delivering two bowls of hot broth. Then, he stepped back, crossed his arms and watched us. We swirled spoons through the broth hoping there was more. Maybe something was hidden at the bottom of the bowl.

“The owner stepped toward our table. ‘Is something wrong?’

“We were a chorus of, ‘No, no, no! Of course not, no!’ Because, really, what can you say?

“In your best Italian you asked, ‘Un po ‘di pane, per favore?’

“His lips sagged, creating that Italian look of disgust. ‘Bread? No! No pane.’ He stomped away, huffing, his right hand making wild gestures in the air. We had insulted him. We felt horrible. To make amends we lifted our spoons, then ate.”

Ava’s smile was soft. “Then?”

“Life changing, my dear. Intoxicating. Such complex flavors. So multi-layered. We were transported to long forgotten memories. It made you laugh. It made me cry. You called out an apology. ‘Signore! Signore! Mi dispiace.’ We begged for more. We fell over ourselves congratulating the owner on his daughter’s talent. We thanked them, ‘grazie mille!’ He kissed your hand. I kissed his ring.”

There was dazzle in her eyes. “Then?”

“At the doorway we hugged and kissed cheeks. Then he presented you with a small, gold box, wrapped with a crisp, blue ribbon. ‘Ricciarelli,’ he said. Almond cookies. The chewy ones.

“We scurried back to our hotel room, slipped under the puffy-thick duvet and ate every crumb.”

Ava shifted her body and exhaled. “Luxury.”

“Indeed,” he said, then placed the thin, green blanket over Ava’s chest.

 

***

            They napped a lot now. After a month into treatment Vince required as much sleep as Ava, although for different reasons. Disease and treatment devoured Ava’s energy. Vince was drained by long jags of worry and helplessness.

The first time he heard Ava’s feet thunder across the bedroom floor, Vince bolted and found himself outside the bathroom door. Inside, she was retching. He felt jittery. Should I go in? Knock?  His voice was timid, “Can I help?”

She cleared her throat, “Clean pajamas, please.”

Vince returned with a blue set from the dresser. He was afraid to knock on the door. “May I come in?”

Ava was crumpled against the wall. The toilet seat and her white pajamas were splattered with yellowy vomit. He knelt on the floor and began to slide her upright.

“Be careful of your back,” she said, reaching for the pajamas. “Please leave,” she whispered.

Vince backed out of the bathroom, then sat on their bed and waited. He heard the shower turn on. Is she steady enough to shower?

When Ava reappeared she was dressed in the blue pajamas. Her wet hair was combed straight and she had transformed a large bath towel into a sack. Inside were her soiled pajamas and the rags she used to clean the toilet. Vince followed Ava down the hall to the washer. He placed a hand on her back while she poured detergent into the drum.

“You alright?”

She nodded then looked at Vince’s pants. “Give me those.” Vomit was smeared across the knees.

After placing his pants in the washer he asked, “Can I help you back to bed?”

She nodded, then he walked her to the bedroom.

They’d celebrated forty-four anniversaries. Over the years, life’s responsibilities sifted into His and Hers. Ava managed the laundry but never took the Camry for an oil change. Vince clipped coupons but had no idea where they kept the checkbook. When she said, “the thing’s beeping,” he installed new batteries in the smoke detector. When Vince asked Ava to “manage this madness,” she grabbed her sewing scissors to trim his hair.

As for the obligations that fell under no heading, their system was imperfect; those chores floated across their life like bubbles. And Vince and Ava reached and dove to pop them, one by one, before any, or most, hit the ground.

Vince returned to the washer. It hummed and churned. A box of OxiClean jiggled on the shelf. Having never used the machine before, he inspected the control dial. It could be turned left to a setting called Normal or turned right to a setting called Regular. Ava had chosen Regular. What’s the difference? He searched the shelving until he found the manual.

 

***

            Her oncologist always instructed, “Keep her hydrated. Small meals are best.”

There were many cans of Swanson’s low-sodium chicken broth in the pantry. Vince poured the broth into a pot, then, checking his watch, decided not to turn on the heat. He no longer heated food before Ava was awake.

Vince pulled the orange bottle of anti-nausea medication from Ava’s coat pocket and placed it on the table. He scanned the kitchen. Her knit hat was squashed under a stack of unopened mail, days of dirty dishes teetered in the sink and a Hefty bag was tied and waited by the back door.

Vince sorted the mail. Most was junk but two bills were past due. Damn it.

He prioritized. Call VISA then Electric North, explain, then find the checkbook.

There was an oversized envelope from Commonwealth Health.

Teaching public school – Vince, seventh grade English; Ava, eighth grade Biology – was no get-rich-quick plan but their retirement packages included premium health and dental insurance. Right now those plastic insurance cards were pure gold.

Inside the Commonwealth Health envelope was a Dear Subscriber letter and an Explanation of Benefits chart. Several pages line-listed hospital invoices. Vince studied the charges then saw, You Owe. My God, can that number be right?

He’d call Commonwealth Health after Electric North.

Vince reached for the phone. The voicemail light was blinking. Three messages.

First new message:

Hi there. I don’t mean to bother you but I just thought I’d check to see how Ava’s doing. And, you too, Vince. Let me know if you need anything, okay? You always liked my lasagna. I’d love to bring you two: one for now, one for later. Just give me the word, okay? Talk soon—oh, sorry—this is Frannie. Sorry. Bye.

Second new message:

It’s Ron here. Vince, listen, the son-in-law made sausages again and brought me a double pack last Tuesday. They’re spicier than before but pretty good. If you want, I could bring some around. Let me know. Terrible what you two are going through. Terrible. So. Let me know about the sausages.

Third new message:

Hi, Ava. Hi, Vince. It’s John and Nancy calling. Vince, you call us no matter what. We can do whatever you need. Happy to do laundry or run errands. With these boys of mine I’m driving to the supermarket seven days a week. Thank God for double coupons, right? Happy to grab what you need. Just let us know.

There was genuine concern in their voices but he also detected tones of obligation—and relief when the machine picked up. It had been weeks since anyone stopped by. Vince understood: no one wanted to intrude or be the knock that woke Ava, but he also knew they were afraid. It takes great courage to face another person’s despair.

Still, Vince wished someone would knock. He would have welcomed a friend at the door and the sight of a full, healthy face. He craved the benign, stand-in-the-street news. Proof that beyond the hospital and beyond their home, life was being lived. How the fish were biting. Town meeting scuttlebutt. Flooded basements and sump pumps. He wanted to hear all of it. Any of it. And when nothing was left to say he’d accept Frannie’s lasagnas with heartfelt gratitude. All he needed to do was dial the phone.

But he had promised.

Ava said, “I’ll go through treatment, get it done, then we’ll move on. Like it never happened.”

Vince agreed. “Yes, whatever you want.”

“Just us.”

He nodded.

“Promise?”

“Of course.”

“Then it’s a deal?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

He promised. He meant it. So, Vince deleted the messages.

 

***

            Ava’s hair fell out. They knew it would. But no one warned that so much could fall out at once.

Vince stood at the edge of the bed. Ava brushed listless brown hair from her pillow then said, “Looks like a toddler had a tantrum and took it out on my hair.”

“Not so bad,” Vince said, reminding himself to breathe.

Her remaining hair looked mangy. Normally, Ava wasn’t fussy about her appearance but she always looked dignified.

They walked to the bathroom. She took a bath towel and swung it around her shoulders then sat on the toilet lid. She handed Vince her sewing scissors then bowed her head. A submission Vince found disturbing.

His voice shook, “I can’t do this to you.”

“You’re not doing it to me. You’re doing it for me.”

Vince took inventory of her accumulated side effects: numb fingertips, nausea, diarrhea, and now this. He checked his shirt pocket. “I need my readers.”

Ava reached her hand to his hip and gave him a pat.

Vince let out a long breath then pinched a thin section of Ava’s hair between his fingertips. He squeezed the sharp blades and felt the slice. He held Ava’s severed hair in his hand, then, as if hot, dropped it.

“This is so disrespectful.”

“Distract me.”

It was hot in the bathroom and his shirt was damp under the arms and at the waist, where it tucked into his khakis. He wiped his face against his sleeve then closed his eyes to control his breathing.

“Vince?”

Her voice brought him back. “Sorry. Lost in thought.”

He resumed cutting and dropping then began, “Do you remember when we followed a scary German man into the Black Forest?”

Ava’s voice was muffled by the towel at her chest. “Scary?”

“My dear, he had a shotgun!”

Her laugher sounded different now. Less robust.

“The man had a shotgun and we followed him into the woods because he claimed to know where to find chanterelles. Sure, he wore lederhosen, which was adorable, but who brings a gun to pick mushrooms? Gosh, what was his name? Hanz? Fritz?”

“Hanz.”

“Yes, Hanz. So we hiked and walked until Hanz stopped abruptly and pointed. Chanterelles. Dewy in the early morning light. Their orangey ruffles happily decorating the forest floor.

“Greed got the better of us. We bent and picked until his woven basket was stuffed. At which point, Hanz slipped his arms through the leather straps, adjusted the basket on his back then said, ‘Now we eat.’ Which was sobering. We? We planned to pick a few mushrooms, keep a few, then say our goodbyes.”

“But—”

“We left our car just off the road then got into Hanz’s—a complete stranger who, let’s remember, had a gun. Plus, where were we going? He drove East. Two hours. More maybe. I wanted to appear calm, so I casually asked, ‘You live far, huh?’ But he gave me nothing. No information. He just nodded and said, ‘Umm.’”

“Then?”

“Well, being Sunday, a family day, his yard was crowded with running grandchildren and a large group of adults, everyone dressed in gorgeous Bavarian clothing: edelweiss decoratively stitched on leather pants for the men and the ladies in their long dresses with puffy sleeves and lace collars.

“A long wooden table was nestled into a patio of traprock. The rocks kicked under foot as crates of lager and wheat beer were hauled outside. Then came platter after platter of food delivered to the table: roast duck, white sausages, stewed red cabbage, knödel. Where it all came from, I couldn’t say. It was magical. Then. Mushrooms. Hanz gave our chanterelles a quick wash then fried them in an enormous glop of butter, minced garlic, a splash of white wine—”

“I’m salivating.”

“He fried them crisp. Potato chip crisp. Earthy and rich and coated in a sinful amount of dripping butter. I had the strangest urge to drink them.”

“Heaven.”

“Quite possibly.”

Vince stopped cutting to look at Ava’s scalp. The remaining hair was patchy and her cream-colored skin showed through in places.

She looks sick.

Using a hand towel he gently dusted hair clippings from her head and shoulders. Suddenly, tears began to drip from his eyes. His lungs felt tightly compressed. He lifted his chin to the ceiling demanding to stop the tears.

To mask his emotions, he changed the pitch of his voice and chipped, “Now that I think about it, maybe those mushrooms weren’t really chanterelles.”

Ava removed the bath towel from her shoulders. “What?”

“Honestly, who knows what we ate. Maybe you’ve been misdiagnosed. Maybe you don’t have cancer—”

Her eyes shot Vince a warning, “Don’t—”

“Maybe you have a simple case of mushroom poisoning.”

“You agreed,” she said sharply, then left the bathroom.

It was true. Vince had agreed. No cancer jokes. He swept her hair into a pile with the tip of his shoe.

 

***

            Just before Vince retired they’d painted the kitchen walls Island Blue. After forty years of rushed mornings, heading to the car with toast clenched between teeth and travel mugs splashing hot coffee onto their wrists, they’d envisioned retirement consisting of fantastically drawn-out, island-style mornings—nowhere to go, nowhere to be. Just endless time to relax and sip coffee. He’d even splurged and bought a French coffee press.

Time was, indeed, drawn-out now but there was nothing fantastic about it. He waited for the kettle to boil alone and ate toast over the sink. The French press was still in the box.

He set Ava’s hot mug of ginger tea onto a small table next to the couch. Ava was laying on the couch wearing brown pajamas with tiny pink birds scattered on them. She was snuggled beneath a blue and white blanket she’d crocheted last fall. He remembered how deftly her hands moved the crochet hook, how swiftly the stitches linked, building something complicated and solid. He imagined her cancer cells multiplying into a complicated pattern. Something warm to wrap around her lung.

He knelt at the couch. “Can I tempt you with some broth?”

She smiled but it was forced.

“Or whatever you like.”

She patted his hand. “Tea’s enough, thank you. Now, please don’t kneel. You’ll never get up.”

He placed pillows behind Ava’s back for support. “Are you nauseous? Because, if you aren’t, you should eat. We need to get your weight up a little.”

“Is the heat on?”

He handed Ava the tea and she wrapped her hands around the hot mug. Vince tucked the blanket under her legs, then under her heels. Even with socks, her feet were always cold now.

“I’ll turn the heat up.”

She reached for a red boutique bag sitting on the floor next to the couch. “First, I want to show you something.”

Inside the bag was a thin gift box. She shook the lid until the bottom fell free. Inside, red tissue paper was neatly folded and sealed with an embossed silver sticker. Ava tore the paper and revealed a green and gold headscarf.  “The sales lady said green and gold were ‘colors of strength.’”

Vince felt dizzy. “When did you buy this?”

They’d never discussed it.

            Ava draped the soft silk over her head. He watched as her fingers slowly twisted and rolled the fabric. “After the diagnosis.”

That was so long ago.

“Can I help?” he asked.

She tucked fabric into place. “I want to see if my fingers can still do it.”

Still do it? When did she wear it? At the store?

“It’ll keep my head warm and conceal my hair. A little, anyway.”

In contrast to the scarf’s rich colors, Ava’s skin was sallow. Her eyebrows had thinned. Her eyelashes were gone. With great care, Vince adjusted the fabric around Ava’s ears.

“You look glamorous. Exotic. Like a gypsy.”

 

***

            Ava and Vince stepped off the hospital elevator then turned toward the chemotherapy suite (which they now called “that place”). An experienced nurse suggested Vince fill a backpack with items they might need: pen and paper for questions or notes for the doctors. An extra sweater, tissues, baby wipes, an extra pair of Ava’s underwear (diarrhea was unpredictable). Lifesavers or gum (for when she vomited). The backpack was bulky and slightly uncomfortable, but Vince felt competent and, secretly, he hoped someone would ask for a pen. He’d packed three.

It was the first day Ava wore the headscarf. Even though it was baby-soft and the color of gems, he hated it. It was a seething, retched kind of hate. And once treatment ended, he never wanted to see it again. Never. He planned to throw it out—or better, burn it.

He resented the hospital too, which he realized was illogical, but the hallways were crowded and smelled of sweat and bleach, staff was infuriatingly cheery (they smiled a lot), the artwork was insipid, antibacterial gel dried his skin raw and the coffee tasted like a Ho-Jo’s breakfast-buffet gone completely awry.

Ava patted his arm, “Get yourself a coffee while I check-in.”

His mind re-centered, “Coffee, yes. Can I get you something sweet? Fruit?”

“Water’s fine.”

The receptionist swooned, “Oh, Ava, what a beautiful headscarf!”

Vince gave the receptionist more of a sneer than a smile before walking toward the gleaming credenza. He overheard the receptionist say, “You two are the sweetest. Look how he cares for you. That Vince. He’s a keeper.”

Vince pressed his fingertips against the credenza to steady himself. He hated all of this and struggled not to run—to grab Ava and run through the park, past the newspaper kiosk, down toward the pond, then behind a massive, ancient oak to catch their breath. They’d laugh and shake, thrilled by their escape.

But then what? He sighed. You’re no good to her like this.

            He returned to find Ava reclined and waiting for the nurse. He handed her the water bottle but her fingers struggled to twist open the cap. She passed it back to Vince. With ease, he cranked it open.

“My hero,” she smiled, placing the bottle on a side table.

While the nurse attached the IV needle to Ava’s PICC line, Vince stood and looked out the east windows. He never watched this part. If it upset Ava, she never mentioned it. When he heard the pump begin its clackity-spin, clackity-spin he rested his forehead against the window. The glass was cool and refreshing against his warm skin. Morning sun blinked through the maple leaves. If he could reach through the glass the leaves would feel fleshy. In November they’d be yellowy-brown and brittle.

He sat next to Ava’s recliner then tore open a granola bar. He held out the bar as an offer. She shook her head, no.

Ava inhaled deeply then sighed, long and hard.

“What can I do?”

She slumped a bit. “Distract me.”

Vince patted down his hair. It felt thinner. Recently he noticed it had receded even further from his forehead. He’d always had a thick mop of hair and his buddies used to tease him. His friends were bald and blamed it on parenting – raising children caused hair to fall out. Because Vince didn’t have a teenager, he still had the hair of a teenager. Of course, his friends didn’t appreciate the stress of being childless, how difficult it is to celebrate someone else’s children being born then witness every step of their lives, how difficult it is to remain relevant to friends when you don’t share the common connector of parenthood. Not to mention, the crush of Mother and Father’s Day. Vince glimpsed at Ava’s headscarf.

He closed his eyes and focused on clearing his mind. After a few minutes he looked up and asked, “Remember Quebec? Our concierge with the pencil mustache?”

There was a slight smile on Ava’s face when she closed her eyes.

“Remember how he insisted, ‘You must try La Rêverie. It’s impossible to get a reservation but let me try.’ And voilà, a table for two.

“We were dressed to the nines. Your high-heels had those sparkly things on them—what are they called?”

“Sequins.”

“Right. Sequins. You wore a green dress with a low back. Tasteful but distracting. I wore a double-breasted dinner jacket. Gold buttons. And dress pants with razor sharp creases.

“The taxi ride was brief but when our cabbie pulled to the curb to let us off, we were confused. Maybe we had the wrong address? ‘C’est Rêverie’ he said, pointing to the sign.  ‘Le restaurant. C’est correct.’ So, okay, this was the right address, but the doorstep was dark. Dark-dark. No light above the door, no light shining from the windows. Were they closed? Did we have the wrong night?

“Our cabbie pointed to the faire and repeated, ‘Le restaurant. C’est correct.’ So, Merci beaucoup, monsieur, we paid him and stepped toward an enormous wooden door. Like a giant’s door. And I knocked.

“After an uncomfortable amount of time a teeny-tiny woman tugged open the hefty door. I tried to explain, I’m so sorry, we likely have the wrong night. But she stepped back, opened the door widely and invited us inside. Honestly, it felt creepy, like a horror movie—”

“You’ve always been a sucker for horror films.”

Vince laughed, “That’s true!”

“But inside?”

“Absolute elegance. Gray walls, black carpet. Thick and weighty curtains pooled at the floor like the Palace of Versailles. There were mirrors, with ornate filigree. Expansive chandeliers, with thin, white braids of color twisted within the glass—”

“Venetian?”

“Certainly. The room was small, only a dozen or so tables, but there wasn’t a single other seating—not one.”

“Strange—”

“When the tiny woman returned, she said, in her delightful accent, ‘Tonight is a seven-course menu.’ We looked at each other. Our eyes screamed, SEVEN? Then she added, ‘With wine pairings.’ So out came seven miniature plates with miniature servings. Canapés, beef carpaccio, trout almandine, dragon fruit sorbet, lamb lollypops, a local cheese tray with fresh figs, and, as a finalé, a hot peach tart with frangipane.”

“Bliss.”

“Beyond bliss, if there is such a thing. Then, our eighth course arrived. What’s that? How can there be an eighth course to a seven-course meal? Good question, my dear. We begged the tiny woman, ‘Please, no more food.’ We did not know of the miniature bite of dessert that sometimes follows dessert. Yes, true. Double-dessert. But the tiny woman insisted, ‘Compliments of the chef.’

“She placed a purple plate before you and a purple plate before me. On it was one stark, white cookie. No larger than an acorn.”

Ava turned to face Vince and smiled, “And?”

“We placed it on our tongues and it dissolved instantly. Then an explosion! Like a knock-out punch. Our taste buds could barely manage all the flavors. Lemon. Lavender. Hazelnut. Vanilla. Such a small cookie, how was it possible?”

“Perfection.”

“Extraordinary. Magical.”

 

***

            The toilet was too far and running was too exhausting. Now when Ava vomited, she used a bucket. It was placed on an old beach towel on her side of the bed. When she needed it, she rolled to the edge of the mattress. Afterwards, Vince helped roll her back, away from the edge.

Before emptying the contents of the bucket into the toilet, Vince closed the bathroom door. The smell was wretched. He gagged into the sink. His back heaved, saliva dripped from his mouth. Resting his face against the cold wall he muttered, “Okay. Okay.”

Vince washed and wiped the bucket with a rag, then returned it to her side of the bed.

“So sorry,” she moaned.

“Nothing to it,” he said.

He tossed the wet rag into the washer. The bedsheets needed a wash too. If he could get her to eat in the living room, he’d change the sheets and run a load after supper.

He called and put the newspaper subscription on hold. He only hauled them to the recycling, unread. Once a week he called the insurance company. It was a game and, by now, he’d learned the rules. Call and question every charge. Startling how many were removed.

He wrote checks in the company of the ticking kitchen clock. No TV, no radio because he needed to hear in case Ava called out. At first, the quiet made him lonely but, after a while, it became normal.

Later, Vince returned to the bedroom to bring Ava hot ginger tea. She was asleep. He placed the mug on her bedside table then peeked into the bucket. She had used it. He wondered if he could change the bed sheets without disturbing her. How do hospitals manage it?

In the bathroom, it was the same routine: empty the bucket, wash it, gag a little into the sink. He flushed then swirled the toilet brush around the bowl. To Vince, every time he dunked the toilet brush into the water and scrubbed away vomit or diarrhea, he absolved Ava of the indignities.

Her voice was muted, “Vince?”

He opened the bathroom door.

“I’m sorry, would you help me to the bathroom, please?”

He rushed to her. “Of course.”

Sliding her legs to the bedside she said, “I’m a little dizzy and I can’t seem to wake up.”

He wrapped one arm around her waist and held her elbow with the other. Her body was bony and her pajamas sagged. The doctor had recommended a safety rail for the toilet and Vince was grateful.

“Hold the rails before you turn around.”

He held her hips as she turned.

She said, “I’m not sure it’s worth it. Even if I get better.”

“Nonsense,” he said, while slipping his hands under her armpits to steady her body as she sat.

She continued, “This is just so—much. It would be easier for you if I just died.”

Her words stung. Vince backed away. “Easy! How would that be easy? Don’t ever say that.”

 

***

            Once Ava was settled back in bed, Vince poured himself a bowl of Cheerios. The milk had soured so he ate them dry.

After months of managing their grocery shopping, Vince still bought too many vegetables and poured sour milk down the drain. This time, he decided, everything had to go.

He snapped open a Hefty bag, then pitched decaying bell peppers and moldy onions into the trash bag. His thumb sunk right through a slimy cucumber. Leftovers were so revolting he tossed them, container and all. The deli roast beef he bought for sandwiches but never ate, the eggs, the escarole. Out. Then he wiped down the refrigerator and returned the butter, pickles, ketchup, and mayonnaise.

One by one, Vince hauled trash bags to the garage, filling one barrel to the top. The other barrel needed pressing to close the lid.

Did I miss garbage day? Garbage pick up was on Wednesdays. What’s today? Is it Wednesday? It was Thursday.

Garbage could wait until next week, but they were out of food and he needed to get to the market. But Ava was weak and couldn’t walk the aisles or risk exposure to germs. He couldn’t ask her to sit alone in the car; she might need the bathroom. And he couldn’t leave her home for the same reason.

He walked back to the house. Maybe someone could stay while she slept. Just for an hour. Maybe Frannie? Ava might agree to that. Maybe Frannie would bring lasagna. One for tonight, one for tomorrow.

When he entered the house he was lost in thoughts of lasagna. When he heard her, his body turned to stone, his stomach cinched.

Her voice was small.  “Vince?”

He sprinted without questioning if he could. Ava was in the bathroom. The doorknob gouged his hip when he pushed through the door. She was on the floor, curled like a comma, with her cheek pressed against the tile. There was vomit next to her face.

He didn’t mean to yell, “Don’t move! Don’t move!” Then he immediately negotiated her to a sitting position.

A wet gash above her ear bled into her pajama collar. Vince grabbed a sock from the laundry basket and pressed it against the wound. Ava winced.

Frantically, Vince searched her body. “Anything broken?”

“I got light-headed.”

“Did you black out?”

“I don’t know—”

“How hard did you hit your head?”

She didn’t answer.

Vince scanned his memory for where he’d left the phone. “You need an ambulance—”

“I just need to sit.”

He stood to find the phone. “We need an ambulance.”

She pled like a child, “Please, don’t.”

“Your head is bleeding. You could have a concussion. Or broken something—”

“I just want to sit a while.”

The carotid arteries in his neck were throbbing. His thoughts were jumpy. No ambulance. I’ll drive. I can get her to the car.

Slowly, he lifted the sock from her wound. Blood rose to the surface and slipped down her neck. He caught the stream, smeared it with the sock, and returned it to the wound. She moaned. He pressed more gently. “That needs a stitch. Maybe two.”

“I don’t want this anymore,” she said, taking over the sock and pressing it to the wound. “Let’s go to Siena for broth or to Quebec. I want to drink chanterelles.”

Vince’s legs and hands were shaking. “We will. As soon as you’re well.”

She leaned and kissed his cheek. “I’m vanishing. Right before your eyes.”

“No, you’re getting well!”

“I want to stop treatment.”

His mouth opened and his eyes grew to the size of lemons.

Before he could manage a word she said, “I miss living.”

 

***

            Vince turned off all the phones. After placing the kettle on the heat he helped Ava to the chair on the sunny side of the kitchen table. Her head was still wrapped with thick bandages. On the table were two coffee mugs, a pitcher of warm milk, and a small plate of Fig Newtons. Ava reached for a cookie, then took a nibble. Vince scooped coffee into the French press then sat next to Ava. They waited for the kettle’s whistle to blow. There was nothing but time.

My grandma lives in a double-wide trailer on an acre of land her husband left her. My family lives a few hours south, but I don’t get along so well with my dad, so I’m spending time up here.

She bought the doublewide from a family whose father died of throat cancer. They had to sell the place because they couldn’t afford to rent the land they were on or to move the trailer. The widow and my grandma bonded over losing their husbands and when they sat down to figure out a price, they each argued for the other one’s side, worried what my grandma could afford and what the widowed woman needed.

My grandma moved the doublewide down the road to her acre of land, then had septic, water, and power hooked up, and a pond dug. She was the only one in the area to set her house perpendicular to the road, so the bay window faces the pond and only the window over the kitchen sink and the small one in the bathroom look toward the road. It isn’t the road so much that’s the problem— there isn’t a lot of traffic. And the house across the street is neat and well kept. It’s what lies a half mile beyond the house, just sticking out over the woods, quiet and calm: the top of the cooling tower for the Tom’s Bay nuclear reactor.

Day and night, the tower exhales a thick soft cloud of steam. On sunny days, it’s the only cloud in the sky, and on cloudy days, the strange vertical plume sticks out against the layers of natural clouds. But on a rare day, the steam rises until it touches a low cumulus cloud, making the tower look like it’s a cloud factory—as if without it, there wouldn’t be any clouds in the sky at all.

I sit outside sometimes in summer and watch the ducks my grandma named donna and Lydia swim around in the pond. They try to make friends with the Canadian geese that visit for a few weeks every year, but the geese aren’t friendly—they squawk, ruffle their wings, and chase the ducks away. Sometimes I get up and run after the geese, just to show them what it feels like to be chased and to remind them this isn’t their land.

Other days, like today, I turn my chair and look out across the road, at the thin rim of the tower poking up behind the trees. I’d never seen a cooling tower before coming up here, except on a page in a social studies book which compared different sources of energy. When I first saw the tower as a kid, I told my grandma that it looked like a giant coffee cup with steaming coffee. I’m older now—I just turned fourteen two weeks ago—and I think of it like the tip of a cigarette, filling the air with smoke.

My grandma said the family that had lived in the doublewide all smoked— even the three kids, because, as the mother said to her, ‘It’d be hypocrite to tell them no.” Grandma says they packed up quickly, leaving behind the greasy pans, mildewed rags and dirty socks, forgotten boxes of baking powder and rat poison, but worst was that the trailer smelled like it’d been scorched by fire. “The walls were sticky and yellow with nicotine,” Grandma said. “It was like walking through a smoker’s lung.” I don’t know why the kids in that trailer ended up smoking. In my house, you can’t see or smell what dad uses, but you can feel it in the air. That’s all I could think of when someone tried to hand me a cigarette in fourth grade. It’s enough to make me never want to take anything.

Sometimes when I see the cooling tower, I imagine it exploding, huge pillars of fire. I get lost thinking about what I’d do if that happened, how I’d grab my backpack and my picture of my sister Alice, yell for my grandma to get out, pick up donna and Lydia and stuff them in the car while yelling, “Goodbye suckers” to the geese. Then I’d drive the four of us west as fast as I could.

I imagine it happening like that, as though I’d be the one who’d get us out of there, who’d save us, though I’m not old enough to drive. I know enough to know we should drive west. I’ve watched the weather channel with grandma at night enough to see that all the winds come from the west—that we don’t want to be east of the fallout.

Of  course, deep down I know if an accident happened, we wouldn’t have time to gather things up, to grab the ducks, and drive away. If the thing exploded, there wouldn’t be time for any of it.

The other day, I asked my grandma about the reactor, if she was scared living so close.

“Not really,” she said.

“Then why’d you turn your house away from it?” I get angry sometimes when things don’t make sense to me.

“Well, it’s only scary when you think about it,” she said, “and I only think about it when I see it.”

I think about the reactor all the time, whether I see it or not. At home, in my locked room, I sometimes dream I’m at Grandma’s and the reactor’s exploding. In the dream, I see a fire over the trees and it’s so mesmerizing, I start walking toward it. I can’t turn away. I tell myself to get out, but I keep stepping closer. I want to see the whole building on fire.

