Myra and Tom fanned their faces with wadded newspapers as they made their way through Jaipur’s City Palace. The tour guide aggressively ushered them through the palace, saying “Take picture take picture take picture,” seizing their camera and asking them to “Cheeseburger smile” in front of the marble elephants, Diwan-I-Khas, huge silver water jugs one of the old Kings traveled with. Their sunglasses were useless against the unforgiving sun. Older Indian women waded around them slowly, clutching their saris to their body protectively as if this would make the sun less hot. Children ran around them in circles. Myra told herself not to look at them.

Their hands were smudgy and black from holding the newspapers for so long. The tour guide led them through to the Pitam Niwas Chowk, proudly displaying the four gates representative of each season as if he had painted them himself. Myra stared at the Autumn Gate, one of the peacocks staring back motionlessly. The colors—blues, greens, ambers—caused her heart to sigh and sit down. When the guide motioned for them to stand in front of the gate for another picture, Myra sighed again, this time out loud.

“Nahin dhanyavaad.” Tom was proud of his dusty Hindi and asked for the camera back. The tour guide was persistent but thrust it back, motioning for them to follow him yet again. Tom strung his arm around Mrya as they followed, the unspoken lying between them. Myra knew framing any of these photos would feel like a betrayal but wasn’t so sure Tom agreed.

They were to be in India for two weeks. Delhi was their intended city of travel, but they were taking their time to get there.

***

Myra watched Tom as he moved back and forth across their hotel room, gradually adding layers of clothing as he adjusted to the air-conditioning. They had had drinks at the hotel bar before walking back, the heat thick around them. A wedding procession had been starting up, the bells and drums and voices becoming the night’s symphony. Myra thought if she listened hard enough now, she could still hear them. But she knew that could be in her imagination.

She felt guilty being joyful over anything.

“We could ride those elephants tomorrow.”

“Hmm?” Myra asked. Tom plopped down in bed beside her, his blonde hair falling in his eyes momentarily.

“You know, at Amber Fort. If you go in the morning, you can ride the elephants to the fort.”

“Instead of what?”

“Instead of walking.” Tom’s voice was clipped, as if the answer had been obvious. Myra looked away.

“I don’t know.” She pushed her body down further in the bed until she was completely on her side, her back facing Tom. Silence fell between them. A few moments later, Tom placed his hand on her side, gently.

“Graham loved elephants.”

“I know that.” Myra spat out her words; she couldn’t help it. “You don’t think I know that?” She moved her head slightly, Tom able to see the edges of her left eye. His hand remained on her side, but it felt heavy, like a weight that he couldn’t move.

“I just thought—”

“I know what my son liked.” Her eyes didn’t move as she said this, her body stiff. She moved her head back to the full resting position, biting her tongue so she wouldn’t cry, a trick her sister had taught her in primary school.

All the lights were still on in their room. After some time, Tom got out of bed to turn them off and brush his teeth. When he returned, he knew his wife wasn’t asleep, even though her body was deathly motionless. He gingerly wrapped his arm around her side and pulled himself close to her. Myra let go of her tongue.

***

When Myra looked back on her life, she saw it like this: before, during, and after. Now was the after. Her first trip to India had marked the start of the during. Before, she had drifted through college (Oxford, on her parents’ insistence) like someone drifts through an unfamiliar city, aimlessly drinking in coffee shops and pubs. Being away from her parents for the first time gave her space to breathe and make decisions on her own. Of all the family traditions she eschewed, the only one that stuck was her desire to be a mother. Sometimes, she felt in burning inside of her, a dream she couldn’t shake.

After graduation, Myra withdrew part of inheritance and bought a plane ticket to India with two of her girlfriends. She had never been outside of Europe. She was 21, the age when almost everyone else in her family had done the “respectable” thing, like get married or start working a job that supplied reliable income, time off for holiday. To Myra, this kind of existence sounded joyless.

India had changed the way she felt and thought about everything. They had traveled in the summer and the hazy heat seemed to follow them wherever they went. In England, she felt as if she was permanently living inside of a cold, rank fish; in contrast, India exposed itself like a lotus, spreading its fingers far and wide anywhere she went, revealing colors and spices she had never noticed before. And people, so many people. The constant voices forced on her an awareness of every single moment. Never in her life had she felt more awake.

A man—Tom Schlafly, she would later learn—approached her on the steps of Jama Masjid to ask for directions to the Old Delhi train station. She was sweltering under the long-sleeved clothes required to enter the mosque. He said he was due to catch a train to Udaipur but had broken away from his group because he had wanted to visit the mosque as many times as possible. He was American, a graduate student in architecture. He was particularly interested in Mughal design.

Her two friends smirked as they eavesdropped on Myra’s interaction with Tom. The sun approached the middle of the sky. In hindsight, she knew he really hadn’t needed directions anywhere, as he was two months into his six-month study in India and spoke almost perfect Hindi. But she found she couldn’t stop smiling while talking to him, the rest of the mosque fading away until it was just the two of them.

She extended her stay in India and four months later, flew to America with him. He became her during.

***

Myra and Tom traveled by taxi from Jaipur to Chand Baori. Outside, the scenery alternated between endless patches of dust and scrubby greenery, villages appearing at random. The intense decrease in people left Myra