It isn’t that I don’t have enough things to worry about already. My dad takes drugs I don’t even know the names of, and my mom lies to cover it up. She works extra jobs to bring in enough money for food, because dad’s addiction is always first. Mom is always telling my sister Alice and me that Dad’s sick and he needs his medicine, but taking his medicine makes him sick, so he’s trying to get off it, and we all have to be patient with him. But I’m the one who goes to bed hungry, who has to explain things to Alice, who locks my door at night like Mom tells me, in case things flare up. “There’s a fire inside your pop,” she told me once, “and it’s important you don’t add any fuel.”

But I guess I did anyway. Last fall, dad told Alice and me that this was it—he was going to quit once and for all. For us, for his family. He stayed in bed for almost a week, Mom making him food and bringing it to their room. Alice and me were on our own, which meant I made lunch and dinner for the both of us. When Dad was finally up and out of bed, he sat on the couch in front of the tv and drank beer from cans all day. We were told we could help by not disturbing him, by giving up our tv shows so he could watch whatever he wanted. I was mad. He was turning into even less of a dad than he had been, and we were giving up more and more.

Then one day in November, he called me from the living room. “Jaycee!” he yelled it strong, like I’d done something terrible. I didn’t want to come out, but a part of me did. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I wanted to see him try and accuse me of something.

“What?” I yelled back, slamming my door and marching out into the hall.

He looked angry, but also scared. He was holding a sandwich bag with about twenty bright red pills in it. I wondered if he was going to accuse me, say that they were mine. He looked at me like he hated everything about his life, me included. “Take these and hide them,” he said. “Don’t throw ‘em away. They’re worth too much. But I can’t know where they are right now. Put them somewhere I can’t find.”

He handed the plastic bag to me and walked out of the house. I guess I should have done what he said. But I was tired of doing things for him, of giving up my life, of being the adult when I was only thirteen, and all my friends were able to be normal kids, worrying about themselves instead of their parents.

I held the bag stretched out in my hands there in the living room, trying to figure out what to do. And that’s when I sort of left my body, floated up and looked back down and saw myself in some clear way I never had before. I was a thirteen-year-old girl holding a plastic bag with drugs. They were illegal, for sure, and if the police walked in right then, I figured I’d be the one who’d go to jail. But I hadn’t done anything wrong. I only had them because my dad had given them to me. He was the one breaking the law, and he had dragged me into it, made me a criminal.

“A criminal in my own house,” I heard myself say aloud before I floated back into my body. And that’s when I knew what I had to do. I threw the bag of pills behind the sofa, grabbed my cell phone, and left the house. I ran in the opposite direction I’d seen my dad go and I didn’t stop until I was in the woods behind the shopping center. When I caught my breath, I called 911 and told them that my father had given me a bag of drugs to keep and I didn’t know what to do.

The police put dad in rehab and then in jail. My mother was so angry, she wouldn’t talk to me for a month. Everything she needed to say, she said to Alice instead. And in April, just before my dad was released, she told me I should go back up and live with Grandma for a while, because it wouldn’t be safe for me to stay in the house.

“I thought dad was sober now,” I said.

“Oh, he is,” she said, though I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth. “He’s sober enough to know what his daughter did to him, just when he was trying to come clean.”

It was still a month before the school year ended, but my mother worked out something with my teachers. I had to e-mail them my homework on my phone since Grandma doesn’t have internet. I left without telling any of my friends, because I knew they’d ask why I was leaving, and I’d have to tell them or lie.

“We need you to be strong,” my mother said when she took me to the bus stop to come up here. “Okay,” I said, and got on the bus. Then I cried all the way up here, but cleared my eyes before I got in Grandma’s car.

Here at my grandma’s, things are quiet and safe. She doesn’t drink or smoke. She just works in her garden in the day and watches tv at night. We always have enough food, though sometimes, I get bored. I bike up and down her road looking for other kids, but all I see are men older than my dad cutting their grass on riding mowers and old women watering flowers or walking out to the post box to check the mail.

And always in the distance is the cooling tower puffing out its steam, a distant, quiet threat. To get to it, you have to go down the road a couple miles then turn left on a lane that doubles back to tom’s Bay. There’s nothing else on that lane, no reason to go down there, so I’ve never seen the power plant up close, though I want to. Only seeing the top of the tower, with its plumes of steam, makes it seem far away, not quite real. Like something that only lives in dreams.

 

Still, it’s better here than being at home. Grandma has fixed the doublewide up nice. She said she had to tear out the carpet and paint two coats of primer on the ceiling and walls, just to get rid of the cigarette smell. There’s a spare bedroom in the back, but I sleep on the sofa. I don’t like being stuck in a room with the door shut. “You don’t have to close it,” Grandma says, but I tell her I prefer the sofa. I like being near the front door, in case I have to get out.

Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night from a nightmare about my father. In one, he’s sitting beside me in my bed with a syringe in his hand. He’s already so high that when he goes to shoot up, he puts the needle in my arm instead of his. I’d begin to pass out and claw myself to stay awake. I try to tell him to stop, but my speech is slurred. “It’s okay,” he says. “This way I don’t feel the pain.”

 

Last month, I finished school and turned fourteen. My grandma baked me a strawberry cake. I even got a card a few days later from my parents, though I could tell it was just from Mom—she’d signed both their names.

Now it’s the fourth of July, and Grandma and I are sitting by the pond, watching the neighbor’s fireworks from across the street. The sound scares the ducks, who huddle in the middle of the pond, as if all that water will keep them safe. I think about my sister, Alice, and if anyone is taking care of her.

“I hate firecrackers,” Grandma says. “They scare the hell out of Donna and Lydia.”

“But you stay out here and watch them,” I say, angry at her for some reason. “I suppose there’s a little pyromaniac in us all.”

Not me, I think, but I keep watching them. She’s right, I can’t really turn away.

After they are done, Grandma goes in to watch tv in the living room, so I sleep in the bedroom because I’m tired and don’t want her to feel like she can’t stay up and watch because of me. I dream my mother calls and tells me, “Your father’s gone.” I can’t tell if she means left or died—and she wants me to come home. I end up biking to the bus station, but when I get there, the driver says my ticket was only one way, north, not round trip. And it’s expired.

I wake up in the room I don’t recognize and think I’m nowhere I know. Then I go out to the living room and see Grandma sleeping on the sofa, in my spot.

As I make her breakfast, she tells me about the shows she stayed up watching, as though it’s a sin she’s confessing. “It must have been almost midnight before I fell asleep,” she says. I don’t tell her about my dream. Instead, I do the dishes while she goes back to sleep in her bedroom.

I’m looking out the kitchen window, wondering how long I’ll live in this doublewide with Grandma, if I’ll I inherit the place when she dies. I wonder if I’ll end up here all alone, like her. I stare up above the trees then, at the bright blue sky for a few minutes before I realize there aren’t any clouds—in the sky or rising from the tower. Without them, the tower itself is hardly visible above the trees.

Something must be wrong, because reactors can’t just turn off like that. This is it, I think. Instead of flames, there’s just nothing.

My head grows fuzzy and I feel something race through my body. I drop the sponge and call out to Grandma. I scramble to think what I need to grab and if I should first wake her, and if there will be enough time to get Donna and Lydia.

No, I tell myself, there isn’t time for any of this.

But still, I have to try. Isn’t that what creatures do, even if it’s pointless?

I yell for my grandma again as I grab my bag in the living room and stuff it with my phone, a journal Alice got me for Christmas, and a few clothes. Then I rush into Grandma’s bedroom and tell her to wake up quick.

“What’s wrong?” she says, sitting up, drowsy.

“The reactor,” I say. “It just stopped.”

“Oh, honey.” She stares at me a moment. “You know, it does that sometimes. They turn it off to check the system. It’s called an outage.”

I look at her like she’s not making sense. Then I drop my bag and run outside. I have to see for myself that nothing’s wrong. The flowers in my grandma’s garden are in full bloom, vibrant in the morning sun. The ducks are gliding peacefully across the pond. They’d sense something was wrong, wouldn’t they?

I look at the tower sitting silently behind the trees, and I listen for an explosion, for anything. But the day is quiet. It’s late enough in summer that even the geese, with their angry squawking, are gone. There’s only the sound of a lawn mower, far off, like the hum of a bee.

I’m safe, I tell myself. I can just sit here and enjoy the day, which doesn’t have a cloud in the sky.

All the girls in our town are assigned a corpse to carry once they’re old enough. It stays with you nearly forever, slung around your neck, or held in your arms, or somehow fastened to your body if you’re clever enough, or lucky enough to get help to do so.

Boys don’t get corpses. They walk around unburdened, free to do whatever they want. You’re lucky, we girls are told when we’re young, to so intimately know the meaning of life. To stare death in the face. To deeply understand sacrifice. You’ll see. This corpse will make you better.

Your corpse is with you all the time. At breakfast. At school. At the mall. You only get a break when you’re almost one yourself—that is, when you’re very old. Those women, the retirees, are called future corpses. My mother still carries her assignment, but my grandmother’s tour of duty is done. My dad claps Grams on the back. You’re free! he says. Some grandmothers party when they’re finished, whooping and hollering, but not mine. My grandmother doesn’t smile, never has. She is stooped and bent from years of carrying the dead, has a glazed look in her eye. I’m tired, she moans from her easy chair. She doesn’t even wear her blue ribbon, her sole reward for decades of service. All she wants is to rest. We flick on the TV for her, and she watches, dazed. She is now a future corpse.

Mom tells me, Never mind your grandmother. She pops a pill surreptitiously, then smiles, reaching for the vacuum with one hand while adjusting her corpse with the other. She trips, smashes her knee on the corner of the coffee table, yelping in pain. I look up from my homework. My brother passes through the living room, headphones on, not noticing that my mother has taken a spill as he heads out the door. “I’m okay!” Mom winces out. “Nobody run over. I’ll be fine. Really.” She curses under her breath, readjusting her corpse, which has tumbled awkwardly to the wrong side of her body. She continues vacuuming. She left her job ages ago because juggling everything was too much. She still carries a business card though, one that says, Justine R. Helms, Career Mom & Corpse Carrier. Ask me about my great kids, Lana and Jason. I scribble a note in the journal I keep tucked in my three-ring binder, recording thoughts at a moment’s notice. To be a corpse carrier—is that all there is?

###

At school, after the latest Corpse Assigning Ceremony, my bestie Trina and I watch the older girls attempt to carry on with their newly assigned cadavers. Most of the corpses are bigger than they are, trailing awkwardly behind them. Some of the girls gather in the halls like they used to, attempting to flirt with boys. “Show me yours,” a boy says to one of the girls.

“Okay!” she chirps, snapping her gum.

She produces her assignment’s certificate, points out features.

Trina rolls her eyes, muttering. “Some girls will do anything to get a boy’s attention.”

“Mine’s a 65-year-old male,” the girl intones, breathless. “He died of natural causes.”

The boy shrugs. “Is yours preserved?”

The girl nods. “Yeah. I got lucky.”

“The truth is,” Trina hisses, “her mommy and daddy paid extra for that!”

I scan the hallway. I notice the girls from down-and-out families; their corpses aren’t preserved, and will start to stink soon. They will likely drop out of school, get menial jobs where no one minds your stench. Other girls seem to walk smaller, like their corpse is dragging them down.

“Our corpses are a gift!” a girl in tight yoga pants raves to a friend. “We’re soooo lucky to have this form of enlightenment. I mean, boys don’t know what they’re missing!” Her shirt has a cartoon dog on it, with the mantra, Nama-stay. Her corpse is blonde, thin, and lithe, and fastened to her body piggy-back style, obviously with some help.

“Let’s go to class,” Trina says, “and leave these hosers behind.”

In biology, I make a note in my journal when the teacher isn’t looking: Only 1 year left ‘til my corpse assignment. Is that what I really want? Do I even have a choice?

In the few remaining weeks of school, I notice that most of the girls with new corpses are quieter. Only a brave few carry on as if nothing’s changed, making out with boys in the hall, with a dead body slung over their shoulder.

“Gross,” Trina growls after we pass one such couple.

I have to agree.

On our walk home, I’m distracted as Trina carries on about the injustices of being female. But my mind’s on logistics, and spatial conundrums: how does one have sex while carrying a corpse? I mean, I imagine it can be done. It must be done all the time. If not, how would children ever be born? How would I have ever come into this world? But I wonder if there are unspoken and socially-sanctioned cheats, like, it’s okay for women to put down their corpses for a hot minute, just so they can fuck. I imagine my own parents, my mother’s soft white body under my dad’s, my mom’s assigned cadaver resting beside her in their king-sized bed as my parents grunt and moan. I shudder, wishing I’d chosen another image.

The next day at school, Trina points out something I hadn’t noticed before: All our teachers are men. She says: “There are no role models for us. At least, not here. How are we supposed to know how to be strong women if no one’s modeling how to go through life with your corpse?”

The girl is right, so right. And her life isn’t fair—her mom disappeared one day when Trina was a toddler. And her grandmother died young. Trina had no one, only her dad. At least I have my mom, and my grandmother, though Grams, a future corpse, has checked out and is only waiting for the end.

“You should come over more, and hang out with my mom. She’s strong,” I offer. Trina doesn’t seem convinced.

After school, we go to Trina’s house, and watch television when we’re done with our homework. None of the women on TV carry corpses, and we begin to wonder what’s real. We look it up on the internet. It appears that corpse carrying is a regional custom turned into law, something only we local women do, or are forced to. “If we leave this town,” Trina says, “we can break this cycle. We can be whoever or whatever we want, without those awful things literally hanging around our necks.”

Together, we dream about our futures. Trina wants to go to art school, move to the big city, and be a painter, a famous one. My dreams aren’t as exciting or flashy. I think about my talents, and they are quiet ones: research and writing. “But still,” Trina says, “so what if your dream is to live a quiet life? You should be able to do that without hauling around a corpse your whole life, for fuck’s sake.”

Plus, I tell her, it would get in the way of, well, you know.

Trina nods knowingly. “Yeah, girl. Preach.”

We imagine our future boyfriends, or maybe girlfriends, and think about how beautiful our lives together could be if we weren’t carrying corpses. I close my eyes and dream about the perfect boy, imagining what it would be like to kiss him, how warm and soft and sweet.

“Promise me one thing, girl,” Trina says, resting her curly head on my shoulder. “That no matter where life takes us, somehow we’ll stay friends ‘til the end.”

I envision us old and white-haired, sitting in side-by-side rocking chairs after both our spouses have died, watching the ocean in peace at the last of our living days, after we’ve had the lives we’ve always dreamed of, Trina the world-renowned artist, and me, a bestselling novelist.

That night, I make a note in my journal: Future plans—run away with Trina.

###

Over the summer, things get weird. The news blares that more and more towns and states have passed laws requiring that young women are assigned a corpse. “We have to get outta here, Lana,” Trina says. “Run away with me. We have to get somewhere safe, as far away as possible, before this thing spreads like a disease.”

I nod. Running away was only ever a fantasy; what did I really know about living on my own? I had no job, and didn’t know if I could get one, at least one that could pay for an apartment.

“We’ll figure it out,” Trina says. “We could crash at my cousin’s out of state. He’d be okay with that. We could waitress in his restaurant, get tips.”

I ask her for some time to think, to prepare.

“Tick tock,” she says. “We’re not getting any younger.”

At home, Mom seems different, like the smiles are fewer and far between. Her face seems more worn, ravaged by worry and struggle. I try to cheer her up, gifting ideas like buoyant balloons. “Mom, Trina needs a role model. Someone who can show her how to be strong and live a satisfying life while carrying a corpse.”

Mom finally smiles, but it’s a bitter one. “I don’t think I’m up for that, honey.”

“But Mom! Trina’s thinking about running away.”

She doesn’t answer, only pours herself a glass of wine and goes back to stir-frying vegetables, steam glistening on her forehead as her corpse appears to sleep peacefully on her shoulder.

I don’t tell her that Trina wants me to come, and that there’s a part of me that wants to go. But there’s a part of me that can’t leave the others behind. Least of all, my mother. If she can be strong, and live her whole life carrying a corpse, why can’t I?

Weeks later, Trina and I fight. She tells me that I’m weak and calls me a baby, and that I’ll regret it forever if I don’t come. She leaves that night on a bus. I tear up my journal, burying it in a hole in the yard with my dreams. I never see Trina again.

###

The next year at school, I’m dreadfully lonely. I throw myself into writing weird stories, though I have no one to share them with, and I neglect my homework. First semester, I manage to get Cs across the board. Not bad enough to cause my family heartbreak, but not great enough to ensure a college scholarship and a scintillating career.

As Corpse Assigning Ceremony approaches, there’s an epidemic of broken arms, broken legs, and broken spines—girls hurting themselves to get out of corpse-carrying. But that doesn’t relieve their duty, the law says. Only decrepit old age does, or death. Then there’s a flood of disappearances of girls in my grade—a rash of run-aways. Then, finally, the suicides.

Our town is ripped apart.

At candlelight vigils, mothers carrying corpses scream at each other. We carried corpses all our lives, some howl, and we never once complained. The others scream back: What we wouldn’t give to relieve ourselves of this burden.

At home, Mom no longer gets out of bed. My father refuses to talk about it. He has moved into Jason’s old room since Jason left for college. At night I help cobble together supper with my sad cooking skills, with dad ruining meat on the grill, if we don’t get takeout. Tonight I chop some random limp veggies from the fridge, broccoli and carrots past their prime, and make a salad, then I bring a bowl to Mom’s room.

I open the door slightly. The curtains are drawn, the room is dark. Mom’s whimpering in her sleep. She shares the bed with her corpse, whom I’ve never taken a good look at. I’ve always avoided wanting to know about it, or the process of corpse carrying; I just naively assumed it was something normal, something women have always done, never mind the person whose body it once was. I took for granted that someday, it would be my destiny.

I enter, put the bowl down on her dresser, and open the curtains just enough. A slice of light cuts across the bed, illuminating the face of my mother’s assignment. He’s young, or was, when he died, about sixteen years old. He was perfectly preserved, no lines in his face. He looks a lot like my mom, like a young male version of her. High cheekbones and dark brown hair, pale skin, with an eerie sheen, artificially heightened by makeup to look fresh forever. It takes my breath away to see him lying so peacefully beside Mom, and to see her so ill, unable to cope with life. I hunt through her nightstand for clues, for her assignment’s certificate of origin. Way at the bottom, beneath packets of tissues, tubes of lotion, pill bottles, and candy wrappers, I find it. It reads:

Martin J. Helms
Twin brother of Justine R. Helms
Aged 16
Died of aneurysm
Assigned to Justine R. Helms to the fullest term of the law
Under no circumstances may this corpse be abandoned

 

My mother’s assignment is her twin. My mouth goes hot and dry, and I feel sick. I’d heard that most girls are assigned randos, people they don’t know, but my mother has been carrying her brother all these years.

From here, my life could go one of three ways. I could go on as usual, accepting the rules, and receive a corpse when I’m old enough. I could pretend like it doesn’t bother me, like it’s not crippling. I could go about my schoolwork, and go off to college. I could fall for the first boy that shows me some sympathy, the first boy that tells me, You’re so brave for accepting your assignment with so much grace. We could make tender love, me putting my corpse aside for a brief moment behind closed doors. We could move back home so I’m closer to Mom, and get married, dancing our first dance with a cadaver slung over my shoulder, its weight straining my beautiful lace gown. We could have kids, born a few years apart, a corpse nestled beside me in the hospital bed as I scream in labor, then again as I nurse my newborns. When the kids are old enough, I could ignore the encumbrance strapped to my body as I attempt to hold down a job, one that helps with our finances while I write a novel in the evening, after the kids have gone to bed. I could try so hard, but could keep quiet as I struggle—let everyone think that I’m strong. I could put on a brave face until I can’t anymore, watching the boys and men move around me unfettered, while my daughter inherits my burden. After so many years, I could get tired, so tired, and the light in my eyes would go dim. I’d quit my job, and stop writing. I’d begin to drag my feet, and fade, living even smaller because I have no energy to carry on. My mother will die, and my husband and children might drift off, and I’d be numb, all alone with my corpse until I’m old, too old for anything else. Then I’d become a future corpse, sitting catatonic with nothing left to give.

Or I could lift my mom’s credit cards from her purse, and buy us some bus tickets to a place where the law hasn’t caught up, where we can walk away free and live without being weighed down. I could sit Mom by the window, and we could watch the road spill out before us, through miles and miles of open prairies, past blue-tinged mountains, past small towns with white picket fences. I could feed Mom little by little, rebuild her strength, and tell her stories of all the things we’ll do when we get to our new home. I’d tell her about the modest house we’ll have, with a garden, and the feeling of being able to breathe. We’ll make up new names for ourselves, start fresh. I’ll get us three rocking chairs, one for her, one for me, and one for Trina, whom I swear I will find. I wouldn’t tell Mom that we’d be fugitives, outlaws, and our faces would glare from posters at rest stops on the way. But something tells me she’d already know that, and would make her peace with it.

Or I could go back to school and whisper in the ears of the girls who are still left, and tell them, We don’t have to do this anymore. And they’d whisper in the ear of the next girl, and the next girl, and the next, that no matter what, we won’t take what they’re giving—we reject our assigned corpses. Outside the ceremony, we’d stretch our arms, linking up tight, forming a chain of girls blocking the door. The chain would stretch across town, into the hills, and beyond, girls linked as far as the eye can see.

Perhaps there’ll be flashing sirens, the wail of alarms.

Whatever. Let them come for us.

Dad calls out from somewhere in the house, piercing my daydream. He announces that he ruined the meat on the grill because he wasn’t paying attention, now he’s running to town for takeout. He tells me he’s sorry, asks me to keep an eye on my mother.

Once his car’s out of sight, I drag Mom’s dead twin brother out of bed, hauling him over carpet, tile, and grass to the furthest corner of the backyard—Mom’s abandoned garden—a spot that’s overgrown with weeds, a place everyone forgets.

Then I get a shovel, and I dig.

“The thing is,” Jacob said, “I just don’t want to be here.”

“Well, it’s not really a choice, is it?”

“Everything’s a choice.”

There was honking, and the siblings looked up to see a dozen geese coming in for a landing, wings scooped back, pressing the air behind them, webbed feet stretched wide and peddling madly.  They hit feet-first, water-skiing for a second, before folding wings to bodies and looking around with their long necks.  As if they’d always been there, paddling and serene.

The birds filled one end of the drainage ditch, floating in a foot or so of muddy water.  They were not deterred by the fake swans that the public works department had anchored at the other end.

Ellie shivered in her jacket.  Her ears, she could tell, were turning red at the tips.  She thought of elves, of gnomes, of frostbite.  She hated November.

“I was thinking of going to Boulder,” Jacob said, in a voice that made it sound perfectly normal.

“You can’t go to Boulder,” Ellie said, pressing her hands deeper into her pockets.  They were disgusting, full of crumbs and receipts, that slippery kind of paper you weren’t supposed to recycle.  She was too cold to care.  She wondered vaguely where her gloves had gotten to.

“I have a ticket for tomorrow,” he said.

“She’s not dead yet.”

“I know.”  Jacob walked away, stood slouched at the corner of the ditch, the water at the tips of his big brown construction boots, their laces undone.  He was still wearing his work clothes, Carhartt pants and matching jacket, study of a man in working-class brown.  Ellie saw how the slump of his shoulders to the right was like their father’s, how the corkscrew in his hair mirrored their little brother Davy’s, even though Davy had been dead for twenty-three years.  When Jacob turned around, the sharp edge in his eyes was all their mother’s, icy blue.  There was nothing else to say, so Ellie shrugged.

“Do you need a ride to the airport?”

“Nah,” he said.  “I’ll take a cab.”

#

The next day Ellie sat hunched on a freezing cold bench, watching the geese as her ass slowly numbed.  Jacob had left before she’d woken.  She wasn’t surprised, not really.  He’d finished the latest bridge job, and he was flush.  Usually when that happened, he’d roll back into their lives, take Mom out for a fancy meal that she’d have trouble digesting, go on about it afterward like he was Midas himself.  Then when Mom needed a ride to a doctor’s appointment, or needed someone to pick up a prescription, he’d be gone again.  It was Ellie who’d step in, turn over the ancient Buick with its rattle like Mom’s when she woke in the morning.  It was Ellie who would wait patiently in the parking lot of the salon until her mother came out with her hair looking almost exactly the same as when she’d gone in.  If Ellie went inside to fetch her, the other little old ladies would coo from their chairs.  Girls are best, they would say, smiling.  Girls stick around.

A goose reared up out of the water, flapping its wings and honking, causing two others to do the same, all of them beating water and air with powerful strokes, stretching their necks, making a ruckus until, just as suddenly, they subsided.

“What was that all about?” Ellie asked, but the geese simply continued paddling.

The thing was, it wasn’t supposed to be just Ellie and Jacob.  It was supposed to be Ellie and Jacob and Davy.  She wasn’t supposed to have to do this alone.

Ellie’s phone buzzed and she looked down to see a text from Janelle the hospice worker that read, “She’s sleeping, take your time.”  Ellie stood, stomped blood back into her feet, started walking back along the drainage ditch.  She knew Janelle meant what she said, the woman was a saint, a true saint.

That’s what Ellie told everyone, thank God for hospice, they really made it all bearable, although the dirty secret was that of course they didn’t.  Nothing made it bearable, but if you told people that they worried, so Ellie just repeated what she’d heard someone else say.  Hospice, they’re the best.  And Janelle was, she was charming and sweet and professional, but just the reminder that someone else was doing the job of sitting with her dying mother was enough to get Ellie back on her feet.  She almost fell as she stepped in goose shit, slick underfoot.

Prying her boots off on the freezing glassed-in porch, trying to avoid touching the bird shit, Ellie remembered who it was she’d heard say that about hospice.  Her mother, when Davy was dying.  For the first time, it occurred to Ellie that mother had been lying.

#

What was the point of a goose, Ellie wondered the next morning.  It was much colder, and the geese were tucked in on themselves.  There was a skim of ice on the water in the demilitarized zone between fake swans and living geese.  It wasn’t much, but it stilled the water, imposed a crystalline order.  Ellie studied the geese, their necks pulled down, their feathers fluffed.

“What are you still doing here?” she asked.  “Go!  Go where it’s warmer!”

“I know I would!” a voice came up behind her.  The speaker was a small woman her mother’s age, peering out from under a sensible red woolen cap.  “If I could just fly away,” the woman said, “I sure would!  But I hate to fly.”

Ellie tried to nod politely.  The woman was a stranger, which was surprising because Ellie thought she knew all of her mother’s neighbors.  Who else would come to this shitty half-park? It didn’t exactly have the amenities to draw a big crowd.  Besides the mucky ditch filled with geese, there was a patchy-looking soccer field and a concrete path, cracked and frost-heaved.  That was the extent of this suburban oasis.

“Cold day,” the woman said, putting her hands to her lower back, heaving a sigh.

Ellie nodded.

“You know, I heard on the radio the other day that there are two kinds of geese.  They used to all be the migratory kind, but now there are these geese that just hang around, causing a nuisance.  Resident geese, they said.”

“Wow,” Ellie said, for lack of anything else.

“Maybe these are the residents,” the woman said, squinting at them.  “Well, I’d better keep going!  Gotta keep my heart rate up, stay on the right side of the grass!”  The woman laughed as she strode away, swinging her arms.  Ellie tried to remember the last time she’d seen someone power walk.  Decades.

#

The thing was, Ellie thought as she was forced out of the house again the next day, that she didn’t particularly want to go for walks.  What was the point?  If she was the one who had to be here, alone, waiting for her mother’s death, then she should do it properly.  Sit.  Wait.  But Janelle insisted, she always insisted.  Hospice, Ellie decided, was an overbearing, bossy organization.  They acted as if they’d patented death and all of its processes.

Janelle had informed Ellie that morning that her mother had gone into Active Dying.  She’d launched a long analogy with the labor process, ending with a description of herself as a death doula and Ellie had never wanted to punch someone more.  She’d refrained.  One couldn’t admit to an outright hatred of hospice.  One was meant to be grateful to hospice, even when they were total twats.

Not that Janelle was a twat, she really was lovely.

Ellie had a heel of bread in her pocket, plush in its plastic bag, and she fondled it as she walked towards the drainage ditch.  Standing at the edge of the water, Ellie remembered that you’re not supposed to feed bread to birds.  She couldn’t remember why, but she couldn’t be responsible for the mass murder of a flock of geese.  Her mother would have said she was being overdramatic, but Ellie didn’t care.  Every once and a while, it was healthy to believe the world revolved around you.  Life was otherwise unbearable.

Ellie took out her phone and with numb fingers scrolled down for Jacob’s number.

“El?  Did it happen?”

“No.”

She was quiet, watching the geese.  Were there fewer than the day before?  She tried to count them.  They wouldn’t stop moving, paddling.  She thought that Davy, once, had had a stuffed goose.  Or was it a duck?  Yes, that was it, a stuffed white duck he’d called Peeky.  Where on earth Peeky had come from, Ellie had no idea.  Most of their stuffed animals had been generic, run of the mill.  Bears.  Monkeys.  But when Davy’d gotten sick so many gifts entered their home uninvited, like anything could make a ten-year-old feel better about dying.

“Do you remember Peeky?”

Jacob was quiet.  There was minor, territorial goose squabbling.

“Fucksake, Ellie, did you call just to ask that?”

Ellie shrugged.  The phone had been warm in her pocket but now she could feel it pulling the heat from her ear.  She hunched her shoulders against the wind.

Jacob sighed.  She could hear noise behind him, talking and tinny music.

“Yeah, Peeky.  I got it for him.  Remember?  Before he was sick, for Christmas.  Because he asked Santa for a pet rabbit and I knew he’d never get one.”

“So you got him a stuffed duck?”

“Closest thing they had.”

There was a squirrel this morning, nosing around the other end of the ditch.  Ellie watched it put one paw into the cold water.  The squirrel pulled the paw back out, giving it an abrupt shake like a kid deciding the water was too cold.  The squirrel scampered back up the bank and sat, fluffing its tail until it was perfectly curled over its head.  Ellie wondered if bread made squirrels sick.  Probably not, but she wouldn’t feed it.  Once when Ellie was a kid, a squirrel had run right up her leg, its sharp claws digging in as she shrieked and jumped.  Jacob had grabbed her with one hand and ripped the squirrel off with the other, flinging it away.  He’d been her hero, then.

“Where are you?”

“Vegas.”

“I thought…”

“Too cold.  Hopped another flight.”

Ellie waited for him to ask the questions he should ask.  He didn’t as she’d known he wouldn’t.

“Listen, I gotta go Ellie.  I’ll call you later.”

He wouldn’t; she hung up anyway.  She kneaded the bread in her pocket through the plastic bag, feeling the crumbs loosen, squishing it until there was the faint pop of plastic giving way and the mess was all over her fingers.  She squished the bread, gluey under her nails, as she walked back to the house.

#

When Ellie got to the ditch the next day, it took her a moment to figure out what was wrong.  The ice had melted, the fake swans bobbed happily, the squirrel had found a friend or a lover or a child and they were chasing each other near the swans.  The geese were gone.  Ellie stood, staring at the silent water, then turned and ran for home, so fast she thought her heart would burst.  When she slammed open the porch door, she could hear Janelle talking quietly to her mother in the other room and she could feel from the air in the house that no, it hadn’t happened yet.

#

Janelle told her that people often waited to die until the ones they loved most walked out of the room.  Ellie had heard this before and she thought it was bullshit; when death took you it took you.  She and Jacob had been kept out of the room, but they’d been right there on the other side of the wall when Davy had gone and they’d heard everything.

Maybe this was why Janelle kept kicking her out of the house on these walks, maybe she was trying to hurry the process along so that she could move on to some other family, someone more appreciative of hospice, someone who didn’t grump around.  Janelle was lovely, she was lovely, she was lovely lovely lovely.

There were no geese.  There were no squirrels.  There was no woman in a red hat, there was nothing.  The ditch had half-frozen, a bit of liquid left at the deeper end.  Ellie squatted down to see if there was anything there, in the water.  What, she had no idea.  Tadpoles?  Water striders?  There was nothing, or nothing big enough to be seen, just coils of goose shit on the bottom and the errant floating feather.

Ellie walked back and stood outside the house.  It was the house they’d grown up in, the top left window hers, the top right originally the boys’ room, and then just Jacob’s.  The weak afternoon sun glinted off of the row of porch windows, and the house looked blank, like they’d never thundered up and down its stairs or hung Christmas lights from the porch or left jack- o’-lanterns on its front steps so long that they rotted.  Like Davy hadn’t crashed his bike into the steps one bright spring day.

That crash led to the emergency room visit that led, by accidental discovery, to everything that came after.  The neighbors had planted marigolds in the porch’s window boxes that year, watered them every day while the family drove back and forth to the hospital.

Ellie remembered her father pounding down the same steps six months after Davy’s death.  He’d flown south to start a new family in Miami.  Ellie had dropped out of drama, out of soccer, out of friendship, out of school, out of everything to sit at home and hold her mother’s hand.  No one had asked her to do that, but no one had told her not to either, so she’d thought it was her job, especially when Jacob started coming home only to sleep.  Mom insisted on setting five places for family dinner.  Ellie was the one who put them back where they belonged every night after dinner until the night that should have been her high school graduation.  She got drunk off of Jacob’s beer.  She screamed incoherent nonsense at her mother and threw up all over the porch, but the next day her mother set the table with only two plates, two forks, two knives, and two glasses.

Ellie looked back at the window of the boys’ bedroom.  She tried to imagine the arc of a teenaged body leaping.  Jacob had jumped two years after Davy’s death, drunk but not out of his mind, surviving intact with nothing but a bruise on the side of his ass.  After that, he’d moved out for good.

The house looked so innocent now, a piece of disinterested real estate.  Its shabbiness and general disrepair defied their mother, their good, sweet mother who’d rocked them and nursed them and cleaned their wounds and held Davy’s hand through everything.   She wasn’t perfect, but she’d tried, and now she was dying a perfectly natural old lady death.  Davy was dead, Dad was in a high-rise in Miami, and Jacob was somewhere under the desert sun, sticking quarters into a machine that would never give them back.  Only Ellie was left, and she was standing outside in the street with goose shit on her boots, her fingers bare and frozen.

A cloud passed over the sun and Ellie looked up.  So high that she had to squint to see them was a vee of geese.  Leaving, finally.  Ellie pulled the phone out of her pocket and called Jacob.

“El?”

“It’s done,” she said. “She’s gone.”

“Oh thank God.  I’m sorry, El.”

“Me too.”

Ellie hung up the phone, stuck it back in her pocket.  She walked across the street, shucked off her boots in the cloud of her breath on the cold porch.  Inside, Janelle was sitting in Mom’s favorite plaid recliner, next to the hospital bed they’d set up in the living room.

“She’s still here,” Janelle said, “but it won’t be much longer.  I’ll stay, if you’d like.”

Ellie sat on the couch, looked at the wrinkles creasing her mother’s forehead.  Ellie touched the echo of them on her own forehead, briefly.  She felt the restlessness building in her bones, but she crossed her arms, then her legs, then her ankles, then her fingers, binding herself to the spot.

 

I wake up suspecting my horse is dead.

I stand at my kitchen window and drink a glass of water looking out over the front yard.  Everything is bland in weak early morning light. Patches of snow still dominate. It’s April. It’s a consistent miserable.

I know I need to put my boots on and head out the back door and check on Sayre. I need to feed the remaining pony. I need to check his water. I need to wake the kids for school. I need to eat a banana.

But just for now, I stand in the window and close my eyes to the emerging mud of the yard.

Oh, April.

And then, I’ve waited too long, because now I can hear the thudding and knocking and dragging of my middle boy, Teddy, as he steers his 14-year-old body along the upstairs hallway and down the stairs. My boy-turned-man. My scruffy-around-the-edges son.

“Did she live?” he asks instead of saying good morning. He comes right up behind me and rests his head on my back (he has to bend like a willow branch) and breathes me in. I can feel him expand, deflate.

“I haven’t been out there yet.”

“What time did you come in last night?”

“Not sure? It was definitely after one in the morning.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

“Thanks, love.”

He moves off me and heads to the fridge. My back is cold now where he’d landed momentarily. He finds the milk and pours an enormous amount into an old mayonnaise jar.

I don’t want to know if Sayre is dead or alive.

A higher-pitched patter erupts overhead, and soon Boy #3 appears: Charlie. He comes into the kitchen mid-sentence and doesn’t pause for any kind of reaction from his silent audience of two.

“…but I told him he needed to put the arrows on the sides and not in the middle of the paper because then there’s no way for any of the space cadets to possibly overcome the entrancement spell. Mom? Will you make pancakes?”

“Dude, quit,” Teddy hisses at his younger brother.

“What?” Charlie is all wide eyes and forgetting. Teddy makes his jaw hard at him, and understanding blooms on Charlie’s forehead, and he turns to me and is now about to cry. “Mom? Is Sayre? Is she?”

“Sweeties, I haven’t checked on her yet. I’m working up to it.”

“Want me to go?” Teddy asks.

“No, I need to do it.” A third set of footsteps comes down the stairs at a more sedate pace. Jared, my oldest. The most responsible person in the house, I sometimes think. He arrives in the kitchen and doesn’t say a word. His silence is always a peaceful one. He gazes at me over the rim of his coffee cup. I smile at him, and he nods, kindly, quietly.

“And you all need to get ready for school.” I pull my boots over my flannel PJ pants. “No pancakes this morning, just do cereal. Charlie, I’ll sign your reading log if you dig it out of your backpack and pick off anything gross sticking to it.” I slide my arms into my jacket, dig out my wool hat from my coat pocket, and start opening the back door, bracing myself for the rush of cold air.

“Wait, Mom?” says Teddy behind me, and I pause.

 

This Way

I wince at the chill. Jumbo, the orange cat, slips out behind me and together we creep over frozen ruts and crystalized patches of snow.

Roosevelt is waiting for me. Roosevelt is not a clue. That pony could be standing knee deep in wasted bodies of various species and still be focused wholeheartedly on reminding the standing human that breakfast is essential and late. I throw him a flake of hay. He is happy.

I listen for thumps of impatience from the closed barn door. I listen for a whinny. I listen for breath—hers, my own.

The yard is quiet and then a bird whistles from the woods. The first call of spring that I’ve heard.

I slide open the barn door, and there she is. My horse is a mound of flesh gone still on the stall floor, shavings flung over the body and banked around her like she’d been digging herself in. There is no need to check her eyes, her pulse, her gums—her death is evident.

“Oh, Sayre,” I say when my breath gusts out.

I’d had her for fifteen years, and she was the first step I’d made for myself after having my boys. Well, after having two of my boys. And then I got pregnant when I’d thought I was done, and she accepted her partial temporary retirement with grace. When I was back, differently proportioned from a difficult pregnancy and recovery, she was gentle. The plan had been to grow old together.

The plan had changed.

 

That Way

I slide my arms into my jacket, dig out my wool hat from my coat pocket, and start opening the back door, bracing myself for the rush of cold air.

“Wait, Mom?” says Teddy behind me, and I pause. “Skiing today? After school? With Nick’s family? I know it’s not a good time to ask, but I . . .”

My middle boy—the most athletic of the three. And his passion was the wild kind of sport. Skateboarding, extreme trampolining, and now, skiing. Luckily, he had friends whose families were willing to include him in their after-school trips to mountains, because none of the rest of us skied and at 45, I was not taking it up.

“Sure, yeah, you can do that. Let me know how much it will be, okay?”

Their father, Ned, and I were adequately friendly. We broke up when he fell in love with my opposite. But the fissures had appeared long before that and by the time he’d admitted to cheating, I was so far removed from the marriage already that mainly I’d felt relief he’d created a perfect excuse for departure. I think that hurt his feelings. We’ve been apart for six years and besides the occasional logistic bump, we’re doing pretty well at the co-parenting gig.

Teddy turns back to his cereal, happy, I could tell, and Charlie launches into a story about aliens and foreign lands that Jared seems to listen to, and I slip out the door to discover whether or not my horse is dead.

Jumbo, the orange tabby, walks me down the path toward the barnyard, where Roosevelt the pony is looking disgruntled at the fact there is no food in front of him. Oh, Roosevelt. You have no idea how much your life might be about to change. I toss him a flake of hay and am bending under the fence when I hear two things: the first bird call of the new season and a thump on the walls of the barn.

Alive.

She’s standing, even. I slide open the barn door and there she is, no longer a wild creature of sweat and harsh breath, but an exhausted mare who would do well with fresh water and a bran mash. “Oh, Sayre,” I say to her. Her ears prick forward in welcome, and she nudges my hands. Because, food.

And I deliver. Warm bran mash fed to her slowly, in steps, so we don’t have a repeat of yesterday’s colic. Roosevelt too gets a bran mash treat, even though he has the stomach of a . . . horse. And the three of us, four with Jumbo’s silent, slightly judgey presence, watch the day get brighter and even a degree or two warmer before I head back up to the house to deliver the news: my horse had lived through the night.

 

This Way

When your horse dies, not only are you very, very sad, but also there are 2,000 pounds of flesh to contend with, arrange for.

I leave her in the barn and close the door again, so Roosevelt doesn’t have to be confronted with something beyond his understanding. I feel for my phone in my coat pocket. I call Sam Ashley down the road, who has a backhoe and whose wife had offered up his services when I’d run into her at the grocery a year ago. “You know,” she’d told me, waving a pack of Pepperidge Farm rye bread toward me. “My Sam has that digger and he’s happy to do any work that needs to be done up your place.”

I was going to call in the offer. I needed a hole.

“Yup, too bad, sorry ’bout your horse,” says Sam over the phone. “I’ll be up ’round ten, alright? The horse—is it in the barn or in the field?”

“Barn. Is that bad?”

“No, no, we’ll get it done,” he answered.

I hang up and follow Jumbo back up the yard to the house. I open the slider and ease off my boots. A cacophony of kid erupts from the upstairs, the basement where the laundry is occasionally accomplished, the kitchen—sounds of a normal morning because my boys are used to being normal.

“Boys!” I call, and regret it. Let them leave the house and head to school without this in their minds.

But they tumble down the stairs, up from the basement, out from the depths of the refrigerator. “I’m so sorry, but Sayre didn’t make it.”

And they looked at me, three lovely, young, oval faces framed by dark, tightly curled hair. Suffering and slain. Gutted and grieved. My poor loves.

 

That Way

It’s almost hard, when you’re expecting tragedy, to greet the day ahead in all its normalcy. After feeding the horses, Jumbo and I walk back to the house, and I open the slider and shake off my boots.

I can hear Teddy singing in his room. It’s a sound I haven’t heard for a while. Charlie is talking, always talking, and I hope he’s looking for socks at the same time. Jared has his back to me and his head in the fridge. This is not an unusual sight.

“Sayre’s fine,” I call. Jared pops his head and turns to me with a look of surprise and sheer relief. He even, actually, claps his hands together as though he’s on stage in a musical.

“She’s alive?”

“And guzzling breakfast.”

He comes and hugs me. He is shorter than his middle brother, and his chin just barely grazed my shoulder.

Charlie enters the room in a rushing blur and barrels into us, tipping us enough that we all have to reach our arms out to catch ourselves on whatever’s handy. Jared laughs, not his usual response to friendly assault from his younger brother, and I laugh, and Teddy comes bounding down the stairs and for a moment we are all in the kitchen and hugging hard enough that I need to pee but there’s no way I’m going to break the moment.

“Right,” I say when we’ve recovered. “Are you all ready for school? Jared, you good to drive everyone in? I need to get some work done this morning. Everybody brush their teeth?”

It takes only a few minutes for the house to empty of boy. They are here, and then they are driving away, remnants of Charlie’s chatter lingering behind the car as it rolls away, carrying my kids.

The house—whenever I’m alone in it, which is rare, the stillness is what I notice the most.

I could go into the office where I manage a nonprofit, but I’d already let them know I’d be out today. I thought I’d be dealing with 2,000 pounds of horse flesh. The day ahead is a gift, an empty stretch of highway, and I’m the only one choosing songs.

Back up in my bedroom I slip under the covers, telling myself just an hour or so to sleep, to feel a little more human, and then I’ll get something done. I need to sort through the boys’ summer clothes to see what needs replacing—a thankless task that I tend to put off until well into the warm season. But this year, with this free day, I could actually practice some efficiency.

Or maybe, I think, as Jumbo lands besides me and manages to claim half the bed for his own, I’ll eat ice cream for lunch and spend the afternoon ordering seeds from the seed catalogue that came in yesterday’s mail.

But first, sleep.

 

This Way

“Sorry, Mom,” mumbles Charlie into my side. I squeeze hard and then pull away.

“Thank you, men. Are you all about ready for school? Jared, you driving everyone today?”

They look at me with damp faces, and I can see their minds working—is she really sending us to school? Are we going to be kicked out of the day? Yes. This day is going to be hard, and I need one fewer thing to think about—three fewer things.

I see an invisible registration pass through each face and then Jared says, “Of course. Ten minutes until we go, guys.” Darling, responsible first-born boy.

They scatter to finish getting ready. Except Teddy. He waits a moment and then puts his hand on top of my head. Then he rushes to brush his teeth.

The boys manage to organize themselves, Charlie whining about the front seat as they roll out the door toward Jared’s green Honda. And then they’re gone, and the yard is empty.

I pour another cup of coffee. If it were a normal day, I’d shower and head to work. But I’d already called the office yesterday evening when it looked as though I’d need another day to deal with a sick, or dead, horse. I’m a manager at a local nonprofit. I’m infinitely replaceable.

The coffee tastes too sweet, though I hadn’t put any sugar in it. I head upstairs for a shower. I get dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. I feel. . . swept out to tide. Parallel to the life I was supposed to be experiencing today.

When I get out of the shower, I can hear the backhoe approach. I head outside. Sam Ashley’s wife has come along, hanging off the edge of the backhoe like a cranky, aged Valkyrie, just as fierce but without the range of motion. She climbs down carefully and holds out a covered pie plate.

“Chicken pie,” she states. “For you and your boys.”

“Oh,” I say. I wasn’t sure of the protocol. Is one supposed to pop the chicken pie in the oven to share it with the bringers after the digging deed had been accomplished? Can I safely store it in the freezer without offending anyone? “Thanks so much, I’ll just bring it to the kitchen for now.”

“Put it in the freezer, and when you need it, heat oven to 350 and cook until it bubbles along the edges. It’s hearty, good for your kids.” I’m grateful for the instructions. I notice her husband has a toolbox wedged beside the backhoe seat. “Now,” she asks. “Where do you want the grave?”

“I was thinking over along the edge of the field,” I say, and the three of us walk away from the idling machine, and I point out beyond the snowy flat to where the forest just begins. It’s well away from the barn, away from anywhere I usually walk.

“Yeah, no, you don’t want it there. It’s muddy isn’t it. I can see it from here. You want to be up higher where you don’t have to worry. What do you think Sam? Yeah, that’d be good. Closer. It’ll be fine there, you won’t have to worry.”

Oh. I can’t stand this. I didn’t feel any need to cry when I first discovered Sayre’s body, but now, thinking of the practicalities of a burying a dead body, I’m about to be enveloped.

“Okay, how about you and I bring that pie inside and Sam will get to work.” Without waiting for an answer, she starts toward the house, and I follow, carrying the pie plate, trying not to cry, trying not to think of my horse’s capable body reduced to dirt.

Also—what was this woman’s name? I can’t remember.

 

That Way

I’m dead asleep, but my ringing phone wakes me up because there’s always a chance it could be one of my kids.

“Freida?” cries a voice. Not one of my boys. Not a school nurse, too panicked.

“Yes?”

“Frieda, listen there’s been an accident.”

“Wait. Sorry?”

“Listen, you need to meet us at Trident General.”

“Wait. Who is this?”

“Frieda, this is Sharon Mackenzie. Nick’s mom. Teddy was with us, skiing? Remember?”

“Oh,” I said. But why is she calling me? “Sorry, why are you calling?”

“Frieda, there’s been an accident. Teddy was in a skiing accident. You need to meet us Trident General. Can you do that? You need to come right now.”

“Oh god. Is Teddy okay?”

“No . . .” and here she falls into something unintelligible, as though she’s trying to say many, many words, and she’s underwater and there’s no common language to permeate the membrane.

 

And then I’m driving. There has been a call. Who called me? I don’t know. My brain, my whole being, is doing something strange. There is something wrong with one of my children. I’m driving to the hospital. I’m on the highway. I don’t remember backing out of my driveway. Do I have my wallet? I don’t remember taking my purse. I’m driving. Which exit is the . . . I’m off the exit. I’m at the hospital. The car has stopped, and I’m inside, I’m in a hallway, there are people, I’m in a room, I’m holding my boy and smelling his salty smell, tainted now with something underneath.

Why does he smell like this?

Why are there so many layers to him?

I can’t unwrap all of these layers to see his whole head, his whole self. I want to see his head. I want to smell his hair.

Someone has me by the arms, and I struggle against the tides pulling me away from my son.

He could be sleeping, his face could be swollen in sleep.

His face could be pale with sweat and sleep.

He doesn’t smell right. Teddy.

I’m in a hallway. My ex-husband is there. He’s sobbing, and his face is crumpled like an old map. He’s sobbing and his hands are clutching the front of my shirt as though we were still lovers. He’s sobbing and he’s saying something, choking something, and I can’t understand why he keeps asking me, “Why did you let him go?”

I’m in a room. There’s a couch. I’m sitting on the couch. There’s a box of tissues on the low table in front of the couch, and I don’t need any tissues. Ned is with me on the couch and he has a wad of tissues covering his face. A doctor sits across from us. I can tell she’s a doctor because of the white coat and the antiseptic smell of her hands as they reach for me. She’s holding my hands.

“Your son fell while skiing. There was a drop-off,” she says. “Blunt force trauma to the head. It was quick. Very, very quick. He went fast,” she finishes.

“He does everything fast,” I answer.

 

This Way

I’m looking out my kitchen window at the driveway where two pickup trucks have congregated and behind me, my neighbor is chatting and chatting and chatting, going on about animals they’ve had to bury and how it broke her and how it’s a gift to them to let them go and how someday maybe I’ll feel like getting another horse. “They’re so nice to look at out your window, aren’t they? Noble creatures.”

“Why are all these people here?” I manage to ask when she draws a breath.

“Oh,” she says. “Well, you know, it’s easier when the horse falls outside the barn. They might have to take down the stall door. You know, to make room. But my Sam knows what he’s doing. Oh, the animals we’ve had to bury. . .” and then she’s off again and I’m left thinking about Sayre surrounded with construction debris, how much she’d hate that, how scared those hammers and saws would make her.

 

That Way

Now I’m in the back of a car. It’s not my car. This car smells of hay and dogs and earth. I hear a subtle sob and realize—that’s my neighbor. Sam Ashley’s wife. What the hell is her name? She’s driving and crying. What am I doing in her car? The radio is off. I almost ask her to turn it on. But I’m not sure how long I’ll last here.

Because I keep doing that thing babies do. They fall asleep in one spot and wake in another, through no effort of their own. Just like a tesseract. Teddy loved that book, the one with the tesseract. He explained it to me again and again when he was younger and caught up in the potential science of the fantasy.

“Like this,” he’d say, those brown eyes all wide and wondering. “You hold a string, a bug wants to cross, you put your hands together, you make a wrinkle in the time and the bug, it’s on the other side!”

He’d vibrate with this joy. “A tesseract, Mom! Do you get it? Do you think they really exist?”

I was pretty good, sometimes, at being a mother. I leaned down and gave him a hug. “I know they exist,” I told him. “Moms know how to tesseract because that’s how they catch their kids when their kids fall out of trees!”

And he believed me.

“Teddy,” I whisper, in the back of Sam Ashley’s car. “Explain to me again about the tesseract. I don’t understand. The wrinkle—is it in time or space? How can it be both? I need to understand, my love.”

“Almost home, hon,” says Sam Ashley’s wife from the front. “Let’s just get you home.”

And then her name comes to me. Joanie. Her name is Joanie.

Joanie has no idea that home no longer exists. Yes, we’ll go to the house, and I’ll grieve, and I’ll take care of my remaining boys as well as I can. Maybe we’ll move to a new town, maybe we’ll take a trip to Europe, maybe I will remarry someone kind who can watch out for us. Maybe we’ll continue as we have been. But home has been excised from my experience of the world. Home and I are finished. There is no more home. And then, thinking about home, I cry.

 

This Way

Finally, everything is done. The trucks are gone, my neighbors and their backhoe are gone. It’s late afternoon. The whole day spent in service to this particular death.

I feed Roosevelt his dinner hay and a scoop of grain. “Hey, how’s your day been?” I ask as he eats. I rub his forehead, and he pauses his vacuum function to push up with his nose so my hand quits distracting him from the task at hand.

Roosevelt came from the pony rescue people as a companion for Sayre and now that there’s no Sayre . . .  But that’s a plot twist for another day.

I can hear a car drive in around front and then their voices reach me, shouts and whoops and a deep belly lap, a man’s voice in a place I thought only boys lived.

I walk up toward the drive and round the corner to find them huddled just outside the door. They’re hesitating. Not a crowd that usually hesitates. “Hey guys,” I say, and they all turn toward me as one.

“We didn’t know if we should come in, or maybe come find you in the barn, or maybe you were somewhere else?” rambles Charlie, until Teddy pokes him in the arm and Charlie stops.

“Yeah,” I breathe. “I just fed Roo. I think I’m done out here.”

“Is Sayre? Is she . . .” asks Teddy.

“Over here.” I lead them a short way toward the disturbed earth. There’s no smooth surface. There’s no mound, either. Sam Ashley’s wife warned me that later in the summer I might need to fill in any depression that comes up. She didn’t have to say: from your horse’s decaying body.

“Oh,” says Jared.

“Hey, our neighbors brought over a chicken pie,” I tell them. “Any interest?”

“Chicken pie is good,” says Teddy.

“Chicken pie is very good,” I answer.

Jared and Charlie turn and head toward the house, and I’m about to go with them when I notice Teddy hasn’t moved yet. He stands, not looking at the grave but down the hill toward the barn where Roosevelt is munching his last meal of the day, completely unbothered by any change.

“I wish nothing ever changed,” Teddy says. I take him in my arms and squeeze, wishing I could squeeze all of the inevitable bad things of the future out of him, so they’d never happen. “I wish we could just stay the same as we always have.”

I squeeze harder.

 

IT WAS THE FOURTH OF JULY, and when he showed up it was still early enough that the heat hadn’t reached triple digits. The dry lightning–sparked fires that had burned for weeks across the border in California were still smoldering, sending russet clouds into a bloodshot sky. The mountains were nearly invisible in the haze.

The parade hadn’t yet arrived at the park, and Lauren was still laying out the brochures: Choose Veg, Vegetarianism for Jews, This Is What Your Bacon Looks Like. The Fourth of July parade brought out all types—there was something for everyone. When the Christians came by, she’d hand them Was Jesus Vegetarian?; when made-up tweens walked by, she’d have Say No to Animal Testing at the ready, with its photos of skinless beagles and bunnies in guillotines.

But it was still quiet when she sensed eyes on her, and she turned to see him standing in the middle of the small booth. He didn’t look like the usual parade-goers— gray-haired couples dressed in red, white, and blue; families with kids in tow; we’re-too- cool-for-this teenagers. He was lean, tanned, and goateed but without the hemp and tattoos that would otherwise define the hipster-country type she usually saw around town.

She asked if he’d like to sign their petitions to help animals, and he held out a hand for the clipboards. He was left-handed, she noticed—she’d always had an inexplicable attraction to left-handed men—and she watched the bend of his wrist on the page, the upward tilt of his writing, the way the edge of his suntanned hand smudged his signature as he signed all six petitions. After he put down the last clipboard, he looked around. “Libby said to be here around noon?”

The new volunteer—she’d forgotten. Their group, Oregon Animal Rights, had added its first new member in months.

“You must be Mark?” she said.

He nodded, pushing his sunglasses into his thick brown hair, revealing hazel-green eyes.

“Um, what do you want to do?” she asked, wishing Libby were there. “We have these petitions, or you could—”

She heard the clang of metal from a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. He began setting items on the table, next to the petitions—a metal cylinder, a pair of pliers with a green band at the end, sharp metal clippers, and something that looked like a handcuff but had a sharp blade rimming one inside edge, covered with duct tape.

“Tools of torture,” he said. “Very educational.”

Lauren shrugged and let him continue setting up. She preferred the soft approach, which she knew didn’t always make her the best activist, especially in the eyes of those who were more extreme—like Mark, apparently. She’d never been the sign-wielding, marching type; she was more the letter-to-the editor type. She’d joined OAR mostly as a social outlet when she’d first landed here, jobless, knowing no one. Now, in her third year, she still only asked people to sign petitions, handed out literature, gave kids cute stickers of farm animals saying Don’t Eat Me.

“Do you know what this is?”

She turned to see Mark addressing a trio of teenage boys. They lifted their still-skinny shoulders, raised their chins, affected boredom.

“This is what they use to castrate calves,” Mark told them, holding up the device, tightening his grip, and widening the green band. Then he let go; the band snapped back to a tiny circle, too tight to fit around the tip of Lauren’s pinky. “This ring goes around the testicles,” he explained. “It cuts off the blood supply. And—well, that’s when body parts begin to fall off.”

The boys stepped away, as if Mark were about to grab one of them to demonstrate. The looks on their faces were pure disgust; one of them actually shuddered.

“This is where your burgers come from,” Mark said. “Scary, isn’t it?” The boys turned quickly, eager to escape, and Mark shoved Why Vegan? brochures into their hands. “Think about it,” he called out to their backs. “You wouldn’t want anyone doing that to you, would you?”

The boys didn’t look back, and Lauren watched as one of them let the brochure in his hand fall to the ground.

“Are you sure this is the best strategy?” she asked. “You have a better idea?”

“I’m just saying,” she continued, “if you freak them out, they’ll put it so far out of their minds it doesn’t help at all.”

“Or, if I freak them out, they’ll feel it in their balls the next time they’re about to order a Big Mac.”

Lauren let it go. A middle-aged woman stopped to look at the photo of a beagle in a testing lab, its torso red and raw, furless and bleeding. Lauren picked up the petition against animal testing and, just as she was explaining what animals endure to create eyeshadow, she heard Mark ask another young boy, “Can you guess what this is?”

She glanced over—the boy was all of ten years old and wore a Jesus Loves You T- shirt—and she felt a chill when the boy said, “Yeah, we use it on our sheep.”

“You do it yourself ?” Mark asked him. She could hear the surprise in his voice.

“No, I watch my dad do it.” The boy looked at Mark, then added, “We do it when they’re newborns, so they don’t feel it at all.”

“Really? You think they don’t feel it just because they’re babies?”

“It doesn’t hurt them,” the boy insisted.

The middle-aged woman asked about the other petition in Lauren’s hand—the one about seal slaughter—and Lauren handed the clipboard over. She didn’t hear the rest of the conversation between Mark and the boy.

After both visitors left the booth, Mark rolled his eyes. “God-fearing farmers,” he said. “Newborn calves don’t feel anything, so you can torture them all you want—but a fetus inside a human can’t be touched?”

Lauren said nothing, though she silently agreed. She pretended to busy herself by adding new pages to the petitions, and as she did, she found herself inspecting Mark’s handwriting. The pointy tops to the M meant he was a fast thinker. His script was small, tight, indicating concentration and focus; it was also straight, not slanted, indicating a person who thinks before acting.

She knew a lot about handwriting analysis; she knew a lot about plenty of useless things—from working in a bookstore, she told herself. But it was more like an attempt to fill her brain with information so that it would crowd out everything else.

Like the fact that she was drawn to this man, when she’d sworn off men. But how could she not like a man who cared about baby calves? Too few men, especially around here, thought nothing of animals other than what they were worth by the pound or in what form they appeared on their plates. Good-looking men weren’t scarce, but compassion was in short supply.

Having been an ER nurse in her other life, Lauren wasn’t squeamish, but she knew the extent to which most people were, especially when it came to animals. It was odd, the way most people slowed down to stare at a car wreck but couldn’t bear to look at the photos on display in the booth: the rabbit with its eyes seared by chemicals, the downed cow in the killing chute, the chickens so crammed into battery cages they hardly resembled birds anymore. Still, it angered her when they turned away and walked down the street to order a dead cow on a bun. She understood Mark’s approach even if she couldn’t bring herself to emulate it.

“Then their nuts fall to the ground,” Mark was saying to a young couple, snap- ping the green band on the castration device. The man blinked rapidly, while the woman looked on smugly. “I don’t eat meat,” she said, “but I haven’t been able to convince him.”

“You should work on that,” Mark told the man. “Too much animal protein can lead to all sorts of health issues. Heart problems. Impotence.”

The guy, still looking a bit shell-shocked, wordlessly accepted a brochure.

The sound of drums and tubas grew louder as the parade reached the plaza, and even as the high school marching band played on, Lauren could tell the parade had ended by the surge of sweaty bodies nudging their way through the park. Many of them wore paper masks over their faces, the thin kind that didn’t actually help against the smoke but did obscure most of their features, creating a dystopian effect among the crowds wandering through burnt-orange daylight.

Lauren looked up into the sky. The smoke had thickened, the sun a tight, crimson circle, fighting moonlike to emerge. She couldn’t tell whether the fires had progressed, or whether the smoke was simply settling into the valley. Either way, the turbid air and dimming light gave her a sense of being trapped, of waiting for something inevitable to consume her.

For the next two hours, the traffic was constant—some visitors were friendly, others hostile, many indifferent. Lauren tried to imagine what her own reaction to this booth would’ve been about five years earlier, when she’d been like nearly everyone here: carefree, blissfully ignorant. She’d probably have averted her eyes, reassuring herself that these people were extremists, that none of this was as bad as they made it out to be.

She wished she could still think that way.

When the second-shift volunteers showed up, Lauren was both relieved and disappointed. She felt drained, overheated, but she remained in the booth and shuffled a few brochures, stalling; she felt Mark’s presence on the other side of the booth, as if he, too, were lingering.

“Well,” she said finally, turning around, “it was nice meeting you.”

He looked at her with an expression she hadn’t seen on a man’s face in a long time. “Is there any place we can get a drink or something?” he asked. “I’m kind of new here, but I’m guessing most places will be packed.”

“I know a place,” she said.

*

She had a cousin who was a police officer in Cranston, and she remembered, after it was all over, that he’d once told her that you could tell someone was an imposter by their shoes. He’d learned this from a detective at his station: Imposters usually worked hard on the rest of the outfit, he said, but they always neglected the shoes.

That afternoon, when she took Mark to the bar she liked—a dive on a side street, one of the few places tourists didn’t wander into—she never thought to look at his feet. She’d noticed he was wearing khaki cargo shorts and a black cotton T-shirt with a Mercy for Animals logo on it. But was he wearing Teva sandals, like she was? Closed-toe running shoes? Or maybe he was wearing leather hiking boots—a dead giveaway. If only she’d looked down.

But even if she had, the leather could have been faux; she’d have had to kneel down to touch and smell the shoes to be certain—or worse, she would’ve had to ask. And if they were leather, all he’d have to do was lie about them, and she would have believed him. She knew already that she wanted to believe him.

The windowless bar smelled of cleaning fluid and stale beer, but the arctic air- conditioning made up for it. There was no food menu, but Lauren had made sandwiches she hadn’t had time to eat earlier, and this was the type of place that didn’t mind if you brought in your own food. After Mark bought them each a beer, she offered him a sandwich: Tofurkey, spinach and cucumber and tomato, spicy chipotle Vegenaise. As they ate, she looked at him in the dusky, neon-shadowed light. “You said you’re new to the Rogue Valley,” she said. “How’d you find out about Oregon Animal Rights?”

“A friend,” he says.

“Who?”

“Guy I knew in the Midwest,” he says. “He wasn’t a member or anything—but he has family in the area, sister-in-law or something, so he knows about you guys. Said to look you up when I got out here, ask for Tim.”

“Tim left a couple of months ago,” she said. “I know, Libby told me. Where’d he go?”

Tim had been more active than any of them, had come from an exurb of Portland where he’d done a tree-sit to save an ancient sequoia from being razed to make room for a new office building. Like so many who came through, he was only in town for a year; he’d come for the mountain biking, he said, then contacted them when he heard the local university’s science department was planning to build a new lab that would involve animal testing. Ultimately the major donor backed out, the plans for the lab fell apart, and soon afterward Tim left—apparently for bigger and better mountains, bigger and better protests.

Lauren shook her head. None of them knew where Tim had gone. “What brought you here from the Midwest?”

“I was doing undercover work for Humans Against Factory Farming. You know how it goes. Once you finish a campaign like that, it’s best to leave the state.”

She did know—about these investigations, about the ag-gag laws that labeled such undercover work domestic terrorism—but she’d never known anyone who’d actually done it. “What kind of farm?”

“Pigs,” he said.

A series of images flickered through her mind—the ones that had made her quit meat overnight years earlier—and she shook her head again.

“How’d you manage it?” To stay undercover, investigators had to do all the things the other workers did—in other words, everything they were against.

“Not very well,” Mark said. “I faked it as much as I could without getting found out. It’s fucking barbaric. Even little things were stressful, like eating lunch.” He held up his sandwich. “I constantly worried someone would find out I had Tofurkey instead of the real thing.”

“How long?”

“Two months.” He took a long drink of beer and sighed. “They haven’t used the footage yet. It’ll be part of a bigger campaign.”

“Two months,” she repeated. “Your family must’ve missed you.”

“There’s no one to miss me. Family doesn’t mix so well with disappearing for months.”

She looked at him, but his eyes, unfocused, were on the television over the bar. “How’d you get into animal rights?”

“It kind of found me,” he said. “I grew up with an alcoholic father. He taught me how to fight—but, without realizing it, he also taught me not to be the bully he was. I was in college when I saw a video of a cow slaughtered for meat, and I couldn’t eat beef after that. I looked into animal agriculture, and—well, you know everything I know. Bad for the animals, bad for the humans, bad for the planet. It made me want to do something about it.”

He straightened and turned around once on the bar stool, as if he were resetting an imaginary switch, then faced her again. “How about you?”

“I used to be a nurse,” she said. “I’d planned to go to med school, actually, but—” Here she stopped, not wanting to reveal too much. “Anyway, I didn’t get far. I used to love science—” She paused again. She’d once read a study that claimed women kept secrets for an average of forty-seven hours, and she almost laughed as she thought of it. How there are outliers everywhere. How even science can get things wrong. “I didn’t like the animal testing, the vivisection,” she said, settling on a half truth. “So I started over.”

He didn’t ask for details, and she was grateful. He looked at her empty glass. “Another?”

“Better not,” she said, not wanting to add to the buzzing in her head but also not ready to leave. She didn’t know how to keep the afternoon going, how long they could be together without talking, in this state in which they were both new and undamaged together, still all possibility.

“Yeah, I should go, too,” he said.

They stepped out of the dingy bar, the summer light blinding them both for a moment. The wind had picked up, and above, bronze-tinged clouds moved steadily west, shards of blue sky fading in and out behind a wall of smoke. “Maybe I’ll see you at the next meeting,” she said.

He nodded, and she couldn’t read his expression. “I don’t have a cell phone,” he said, rummaging in his canvas bag and pulling out a pen, “but if you give me your number, I’ll find a way to call you.”

It should’ve been another sign, but instead she felt charmed as he wrote her number down on the skin on the inside of his right wrist. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely insane not to have a cell phone; he’d been undercover, and lots of activists were also anti- consumerists. It was endearing, really, and reminded her fondly of her mother, who’d gotten her first mobile phone only a couple of months ago. The first time Lauren called, reaching her at the grocery store, her mother said, “How did you know I was here?”

Mark pocketed his pen. “See you soon,” he said.

She smiled and thanked him for the beer, then watched him disappear into the haze of the afternoon.

*

She’d left the air-conditioning set to eighty for the cats, and when she walked in she turned it down a few degrees. She felt guilty about the energy consumption, but on days like this, she told herself she deserved it—she lived alone, ate only plants, avoided anything involving plastic, and, other than her one-way trip across the country, never traveled. She had no children, and this alone guaranteed a small carbon footprint.

It had been more than three years since she’d come home to a human, and now that she had only the cats, she was all too aware of this. Last week, her mother complained about Lauren spending her weekends volunteering at the animal shelter when she should have been planning her wedding or making babies like a normal thirtysomething. But whenever Lauren came home and the cats meandered in to greet her, she didn’t want it any other way. Unlike the human she’d lived with, cats didn’t have dark moods. They didn’t belittle or judge. They simply were, and simply allowed you to be.

As she shut the door, they came forward in the same order they always did: Mickey, her tuxedo, whose hind legs caused him to stagger and sway; then Gloria, a dark-haired tortie who’d been adopted and returned to the shelter twice, once for “hiding” and once for not being “friendly”; and finally scruffy Clara Bow, still tiny at four years old, whose tawny fur never smoothed out as most homeless cats’ coats did after being in a new home.

Relaxed and lazy from the heat and beer, Lauren sat down on the couch, leaning her head back. Mickey sprawled in her lap, and Lauren scratched his head as she picked up Clara Bow with her other hand and held her under her chin. When her phone rang, buzzing on the kitchen counter where she’d left it, she didn’t move; she felt too peaceful to talk to her mother, a conversation that would begin pleasantly and then become a lecture on spending the holiday at an animal-rights booth instead of a backyard barbecue with eligible men.

She fell into a cool, dreamless sleep, and when she woke the cottage was dark. Outside, the moon was rising, blurred in the smoky air. When, after feeding the cats, she finally picked up her phone, she saw a message from an unfamiliar number and listened: Mark, asking if she’d like to meet for dinner that week. She looked out the kitchen window again, eyeing the jaundiced moon, the smoke heavy in her throat.

*

On the morning of her date, she stood in front of her closet trying to figure out what to wear. The town’s official dress code was new age–casual; she never had the occasion to dress up. She pulled out a flowy skirt, then realized that Gloria was sleeping on the shirt she usually wore with it. So she kept looking, digging among the clothes on the other shelf, leafing through the hangers, deciding finally on a faded blue sundress.

She and Mark were meeting at one of the local pubs after work; she liked that he didn’t invite her to one of the fancy restaurants that cater to tourists. It was a slow day at the bookstore, one of those days she hated because it left her with too much time to think. Her life worked best when she didn’t ponder what she’d left behind, what it might be like if she’d gone through with the wedding.

In the moments when her mind did wander, it slowed and stopped in one spot, as if she’d hit the pause button at the same scene in a film, a wavy and pixilated image of one of the last days on her journey west. After leaving the interstate, she’d stopped in New Pine Creek, a tiny border town half in California and half in Oregon. By then she’d come almost as far as she could, but she couldn’t decide between the two states. She stood in the middle of State Line Road, so she could plant one foot in each, and closed her eyes, waiting for something, a magnetic pull that would draw her in one direction or another. When nothing happened, she took a few blind steps, and when she opened her eyes, she was in Oregon.

Even now, as she stepped into the pub and saw Mark, waiting at a table near a window, she wondered what might’ve been different had she stumbled a few feet south instead.

When she got to the table, he held up a phone. “Cheap, prepaid,” he said, “but it’ll do the trick.”

They looked at menus, ordered drinks. When Mark ordered the tofu sandwich, Lauren said, “There’s milk in the bread.”

“Oh.” He scanned the menu again, then looked up at the waitress. “Is the curry vegan?”

The girl nodded, and Mark said, “I’ll have that, then.” After she left, he looked at Lauren. “Sometimes I forget to ask the right questions. I usually cook for myself.” He paused, then let out a short laugh. “Hope you don’t think I’m a bad vegan. A bad activist.”

“Yeah, I was just thinking exactly that,” she said.

“I hate having to special-order everything. It makes us all seem high-maintenance and fussy.”

“No one can be perfect,” she said. “I mean, you’re not truly vegan if you’ve ever taken an aspirin. Or had a flu shot. It’s just not compatible with how the world works.”

“True,” he said. “But every little bit helps.”

She heard the echo of another voice in her head. Why bother? East Coast accent, dropped r’s. You’ll never make a difference.

“That’s why I’m here,” Mark continued. “To do some above-ground advocacy for a change.”

“Why here?” she asked. “I mean, why not Portland, or even Eugene? Our group—the whole valley, really—is pretty small by comparison.”

“I heard you’re planning to fight the slaughterhouse,” he said. “That’s not small.”

“Well, we’ve been protesting it,” Lauren said slowly, not sure how much he knew.

The meat-packing company had bought the land a year ago—there were no local slaughterhouses—and it planned to break ground any day now. OAR had petitioned against it since its inception; they’d lobbied the county, state senators, members of Congress, even the governor—but the plan was still moving forward. The local farmers, all smugly boasting about their grass-fed cows and sheep, were tired of sending their animals out of town for slaughter, and they’d worked hard to convince residents that it would lead to more jobs, fresher meat; they even argued that it was more humane to kill animals locally. No one seemed to consider—as OAR was attempting to show—that a local slaughter facility would only lead to bigger, more inhumane farms—not to mention polluting to the groundwater, the air. And were grueling, bloody jobs in a slaughterhouse really something to covet?

Lauren looked at Mark, trying to figure out whether he knew something she didn’t. “What did Libby say to you?”

“Just that I joined at the right time.” He leaned forward. “So, tell me about you.”

Their drinks arrived, and she managed to find the right balance—as she had that day in New Pine Creek, one foot in each state—as she told him about the breakup, the cross-country move, the starting over. He was a good listener and didn’t ask a lot of questions, and by the time their food and her second glass of wine arrived, she found herself believing her own story, believing in the optimism of all that she’d done.

After dinner, they walked into the park. She led him up a steep path, a few wooden steps embedded into the trail, to a plateau with a bench among the tops of the pines. When she sat down, he joined her, his leg aligned with hers, and she felt the heat between them, a spark completely separate from the smoke-washed summer air. It felt as if the wildfires had reignited within her, feeding oxygen to dormant embers that had long been starved, and safe.

And then, when he placed a hand on her cheek and kissed her, her mind flashed back to the science she’d studied, to chemistry, to—yes, there was a word for it: philematology, the science of kissing—the endorphin rush, the surge of dopamine, the decrease in cortisol, the increase of oxytocin, the intoxicating com- bination of natural drugs so unlike anything else. She felt it first in her face—a quick kiss used two muscles, she remembered; a deeper kiss could use all thirty- four muscles of the face, but by then she wasn’t feeling it her face but in places she was hoping he would touch.

When they pulled apart, he said, “I’d offer you a drink at my place, except I don’t have one.”

“A place, or a drink?”

“Home is my car—for now, anyway.”

She looked at him, surprised. She’d offered to help pay for dinner, but he insisted on paying. In cash.

He seemed to understand her look. “It’s not about money,” he said. “Honestly, my car’s nicer than any of those motels by the freeway. I’ve got a few leads on apartments, but with the holiday weekend I just haven’t sorted anything out yet.”

One of his hands rested on her thigh, the other still loose around her neck, his fingers like hotspots flaring under her skin. “You’re not allergic to cats, are you?” she asked.

As they drove to her cottage—his car was maybe a decade old, but clean; she could see no evidence that he was living in it—she began to regret having invited a near-stranger to her home. But when she opened the door and saw Mickey limp right up to him, and when Gloria not only made an appearance but let Mark scratch behind her ears, Lauren led him to the bedroom knowing he was there to stay for as long as he wanted.

*

Whenever she thought of her ex, she wondered how living with someone for six years had somehow created more distance than closeness. They rarely strayed more than a few miles from each other, yet in the end she may as well have been living on another planet. In fact, he accused her of as much when she suddenly would not compromise, when she would no longer have meat in the freezer or milk in the fridge. It was after she watched an undercover video of calves taken from their mothers and shot, the wailing cows hooked up to machines and sucked dry of milk meant for their babies. She put her hand on her stomach and knew she couldn’t live the way she’d lived for the past thirty years. He didn’t get it. In the end, he wanted a baby, but she couldn’t bear to bring a child into a world that was falling apart.

She worried that connection with another human might be impossible, so it surprised her when Mark’s overnight stay seamlessly turned into days, into weeks, into months. The smoke cleared; the rains swept clean the valley, and the trees flamed red and orange. Mark found a job at a café and bought groceries, took her out for dinner a couple times a week. It was so fluid, the way he blended into her life, and unlike anything else she’d known in that they shared everything:
the books she bought with her employee discount; he read them all. The OAR meetings he attended, their discussions afterward. The only thing she didn’t fully agree with was his push for direct action on the slaughterhouse. “We’re not that kind of group,” she told him one night, as they sat in her small kitchen after dinner, a candle burning on the table between them. “We’re not Humans Against Factory Farming, with a big budget and thousands of volunteers.”

“You don’t need money, or even that many people,” he said. “In fact, with so few of us, it would make sense to be more aggressive.”

“What do you mean, more aggressive?”

“Petitions and protests are only effective in big numbers,” he said. “Other things—I don’t know, disabling construction trucks, burning building materials— don’t require a lot of bodies. Just a lot of courage.”

“The courage to go to jail, you mean.” “Every protest comes with that risk.”

“Nonviolent action is one thing,” she said. “Vandalism? Arson? Those are crimes.”

“Only if we get caught.”

She shook her head. “Libby would never go for it.”

“There’s a lot at stake,” he said. “And nothing’s been working.”

At the next OAR meeting, though, Libby proved her right. “Are you insane?” she said in response to Mark’s suggestion. “You think they won’t know who did it?”

“There are ways to deflect blame,” Mark said. “Trust me, I’ve done this.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Okay, fine,” Mark said. “We do it your way. But then what? We get a little media attention, our fifteen minutes. What happens at minute sixteen, when the bulldozers start up? What’s our Plan B?”

“He’s right, Lib,” Brendan said. “We’ve got to do something that counts.”

“Let’s give the sit-in a chance to work,” Libby said.

“What if it doesn’t?”

“We’ll see when we get there.”

Mark raised his shoulders and let them drop in a gesture of both impatience and surrender. “It won’t be enough.”

Mark kept talking about it, and on the night of the next meeting, Lauren stayed home, saying she didn’t feel well. It was true—she felt unusually tired, headachy and bone-weary—but more than anything she didn’t want to sit through the stress of another meeting. For a group of people who were all supposed to be on the same side, there’d been far too much arguing ever since Mark joined.

She was sitting on the couch with a cup of tea when Mark got home. He picked up Clara Bow, holding her against his chest as he sat down next to Lauren. Clara Bow nudged her wet nose against his ear, and she saw a weariness in his face.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“We got Libby to step it up, at least,” he said. “Chains and handcuffs and bike locks for whoever’s willing. It’ll be harder to get us out of the way, at least.”

“She didn’t go for firebombing, I take it?”

“We’re working on it.”

She put her tea on the coffee table. “Who’s we?”

“Me and Brendan.” He looked at her. “Are you going to the protest?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”

“When we talked before, you seemed reluctant.”

She laughed. “You were talking about setting fires. I can chain myself to a fence for a couple hours.”

“It’s still illegal,” he said. “We’ll be trespassing.”

“So? Even if they do call the cops, they’re not going to arrest anyone.”

“These things can escalate. I’ve seen it.”

“I’m not worried about that.” Then she noticed it was past eleven o’clock. “I didn’t know it was so late. Were you at the meeting the whole time?”

“We had a lot to cover.” Mark yawned. “Bed?”

She nodded, and he took her hand as she rose from the couch, the sudden movement making her feel momentarily dizzy. In bed, he wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close, and she fell asleep quickly. When she woke later, Gloria was wedged into the warm space between them.

*

She didn’t notice her period was late until the day before the protest, and she had only enough time to buy a pregnancy test, not to take it. It wasn’t until late that night, long after everyone had been arrested and released, that she stared at the two thin pink lines on the strip and knew for certain what she’d suspected that morning, just before everything got started.

She lay in a hot bath, steam rising, hoping the heat wouldn’t harm the baby as she balanced the test strip on the edge of the tub. She’d been up nearly twenty hours; they had set out before dawn, so by the time the early morning light was breaking over the mountains, by the time the first construction trucks arrived, six of them were chained to gates and fences; the rest bore signs and shouted hoarse chants. A television-news van and a handful of reporters and photographers arrived, taking video and notes and photos.

Still, her memory of the day’s events blurred—the angry voices, hurling words at protestors and into cell phones; a few of the workers roughly wielding bolt cutters to cut the protesters’ chains, ignoring Brendan and two others, stuck fast with bicycle locks around their necks.

Lauren watched it all through the dusty window of Mark’s car, into which he’d hustled her after she got dizzy and blacked out as he was handcuffing her to the fence. She wasn’t even sure she’d actually lost consciousness, but as Mark rushed her back to the car, she felt too weak to argue. Leaving her the keys, he returned to the protest, and as soon as he was out of sight, she leaned out the car door and threw up into a pile of gravel.

She lay on the backseat for a few minutes, then jolted upright when she heard the sound of an engine. One of the workers was in the cab of a backhoe, putting it into gear. If he moved forward, within a few minutes he’d be right in front of— or on top of— Brendan and the other two who were bike-locked to the fence.

The rumbling grew louder as the engine revved. Lauren closed her eyes, then opened them again when the rumbling slowed and quieted.

Mark stood in front of the vehicle, not moving, forcing the driver to stop. He stood silent as the driver shouted at him and then finally climbed out of the cab. Still yelling, he got within inches of Mark’s face, and Mark didn’t budge. When the guy took a swing at him, Mark blocked it, struck him in the face, and pinned him down.

Lauren heard the whoop of a siren, saw red and blue flashes of light, and turned to see a police car rush in, dust flying. She watched as the other protestors fled for their cars—and then Libby was there in the driver’s seat, shouting for the key, and three other volunteers crammed into the backseat with Lauren. They spun out of the driveway before she could see what had happened.

Libby updated her later: Most of them got away, except Brendan, Mark, and five others, who were arrested for criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. They were taken to jail, processed, and released with orders to appear in court to face the charges. Though Libby had called that afternoon, Mark hadn’t come home until past ten o’clock, and Lauren hadn’t yet asked him why.

From the bathroom, Lauren heard a door closing down the hall, the sound of footsteps on the hardwood floors. She let herself sink more deeply into the water. Silence filled her ears and drowned the sounds of Mark walking around the cottage. She let her hands float over her belly, and she wondered how, when—even whether—to tell Mark. She knew he believed that a world with fewer people in it was the only way humanity would survive—as she herself believed, or used to. Maybe, she thought now, the very act of having a child was an act of optimism, and maybe to be optimistic in the face of so much wrong was in itself a form of activism.

She emerged from the bath to find him making soup. She sat in the kitchen and watched him cut the plastic of the six-pack holder of the beer he’d bought, so that no turtle would ever grow into a deadly collar. She thought of how he’d checked to make sure there was no leather on the label before buying a pair of jeans at the consignment store a few weeks ago. How he’d walk into the street to stop traffic if deer or wild turkeys were crossing.

When the soup was ready and he poured them each a beer, she looked at her glass and knew she’d made her choice. When she told him, she wasn’t surprised by the blank stare, the moment of confusion. Then—a flicker of joy, a smile that lit up his eyes before he kissed her.

“No wonder you fainted earlier,” he said, and that was as close as they came to talking about the protest. Instead, he asked about the pregnancy, how she felt, when she found out, what he could do. They stayed in the moment—they didn’t speak about the future, the two of them, the baby—it was all about here and now; they didn’t even talk about the next day.

But that look on his face never fully vanished, that dash of uncertainty. And she was no longer sure what it was about.

*

The morning sickness was so severe she rearranged her schedule to work in the afternoons. That week, she and Mark went through their days in much the same way as before, but everything felt different. She slept late and he worked late; they rarely saw each other. When they did, she noticed he ignored the cats as they curled around his legs, and he never stayed in a room with her for long; he was tired, wanted to go for a run, had to check email.

One morning, she woke earlier than usual, the bed cool and empty beside her. When her phone rang, she answered it without looking, thinking it would be him.

“Turn on the news,” Libby said, her voice tense and clipped.

An explosion at the building site. Construction vehicles, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of building supplies—all destroyed. Police weren’t commenting, but the TV station showed footage of their protest the week before. Flames pulsed behind a windblown reporter as she announced, “Members of a local activist group will likely be persons of interest.”

“Where’s Mark?” Libby asked.

“I don’t know. At work, I guess.” “I can’t reach Brendan either.”

“Well, I haven’t tried to reach him,” she said. “I’m sure—”

“He’s gone, Lauren,” Libby said. “They’re both gone.”

*

She didn’t want to believe it, but Libby was right. Mark didn’t respond to her calls or texts. The next day, she and Libby both talked to the FBI, separately— Lauren alone, Libby with a lawyer. Lauren could tell them nothing because she knew nothing. It didn’t matter what she said anyhow; they took her computer and phone and left her cottage in disarray, the cats hiding in the bedroom closet.

“They planned it that way, to protect us,” Libby said, when she came to the cottage that night. Lauren plugged in the electric water kettle and got Libby a beer.

Libby opened her beer and threw the bottlecap toward Lauren’s trash can and missed. She didn’t pick it up when it skidded under an overturned drawer. Lauren stared at the kettle’s clear glass top, watching the steam freckle the inside with beads of water.

Libby took a long drink before saying, “My lawyer said Brendan’s taking a plea.

Because he can give up Tim. Apparently Tim’s the one who taught him how to make the explosives. For the lab, back then.”

Lauren poured hot water into a mug and watched the tea stain it brown. “What about Mark?”

Libby let out a short, hostile laugh. “Lauren, there is no Mark. Everything he told you was a lie. He set us up. Just be glad he didn’t convince you to go out with him last night.”

Lauren was about to mention the baby but stopped.

“I think it was all about Tim,” Libby continued. “Did Mark ever ask you about him?”

Lauren wrapped the string around the teabag and squeezed. Then she shook her head.

“You can’t come back to OAR,” Libby said. “I’ll probably have to disband the whole group at this point. We just have to hope Brendan doesn’t lose his shit in there and flip on us.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“That was never the point, was it?”

“But the slaughterhouse—” She looked at Libby’s face and stopped. The first sip of tea burned her tongue, the roof of her mouth.

*

At first, Lauren didn’t know where she would go, but she knew where to start.

She drove through New Pine Creek without stopping, got back onto the interstate where she’d last left it almost four years earlier, and headed west. She stopped in a town outside Sacramento, where she found part-time work at an animal sanctuary. The region had been scorched by wildfires the summer before, and the landscape was so dark and dead Lauren felt as if she could still see smoke rising from the earth, as if it hadn’t cooled off completely.

“We got all the animals out just a day before the fire reached our property line,” the sanctuary manager told her. “Everyone thought I was crazy to evacuate, but I had a bad feeling. It took a week to find fosters and shelters, but we did it. The firefighters saved all but one of the barns.”

The memory of smoke was everywhere, or maybe it was the memory of Mark, still lingering in her body. She began to talk to the growing child inside her, as she often spoke to the cats—not expecting a response but feeling heard, somehow.

It was dangerous, this one-way conversation; it led her to thoughts she couldn’t repress once they arose: that even the most tender words and gestures between her and Mark had been false. That perhaps the very act that created this child had been part of his plan. That her baby’s father would never be anything more than a living ghost.

She made and cancelled three appointments at a local clinic before she scheduled a visit with a gynecologist. You’re half mine, she told the baby. For every one of him out there, there needs to be at least one of you.

Nola was born five months after they’d moved. The cats, curious, took turns watching over her as she slept, batting at the mobile Lauren had installed above the crib. One night she stumbled from bed after Nola’s crying woke her, only to find Clara Bow tucked into the space between the baby’s arm and chest, both of them asleep.

*

It happened when Nola was two years old, a golden-haired girl who looked so much like Lauren that it helped her forget what her father’s face had looked like.

She and Nola were in Providence, visiting Lauren’s parents. It was their first visit, after dozens of taut conversations in which she defended her decision to have a child on her own. She’d told her parents that she’d gone to a sperm bank and knew very little about the biological father. It was true enough.

Now, it was early spring, and the weather was clear but unseasonably cold. Lauren held Nola’s tiny mittens and hat as they maundered through Rhode Island’s first VegFest—another point of contention with her parents: raising Nola on plants. Lauren had just hoisted Nola from one hip to the other when she saw him and froze.

He was at a booth very much like OAR’s—animal-rights signs and pamphlets, volunteers calling out for petition signatures—but this time, he held not his tools of torture but a page of brightly colored stickers, which he was doling out and affixing to the winter coats of passing children.

Lauren stared, not quite believing it was him. She should have known to expect this one day; the animal-rights community is small, often far too small, and it wasn’t unusual to run into one another at such events, even across the country.

And, while she still didn’t have any idea who he really was, at the same time she was certain it was him. The tilt of his head, the way his sunglasses nested into the wave of his hair. The way he used his left hand to peel stickers and hand them to the kids.

Nola began struggling to get down. Relieved by the distraction, Lauren lowered her to the ground. The girl ran straight to Mark.

“Would you like a sticker?” Mark asked. Nola nodded, and Mark unfurled a sticker from the page and placed it on Nola’s coat, a bright red circle that read I ♥ Animals.

As he straightened up again, he looked at Nola’s face, and Lauren held her breath as he grew still, became a statue in front of her. Then his head snapped up, and he locked eyes with Lauren.

They held a look that said nothing and everything, and it was then that she knew how he’d recognized his daughter. What Lauren hadn’t seen, hadn’t wanted to see, was that he and Nola shared the same eyes: that inimitable speckled hazel, sea glass on a restless tide.

Her eyes still on Mark’s, she reached for Nola’s hand. “What do you say?” she prompted.

“Thank you,” Nola said.

“Do you want to sign our petitions?”

Lauren turned to see another volunteer, a rosy-cheeked twentysomething with dark red hair flowing down from under her winter hat, holding out a clipboard. “Sure,” Lauren said.

She could have—probably should have—walked away as quickly as she could. But a part of her wanted Mark to be in the presence of Nola for another few moments, to see everything he created, everything he left behind. The lifetime of everything he would miss.

She did not let go of Nola’s hand as she scrawled her name on the forms. She handed the clipboards back to the red-haired woman, who had her eyes on Mark, probably the same look Lauren herself had worn once.

As she and Nola walked away, Nola skipping and tugging at her hand, Lauren felt eyes on her back. Fueled by a sudden, misguided impulse, she turned around, but she kept her gaze downward, on his feet. He wore thick, laced winter boots that looked made of leather, though of course she could not be sure.

 

 

NEVER USE THEIR FIRST NAMES, the trainer said, and don’t tell ‘em yours. You call’em Inmate Zamora, Inmate Kavanaugh, Inmate Benally. That keeps ‘em in their place. They hate that word “inmate,” so use it to your advantage. You’re the alpha dog here. You’re nobody’s friend.  You don’t get chummy with these scumbags — excuse me — with these criminals. They’re up to no good. And don’t you forget it, he said, pointing his ugly fat finger at me, though there were ten other new employees in the room. Fish, they called us. New employees are fish. He was a finger-pointer, that trainer.  The brainwasher of the fish.

And so I never used their first names. I called them Mr. Zamora, Mr. Kavanaugh, Mr. Benally. And I never told them where to sit in my classroom as an alpha dog might have done; they placed themselves according to race, the Mexican men in the back left corner, laughing and slapping and punching each other, like brothers; across from them, quieter people – Apache, Pima, Navajo, Havasupai; in front of the Natives  the African Americans sat, several in elaborate braids; the Whites, mostly hairless, claimed the space across from the African Americans. I tried not to think of the Whites as The Aryans, I tried not to judge, but more than once I saw a copy of Mein Kampf pass from hand to hand. Not to mention the swastikas.

Still, I moved happily among the segregated men, checking their work or encouraging them to do some. Or I stood at the whiteboard, showing how to find common denominators or how to solve for x, or where to place an apostrophe, or what Andrew Jackson was up to with the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

 

When it was time for a break, which I couldn’t help thinking of as recess, the groups moved, intact, into the four corners of the cage outside the classroom, where they rolled up cigarettes and smoked them.  Sometimes they ignored me at recess, and I stood alone by the door with the radio on my hip, in case I needed to yell for help. But sometimes someone approached me.

I’d been warned in my training as Correctional Education Program Teacher about conversing with inmates.  Stick to the weather and to sports was the instruction, one that I found difficult to obey, since I didn’t follow sports and the sky was generally an uneventful blue, broken by the occasional raven floating by, or a cloud.  Plus, I was curious: who were these men. But my trainer cautioned against personal conversations. You ask’em about their childhoods, he barked, and they’ll ask about yours. Pretty soon you’re blabbing your whole life to them. The more they know about you, the easier they manipulate you. That’s all these convicts think about, 24/7: manipulating staff. You let ‘em know what kind of book you like, they’ll have one brought in from home or steal it from the library and present it to you as a gift. They know you’re not allowed to accept gifts. They want you to take that book so they’ll have something on you, something they can bribe you with.  The favors they ask of you in return will start out small: here, mail this Mother’s Day card for me, will you. My moms is sick. Then the requests will get bigger and bigger. Pretty soon you’ll be carrying in contraband.

So there we’d be, in the cage, making conversation. I could feign an interest in the Diamondbacks or the Cardinals or the Suns for a while, but soon the words would turn, disobediently, personal. Did you play baseball as a kid? I might segue to Mr. Moreno, one of whose big, strong arms revealed a blue Lady of Guadalupe.  Or I’d ask Mr. Yazzie, the back of whose shaved head bore a long red feather, if he’d liked basketball in school. And then I might be transported onto a playground or into a childhood home where guns outnumbered toys. Or into a hogan, in front of a red rock wall near Kayenta on the Navajo reservation. A lone white horse could wander by. Or I’d be taken into a home much like the one I grew up in, with lilies of the valley in the backyard and apples and carrots in the kitchen and a full toybox in the den. Mr. Rose grew up in a house like mine. The dark-haired, broad-shouldered Mr. Rose.

Or there’d be a one-on-one conversation, there outside by the classroom door, in private, as in the confessional of old, maybe the story of the crime, or a blurting out of what a guard had done, or a question like this one: How come, Miss Malloy, how come all these Mexican cats can speak Mexican and I can’t speak African? You feel me?

How to explain that, in the United States, the Africans’ language had gotten away but the Mexican cats’ had stayed? Where to begin? Which layer? 1619? Coronado?

Oh, to really teach history. But I’d been warned about offering too much information on the subject. I was told to teach American History, yes, but to teach it with a twist, to avoid certain periods, certain topics, certain heroes. Civil rights, for example, my supervisor said, don’t mention them.  You might want to stay away from the Civil War, too, now that I think about it. And then, World War II, well, that might be okay, but avoid any mention of Hitler. Definitely. No Hitler. No Holocaust. Harriet Tubman? Sojourner Truth? Are they off limits, I asked? How about Dred Scott? The cotton gin? Good Lord, no. None of them. Well, what’s left, I wondered. The American Revolution, was that safe? The Constitution, minus the 13th, 14th  and 15th  amendments, of course? But I nodded and let the Correctional Education Program Supervisor tell me about the fiery feelings that could spark in my classroom and catch fire out on the yard as a riot if the AB boys were unhappy with the material I presented. AB? What’s AB? The Aryan Brotherhood, of course. I was horrified by this instruction but didn’t want a riot to break out on my behalf. Riots brought shanks, SWAT teams, lockdowns, yellow police tape, the warden out into public view in her blond page boy and powder blue pantsuit toeing around in the dirt, looking for blood or weapons. I was no troublemaker. I’d never been a troublemaker.

 

Even in prison, officials recognize the first amendment right for incarcerated per- sons to practice the religion of their choice. Many of the Natives there chose the sweat lodge as their place of prayer. So on Monday mornings, in the dark in the winter, at dawn in July, when I got to the yard, I could see smoke ascending from a domed hut made of curved branches, I could smell the cedar burning and hear drummers beating and men singing.  My steps sped up or slowed down with the beat of the drum. The sacred came to the prison, on Monday mornings anyway. Native students were excused from Education on that day in order to pray, so few, if any, showed up for class.

Thursday was the day to worship Thor and other Norse gods. Thor’s Day. A day without Mr. Rose. Only rarely did a white student appear in class then and so Thursday became the time for me to offer stories about the Underground Railroad, to show pictures of people for sale on the auction block; to read Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail together; to discuss the 13th amendment and, once, to mention the plantation-to- penitentiary thesis advanced by Ava du Vernay in her film, 13th.  I never got caught presenting such lessons and no riot ever broke out that I know of. My supervisor looked through the window into my classroom a few times a day in case I’d been tied up or knocked out, but he rarely walked in. He never checked on the content of my lessons. Security trumped education.

When I told my husband that I’d brought du Vernay’s thesis into a Thursday af- ternoon history lesson, he shook his head and took my hand. You’re losing your mind, he said gently.  The kidnappers and murderers and rapists you spend your days with are not innocent men. They’ve shot people for twenty dollars and put them into wheelchairs for life. They’ve stolen from their grandmothers. They’ve sold drugs to children. Methamphetamine. Crack. Heroin.

No, no, I said. You don’t understand. They took drugs as children. Their parents gave them drugs. They didn’t have a chance, don’t you see? They couldn’t grow up right.

My husband chose silence after that, but his raised eyebrows said that he saw trouble coming my way. He gave me pause, that husband of mine did. He always gave me pause. I tried to rein myself in, but he didn’t know them, he didn’t know about their childhoods, in spite of which, on most days, my prisoners were cheerful and ready for any kind of fun.

One day we had fun with a poem, one of Emily Dickinson’s. It begins like this:

A Bird came down the Walk —

He did not know I saw —

He bit an Angleworm in halves

and ate the fellow, raw,

 

Mr. Jordan, in his multitude of long elegant braids, set this stanza to a hip-hop beat in his corner of the classroom. Loving violence of any kind, we all clapped, even the Aryans. Later, at recess, out in his corner of the cage, Mr. Jordan rapped this one again, remembering every word of that first stanza and adding several stanzas of his own, going on about bears and lions, a fox, a hound, causing twenty or so men in orange to laugh and egg him on. And one Correctional Education Teacher, getting a little too chummy, the trainer would say, with the inmates. Maybe standing a little too close to Mr. Rose.  Pulled to him like a mag- net. But…but… I defended myself, to myself, in preparation for the inquisition I imagined coming my way, . . . it was my first live hip-hop performance. And I’m supposed to be teaching the language arts, right? What’s wrong with laughing and clapping? Was I being watched? I searched the concertina wire for any sign of a camera, any sign of a microphone, but found none. Maybe I was safe out in the cage. Safe from those officers, the captains, the lieutenants, with their heavy boots on. Safe with my prisoners.

 

What’s your favorite book, Mr. Rose asked one afternoon during English class. Oh, I don’t know, I said. The one I’m reading now is pretty good, and I pulled Scott Spencer’s novel Waking the Dead out of my bag. A prison Wendy reading to Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, I opened the book and read them the beginning. The action held them rapt: a car bomb had exploded, killing two Chilean dissidents and their American driver. The Chileans were in the U.S. to tell the world about atrocities committed by the military government back home. The suspicion was that the generals had ordered the planting of the bomb.  This was fiction, I explained to my students, but it was based on a true story. They wanted to know where Chile was and why generals headed the government. I answered as well as I could, and then, always on the lookout for a pop-up geography lesson, pointed Chile out on the map on the wall, mentioned that Spanish was the official language there and why, which took a while and was a touchy subject given that the conquistadors were white, and then I told them that I’d put the book on our Books to Borrow shelf when I finished it, and I did.

 

A few weeks later, Spencer’s Endless Love appeared on my desk, with a note: For the Classroom Library.  The novel’s narrator is a seventeen-year-old boy who’s obsessed with a girl named Jade. I remembered that there was a lot of sex, vivid sex, in the book, so I knew better than to begin aloud a passage I couldn’t finish, not even from the scene where the protagonist sets a house on fire, which my lost boys would have loved. I wanted them to love reading, even readings about conflagrations. I wanted them to take books back to their cells, to ignore the tele- visions bracketed to the cinderblock there in favor of building their vocabularies. But I decided to return the book. It did not belong in a classroom of twenty-five mostly young men and a teacher old enough to be their mother.

I knew who had “donated” the book; I recognized the handwriting on the note attached to it. It belonged to Mr. Rose, who would “accidentally” brush my arm with his mighty one as we passed each other in the doorway. Or he’d hold the heavy door open for me, his arm above my head, and motion me through. Chivalrous. The way southern white men treat their ladies. Was I his lady? Did I want to be his lady?  His skin seemed clear of any Aryan-themed inkings, but I’d never seen him without his shirt on. He was older than a lot of the students but still young enough to be my son.  He told me that his little sister’s name was the same as mine. Molly.

Molly, whose popularity in middle school grew when the news got out that her big brother was locked up. Neither Molly nor his parents had visited Mr. Rose. (Because Big Brother had gone off to prison and turned into a Nazi? I wondered, but lacked the courage to ask.)  His family didn’t know about his years in solitary, about the captain’s boot on his neck, grinding his cheek into the concrete. They didn’t know about the strip shack. But for me, Mr. Rose pulled back the veil, and told me stories that made me shudder and pity him. He talked, I listened, my Desdemona to his Othello telling of the dangers he had passed. We talked often in the cage, at recess, outside the classroom door. Just the two of us, talking, and watching the others smoke and joke.

 

I decided to return the book to its donor, but I slipped it into a drawer of my desk instead and when the classroom emptied out, for the lunch break, I took a look at the passages that Mr. Rose had seductively underlined. My memory was correct: the sex is vivid. Was I being watched?  Could the crime unit have gone to the trouble to install a camera behind a ceiling tile in my classroom?

 

The convicts called each other by their yardnames, Scar, Coyote, Misfit, Ladiesman, SnakeEye, Dope, etc. or, more often, Dawg and Homey and Carnal, generically, as in Hey, Dawg, pass me that pencil, will you, and some called me Boss or Teach, as in Hey, Teach, is that a wedding ring I see on your finger? I looked at it, admiring the tiny gold band that was the opposite of ostentatious, but for all its simple beauty, it wasn’t good enough for the protectors of white women I met in prison. Where’s your rock, Teach, where’s your diamond? A woman like yourself should wear a diamond as big as my fist, one pale little Aryan declared, shaking his fist. And the surrounding Aryans called out Yeah in unison. What’s wrong with your husband? That cheap bastard, one said, disgust lacing his words. He could have come at my husband with a torch.

Hey, you knuckleheads. What’s the matter with you? Don’t disrespect her husband, my new friend, Mr. Rose, said, with authority. She shows us respect, doesn’t she?  And he used his mighty arm to punch the initiator of the attack on my husband in the shoulder. Respect was big at the prison. The disrespectors of my husband looked at their feet. He was becoming my defender, this Mr. Rose, this would-be donator to my classroom library, this sometime-carrier of my books, this maybe-Aryan, this heartthrob.

 

May I show you a different way, I said to Mr. Rose one afternoon in algebra class early in our time together. I’d been looking over his shoulder and noticed that, as he solved for x, he did most of the figuring in his head. At his enthusiastic assent, I sat by his side and showed him a more methodical route to solution, recording each step, each addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, with a pencil.  Will you show me another one, Miss Malloy, he asked, and I did. Another one, he prompted, and I showed him a third, more complicated problem. How about one more, he said and during this last show ‘n tell, his knee fell over onto mine, where it stayed until I found the will to pull my leg away.  The words of the imaginary inquisitor sounded in my head: how long would you say you hesitated, Miss Malloy, before pulling your pretty little thigh away from the inmate’s thigh?

 

You see the number 88 on some punk’s neck, my trainer barked. That’s not a celebration of the punk’s birth year. Nope. Anybody know what 88 stands for? Silence. What’s the eighth letter of the alphabet, he challenged us, and we all started counting on our fingers: H. Bingo, he said. You got it. H. Two H’s. Any idea what HH might stand for? Silence. How ‘bout Heil Hitler. Ever thought of that? Yep.  Code for Heil Hitler. Ain’t that a clever dog whistle? 88. And how ‘bout the number 14? No, that’s not the age of their first kiss. That’s The Fourteen Words. You want to hear ‘em? Not exactly, I wanted to say, but I heard ‘em anyway: WE MUST SECURE THE EXISTENCE OF OUR PEOPLE AND A FUTURE FOR WHITE CHILDREN. How ‘bout them apples? And then there’s that green shamrock you see on forearms and necks around here. You think, how sweet. A celebration of St. Paddy and all things Irish? Nope. Not a chance. Sign of AB affiliation. Got it? Wise up, you all.

 

The first time I found a piece of chocolate on my desk after recess I knew whose eyes to contact. I contacted them and then picked up the chocolate and dropped it into the trashcan with some ceremony, without smiling, picturing an 88 sitting between Mr. Rose’s shoulder blades, or WHITE PRIDE stretched across them. How dare you try to woo me with chocolate, my look said. Were those eyes Aryan? By the second time a chocolate appeared, the inky images had dimmed for me. I let the rectangle lie there, on my desk. By then I had learned that convicts join gangs for protection, duh. That one might not hold to the beliefs of the Aryan Brotherhood but have no real choice about becoming a brother in that nasty family. I let the chocolate sit on my desk until my prisoners had gone back to their cells and then I placed it in my mouth and let it melt there, searching the ceiling tiles for the eye of a camera.

When a lieutenant burst in through my classroom door with two German Shepherds, a trace of chocolate remained on my tongue. How are you, Miss Malloy. he said, gruffly. Such visits happened periodically. The dogs were on a drug search, sniffing all around. The lieutenant pulled a few books off the shelf and flipped through the pages, looking for a tab of acid, a tiny cellophane of cocaine. I was glad Endless Love was not among the books; its underlinings could have attracted the lieutenant’s attention. My heart was pounding hard and fast against my ribs. Was he really looking for drugs or was he looking for Mr. Rose? But all the lieutenant said was, Looks all clean in here. Come on, fellas, he barked to his dogs, and they marched out through the door, leaving behind a whiff of German Shepherd.

Unfortunately, I had seen the movie, Mrs. Soffel, in which Mrs. Soffel, played by a young Diane Keaton, falls in love with a convict, played by a young Mel Gibson, while reading passages from the Bible to him through the bars of his cell. Though I ardently disbelieved the myth, the song, the cliché that Ladies Love Outlaws, the film was nonetheless convincing, even the part where Diane helps Mel escape.

I fell into a reverie on my drive home one day; in it, I helped Mr. Rose, whose eyebrows resembled Mel Gibson’s, escape. I climbed a fence, spider-man like, and held apart the strands of the concertina wire for him to slip through and climb down the fence on my side.

While within sight of the concertina wire, Mr. Rose was my guide, my fan, my protector. My translator. English majors love vocabulary and he defined words for me, words like stinger and shiv and Cadillac and dime (paperclip wires turned into a water heater, a cell-made knife, a convict’s bunk, a ten-year sentence). In return I taught him words like argot. You’re teaching me prison argot, I said. Argot has a silent t as in ballet – he liked that – he liked the sound of French words. Genet, chalet, poulet, ricochet.  Ricochet? Really? There’s a t in that?

But once he was released – yes, I saw him after his release – his attention wandered. Out in the world beyond the gate, walking along an arroyo, he often wasn’t listening; he was admiring the clouds or pitching rocks at the saguaro, the agave, the ocotillo. He’d left his courtly prison ways behind. To get his attention I asked him questions. One of his answers was this: no, he hadn’t had to, or been invited to, join the Aryan Brotherhood, ostensibly due to some impure blood in his ancestry, and he didn’t think that white people were superior to people of color, but he believed in the separation of the races. No mixing, he said with authority, as if he had a PhD in something important.  I remained silent, in spite of the urging, I’d received in my youth, To Instruct the Ignorant, a Spiritual Work of Mercy.

 

I’d had no intention of leaving my phone number on my desk the day before his release. But I did, my body did it, not my mind. And the first few times I saw an unknown number on my phone, the trainer’s words came to me: DOC EMPLOYEES SHALL REFRAIN FROM PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH CURRENT OR FORMER INMATES! But eventually I silenced that voice and said hello.

I checked his chest for signage. All clear. WHITE POWER was written nowhere on his body. I saw no 88s, no green shamrocks, no 14s, no swastikas.  Skin as clear as a newborn’s, except for the scars you’d expect to see on a man such as he.

But just because he didn’t display white supremacist beliefs on his body didn’t make him perfect. Far from it. One day, in my car, he said, This hurts me almost as much as it’s gonna hurt you, Miss Malloy. We were on our way to the zoo. He’d claimed he wanted to see a tiger. We had the whole Saturday together, my husband was away. Mr. Rose, oh let’s call him Danny, though I never once called him that, was in the bucket seat next to me.  I was driving. The Cranberries were singing on the radio. I detected motion next to me and turned my head to see him wrestle an angry little silver gun with a black handle out of his pants pocket.

He pointed it my way.

Let’s go to a cash machine. You’re kidding?

Nope. Sorry.

We entered the cubicle that housed the ATM. The bank was closed; no one was around. Danny beamed when he saw the balance in my savings account, but grimaced when pulsing green letters announced a $400 limit for a day’s withdrawal. I wanted to kiss him in spite of the gun.  The machine dispensed his twenties; he stuck the gun in the waistband of his jeans to retrieve and count the bills, and then he was gone. Where were the captains and lieutenants when I needed them?

I had my phone, I had my car. I could have dialed 9-1-1, or given chase, but I was frozen. And anyway, what about the disgrace, what about the divorce, what about the dismissal from my job.

And more prison time for Danny.  Even after the silver gun, and the four hundred dollars, I couldn’t send him back into those kennels, into the sloppy orange costumes, onto the chow lines, behind the long slits of windows in the cellblock that let in so little light, to the humiliations of the searches, in the cells, along the fences, in the strip shack, back into the ugliness of the prison when he appreciated beauty, the beauty of French words, of the pearl buttons on the back of my blouse, of the raven against the blue sky. Or was he just pretending?

And I didn’t confess to my husband either when he returned from his trip the next day. By then my heart had stopped pounding and my fingers had stopped rattling. I made dinner, poured cabernet, lit candles.

What would the courageous truth-telling women I’d celebrated in Social Studies class say about my omission? Sojourner Truth, for example. What would Sojourner Truth have said? Sarah Grimké, Alice Paul, Harriet Tubman. Oh, let them talk. Let the ladies talk.

When I got to work that next Monday, I expected trouble in the form of an inquisition. But it was just an ordinary day at the prison. A guard at the gate checked the trunk of my car, then waved me on through; another checked my bag at the door, as a machine checked my body for metal. I was handed my keys and my radio and I made my way through the sally port and on to the classroom, unlocking and re-locking padlocks and doors along the way, my hands shaking as I did so, my head whipping around in the blowing dust to see if anyone was coming after me. Anyone in black boots.

The Mexican men were rowdy that morning, the Blacks laid back, lounging in their plastic chairs, cool. The Natives engaged in the sacred at the sweat lodge; their corner was empty. The Whites were out in full force, all those bald heads.

I offered my usual Monday morning greeting: How was your weekend, a greeting that always got a laugh. Then, as usual, they turned the question back on me and, rather than tell them about the robbery involving a deadly weapon, I invented a story about taking my dog to the vet. They loved hearing about Buddy, my shiny black prince, even though he’s not a pit bull. They knew how he trembled when it thundered, how he picked up my shoe with his teeth when he wanted a walk and dropped it at my feet.  So I took Buddy to the vet, I lied, it was time for his shots. Shots? broke in Mr. Jordan. Do like in the hood, Miss Malloy. Dogs in the hood don’t get shots. Buddy don’t need shots. Give Buddy a break.

A chant began in defense of my dog. Fists hit desks. Bud-dy. Bud-dy. No shots. Bud-dy.

Okay, guys, enough about Buddy. Shh. Shh, I said, a snake of sound leaving my mouth.

They persisted.

Stop it, I said. Stop it. I’ll write you up. Bud-dy. Bud-dy.

Shh.  I’ll call the captain, I threatened, though the captain was the last person I wanted in my classroom. I raised my radio to my mouth.

The chanting stopped, but the men were not happy. Their happiness was no longer a concern of mine.

Don’t do us like that, Teach, instructed Mr. Jordan. What’s wrong with you, ma’am? Don’t do us like that, and then he turned to the others in the room and opened his arms wide and he asked, What other way they ever do us? and he started shaking his head. The others followed his lead. They were silent, but they were all shaking their heads. All those heads.

 

IT’S ALL A MATTER of public record—the grisly murder, the killer’s fetish for his hands, his mother’s red Kool Aid, the yellow clay of Belknap Creek, the yellow American Girl roses my sister-in-law keeps ordering. Even me, I’m part of those court records. But not every fact is in there. Some day next week or the next I’m going down to the basement of the Woodbury County Courthouse to prove what I suspect is true—the court reporter stopped typing. Ladonna denies she said those words. My husband says there’s a rule about what can and can’t be recorded. I say Lady Justice, that cold stone-faced woman, came unhinged in the courtroom that day. She was not only blind but deaf and maimed as well.

The words that I heard I am not making up, although, like the police, the prosecutors, his lawyers and, of course Ladonna, my brain has been working overtime. My mother says let it go. But I know, and you need to know, that in over a dozen court appearances and a year of legal maneuverings, Ladonna in her fresh new hairdo and manicure and new size 6 dress and that loose-lipped, cock-eyed, cock-brained boy were playing the same rigged game of chance. And believe me, they weren’t deaf. She and that boy—they listened to each other, they loved the same soft incessant stirring of the crowd and, as if it was a game, they watched the same balls tumble, hoping for a turn, for one last chance to best the other and call “Bingo!”

The court reporter sits in the shadow of the judge’s bench, her dark suit and hair and her wooden face disappearing into the stained oak paneling, her expression never changing, her eyes focusing on some invisible point between judge and witness. A tiny lamp arcs over her keys, making her fingers stand out from her black sleeves. Fingers long and curved, she types the way my fifth-grade piano teacher wrote in my Hanon Scales, Book 1—“curve your fingers, knuckles up, do not look down!” On the next page, above exercise two: “Faster.”

All the hard evidence is locked in boxes and envelopes in the basement of the courthouse in a room marked Records. The trial took on a familiar pattern: evidence comes up, postponement, evidence goes down. Another court date is set, we come in, that evidence comes up, the boy appears in his new hair color, the hearing starts and halts: psychiatrists, DNA admissibility, his shoes and soil samples, the red stain on his Grungy Monkeys t-shirt (he claims it’s Kool Aid, Ladonna claims it’s blood, the judge says either way it’s not admissible), Leanne’s t-shirt, jeans and panties, (where her bra went we don’t know, maybe she’s still wearing it); her shoes, more soil samples; two geologists, both experts; the $100,000 bond his parents paid in cash; the names of witnesses: twenty-seven East High kids all drunk, all stoned at a party down along the Missouri.

Those kids swear that he was there at the river, that Leanne was there. That much is sure. Some say he was acting spooky, talking about the things his hands liked to do, where he liked to rub them. Even in court, he kept those hands tucked in between his thighs. Some say Leanne was acting wild with a bottle of Wild Turkey, coming on to some fat-jawed wrestler, and some say why else does a fifteen year old carry condoms in her purse.

Now that the case is closed, all those words and more, 560 pages more, every word that court reporter typed, is part of the public record. You go to that court- house, go downstairs, read the court reporter’s notes. Sift through hair samples, and saliva samples, and carpet scrapings from a 1998 Honda. You tell me what you see, then I’ll tell you what you still don’t know.

——

Ladonna likes tomato red—she says the color photographs well. In every one of the Mattero family photos you can spot her right there, bright red in the middle, between all the dark brothers—Roberto, Frank, Vinnie (he’s a policeman down in Omaha so he thought he was a big help in all this), then Art and then the youngest, my husband Tony, out there on the end. Red is the color she wore that Monday morning when the lady came to do the first story.

Ladonna had called me to come over and by the time I got there Ladonna was sitting on Leanne’s bed, all those stuffed animals left over from when Leanne was a kid propped up around her. A box of Kleenex and Leanne’s tenth-grade class picture were next to her.

“My little girl just wouldn’t disappear, I know she wouldn’t.” She told the TV lady the story about her ex being a cattle buyer down in Boca Raton, how she’d checked with him and Leanne wouldn’t go there anyway. She held up Leanne’s picture and the TV woman told the camera guy to do a close-up.

The TV woman was the older one, not the blond, but the one who does the daily features and fills in on weekends. I could see she felt sorry for Ladonna, probably had kids at home who were giving her trouble too. She was trying to find more than the news. “When did you last see your daughter?”

Ladonna fingered the ears of a pink bunny. “This was her favorite. We went to Adventureland last summer.” She looked up. “On Friday. She came right home from school and I had to be to work at five,” (Ladonna had worked her way up to assistant manager at Red Lobster), “so I opened her a can of soup for supper. She said that she and Shondra and a couple other friends were having a sleep over.”

The TV lady whispered to the guy and he crawled his camera over Leanne’s bed and desk and the walls of her room. Ladonna had straightened things up. She’d gotten rid of the clothes and CDs and dirty dishes Leanne always left all over the floor. She’d taken down the love scenes from Titanic that Leanne had taped above her headboard. While the man’s camera was taking in everything, the TV woman checked her notes. “You know, Mrs. Richards, there’s been some criticism in the newspaper about why you waited until Saturday night to report her missing.”

Ladonna bristled at this, but the reporter was only doing her job.

“She told me she was sleeping over at Shondra’s. When she didn’t come home in time for her dance class, I called over there and Shondra’s mom said she hadn’t stayed there and then she called Shondra down at dance class and then she called me back and she said Shondra said that she said she was staying at some other girl’s. By the time I called all those other girls and my parents and my brothers and Stacy,” she looked at me, “it was already quarter to four and I had to be back to work.”

I could tell by the TV lady’s face that this story was getting too long.

“What come into my head,” said Ladonna, “was that lady up in Sioux Falls, how that meatpacker hacked her up and stuffed her in the trunk of his Olds Ninety-Eight. She wouldn’t just disappear, not my Leannie. Someone’s got her, someone’s done something to her.”

She collapsed back into the pillows and hid her face in her Kleenex. A couple of stuffed teddy bears came tumbling onto the floor. I gave the TV woman a look like how would she like this to be happening to her. I kicked the animals under the bed with the rest of the stuff.

The reporter edged away from me and around the other side. “Mrs. Richards, at this point the police still have her listed as a runaway, am I right?”

“She’s not a teen runaway!” Ladonna sat up. She’s a short woman, but she was heavy enough at the time that while she didn’t seem fat, she did seem substantial. I never liked to argue with her. “She’s not a runaway. The police just say that because they’re too lazy to look until it’s too late.”

That was the first thing Vinnie had told her over the phone—that they wouldn’t start looking until they suspected foul play and then it would be too late.

The TV lady edged a little closer, so close I thought she might sit down on the bed. “So, do you feel that the local police have mishandled this case?” Now she knew what tonight’s lead-in would be.

Ladonna screwed up her lips. “Wouldn’t you?”

The cameraman waved a hand, and the reporter stepped in front of the shelf where Leanne had her ribbons and her dance trophies and watched for the red light to come back on.

She said the name and number of her station and reminded people “—if anyone has information about the whereabouts of Leanne Richards, last seen wearing dark jeans and a red ‘Save the Whales’ t-shirt, please call the station—” As the reporter gave the 800 number she fingered the buttons on her blazer. Then she turned to Ladonna. “Mrs. Richards, do you have anything else you’d like to say?”

Ladonna sort of drew herself up. I saw that she’d been watching the TV lady and already knew how to look right into that red spot. Her voice started soft, real sad. I did feel sorry for her.

“I just want to say to whoever’s got my little girl, whoever you are, please don’t hurt her, oh please don’t, she’s all I have. Please let her go.” She paused, looked down to hide the tears while the camera moved closer, then she looked up and spoke a little louder. “Leannie, hold on, honey, Mommy’s coming.”

That night we watched the evening news in my kitchen—me, Tony, our two girls, and Ladonna because we didn’t want her eating alone and she didn’t want to go over to her mother’s. What the TV lady said had us all crying, me, the girls, even Tony, right there at the kitchen table while our chicken and Stove Top got cold. The TV lady came on and then Ladonna and then the TV lady again.

Then the police chief came on with his side, “It’s always been departmental policy.” He was sitting at his desk in the new Law Enforcement Center and you could see how his window looked out into the clouds. “We like to take our time and be thorough. Nine times out of ten, the kid shows up on their own. In the Richards’ case, we’ve interviewed family members, we’re checking with relatives in Boca Raton. We’ve checked school records and talked to the girl’s counselor. She says there has been a history of chronic absenteeism.”

“Now why would that counselor say that,” snapped Ladonna.

Then Ladonna came back on TV. She looked real good—brave and scared—like you’d want to look if this was happening to you, especially in the part when she called out to Leanne “Hold on, honey, Mommy’s coming.” You could have heard a pin drop all over Siouxland.

Well, it must have worked. The next day the Journal ran a mini-editorial. The next day my Chareese came home from school and told me that the police knew about that party down by the river that Friday night and were at school all day interviewing kids, finding out who was there and who wasn’t.

And the next day a farmer over by Akron was out checking beans and saw a spot of red down along the drainage ditch. He said right away his mind brought up that poor little lost girl he’d seen on the TV news. He just had to go down there and look. And there were her shoes and clothes, the gag from her mouth, and some blood on the sand, but not her.

After that came Leanne’s picture in the paper a third time. Then came a front-page picture of Ladonna still sitting on the bed, those stuffed animals still propped up beside her.

And then there was his picture in the paper—front page, full color. A young kid, bright orange hair, haunted eyes, in a black t-shirt and earring, raising his middle finger towards the camera. It was the kind of thing you didn’t see right off, you were so busy looking at his face and those eyes. Chareese had to point it out to me, said the kids at school went wild over it. Bet someone down at the Journal lost their job over that finger. After that came the arraignment.

And after that, after that day when they first spied one another, that’s when Ladonna and that boy raised the ante.

——

Some day next week or the next, I’m going down to the courthouse to see if Ladonna’s words went through that court reporter’s machine. All the time during the hearings, behind the other noises—the judge clearing his throat, the lawyers shuffling their papers and their shoes, the people behind Ladonna and me whispering their opinions, that boy’s mother leaning into her husband’s six hundred dollar suit and softly crying, that boy sniffing and rubbing his nose on his shoulder, the sound of the air conditioning, then later the furnace, then the air conditioning again turning on and off, on and off—all the time behind all those sounds I could always hear the soft tap-tap-a-tap of the court reporter’s keys as her curved white fingers followed the rise and fall of the words, running up their scales and down, recording the sounds made in that courtroom. She played that machine exactly as it’s written in my scale book: “Wrists straight, don’t look down, hear the scale,” and finally above exercise five, the last one I ever tried, “Trust your ears to lead you.” Did she ever write a wrong note? I don’t know.

But I do know she stopped typing—a grand caesura—when Ladonna stopped the whole court proceeding and said what she said. And I want those words to be in there.

Vinnie came up from Omaha for the arraignment. He had some vacation days coming and he’d worked on a double murder kidnapping case three years before. Tony had gone to work. Chareese was at school. Vinnie and Ladonna and me were at the kitchen table.

“I seen these kind of cases before,” Vinnie said, “and believe me, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.”

Ladonna wiped some cookie crumbs off the table and onto the floor. “The police chief said—”

“He’s an asshole.” Vinnie looked at me, knew I didn’t like that kind of language in my kitchen.

“He said that—” Ladonna tried again.

“I don’t care what he said. He runs a shithole department, excuse my language. They already screwed up the case by going through the kid’s house and car without a search warrant. You know what Chief Big Butt Lacey will do now? He’ll sit on it. Believe me, he ain’t gonna get outta his chair. I know how his department works. He’s gonna assign some detective who puts in his nine hours and goes home. And the county prosecutor—he’ll play with his dick awhile then write another press release. Meanwhile that rich kid’s lawyer—these are billable hours—you better believe he’s working overtime.” He turned in his chair and swirled the coffee around in his cup. Vinnie liked his coffee real strong and I got up and put on a second pot.

“I seen that kid’s mom around the school last year.” Ladonna said it like she already didn’t like the mom.

“What you got to do,” Vinnie put his thick hand on the table in front of her like he was pinning down a plan, “is put pressure on the police, you got to keep Leanne on top of the paperwork pile.”

“I seen that boy’s mom at the school.” Ladonna was stuck on that. “Don’t they live in one of them new houses south of the mall?”

“And I can tell you what else. The police won’t do squat to that boy until we find the body.”

I knew what Ladonna was getting at. In this city, you can’t keep up. I had seen that boy’s mom around school, at band parent meetings, tavern suppers, parent- teacher conferences. (My Chareese, she gets good grades, an A in business math.) She’s the kind of parent who sits on committees and can stand around laughing with the principal. Just by looking at her you pretty much knew where she lived. Back when Ladonna and I went to East High, the popular kids, which we weren’t, all lived between Sunnyside and the high school. Ladonna still lives down on South Royce, but now that I live in Sunnyside—my Tony’s got a real good job at the meat plant (in the office)—now the rich folks have moved up into those hills overlooking the mall. They’re all computer people from California, like what that boy’s parents are, happy as toast that whatever their bungalow in L.A. sold for buys them a fancy six bedroom out in Singing Hills. Another hundred thousand gets them over in Dakota Dunes. Ladonna had seen that boy’s mom around school and I could tell by the way she suddenly started tapping her nails on my kitchen table that she knew things were stacking up for Leannie the same way they always had for us.

The first time Ladonna ever gave her little talk “What I Want Every Mother to Know” it was at the Singing Hills PTA. This was after the court hearing when the boy was released on bail and was still living up in those hills at # 22 Tamarind Lane. For the PTA meeting Ladonna made up orange flyers with Leanne’s picture xeroxed on the top and “Advice to Concerned Mothers” underneath and a poem she’d copied out of the September Women’s Day. It looked real professional. The lady down at the office supply store helped her with the layout and then took up a collection among the employees for the Little Leannie Richards Save Our Children Defense Fund. When Ladonna passed out the flyers, she talked to the mothers about being empowered.

She’d learned that word from the gray-haired lady at the women’s support group she went to up at St. Luke’s Hospital. I went along the first time. Empowered means you can change the tune any way you like. You don’t have to play the scales the way they’re written. I didn’t go back. Later it came to me—that court reporter in her fancy wool suit and pale white hands, if she thought she was empowered, what gave her the right? Lady justice should play exactly what she hears. And she did hear those words, didn’t she?

At that PTA meeting, on that flyer, Ladonna’s very first bit of advice was “You have the power to make your neighborhood safe—even if it means creating a disturbance.” Ladonna was into creating disturbances. She gave those mothers extra flyers to pass out to their friends.

So when the boy’s Singing Hills neighbors started complaining and started writing nasty notes and that boy’s family tried to move across town, the Dunes people had already seen those orange flyers on their Singing Hills friends’ refrigerators and had heard about it in their own support groups and didn’t throw the flyers out when they came with the rest of the junk mail. (The VFW let Ladonna use their postage meter.) And when new orange flyers—ones with a picture of that boy and the words “Have you seen this killer? You soon will!”—hung from every doorknob in their subdivision, you better believe they had the power to force a realtor and a seller to back out of a sale.

It was all in the papers—the letters about safe neighborhoods and letting killers go loose, the boy’s claim that he was being persecuted, the parents’ declarations that their son was innocent, the letter from the neighbor who three years ago found three cats dead in his backyard and still had suspicions, Ladonna’s claim that little Leannie couldn’t rest happy until every child’s neighborhood was a safe one.

Then that boy and his family disappeared. We weren’t sure where they were living. Ladonna couldn’t get the court to tell her and later we found out that they’d bought a house on the back of a golf course up in South Dakota without any of them people knowing. They did it through their lawyer, cash, a big two and a half story thing up on that ridge that runs east of Vermillion. The house is all sharp angles and odd roofs. From halfway down the ridge it looks like a sailing ship parting the grass—at least that’s how it looked to me in the paper when that crazy boy was standing up there on the mast with a shotgun to his sister’s head.

——

I’m getting out of order. If you’re going to hear what Ladonna said in court that day, you have to hear the order there was to it—how she and that boy played it out.

First Ladonna went on TV.

No, wait. First Leanne didn’t come home, then Ladonna went on TV. But, really, before that was Ladonna kicking her husband out of the house and before that was her marrying the bum in the first place.

Next, that farmer found Leanne’s clothes and that rag with saliva and semen on Leanne’s picture was in the paper again. Then Ladonna’s was in the paper. Then Ladonna made the five-thirty news once more.

Then the police arrested that boy. You heard about that picture in the paper. At the arraignment, his hair was dyed green. And at the hearing to bump him up to adult court it was dyed blue. At the hearing to determine if a psychiatric evaluation was needed it was dyed yellowy-orange again. You can guess how that decision went. Four months later just before he was declared competent, a big article all about him appeared in the paper. This time his hair was dyed bright pink (they ran a full color front page picture) and he told why. He was part of the Rainbow Coalition and he was being discriminated against, just like them, not because of anything he did but because of what he was and what he looked like. Ladonna was furious—every morning since Leanne’s birthday she’d been going to the school and laying a yellow American Girl rose beneath the flagpole and no one had noticed that! Chareese said that the next day half the school came with their hair dyed some crazy color just to show sympathy for him.

So Ladonna complained and the local news came out a week later and took a picture of Ladonna and a bunch of Leanne’s friends praying at the pole.

Then that Chicago columnist who’s always doing these kinds of stories picked up the story. He must have called that boy’s family because he never called Ladonna or me or any of the brothers or her mother. The column started with “The slow jaws of the judicial system have chewed up another childhood” and he wrote about how this young boy had been sitting in jail for seven months and how the police never found a body and how there never was a search warrant and how any evidence the police had was clearly from entrapment. Most of all he stressed how there was no body. He must have phoned that boy in the jail because he had a quote: “I just wish that girl would come home and let me out of this hell.”

Then came the hearing when he was released on bond.

After that was when Ladonna started handing out pamphlets and giving her talks.

Maybe Vinnie gave Ladonna her next idea. Maybe she got it from reading that newspaper column. I don’t know, maybe it was the way the county prosecutor kept pushing for it. Ladonna got her priest to do a funeral, a big memorial service where she wore black and the brothers read eulogies and the casket had yellow roses and a ribbon saying “Beloved Daughter” and she even put that empty box in the cemetery plot that her and her ex had bought back when things were going well together. There was a tombstone with Leanne’s name and dates and a cherub and the words “God Loves His Little Angels” on one half and room for Ladonna on the other. It still gives me the shivers, the way the priest said, “We labor in vain when we look to this earth for answers.”

For a moment it made me think, maybe, finally, Ladonna would put Leanne to rest. But then I’m not Catholic. I married into the family. Her mother snipped out the photo of Ladonna and the gravestone and hung it on her refrigerator next to a St. Jude Novena from the very same page. She said it was a good sign.

One thing that never was put to rest was the rumors. They kept coming up about Leanne and they kept coming up about that boy. During the months and months of hearings, the judge had to sort out and that court reporter had to type in what could and couldn’t be admissible, what was hearsay and what wasn’t, what the law would allow as evidence and what it wouldn’t.

Like the knife. It belonged to the boy. The police found it in his car.

Like the hair. It belonged to Leanne. The police found that in his car too.

And mud from Belknap Creek. It seemed to be everywhere. Even on Ladonna’s basement carpet.

Even some stuff about Ladonna started to rise to the surface.

——

I forgot to tell you about what happened after Vinnie gave his speech about the squeaky wheel getting oil. We’ll go back to there.

First thing Ladonna and Vinnie did was talk to their father and he talked to the VFW who got a whole bunch of volunteers together and for the next three week- ends we combed every inch of land up around Akron and down by the river. At that first search, Ladonna was on the news in fancy hiking boots and a red wool jacket. By the second weekend there were close to three hundred people out looking for some trace of Leannie.

The TV station sent a camera crew on location and they took shots of Ladonna standing at the edge of the ditch. The map calls it Belknap Creek. The reporters interviewed the farmer and took shots of some tire tracks the police had missed and the searchers had found. Ladonna came off a little hysterical, calling the police names and demanding that the FBI be called in. Some people, including my mother, thought she was having a nervous breakdown. But this was before the support group and the PTA talks and her spot on Oprah with other mothers of teenage daughters who were victims of date rape. (She was told that she should tell all the details—about the knife with a notch for every girl he’d ever done it with, about the rag, the hair samples from his car, the yellow clay on his floor mats and on Leanne’s shoes, the pornographic pictures and drawings of swastikas the police found between his mattress and box spring, the tattoo, especially about his lawyers’ legal maneuverings and the ten months of delay in setting a trial date and how he was free on the streets, how he even got to go to his senior prom. But Ladonna was not to mention that boy by name. Oprah did not want to get sued.)

So, about that knife.

Forget about the knife and the notches. I think Ladonna made that up.

It was somewhere back in time there, between his pink hair and Ladonna’s decision to network; it was then that the boy came to court with the tattoo. At first, from a distance it looked to be a black smudge—I thought of Ladonna, the mark she wore on Ash Wednesday. The judge ruled against some evidence: what our geologist found in that creek bed; what the detectives had taken from that boy’s house and car before they got a search warrant and what they took after the search warrant. I don’t remember exactly.

After the deciding, I slipped out, caught up with the boy at the elevator and squeezed in like I was family. He was standing at the back, head down, and as I shifted around to get a better look, the mother shuddered. I don’t think she knew me. But I saw her shudder. I know how bad I feel when one of my girls does something that disappoints me. Chareese got her tongue pierced last Friday.

The mom stood there, eyes closed, lips tight, as her husband pushed the button. Her head tipped back against the burnished metal wall. You could see things in her face you couldn’t see from across the courtroom. What words had come from her lips when she first saw it? What fears flipped through her heart? When that boy first walked into her kitchen with his new tattoo—what if he’d caught her doing dishes, her hands all soapy and warm, looking out over that broad flat plain below their house (they were living outside Vermillion by this time), what if she’d been looking out over that old riverbed where the Missouri used to roll, what if she’d been thinking back, back to a time before the trial, before he’d been born, before she’d been married, before quarter-sections, pioneers, explorers, Indians, thinking back to wetlands and oxbows, terns and plovers, back to a place and time when the river flowed smooth wherever it wanted, what if she’d been standing there, escaping to then, when that boy came in? I know kids. I can guess what he did. He stood there in her kitchen, anticipating the moment when his mother would turn and first see that mark on his forehead. I’m a mother. I know. At that point, what could she say, what could she say? I feel so sorry for her, of everyone, most sorry for her.

From across the courtroom it looked like a tiny black smudge. But up close—when the elevator bumped against the bottom floor, when I pushed a little ahead, then glanced back over my shoulder—up close the spot took shape. Three tiny circles, all together no bigger than a nickel, three tiny circles with black tails flipping up. A tiny 666.

Chareese said it doesn’t mean anything, those were her words, “Mom, it doesn’t mean anything.” (These kids, these well-boned, white, strong children, heirs to the whole wide world, what have we hatched?) She said a couple other kids in school had done the same thing.

So do marks mean nothing, do words mean nothing? All the words that that court reporter did or did not type—do they mean nothing? It’s so easy to lose one’s place. Her hands so white, her fingers so curved, her calm forever forward-looking face, her tune a soft and rhythmic one-tone tapping. Why should I doubt her efficiency? Why look for something that’s not there? My mother says let it go. And Ladonna, she’s recovering.

——

After that boy came in with the 666 tattoo, the papers and people started all up again. Channel Nine ran a week long investigative report on “Kids and Cults: Making Siouxland Safe.” After that, that’s when Ladonna went on Oprah and after that was when his lawyers moved for a change of venue. That’s when that boy came on TV and gave his own press conference: “This is a symbol,” for one moment he lifted his hands from between his thighs, one finger touched the spot between his eyebrows; you could see the camera lights flashing, “a symbol of what you people have done to me. Madame Defarge has her needles. Kurtz, a dark heart. Hester has her A—” (that’s from Scarlet Letter, Chareese told me that he was really smart) “Marvel’s mutants wear Xs. Now I have my mark. You’re the ones, you’re the ones who have branded me.”

You see! He understood that marks have meaning!

Things quieted down after that. Maybe the courts put a clamp on the news people. Maybe it was self-imposed by some editor or conscientious station manager. Ladonna was a little distracted, busy planning for a big rally where moms from all over Iowa were going to march on the State Capitol and make demands for “safe streets, safe lives, safe children.” A PTA in Norfolk was after her to come and lead a three-day seminar. And of course, there was the Little Leannie Save the Children Foundation to watch over. The secretary she’d hired was having trouble with the new computer system, trouble keeping up with all the contributions. Ladonna, as CEO, had given herself a raise. Officially, the judge said he needed time to deliberate on that boy’s motion. I suspect he already knew that words and names and places disappear faster from memory than they do from newsprint.

Suddenly, the last Friday in July, that boy’s lawyers, all three of them, showed up in court ready to cooperate. They agreed to allow the DNA, to accept the findings of our geologist, to allow the hair samples from his car as evidence. They gave up the diary.

The next morning Vinnie showed up in my kitchen. He’d read the court proceedings in the Omaha Herald and called in sick to work.

“How can your lawyer be so stupid!” He threw his hands against the table. “How can you be so stupid!” He looked at Ladonna and me as if we controlled what came up out of that basement. “Don’t you know what’s in that diary?”

It seems he knew and the boy’s lawyers knew, and the guys in the evidence room knew, probably the whole police force had read it—they all knew what was in there.

Ladonna frowned. She didn’t like to be told anything.

“It seems that this kid and Leanne and a couple of their friends—they were into this secret game.”

“I don’t believe it.” Ladonna lifted her chin and turned her head toward the window. When she saw Vinnie wasn’t going to say anymore, she turned back. “What kind of game?”

Vinnie sat quiet.

“What kind of game?”

“Kinky stuff. Sex. Drugs. Bondage. Stuff I don’t like to talk about, stuff you don’t want to hear about.” Then Vinnie shut up.

It wasn’t like him not to talk so I knew it was bad and suddenly I knew why in court the day before, when that boy’s lawyer had said they would allow the diary as evidence, that’s why that boy had turned in his chair and stared straight at Ladonna. She was looking around the room, whispering to the other mothers, proud that she’d finally won something for Leannie. She didn’t see it, but as that boy turned back, I saw it there, for just a moment, the slightest smile, a smirk. He knew he’d drawn the lucky number.

 

“I don’t believe it,” Ladonna said that day in the kitchen. “I know my Leannie.” She must have sometime, somehow, heard something about their games, but she never let on to me that she knew. I know Vinnie never said another word about it to her. From what the detective told Vinnie and Vinnie told my Tony and Tony told me, Leanne’s nickname was the Sorceress. That’s the name the boy used for her in the diary, and the detective said they found other boys, witnesses, friends of his, who were finally willing to testify publicly about what they did and that she was the one they did it with. The boy had called himself the Lord of the Manor and kept careful records about potions and elixirs and virgin knots and the size of men’s swords, where they sheathed them and when—it was an elaborate system of names—but it all came down to the size and tightness of body parts and sex and drugs and stuff you don’t want to hear about. He even wrote about how they would use her “castle” whenever the “Dragon Queen” was spending the night in the cave of the “fat dwarf.”

I knew Ladonna had been, at the time, seeing a heavyset salesman from an office supply store. Way back before this started, over coffee, as I finished the breakfast dishes or we decorated cookies for my little one’s girl scouts, she’d tell me how they’d gone dancing or out to Theo’s for a steak, or up to the Plaza Bowl. Were they sleeping together? I didn’t ask. She didn’t say. It was just like Vinnie not to say out loud what was in the diary. There are words that stay out of the light, out of our family, out of our life, out of my kitchen. See how efficient we can be?

Of course, it came out in the papers and on TV—not the graphic details but close enough. And when one of that boy’s friends, the fat-jawed wrestler, was finally up on the stand (hearings had been held for all those boys on whether to make them accessories or give them immunity) he told about their game, and the money they played with, and how Leanne had been talking Minneapolis. And when the prosecutor kept badgering him about it and then kept badgering him more, the boy blurted out, “It weren’t no different than what her old lady was doing upstairs with her fat boyfriend.”

Even that got typed into the public record, even though the prosecutor com- plained and the judge raised his eyebrows. You see how quickly her fingers could fly, typing in the notes that played, copying down word by word by word the things that escaped? (Those boys got immunity, every one of them; they all swore, “It was a game, for Christ’s sake, just a game.”)

And then there was me who said I always knew Leanne to be a good girl (what else could I say?) and smart. She was a real smart girl. By the time that day was over what it came down to was that that blue-haired boy had won two in a row.

Ladonna, she said she didn’t want to go back into that courtroom, but I told her she had to, for Leanne’s sake. Maybe that was my mistake. But there were so many rumors about Leanne and Ladonna and our family. Chareese came home from school crying in the middle of the day and said she wouldn’t go back.

Then the boy’s lawyers made their next move. They called on the judge to declare a mistrial. What the boy’s friends said Leanne said, that was all hearsay and should never have been admitted as evidence. It took the judge another week to decide.

You have to hear this next part very carefully—words matter.

That next court date Ladonna wore a red suit, one I hadn’t seen before, and black pumps. Since she’d lost weight and started jogging, there were a lot of clothes I hadn’t seen before. She sat in her usual spot—the first row behind the prosecutor’s desk. I sat on one side of her. Her mom sat on the other. Ladonna had contacted mothers on the We Are One Website and a whole bunch of them were all there with her. The judge sat, round-faced, up above us. The court re- porter sat below him, listening intently, typing, typing, typing, typing in that boy’s side, typing in Leanne’s side.

I’m sure that boy was hoping for a dismissal. (Don’t we all want to slough off the old skin and start as someplace new?) When the judge said no, that the trial would continue, you could see the boy’s shoulders slump. He dug his hands in tighter down between his thighs and he sort of collapsed. The judge asked him to stand. One of his lawyers, the bald one who always wore a bright hankie in his breast pocket, helped him to his feet. I could see the boy’s face. His eyes were coming clear as if he was finally realizing that this was no game.

The judge brought his gavel down hard. The boy’s head reared back, his hands came up, and he yelled, “The body, where’s the body? You don’t have the damn—” His lawyer pulled him down. Every eye was fixed on him.

Ladonna. That’s when Ladonna claimed back the spotlight and rose from her seat.

“Stop it.” Her voice made the boy’s face freeze and the reporter’s fingers stop playing. “Stop killing me, stop it,” she yelled back at him, “why don’t you go kill somebody else!”

Tell me those words don’t mean much to you, tell me that. It would make my life so much easier.

——

Someday, next week, or the next, I’m going down to the basement of the Wood- bury County Courthouse to prove what I suspect is true—the court reporter stopped typing. Ladonna and her mother say I’m exaggerating, that Ladonna didn’t mean anything by it, that she didn’t know what her words could do, that the boy probably didn’t pay attention to them anyway. My mom says, “Of course she stopped typing—she was as shocked as the rest of us.” Tony says that court reporters have to stop, that the only thing allowed in public records are the official proceedings. I say, couldn’t she hear? Words, words, words, what good are a million words if you leave out the right ones. What made her fingers freeze? I want it official. I want some mark of how Ladonna played it out. I expect Justice to be blind, but not deaf, not paralyzed.

Two weeks after Ladonna’s outburst, Chareese came busting into the kitchen after school and rushed for the TV on the counter. All three stations had camera crews out at his house. He’d already killed his brother in an upstairs bedroom and for the past three hours, he’d been sitting on the peak of his house, holding a double-barreled shotgun to his sister’s head. You could see the lights of all the patrol cars flashing and hear the voice of his mother calling to him. You could see a uniformed policeman climb out a second story window and edge along the roof towards him. The boy looked right down into the camera, into my kitchen, and mouthed something into the bright white afternoon air. Then he blew off his sister’s head and then his own quick as a wink just like that. They didn’t replay that last part on TV but I watched what was before it two more times and watched it again on the evening news and then again at ten. I saw his lips move.

I read his final testimony. I knew who he was talking to when he said it, “Are you happy? Are you happy now?”

——

I wonder how her fingers feel at night, how much her ears can hear when it’s dark. I know the condo where she lives. No, I didn’t follow her home. It’s a matter of public record. But I drive by some nights. How do her fingers feel when she sleeps: tired? strained? aching? Do they need a bit of a rest? Do tiny muscle spasms ripple through as she records the words her dreams long for?

And Ladonna? Oh Ladonna, she still stops by my house for morning coffee, maybe not as much as she used to, but she still comes by. She’s got a hairdo like they show in the fashion magazines. She’s got her new size 6 clothes. She’s got her three year appointment to the governor’s commission on crime and violence. Sometime next week or the next I’m going to the basement of the courthouse. My mom, she says to let it go, turn it over to God and time, that it’s over. Leanne’s gone. The boy’s dead. Two innocent children have been blown away. Tony doubts they’ll let me down there. Ladonna—she’s happy with what she’s become. And me, what has become of me? You can hear, can’t you?

RODGE WAS NOT a hurrying kind of guy, but he moved quickly when the front doorbell kept ringing like an alarm.

Cecile hurried in. “I had to hit the bell with my elbow. My God.”

Rodge got the box of Band-Aids and soon was covering the blisters at the base of his wife’s thumbs, along her fingers, over her palms.

“Ow,” she said and then laughed to reassure him. “The staple gun tried to kill me.”

“You need to hire an assistant.” “It’s only one room.”

“If you can’t get help, you should quit the whole idea,” he said. She laughed at him.

“Look at your hands.” “They will heal.”

“I mean it.” He worked for a hospital in accounts receivables and his world was full of people who ended up in the ER, sometimes dying because of preventable accidents. “I’m telling you to stop. I insist.”

“No.”

The Jordan house—the Jordan room, and a small room at that—was her first job. She didn’t have enough money to hire an assistant, not after living off her savings while she learned the interior decorating business.

It was not lost on him that as soon as their wedding was over, Cecile had begun redecorating him. But he’d been flattered, really. His coworkers noticed him all of a sudden. And Cecile’s concern for the right cut and collars of his shirts— well, it had been fun to get so much attention. But now she was all about the Jordans. The way the Jordans lived. How everything about the Jordans was just right.

“And when they don’t pay you? How will you like the Jordans then?”

“They gave me a deposit,” she said, her voice rising. “Of course they’ll pay the rest.”

That night, he couldn’t get near her with her hands swollen and balanced over her crotch like a fence. He went out to the living room and sat alone in front of the TV, cracking open a beer and staring at a sports channel. This had been his life before meeting Cecile. He didn’t want it back.

***

Cecile Collette had been Pat Graves before she decided to quit her office management job and follow her passion, a financially dangerous move. “It’s now or never,” she told her coworkers who’d gently implied she was out of her mind. She was forty-nine. This was in Pittsburgh. She moved to Cleveland. It was only two hours west, but it was somewhere else. She wanted nothing around her to lull her back to old routines. Everything would be new, including her name.

Since she was changing her life, she decided to dip her toe—might the ice have finally melted?—into the waters of love. She joined online dating sites, one of which coughed up Roger “Rodge” Debrett, only two years her junior, who pro- fessed to liking candlelight and long walks in the rain—bogus she was sure—but whose mint green shirt with dark-green stitching, epaulets, and white buttons cried out to her for rescue.

They met for coffee. He talked a lot about himself, but she ignored his sales pitch. Rather, she was assessing his comb-over, the fit of his jacket, the possibility he’d inflated his value. And had there been damage in his early years? Yes, she thought, I could do something with him.

***

Naked and spread-eagled, she listened, shocked, to her loud and uncontrollable giggling—she giggled?

Rodge hopped in circles, his lowering hard-on bobbing up and down, his tie over

his hair like a headband while he cried, “Hoo ah! Hoo ah! Hoo ah!”

It was during their honeymoon—two nights at the Renaissance-Marriott with a pair of tickets to a Browns game and dinner at Johnny’s—that he noticed how she’d touch every fabric she came close to. It made him think of Braille.

“Isn’t it all just cotton?” he’d joked, listening to her identify what the bedspread was, what the thread count was, what the pillows were expected to do. A cold look came into her eye, and he hurriedly backtracked and let her know he was actually “pretty bowled over.” Hell, she had to realize, he told her, “I don’t know any of that stuff.”

Her eyes remained steady. “I don’t want you to know it,” she said. “It’s only important that I know it. It’s what I do.”

“Well,” he smiled a certain smile, “as long as it’s not all you do.”

***

In the morning, Cecile let herself into the Jordan house, a rambling clapboard in Cleveland Heights, big as far as she was concerned, but lacking the reach and manicured lawns of wealthier neighborhoods. Inside was a mix of valuable and worthless pieces and, like place-savers, possessions of the two children who were off at college. There were also toys for the toddler, a late baby, Poppy.

Hallie Jordan told Cecile she’d called her after seeing her ad in the church bulletin. Which church Hallie meant would remain a mystery; Cecile had joined three. Possible clients would connect Cecile Collette Designs with the fellow parishioner seen in a (Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Catholic) pew. She had also joined the Rotary, the Mandel Community Center, the Chamber of Commerce, and two book groups. All this in addition to her website and a blog.

And only the Jordan room to show for it. Cecile learned that the problem with following a passion late in life was muscling onto the turf of people who’d fol- lowed their passion a whole lot earlier. She was gently but unequivocally rejected for hire in their shops. Her competition was not only dug in but fiercely defensive. She was an unattended nova in a very small heaven.

“Cecile,” Hallie cried as she came into the kitchen. She was carrying Poppy. The little girl had Down syndrome, and her wide face held a questioning look as she turned to Cecile.

“Hi, you two.”

“No, what happened to your hands?”

“Nothing. They’re fine. Comes with the territory. Hello, Poppy. Hello.” The child tucked her head into her mother’s neck.

Turning to find her purse and car keys, Hallie said, “I may not be back before you leave. Help yourself to coffee, okay?”

When they’d gone, Cecile felt that icy freedom of being alone in someone else’s house. Quietly, almost on tiptoe, she walked through the first floor. Framed photos covered the walls of the hallway. Smiling Jordans. The two older kids holding Poppy between them like a prize. Troy Jordan in a summer chair, mugging in Ray-Bans. The fact that no one was breathing or speaking in the pictures encouraged her to idealize their lives. She studied the progress of the older two, from baby photos through school years and into young adulthood, taking them into her heart until she might have given birth to them herself. She returned to her work in a confusion of moods: inspired, sad, motherly, joyful, even elegiac, having lived through a generation of a family in a concentrated twenty minutes.

The problem she’d been solving for Hallie was a room off the kitchen. It was too big and too open to be made into a pantry, and the lack of windows made it difficult for any other use. Cecile drew up a picture of the room as a breakfast nook inside a tent, pleated fabric covering the ceiling and walls, light fixtures that were simple and strategically set.

Hallie hadn’t been sure of hiring her until she’d seen the drawing. “You can do this?”

Outlining the room in furring strips had been easy. Getting the pleating around the central point of the ceiling had gone well. Tall, she was also strong and not afraid of ladders. But using the staple gun became an issue. By the time she attached the fabric along the top of the walls, she could barely move her hands. A hammer and tacks worked until she smashed a fingernail.

She decided to spend the morning trimming and taping the fabric edges. After methodically working around the little room, she found her fingertips drying out and splitting. Moisturizer would help, but it might stain the fabric. In her tool bag she had a box of disposable latex gloves. She put on a pair and continued.

That night, with her hands throbbing anew, she began to think she hadn’t asked enough for the job. She’d been afraid to lose the business if she asked for more money. Wasn’t an initial low price better? But the room was turning out amazing.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Sorry. Nothing’s wrong, Rodge. Go back to sleep.”

She wanted to kill herself for not asking enough money. There were guidelines. Why hadn’t she followed them? Well, she hadn’t, and that was that. What she needed were more clients, which raised another question. What was keeping her from making Hallie her friend? They were about the same age. Going over the short conversations they’d had, it seemed as if Hallie was offering friendship. But that could be courtesy. A presumption on Cecile’s part could be damning for future business. But if they became friends, Cecile could connect to Hallie’s other friends and then the friends of those friends.

“Quit sighing.” “Sorry.”

“What’s the matter?” “Nothing.”

“How about we do it?” “What? Oh. My hands.” “Are we ever going to do it?” “Of course, but my—”

“We can do it without using your hands.” “Rodge, it’s pretty late.”

“Don’t move. Okay? I’ll do everything.” “But I need you to get me turned on first.” “I know. That’s what I’m doing.”

“It’s not really—Rodge.” “Keep your hands in the air.” “It’s not—”

“What!” he yelled. “It’s not what? There’s always something that—this started with the Jordans. You have to get away from that snob crowd. It’s them!” She threw back the covers and hurried out to the living room.

Rodge followed, yelling. “The damn Jordans, damn, rich Jordans. You have to stop this stupid stuff, Cecile.”

Cecile now began seeing Rodge as she would a large, unmovable cabinet that drew the eye from the rest of an otherwise beautiful room.

He yelled.

She shoved him toward the front door. He yelled louder.

“I need my sleep,” she screamed, “so I can do a good job for the Jordans. It’ll get me more work.”

***

It was the following day when the trouble started. After Hallie settled Poppy in for an afternoon nap, she saw Troy getting out of his car. His face looked dam- aged. “How come you’re home?”

“Can you come inside?” he asked and let her lead the way into the house. “Is that woman here?”

“No. She’s picking up a light fixture. She’ll be back.” “Christ.”

He went into the living room and sat down, waiting until she sat across from him. “First thing this morning, because we’re getting backed up, I call the outfit making the new machine.”

“For the eco bags.”

“Yep. I say, ‘Hello. It’s Troy Jordan. I’m checking on the order.’ And he says,

‘What order?’”

“He lost your order?”

“There was no order. He never got an order. No deposit, no nothing.” “So you reordered?”

“With what? There’s no money. That shit took the loan money. My partner.”

She stared at him, picturing his partner’s friendly, undistinguished face. “He took it where?”

“He stole it. He’d been out for a week, so this morning, I call up the machine people. ‘How’s it hangin?’ I find out nothing’s hanging. So I start checking. He cashed out our line of credit. I don’t know where he went. He’d put in for vacation. I thought he was in Wyoming.”

“Wait. He took the money for himself ?”

“I was with the lawyers for two hours before I had to get out of there. That shit left with over three million dollars, and I have to pay it all back, which I can’t, and no machine, no way to fill the new orders. No nothing. We’ve been backed up with shipments and getting the place up to speed for the new stuff.”

“There must be papers. Contracts.”

“Oh there were, yeah. I signed all sorts of papers. They were dummy papers. Nothing was real. I called in the lawyers. They called the prosecutor and the FBI. Jesus Christ. Everything.”

“God.”

“I trusted him.” “Was he on drugs?” “I don’t know.”

“Or gambling.” “I don’t know.”

“What about insurance? Is there insurance?”

“Nothing that stops the bank from taking the business. They’ll take everything. Or they’ll give me another loan, and I’m not sure I can manage two of them.”

“He’ll be found. You can’t disappear anymore.”

“I’ll never see that money though. And I may be sued. I may be indicted. I

don’t know what legal costs I’m looking at. The payroll still has to get out. This morning I thought that machine we ordered, thought we ordered—I was worried about the ventilation and the electrical codes—and this son of a bitch—”

“Legal costs? They can’t indict you.”

“You know what’s funny? He knew just when we had the most cash available to cover everything. I was at the table making plans with this shit, and all the time, he’s waiting for everything to ripen.”

Hallie was silent, staring at Troy, who now flung himself up and against the back of the chair as though the thing had goosed him. She only stared at him for something to focus her eyes on while this news shifted and butted inside her head. She began thinking very quickly.

The cars, she could sell one of the cars and a lot of the furniture, most of it, and sell the house, the contents of their life suddenly flying off into the blue.

It came to her that she would never want to eat anything ever again. What’ll we do? seemed a question both inadequate and redundant to the moment. After a long time—sunlight slipping from the front of the house to the back, the middle of the day leaving them with the beginning of an afternoon—the news was no longer something that happened to other people. Never to them.

He said, “We tell the kids the rest of college is their dime. They’ll be all right.” Seeing her face, he said, “They will be.”

“I know.”

“I wish I was younger. For what’s coming. I’m thinking of driving off a bridge.” “Don’t drive off a bridge.”

“Okay.”

Poppy. Security for Poppy. Now something violent squeezed her heart. She felt herself trembling.

He said, “Off a cliff ?” “No.”

“I think I’m serious.” “Please.”

A slow creaking noise came to them. Cecile was letting herself in through the back door. There followed a long struggling sound as though she might be burdened with a large package. The noise became a scrabbling. Then the quick suction of her shoes—was she trying to be quiet? The kitchen might have been the aim of an inept burglar. Had someone else decided to rob them? One thief wasn’t enough? They got two?

Catching her husband’s eye, Hallie’s shoulders began to shake. Troy threw up his hands. He began shaking, too, his eyes shut, his mouth opened wide, gasping back laughter. After a short time, hysteria played out only to return when they heard Cecile call out to them from the kitchen, “I’m here?”

“Okay,” Hallie managed to answer before leaning sideways against the sofa arm, her eyes squeezed shut, shaking with strangled laughter. Grief seized up inside her. “Oh,” she said finally, sniffing, sighing. Pointing toward the kitchen, she whispered, “That room might make it easier to sell the house, the—decor?” She was gripped again in hysteria, tears down her face and her breathing hiccupping.

***

That evening when Rodge came home from work, Cecile was soaking her hands in Epsom salts. He found the ibuprofen and fed two pills into her mouth and held a glass of water gently against her lower lip so she could swallow them.

“He was home in the afternoon,” Cecile told Rodge. “Troy. I heard them laughing in the living room. I was hanging the chandelier. It’s not a real chandelier. It’s plain. But it was just big enough and just heavy enough. Thought I’d fall off the ladder. And don’t look at me like that. I can hang lights. It was just . . . They were laughing. You know how people make those wheezing, sucking sounds like they’re trying to be quiet, but they can’t stop laughing?” She felt close to tears, hurt by the suspicion they’d been laughing at her.

What she didn’t tell Rodge was what followed the laughing. There was a long moment of silence, and then Cecile realized they’d moved to the living room floor and were having sex, the noise from them loud and thumping, someone’s voice yowling, the other voice grunting. It felt like the whole house was in on it. She hurriedly finished and ran out before they reached the end. On the way home, she nearly had an orgasm at a red light, so aroused was she by Troy and how she imagined he was going at it in the next room. That she’d overheard them infuriated her. She couldn’t recall instructions on how to deal with this sort of thing in her professional guidelines.

***

The atmosphere in the Jordan house that evening affected Poppy, who, sensing something wrong, fussed and was unhappy. Both parents gave themselves over to her, distracting themselves with her care. Long after the little girl went to sleep, Hallie and Troy were still knocking about the first floor, tidying up as though cleanliness might save them. Unable to stand being awake any longer they finally went to bed.

Anger came in waves for Hallie. She worried about Poppy. The older kids would take care of their sister as everyone aged, as she and Troy passed on, but that wasn’t what flayed at her. It was her child’s immutable innocence. Like light, this moving, diapered light. Hallie responded with such a need to protect her that a threat of any kind sent her soul raging against the universe, screaming at it from inside her head.

Troy was awake. She thought he might be crying. Like a lover bereft. She remembered him before the theft, anticipating his company’s future, a new machine for the newly designed bags, ecologically sound, his war against plastic. For months, so much excitement and wonder. Like a teenager with a first love. He was heartbroken.

What would they do?

Her job was suddenly important. Teaching remedial math had flattered her sense of civic spirit, the extra cash allowing her to hire someone to fix that worthless sort of room off the kitchen. She’d teach more classes. But that would leave her less time for Poppy. She’d need more time for the child now that she couldn’t pay for Poppy’s team. Only she’d have to work more hours—

They’d sell the place, of course. Pay off the mortgage. Maybe sell it themselves to save on the agent’s fee. Yes. They’d do that. They’d have everyone they knew over, a goodbye party and—Does anyone know anyone looking to buy a house? A sell-the-house party. Her spirits rose at the idea of everyone coming inside to them, one last time. Soon, she thought, before it’s all over.

***

The following morning, Cecile let herself into the Jordan house. She was wearing her best clothes, expecting a group of people to see the tented room reveal. Instead, she was alone. She waited. She took photographs. When she felt she’d captured every angle, she waited some more. Hallie finally came downstairs and into the kitchen, a mean, bitter expression on her face. Poppy was walking with her, holding her hand.

Cecile said, “Ready when you are!”

Hallie let the little girl go in first and followed. “Oh. Very nice. Yeah.” She laughed. “My God. It’s actually magnificent.” She leaned against the doorway. “Oh my God,” she said as though completely defeated. “I’m going to have to. I knew I would.” Cecile was amazed at the woman’s response. Poppy turned and toddled out of the room. Hallie followed the girl. “Poppy. Come with Mommy.”

And wouldn’t you know, Cecile thought, catching some errant threads. At eye level beside the doorjamb. She used her thumbnail to tuck them under the fabric. She searched around in case there were more. Sure enough, at the angle

where the baseboard met the molding. On her knees doing a quick fix, she heard a car move along the driveway. She wondered if Troy had come home again in the middle of the day. Back on her feet, her face close to the edge surrounding the door, she gave it a last going over.

“Honestly,” she laughed, thinking Hallie was still close. “Two tiny threads. There’s always something, isn’t there.”

No response came. She went out to the kitchen. Hallie and Poppy had disappeared. She called out. No one answered.

Hallie’s number was on her cell, and when she tried it, she heard it ringing on the second floor. Calling Hallie’s name again, she walked through the house. She found the door that led to the basement and hollered down. Nothing.

Angry now, she decided to stay until someone appeared. All day if she had to. The final bill was in an envelope in her purse. She went into the living room and sat where she could see most of the first floor. No one would get by her.

After about twenty minutes, she heard a car again. It was Hallie driving up with Poppy.

“God,” Hallie said on her way in. “I can’t get my head around anything.” Settling the child in her left arm to free her right hand, she began pulling cash from her purse. The money, with the distinctive blue line announcing these were hundred dollar bills, was folded and jammed into Cecile’s hand. “Grab it while it’s going,” she said, her eyes tearing. “No more where that came from.”

Cecile felt it would be bad form to count it out. She closed her bandaged fingers around all the cash. It had an unanticipated feel. She had expected a check.

Hallie went into the tented room with Poppy. Her voice harsh, she told Cecile, “I was right. It does make the rest of the house look like crap.” “I could do the living room if—”

“No, no. God no. We’re selling the place.” “What?”

“I’m having everyone over for a party. The last stand at the Jordans’. We need to unload it, like yesterday.” She stared at the walls and ceiling of the room, and her face began to soften. “Yeah. I’ll miss this. It’s so beautiful. Beautiful.”

Cecile felt her breath getting shallow. New owners might not like a tented room. What if they tore it out? “Why?”

“So we can start over. You should buy it. Do you want it? The roof has to be replaced, and the furnace gets wonky.”

Unsure of what to say—a simple no seemed rude—Cecile asked, “How much do you want for it?”

“Whatever. As much as we can get.” She put her hand over the back of Poppy’s hair, stroking it. “And we’ll have a big party. This was a good house. We’re having a big send-off. Goodbye house. We have a lot of friends. Someone might know someone. Otherwise, I call a realtor. Whatever.”

Cecile said carefully, “Can I help you set up? For the party? I can do up a table so it’s—”

“No! This is crackers and a bowl of punch. They won’t be coming for the food.” “I won’t charge. I mean, I’ll just do it for free, like an ad for myself.”

“Oh.” Hallie said. She seemed to bring Cecile into focus. “Okay. If you want to.” Taking another look at the room, she said, “You should come to the party. Right? You have to be here. People will ask how you did this. I couldn’t tell them. Come, okay?”

***

It was after five, and Rodge made himself a drink.

“I’m so late,” Cecile cried as she hurried in. The amount of worry in her voice alarmed him. “I don’t want to be early to this thing, but I don’t want to be too late either.”

“Are these clowns some kind of royalty?” “You aren’t drinking are you!”

“No.”

“Where’s your good jacket?”

The way she was fluttering all over made him want to catch her as though she were a huge bird let loose in the place. She yelped when he got his hands on her.

When he began roving down her breasts, she yelped louder and hurried away. The bathroom door was slammed in his face. He heard the shower running. Furious, he had another drink.

And another quick one before he took his own shower and, later, because it was really annoying him the idea of her excitement about the rich people, a very short one before letting Cecile help him into the new jacket she’d bought him. His old jackets no longer buttoned across the front. When he thought she wasn’t looking, he threw back one more before they left. “Honey,” she said in a strong voice. “You don’t need that.”

As he drove, she held on to the handle above her window.

“Where is this place,” he asked in a voice that told her the place couldn’t be anywhere good.

“You’ll like them.” He said nothing.

“And I have to tell you, my God, she wasn’t kidding about cheap food,” Cecile laughed. He recognized her bright and cheery come-on-Rodge voice. “Wait’ll you see. Saltines. A block of cheddar. And this punch bowl. I helped her get this silver monstrosity out of the attic. A couple of cans of fruit juice and a gallon of cheap gin. Otherwise there’s a pitcher of tap water. I’m still laughing. It’s that she just didn’t care. She thought the whole thing a big hoot. But I arranged it so it really looks, just, oh my God. And all I did was take some leaves from a catalpa tree I found near the back of the garage and some sprigs of euonymus. I think she appreciated what I did. The table looked incredible. It’s good to be friends with people. The punch bowl belonged to her great grandmother. It took me over an hour to polish it. And right next to it, she sticks this tower of plastic party cups. I’m serious. Those little—”

“All right.”

“All right, what?” She waited. He was silent.

“Rodge, just be yourself. They’ll love you. Just the way you are is fine.” His hands tightened on the steering wheel.

They had to drive three blocks beyond the address to find a parking spot.

At the front door, he sucked his gut in hard. Affecting a very formal tone, he said, “Now. My dear.” He held the door open. “After you.”

Gently, she said, “You might stick to water.” A lot of  noise. There was a crowd of people. “Everyone!” Rodge said in a loud greeting, his hand up. The people closest turned, smiled, made room.

She went into the dining room and almost hollered. The catalpa leaves and euonymus sprigs were piled up like compost behind the plate of crackers. The rest of her greens, as she looked, were on the floor. The table was covered with unmatched platters of deviled eggs, meatballs stuck with toothpicks, rolled ham slices, bite-size quiches, cookies. Of course, Hallie’s friends. But didn’t Hallie know her friends would bring food? Without thinking, Cecile moved a few sprigs and leaves, freeing them and then rearranging them. She heard, “Excuse me,” and moved to let a woman who’d entered the house behind her with a dish of crudités and dip find some space. Cecile introduced herself while stifling a little rage. Stay on course. Meet everyone. The table design was a freebie. The first people into the house would’ve noticed it, and that’s more than enough.

She turned to Rodge, wanting to encourage him to eat something, but he was pouring out two glasses of punch, and she took one from him, thanking him.

“By all means,” he said, “my dear.” “What?”

“Should I make a toast to you,” he said, smiling.

It was then that she heard Hallie’s voice from the kitchen saying, “That’s her.” She looked over. Hallie and a few women were grinning at her as she called, “Cecile!”

The woman beside Hallie yelled, “That room!” Cecile realized others had turned to see who she was. “Come see it,” Cecile said to Rodge.

As she moved to join Hallie, she realized Rodge had noticed the greeting she’d been given. And she saw from the corner of her eye that he didn’t like it. He picked up the ladle and replenished the punch in his cup, his expression full of injury.

She threaded her way through the crowd to get to the kitchen. Here she began to realize the people around the Jordans were the same hodgepodge as the furniture, unmatched and plain or beautiful or young or very old. Her spirits lifted; the mix augured a place for her too. And weren’t they all talking with such animation! The party went at a faster speed than any party she’d been to before. She stepped with buoyancy into the kitchen. To let her pass, a number of arms lifted cups containing the juice-colored gin of the punch, and this put her in mind of weddings where the bride steps under a salute of swords.

“Oh,” she laughed, ducking to get through. She felt very young. She joined Hallie and her friends at the doorway of the tented room. The lights from the hanging fixture and the sconces she’d installed had the place looking magical.

“You did this?” One of Hallie’s friends asked her. “How did you do this!”

“You like?” Cecile laughed. Yes, she happened to have some of her cards with her. “No job too small,” she sang out softly. “And the bigger the better. Anything and everything.” She remained near the decorated room while this group lauded her. Her heart filled. Were her feet even touching the floor? If I can’t make something beautiful, she thought, I don’t want to live.

Rodge supposed he should squeeze into the kitchen and see the room, but instead, he lifted his chin in a signal to Cecile. She should follow him. He was going into the living room. That’s where it seemed obvious party guests should go. They didn’t belong in the back of some kitchen.

Two couples standing near the sofa were deep in conversation. He moved near them, stumbling slightly over the rug.

One of the men said, “I don’t think four hundred. Maybe three fifty?” They were pricing the house, he realized. He moved a little closer. The talk turned to mortgages and interest rates.

Rodge said, “Hah,” and the four people turned, smiling at him. “How much would you say they’d get?” one of them asked.

“I wouldn’t buy a whole house,” Rodge said. The words felt sticky on their way out of his mouth. “I’m in . . . condo. Gotta condo. Right.”

They stared at him. Then they turned away.

He went back to the dining room. To a young woman nearby, he said, “Looks like the well might rush dry.”

She gave a cursory look into the punch bowl before moving past him.

As he drank from his refilled cup, he caught sight of Cecile in the kitchen. Her head was thrown back, her mouth wide open. Her eyes were closed. She was crying out, “Oh!” and the group around her was laughing.

He went back into the living room and kept going. He ended up in the hall- way. The hallway was covered with family photos. He went over and looked at them. Bending close, he wanted evidence of privilege. Cecile should see this, he thought. Vacation pictures of people who hadn’t paid her. That cash she’d come home with hadn’t fooled him. He believed the wads of bills had come from her own savings account to save her pride, to convince him the Jordans weren’t stringing her along. Meanwhile, she was over here polishing their silver all after- noon for nothing. He had to save her from this mess she’d gotten herself into.

He didn’t hear Troy descending the staircase.

***

Troy had put Poppy to bed. The idea of the party had seemed crazy enough to him to wrestle his feelings onto a mat, pinning them down and leaving him agog. Distraction was carrying him for the moment. That was the immediate plan.

He was halfway down the stairs when he spotted the comb-over and the enormous gut on a middle-aged stranger. The man was inspecting each of the family photos with a pronounced sneer on his face. The sneer was aimed at pictures of the older two, Troy’s son and daughter. Babies and then toddlers, his children maturing through beach trips and graduation pictures. And then Hallie with the newborn, and from Hallie’s arm, a waterfall of blankets all the way to her sandals and, peeping from the crook of her arm, a pink knitted cap. Whoever this man was, he gave a snort before draining his cup, after which he turned to walk back through the house.

In the dining room, Rodge picked up the ladle in the punch bowl. He saw Cecile spot him from the far end of the kitchen. She shot her hand up. He glared at her. Her face, and her hand flapping, told him to come and look. Her expression promised it was fun. His glare replied all this nonsense had gone on long enough. Two men beside her joined in. Now he had a trio waving him forward. They looked like cartoons. He turned his attention to the punch, scraping up the last of it.

Troy had followed him. “Who are you?”

Rodge smiled at his host. “I’m Rodge,” he told Troy and put down the ladle. He held out his hand. “Cecile’s husband.”

Troy ignored his hand. “Rodge Collette? You’re an interior decorator too?” “Debrett. I’m Rodge Debrett. And I work at University Hospital.”

“What are you, a doctor?”

“A doctor? No. Not exactly.” He pulled at the edge of his new jacket with the hand that had been refused.

“What are you!”

Rodge took his time, wanting to frame a title for himself that might flatten this son of a bitch. “You think I’m one of the docs? No, your error.” He felt his balance go off kilter and grabbed the side of the table. As he steadied himself, he had a glancing view of his wife and the women and men around her watching him with alarm. Watch this, he wanted to tell them. “Listen,” he said. “A doc? I’m the man who makes sure those doctors get paid.” His heart seized a bit just then because he believed the other man was about to hit him. He braced his feet on the floor, fists up, ready to return a punch.

Troy didn’t hit him. He turned his back on him and walked away.

Rodge hollered, “What am I? You want to know what I am?” and unzipped his fly.

Cecile saw this and so did the people around her. A few more heads turned in his direction and, with that, more and more people turning to see what had every- one suddenly paralyzed. His hand pulled out his wrinkled, fleshy coup du ciel as Cecile had happily named it. It moved, growing slightly as though sensing many people. Turning its singular eye, Who all is here in anticipation? Then the thick hand of its owner directed it down. Rodge peed into his cup, a few drops ricocheting up, the noise echoing in the sudden silence. He poured the cup into the punch bowl, a torrential noise given the hush. To the sound of his wife crying out to him, he did this a second time for good measure.

***

The house with the tented room sold quickly. The furniture was sold, too, and one of the cars. Until a plan was in place, the Jordans moved in with Hallie’s mother, who lived in a bungalow in Bay Village with her partner and her partner’s dog, a Great Pyrenees. The dog, a natural nanny, hovered over Poppy, who grabbed its fur and hugged it, followed it, fed it, and often napped against its heavy belly.

The two elder Jordan children came home to find work and cheap rooms. They were there at dinner when Hallie’s sisters and brother came over with their partners. The dining room was crowded. A chair had to be brought in from the garage. Hallie now and then put her hand on Troy’s back, rubbing the soft fabric of his shirt. It was less support for Troy—though it was that—than a warning to the others not to pile on with advice or opinions. The two grown children watched their father as though unable to recognize him. When Troy announced he’d begin again and it would be even better, it was a non sequitur. Hallie’s mother brought up the affection the dog had for Poppy. She told anecdotes about previous family dogs, devious terriers and foolish hounds, but the stories gained only a little flight before losing air.

Finally someone asked, “Who was that guy? At the party?” The room came to life. Hallie and Troy began laughing. “Oh my God, that guy!”

“I will never drink gin again in my life.” “Or punch. Nothing liquid.”

“But who was he?”

“That’s what he was saying. That guy. He was telling Troy who he was.” “I didn’t care who he was.”

“He came in with Hallie’s decorator.” “Did she bill you for it?”

“He was the only thing that made me glad to sell the house. I couldn’t eat in that dining room again.”

As they laughed, talking about the party, Hallie looked for the dog. There. Once she found the dog, she saw Poppy, her lifeline, an antidote. Seeing Poppy, she felt her breath come deep and steady. She sat back, calm now, and felt her son’s arm around her. She heard her grown daughter’s voice, “You should go into catering, Mom.”

***

“Beatrix Windsor,” Cecile, now Beatrix, introduced herself to the woman. They’d left St. Paul’s after Mass at about the same time, and the woman looked approachable. “I’m new to Grosse Pointe, to Michigan in fact.”

“Oh. Welcome. You’ll like it here.” “Just hoping to find things peaceful.” “This isn’t a business move?”

She turned for a quick look at the lake before they headed into the parking lot. “I lost my husband.” She didn’t mention how. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“I wanted to kind of start fresh. Away from memories.” “I don’t blame you.”

“And my business is portable. I’m an interior decorator.” “A decorator.”

She would not be downhearted. The divorce had left her nearly penniless, but enough remained after they sold the condo to cover an apartment rental and new business cards. She found part-time bookkeeping work, something to hold her until Beatrix Windsor Interiors began taking on clients. Her ads were already in the bulletins of her new churches. She had not been afraid to knock on doors of design shops and show photos of the tented room. One owner said she might be used, as he’d put it, for any overflow. Just that slight promise had thrilled her. To keep her spirits high, she worked evenings on her living room. Her landlady was impressed. And the landlady might know people.

There were nights she was tempted to go back to a dating sight and find another man. A fantasy of romantic moments tempted her. There were times she longed for the bustle of children, of pets and schedules and hurrying, the measure a shared life would take of her. But then she’d sketch out a solution to the problem of a room and become so engaged she’d question if love was really in her best interest. People didn’t blossom beneath her talents the way a sofa or a wall could. Burned bridges and a foolish man be damned, she could be happy. Michigan would get beautiful. She had her passion.

 

 

With permission of the University of Iowa Press ©2020 Eileen O’Leary. Used with permission.

All rights reserved.

JENNIFER SCANNED the waiting room of her dental office, dividing the patients into predators and prey. The compact man seated against the front wall, with the completely shaved head rolled back and legs spread a foot apart was definitely a predator, likely a dominant male leopard. The lithe woman on the left side, with cheesegrater cheekbones, blond bob and blood red lipstick? Also a predator, perhaps a cheetah. Jennifer paused at the teenage girl, a jumble of doughy cheeks, stringy, dark hair, and meaty thighs in tight jeans hunched over reading a book in the right corner. Prey, she determined, maybe a wildebeest. Jennifer blamed her six-year-old daughter Lily’s teacher for this involuntary reflex, which had started two weeks ago with a field trip to the zoo. Since that visit, with the gusto of a gleeful dictator, Lily demanded that her environment be filled with animals. Immersed in a fog of animal-shaped foods, animal-printed clothes, and animal documentaries, Jennifer’s vision was altered like she was wearing a pair of 3-D glasses. As she bent over patients, filling cavities and installing crowns, she envisioned herself as an Egyptian plover, seated inside a crocodile’s mouth, cleaning away the debris.

“Mr. Eckhart?” she said, addressing the leopard. “I’m ready to see you now.”

The leopard rose, creating a vacuum in the waiting room that prompted the cheetah and the wildebeest to readjust themselves, recrossing their legs and extending their arms as they watched him saunter towards the office entrance. The wildebeest lifted her book and Jennifer caught a glance of the title, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Jennifer felt a pressure in her chest, a burst of guilt, and a flash of recognition. The leopard bumped into her as he passed and she followed him, closing the door behind them.

As Jennifer drove home that evening, navigating the smooth asphalt streets and crisp curbs of the leafy suburb where she lived, her mind replayed memories with the low resolution of an old VHS tape.

“Thanks for driving me home, Mr. Slade.” Jennifer tried to control her heart rate, conscious that her left elbow was only inches away from the cute English teacher’s right hand on the stick shift between them.

“No need to be so formal, Jennifer. We’re not in class. Call me Greg. Mari- el and I are glad we found someone Michael actually likes. He looks forward to us going out now.”

“He’s a great kid,” Jennifer said, looking straight ahead, not trusting herself to make contact with Greg’s pewter grey eyes. “I enjoy babysitting him. Beats sitting at home on a Friday night.” In the enclosed space of the car, Jennifer could smell the combination of Greg’s Irish Spring soap and Old Spice cologne mixed with something else she couldn’t place.

“A pretty girl like you? I’m surprised you don’t have boys beating down your door.”

“You don’t have to be nice.”

“I’m not being nice. I’m just stating a fact,” he said, patting her plump left thigh. “Don’t sell yourself short, Jennifer.”

Parked outside her home, a large colonial among a sea of colonials of varying neutral colors, Jennifer felt the phantom heat of a hand on her thigh. She looked down and confirmed that her legs were now taut and toned, clad in fitted black trousers. As she ascended the granite steps up to the entrance of her house, accompanied by the reassuring clatter of her heels, she closed her eyes to recenter herself.

“Where’s my Lily doll?” Jennifer called, as she entered the foyer of her home. She walked towards the living room, where the “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King was playing.

“Mommy’s home!” Lily yelled, leaping up from the floor. Jennifer smiled as Lily’s slight and stretched bones embraced her. She was always grateful that Lily was an ectomorph like her father, Peter.

“Did you have a good day, sweetheart?” Jennifer asked, embracing Lily, inhaling the scent of her apple shampoo.

“Yes, I drew a picture of an elephant. Daddy put it on the fridge.”

“Well, I can’t wait to see it,” Jennifer said, pausing the video. “Go wash your hands and we’ll have dinner soon, okay?”

“I thought I heard you,” Peter said, entering from the kitchen, the lines of his pinstripe suit emphasizing his height. Predator, most certainly a lion, Jennifer thought with a flash of pride, admiring Peter’s mane of thick black hair and lean, muscular limbs. He drew her in for a hug, and she inhaled deeply, wanting to dose herself with his pheromones. She could only smell his expensive cologne, a pleasant chemical reproduction of the scent of burnt cedar. Her temporal lobe whispered a line from Sylvia Plath’s “Applicant”: “Will you marry it, marry it, marry it?”

“Have you seen The Lion King before?” Peter asked, motioning to the television screen, which was frozen on the image of little Simba being presented to the predators and prey comingling peacefully below to celebrate his birth.

“Once or twice,” Jennifer said, looking down. “God, that movie is like twenty-five years old now. Damn, I feel old.”

“We’re not old. Just oldish. Don’t worry about dinner. I put the baked ziti that Marcella made in the oven. It should be done in a few minutes,” Peter said. “I hope you don’t mind if I hide in the study to work a few hours after dinner. I’ve got that trial starting tomorrow.”

“Of course, do what you have to do,” Jennifer said, forcing a smile. “But I’m not finishing that movie with Lily tonight. We’ll never get any sleep if she sees Mufasa get trampled.”

Throughout dinner that evening, Jennifer’s head throbbed. The lights from the chandelier in the dining room seemed too bright, and the laughter of her husband and daughter seemed canned. She felt she was in a play, reciting the same lines and responding to the same cues that she had for many years. The sauce that coated her pasta tasted metallic, and the Malbec she usually enjoyed burned her throat. Neither Peter nor Lily seemed to notice that she rotated her food around her plate instead of eating it.

Later in bed, overheated and wide awake, Jennifer removed the comforter, then the sheet without trying to disturb Peter sleeping beside her. She saw herself sitting in English class, and could feel the hard back and seat of her desk, which felt too small for her. She saw herself focused on the notebook in front of her, drafting a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare as assigned. She could hear the barely suppressed giggles of Michelle and Karen chiming behind her
as they passed notes, and felt a warm rush of self-consciousness. She was certain that they were writing about how fat she looked in her new babydoll dress, which suddenly seemed too short. Or maybe they had noticed the week’s growth of hair on her legs, which she had forgotten to shave that morning. She still hadn’t gotten into the habit of shaving her legs regularly. Maybe that was the difference between herself and the popular girls like Michelle and Karen, who always had smooth shiny legs. Feeling eyes on her, she looked up towards the front of the classroom, and Greg winked at her.

Jennifer grabbed her iPad from the nightstand, causing Peter to stir and grunt before rolling further to his edge of the bed. She logged onto Facebook and typed in the search bar: “Greg Slade.” Her breathing became shallow as her index finger hovered above the search button. She would know more, but never enough, and maybe knowing nothing was best. She inhaled and pressed search.

Greg’s profile was minimal, consisting mostly of photos in which Mariel had tagged him. His face and figure were the same, though the black curls were now streaked with strands of silver. Jennifer tried to reconcile the image of the middle-aged boys’ soccer coach with the charismatic, young teacher who had dominated her thoughts in high school and college. With a flash of satisfaction, she noted that Mariel had not aged well, with a slight paunch and dull brown hair. And little Michael, the boy she used to babysit, was now a tall, handsome man, several years out of college, engaged to be married.

Jennifer looked at the time on her iPad. 4:23 a.m. As she feared, she had opened a dam that she would be unable to stop, and she had no one to blame but herself. A hunger pang traveled from her stomach to her throat, reminding her that she had barely eaten dinner. She crept out of the bed and tip-toed down the stairs to the kitchen. She microwaved the leftover pasta, taking it out before the microwave beeped. It’s okay, she reasoned, as she lifted heavy forkfuls of cheese-glazed macaroni to her mouth before the dim light of the microwave. You didn’t have dinner. You won’t get any sleep if you’re hungry. But don’t make a habit out of it.

After several nights of minimal sleep, Jennifer was feverish and desperate for distraction, trying to stem the flood of humiliating memories that she hoped she didn’t remember properly. She watched wildlife documentaries with Lily, slowly becoming Lily’s willing accomplice in her animal obsession. To Lily, the lions were huge cats who would purr loudly if she pet them, and the zebras were pretty striped horses that she could ride. Jennifer, however, was intrigued by the unwritten and unspoken codes that seemed to govern all the animals in their interactions with each other. There were the elephants, gentle grey giants who traveled in breeding herds led by matriarchs. The females, protective of their calves, would kick out rambunctious males who threatened the younger ones. Then there were the solitary leopards, with their spotted lithe bodies and hungry pear green eyes. The female leopards would eventually abandon their cubs, leaving them to roam and hunt alone. Still, all the animals were guided by the same primal drives. Hunting and grazing to eat. Mating to procreate. No right or wrong. Just instinct and survival. Hunger and satiety. While she only watched documentaries geared towards children with Lily, she spent each night glued to her iPad watching videos of wild animals stalking, chasing, growling, and biting. Only picking at her food during the day, Jennifer would find herself ravenous as she tried to fall asleep. With Peter slumbering beside her, her growling stomach would compel her to creep downstairs to scavenge on leftover rotisserie chicken and cold pizza by the low light of the refrigerator.

“Ah, my two favorite girls are here,” Jennifer’s mother Nancy said, welcoming Jennifer and Lily to her home. “Come here Lily, give your grandma a hug. I have a gift for you,” she said, handing Lily a blue bag.

Lily pulled out a small safari guide outfit. “Look, Mommy! I love it, Grandma! Can I wear it now?”

“Of course, go try it on.” Nancy said, and Lily ran off to change. Nancy’s eyes narrowed on Jennifer’s hairline. “Too busy to get to the salon, dear?”

“I’m sorry, Mother,” Jennifer said with a roll of her eyes. “I didn’t mean to offend you with my horrible roots.”

“No need to be fresh, Jennifer. Blonde hair suits you. But you do need to keep up with it.”

“I really wish you hadn’t bought her that outfit. I’m not sure this is a healthy obsession anymore.”

“The only way out is through,” Nancy said with a knowing smile. “Don’t fight it. Just let her immerse herself until she grows bored and another bright shiny object will distract her.”

Jennifer looked around the living room of the house she had grown up in, and her eyes fell upon the prom picture placed on the mantel above the fireplace. There she was, in a satin violet gown, her round face framed by permed hair and bangs teased high. Jennifer winced at the bulk of her teenage self, especially compared to Amy, the slender friend she had attended the prom with, standing beside her in the photo. She closed her eyes as she recalled when Greg had approached her that evening as she stood alone in the hotel corridor, escaping the ballroom full of teenage couples bound by hormones slow-dancing.

“You look beautiful in that gown,” Greg said with a wide smile, drawing her attention from the framed Renoir print she was inspecting on the wall. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”

“Oh, I didn’t want to sit at a table alone while everyone else was dancing with their dates,” she said, regretting her honesty as soon as she spoke.

“I wish I could ask you to dance.”
“Please stop that,” Jennifer said, with a conviction she didn’t feel. “What?”
“Stop leading me on.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, taking two steps back. “I didn’t mean to upset you. We’ve discussed this before. You know I have my career and family to consider.”

“Nobody would have to know,” Jennifer said, emboldened in her heels and long satin gown. “I would never tell anyone.” “You would wind up hating me.”

“Impossible.”
“You would feel like I took advantage of you. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I just turned 17, you know. I’m not a kid anymore.”
“I care for you, Jennifer,” he said. “But I’m doing what’s best for us both.”

 

“So I ran into your cousin Stacey and her daughter Beth the other day,” Nancy said, interrupting Jennifer’s thoughts. “You wouldn’t believe how much weight Beth has gained.”

“Mother, Beth is like twelve years old. Can we not criticize a child’s weight? What if Lily heard you talking like that?”

“Lily doesn’t have anything to worry about. She’s thin as a rail, like her father.”

“That’s not the point,” Jennifer protested.

“You’re making a big deal out of nothing, Jennifer. I don’t know why you’re so moody today. Would you mind helping me with the garden after lunch? There’s so many weeds this summer, I can hardly keep up.” Working alongside her mother in the garden in the hot afternoon sun, Jennifer licked her lips. “Do you remember Mr. Slade?”

“Mr. Slade? You mean Greg? Your English teacher?”
“Right.”
“Oh, yes, very nice guy. He always thought very highly of you. Are you still in touch?”
“No, I just came across some pictures of him and Michael on Facebook recently. Would you believe little Michael is engaged now?” “Really! Doesn’t time pass quickly?”

As Jennifer dug into the soil, reaching under the roots of the weeds and pulling them out, her temperature rose. It was irrational, she knew, to be mad at her mother for not asking questions that she was desperate to answer.

“Careful, dear, you’re pulling up some of the flowers,” Nancy said with a creased brow.

“Can you keep an eye on Lily?” Jennifer asked, peeling off her gardening gloves. “I thought I might take a look at some of the stuff we have stored in the attic and take it off your hands.”

“I thought you’d never ask. You’d be doing me a favor.”

Jennifer ascended the stairs to the attic and quickly found the cardboard box marked “BOOKS” that she was looking for. There, buried in the bottom, beneath her college chemistry and biology books, was her dog-eared copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. She flipped through the pages, smiling at the emphatic exclamation points, question marks, and underlined verses, made by her own hands years ago but seemingly by another person. She stopped turning the pages at her favorite poem, “Daddy”: “You do not do, you do not do, any more black shoe…” Jennifer couldn’t read the words without reciting them aloud, as she had when she was a teenager. And there, on the inside cover: Dear Jennifer: I hope that you enjoy this as you embark on the chapter of your life. You will be missed. With affection, Greg 6/24/97. The date reminded Jennifer of the warm summer evening Greg had given her the book.

“I’m glad you could come to the poetry reading with me.” Greg said as they walked back to his car. “It’s certainly not Mariel’s type of thing.”

“Thanks for inviting me,” Jennifer said, trying to match Greg’s long strides in her platform sandals. She had chosen her outfit carefully, a low-cut floral dress that defined her waist. Not being invited to Karen’s graduation party had stung, but being here with Greg would have been her first choice anyway. “You didn’t have to buy me a book.”

“It’s nothing, just a small graduation gift. I know how much you enjoy Plath’s poetry.”

“God, her work is so electric,” Jennifer said, flipping through the pages. She wouldn’t tell him that she already had a copy. It was this one, the one that he had signed, that she would keep. “Forget becoming a dentist. Maybe I’ll run off to England and become a poet like her.”

“I’ve no doubt you can do whatever you put your mind to.”

“I only wish I could speak the way she wrote. Her genius makes me feel inadequate.”

“You’re a very impressive young woman, Jennifer. You graduated seventh in your class and you’re enrolling in the most prestigious school in the area this fall. We should go somewhere and celebrate.” He grabbed her left hand, and for several seconds they awkwardly attempted to interlace their fingers. Once their fingers were intertwined, he gave her hand a squeeze that accelerated her heart rate.

“I don’t know, maybe…” This was almost too perfect, she thought, exactly how she had imagined it would happen. “Alright, if you have time.”

Jennifer’s shallow breathing was interrupted by Lily singing outside. She bit her lip, wondering if her mother had ever stumbled across this book with its inscription. Tucking the book under her arm, Jennifer descended the stairs.

“Can we stop for ice cream, Mommy?” Lily asked as Jennifer drove home. Jennifer’s eyes were drawn to Lily’s legs, swinging in the passenger seat beside her. Lily’s shorts seemed tight, cutting into her thighs, which had a faint coating of light hair. Was Lily gaining weight or just outgrowing her clothes? Jennifer considered the generous serving of potato chips that Lily had eaten with her tuna sandwich, and became conscious of her own jeans cutting into her abdomen. It had taken effort to button them that morning, likely the result of her late night visits to the kitchen. “No,” Jennifer said. “Dinner’s only a couple of hours away.”
________________________________________
Subject: Hello
From: jennifer.ballard@pearson.edu
To: gslade@aol.com
Date: September 7, 1997

Dear Greg,
How are you? College is okay. This semester is mostly prereqs for dental school but I was able to fit in a poetry course. It’s interesting to study how Yeats and Dylan influenced Plath. It’s hard to focus though. All I keep thinking about is seeing you again, and feeling the vibration of your voice go through me when you hold me in your arms. Let me know if you want to see me when I come home for Thanksgiving.
Love, Jennifer

________________________________________

Subject: Hello
From: jennifer.ballard @pearson.edu To: gslade@aol.com
Date: October 29, 1997

I’m not sure why you haven’t written back. Maybe you’re too busy or you’re sick. Or maybe Michael’s new babysitter is prettier. But sometimes when I think about the evenings we spent together by the soccer field over the summer, I wonder if you didn’t take advantage of me.

________________________________________

Subject: RE: Hello
From: gslade@aol.com
To: jennifer.ballard@pearson.edu Date: October 30, 1997

Jennifer- I’m sorry that you feel I’ve neglected you. My primary concern has always been your well-being, and I thought some distance would give you some perspective. I remember agreeing that this would end when school started. I think it’s best that we don’t have any contact and that you focus on your school- work and give some lucky fellow at Pearson a chance. Greg

________________________________________

Subject: RE: Hello
From: jennifer.ballard@pearson.edu To: gslade@aol.com
Date: November 1, 1997

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song

One evening, several days after visiting her mother, Jennifer tried to remain still in bed, attempting to control the buzzing in her head and the electricity in her legs that demanded release by movement. Even in her lightest linen night- gown, with the air conditioner blasting artic air, her skin was a feverish shell that refused to cool. Though she had placed her old copy of Ariel on her nightstand several days ago, Peter hadn’t commented on it, and she doubted he had even noticed it.

There was, she had to admit, something familiar, almost nostalgic, about the obsession, the unhalting thoughts traveling an infinity loop, reminiscent of the sleepless nights and hunger pangs when she was in college, which had seemed romantic in its own way. Fresh from Greg’s rejection in the fall of her freshman year, she avoided the loud voices and bright lights of the school dining halls, nursing her starvation like a flame, holding a vigil she intended to keep until she received some affirmation from him. She had watched with satisfaction as her curves disappeared, thinking he would be sorry if he saw how ravaged she was by his rejection. She recalled her parents’ campus visits, when they would comment on her weight loss with approval, and Jennifer would feel pride knowing that the shift in her shape was visible.

Jennifer ran her hands along her stomach, threateningly concave, as if something inside was attempting to punch its way out. The late night trips to the kitchen could not continue indefinitely. She almost wished that her movement would wake up Peter and that he would ask if she was okay. Perhaps the words, whatever they were, would come with his prompting. Then again, Peter would view it as a problem to solve, and she herself couldn’t clearly define what the problem was.

Suddenly Jennifer recalled there was one outlet where she might get some relief. On her iPad, she logged onto XOXO, a women’s site that she and her receptionist had read and mocked during their lunch hour earlier that day. Jennifer created an anonymous account and started a thread on the discussion board in which she poured out all her memories, trying to create an accurate portrayal of all the interactions with Greg that were haunting her. The innuendo-laden conversations and the intentional grazing of her arms and legs on the drives home which escalated to declarations and rejections that never stuck. The evenings in the parking lot of the soccer field which began the night of the poetry reading the summer after she graduated. The depression that swallowed her years in college after he cut off contact. The lack of appetite that nearly
led to an eating disorder which had recently morphed into binge eating at night decades after her last contact with him. She concluded her 652 word post: “Should I report him?”

Jennifer waited until her lunch hour the following day before checking for responses to her post. Seated in her office with the door closed, she was shocked to see 81 replies, an almost universal condemnation of Greg:

KittyKat• 6 hours ago
Girl, OF COURSE you should report him. The man committed a FELONY. He GROOMED you. He RAPED you. Do you really think you were the only one? What about all his other students and babysitters? Don’t you have a responsibility to help all the other girls who are unfortunate enough cross this predator’s path? DO IT NOW.

PeachesAndCream • 5 hours ago
I’m so, so sorry you had to go through this. This guy sounds like a real piece of shite. Seriously, we had to invent the word “fuckboy” for men like this. Just follow your gut and do what you think is right for you. Stay strong!

Then, like a punch in the stomach:

TequilaRain• 3 hours ago
Why does everybody have to be a victim these days? She was old enough to consent, and she did. She wasn’t even his student when they started sleeping together. #metoo is not for bored women processing midlife crises. Stories like this make people doubt the experience of real survivors. I’m going to save my outrage for real abuses of power. Go ahead and report if you want, but I doubt you have a case.

Jennifer’s blood warmed and rushed to her face. How was it possible, she wondered? How could a stranger she had never met size her up so well?

“First, are you our sort of person?” Jennifer’s memory echoed Sylvia Plath’s “Applicant” as she entered the steakhouse with Peter for their tenth anniversary dinner. For Peter, the answer was an unequivocal yes. In his striped dress shirt, unbuttoned just so, and suit pants perfectly tailored to skim the top of his leather shoes, he was a man in his natural habitat who appreciated the code of conduct of a place like this. The silverware would be replaced between courses, the wine would be served at the right temperature, and the breadcrumbs would be swept before the entrees were served. Jennifer felt constricted in her black lace cocktail dress, which she had struggled to zip earlier. She hoped, with her cheekbones contoured by NARS blush and her stomach flattened by Spanx, that the effects of her late night visits to the fridge weren’t showing.

“Are you ready to order?” the waiter asked, with a practiced smile, as he placed a glass of Shiraz in front of Jennifer and a glass of draft beer in front of Peter.
“I’ll have the 16 ounce New York sirloin. Well done.” Peter answered.

“And you, Madame?”
Jennifer’s stomach rolled with hunger as read the menu. “I’ll have the 8 ounce filet mignon. Rare. And…an order of the parmesan truffle fries.”

“Someone’s hungry,” Peter said with a teasing smile as the waiter walked away.
“I didn’t have lunch today,” Jennifer countered. Her eyes focused on the pan of rolls, glossy with butter and dusted with coarse salt, at the center of the table. Her mouth salivated, though Peter appeared oblivious to them, and she clasped her wine glass to avoid reaching for one. She had promised herself that tonight she would focus on Peter, eat her dinner, sleep through the night, and avoid a late night trip to the kitchen. Maybe the wine would ease words to her lips that she otherwise could not form. She tried to make eye contact with Peter as he scanned the room, full of well-dressed pumas and panthers, seated in curved cognac leather booths, washing down bite-sized chunks of pink meat with red wine. Not a wildebeest or warthog in sight.

“Tell me a secret,” she said, running a finger along the rim of her glass. “Something about yourself that you’ve never told me before.”
“You think we have secrets from each other after all this time?”
“I know we do,” she said, hearing the effects of her second glass of wine in the flirtatious lilt in her voice.
“Hmmm, well, when we first started dating, I was actually seeing someone else. A teaching assistant for my constitutional law class,” Peter replied with a mischievous grin.

“Really?” she said, leaning back with wide eyes. “I was the other woman?”
“I was going to break up with her anyway, but I waited until the class was over. It was never really serious.” Peter placed a large piece of pink-brown meat in his mouth, revealing paper-white incisors and canines as he chewed. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Well…” she said, taking a large sip of wine. “You know how I told you Elaine and I studied in the law school library because the medical school library was too loud and distracting?”

“Right.”

“Well, that was a lie. We were there because Elaine wanted to meet law school guys. She thought the dental school guys were too nerdy. She had her eye on you for weeks.”

“Really?” Peter asked with a chuckle. “You mean I was being stalked?”

“I suppose you were. And we had a nickname for you. Prom King. Like, if law school had a prom king, you would have been it.”

“I’m flattered, I suppose.”

“You know, I always wondered,” she said, watching Peter take a sip of beer. “There were two of us that you always ran into at the library, and I’m the one you asked out. Why me?”

“Maybe because it seemed like you cared less and would be a challenge,” Peter said with a shrug. “And I always had a thing for petite blondes.”

Jennifer recoiled at the description of herself as a petite blonde. But she supposed that’s what she was by the time they had met, or at least closer to that than the dark-haired chubby girl she was in high school. And he had mistaken her shy insecurity for cool indifference. She recalled Elaine regularly approaching Peter, asking him for a spare pen, asking what time it was, presenting herself like one of those lionesses in a wildlife documentary with a lifted tail signaling she was ready to mate. He would never admit what Jennifer suspected, that Elaine’s thick eyebrows, faint mustache, and zaftig figure made her like a member of another species that he could never consider seriously breeding with.

“She never forgave me, you know, for dating you,” Jennifer said. “I broke girl code before it was even a thing.” Jennifer’s face flushed when she re- called first telling Elaine that she and Peter were dating, and how she had feigned ignorance of Elaine’s own interest in him. With a coldness that she didn’t know she was capable of, Jennifer later ignored Elaine on campus, trying to avoid the flash of guilt when she saw her. The delight she felt at being chosen by Peter, however, had overridden any remorse she felt.
“Well, here we are, married ten years later,” Peter said. “I would say things worked out the way they were supposed to.” Peter reached for her hand, and Jennifer winced at its cool touch. She remembered the few times Greg had held her hand, and how its warmth would radiate through her body until she felt inebriated. Surely, she thought, this must hint at some important difference between the two men, between their metabolisms and appetites. It had seemed so reassuring in those first days when she and Peter started dating, when she was certain that a man with a cool hand was one she could trust.

Peter released her hand and reached inside to a pocket in his coat and withdrew a navy blue Mikimoto box. “Happy anniversary, my dear.”

Jennifer opened the box, revealing a set of white pearl stud earrings. Creamy and smooth. Tasteful and elegant. Hard and cold. “They’re beautiful,” she sputtered.

Peter leaned back with a self-satisfied sigh that churned Jennifer’s stomach. Usually his ease with himself would transmit itself through osmosis to her until she adopted it as her own. But tonight she was impermeable. If he initiated sex tonight, maybe she would go along. But he probably wouldn’t, and she didn’t really want him to. Grateful, Jennifer reminded herself. Be grateful. Wherever Elaine was now, she would probably be jealous.

“Mommy, hurry up! It’s starting!” Lily said, yelling from the living room to the kitchen.
“Be right there, sweetheart,” Jennifer called, cutting the ham and cheese sandwiches into triangles, the way Lily liked. The National Geographic channel was broadcasting a safari live from South Africa that morning, and Lily’s anticipation was infectious. Jennifer smiled at the sight of her daughter in her safari guide outfit gripping a stuffed leopard doll.

“There’s reports that Prince Leopold, the dominant male leopard in this park, is nearby,” said the safari guide, a young blond woman with a pleasant South African accent. “There’s fresh tracks to our right. If you listen closely, you can hear the impala barking and racing out of the area, so he’s probably close.”

“Mommy, are they going to show a leopard?”
“We’ll see, sweetheart.”
“Look, look!” the guide said excitedly. “He’s poking out from behind the termite mound…he might have waited too long, the impala have a head start, but wait…there’s a little one…the poor thing is having trouble keeping up…it looks like she has a limp…there he goes!”

“Look, Mommy, they’re racing! They’re so fast! Oh, oh, he caught her! He’s biting her…Mommy, the deer’s bleeding! Is she okay?”

Unable to tear her eyes away, Jennifer leaned forward as the leopard sank his teeth into the neck of the impala and lifted her body. She recalled the words of Plath’s “Pursuit”: “Crying: blood, let blood be spilt; meat must glut his

mouth’s raw wound.” The impala let out a plaintive wail, waving her limbs in a desperate attempt to reach the ground. Blood dripped from her neck as she twitched from her ears to her hooves, and her large brown eyes stopped blinking. Once the struggling stopped, the leopard lowered the impala to the ground and began to licking the impala’s stomach tenderly, as if thanking her for her sacrifice.

“You see,” said the guide, “Leo first has to remove the hair so that he can break through the skin. It’s easy work with those rough tongues.”
Suddenly, with swift efficiency, the leopard chomped at the impala’s trunk and began separating the muscle from the ribs. Within seconds he had the smooth, round pink stomach in his mouth, and he dropped it to the ground. Leaving the stomach behind, he began walking with neck of the impala in his mouth, limbs and head dangling on the ground.

“And now Prince Leopold has his dinner,” the guide said admiringly. “The poor impala didn’t really have a chance. As you saw, Leo took out the stomach contents, which means he is probably going to hoist his meal up a tree to protect it from other predators. And look at him, there he goes up now, racing up the marula tree! Never fails to amaze me. Of course, this may not be appropriate for our more sensitive viewers.”

Jennifer suddenly became aware of Lily beside her, white as snow and breathing deeply. Jennifer grabbed her towards her chest, anticipating the howling she sensed creeping to the surface. Suddenly Lily exploded. “Why, Mommy?” she wailed. “Why? Why did he eat the deer?”

“When I see things like this,” the guide continued, as if hearing Lily through the screen, “it always helps to remember that predators are only doing what they are meant to do. And the herbivores are an integral part of the delicate balance out here in the bush. Every animal has a role. The circle of life, and all that.”

Later that evening, Jennifer sat on the bed, face in her hands as Peter paced their bedroom. “I don’t know how you let this happen. Jesus, Jenn.”

“Will you please keep your voice down? I’m sorry. It just happened so quickly.”

“Right, it was completely unforeseeable that a live safari would show a hunt and a kill. Damn it, Jenn.”

“For God’s sake, she’ll be fine.”

“She’s probably going to have a breakdown in school and then we’ll have DCF on our backs.”

“Stop overreacting. I’m sorry I’m not perfect like you, Perfect Peter.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you lately. You’ve been up all hours with your face stuck in your iPad, walking around like a zombie every day. We haven’t had sex in weeks. You’ve been sneaking downstairs to eat in the middle of the night. And now it’s starting to affect Lily and you’re lashing out at me.”

Jennifer flushed with embarrassment learning that Peter had been aware of her late night forages in the kitchen. She stared at him pacing, admiring his tall, solid form and his graceful, strong gait. So righteously angry, with his puffed chest and dilated pupils. This was the man who chose her, the one who was here now. And yet he still knew so little about her, meeting her only after she had smoothed all her edges into something polished and opaque. Re- served, conscientious, nurturing; highlighted, shaved, and toned. A woman who would appreciate Mikimoto pearls and who never made him angry. That was the Jennifer Peter knew, at least until a few weeks ago.

Jennifer opened her mouth, uncertain of the words that would follow. “I have something to tell you, but I don’t know if it’ll make any sense.”

“You know you can tell me anything.”
“Remember when I told you that my first time was with an older guy?” “Ah, yes, the mysterious man you never wanted to talk much about.” She exhaled. “He was a teacher I babysat for. And I think that maybe he took advantage of me.”
“You mean he raped you?” he asked, finally stopping his pacing and turning towards her.
“No, I mean, not exactly. I was 17 when we started sleeping together. But I was 15 when he started coming on to me.”
Relief dawned on Peter’s face. “And why is this on your mind now?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe it’s watching Lily grow up. I don’t want the same thing to happen to her. And what if he’s doing this to other girls now? Maybe I should report him. Should I?”

“I don’t know, Jenn,” he said, rubbing his temples. “That’s a big decision. Do you really want to put yourself through that? And what about the statute of limitations?”

“So you don’t think it’s a big deal?” she asked, her voice rising.

“I’m not saying that, Jenn.” Exhaling deeply, he scanned her, barefaced in her bathrobe. He pursed his lips the way he sometimes did when he was displeased with a glass of wine. “I’m just trying to be rational about this.”

It hadn’t been Peter’s fault, Jennifer realized. She had lowered her voice, made herself smaller, and rid herself of the prey scent that she feared would lead to her being consumed. This allowed her to stand beside a predator, feeling safe and protected. But hierarchies, once established, could only be altered by a disruption to the natural order.

A chill originated from the sacrum of her spine and radiated to her fingers and toes.

“I think I need some time on my own,” she said. “I’ll take Lily and stay with my mother for a while.”

Later that evening, after packing her bags, Jennifer disrobed and entered the shower, letting the hot water run through her hair and over her skin. She remembered the theory from high school biology that every seven years all cells in the human body have died and replaced themselves. By that measure, she was two or three regenerations away from the girl who last had contact with Greg. But there was a caveat, which she hadn’t learned until her college anatomy class. The neurons of the cerebral cortex lasted from birth to death, and it was that remaining fragment in her brain that would never yield. Jennifer lathered her torso with citrus body scrub, thinking of how many changes her body had been through: overweight teenager, malnourished college student, pregnant mother- to-be. She recalled Plath’s Lady Lazarus: These are my hands. My knees. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. She looked down at her legs and was shocked at how long the hairs had grown. She ran her hands along her right calf, and was surprised that it felt smooth, as the hairs were too long to be prickly. She grabbed the can of shaving cream and lathered her right leg with a coat of white foam. She placed a new razor on her ankle and dragged it up to her knee, leaving a track of slick, shiny skin where the razor had removed the cream, hair and skin cells.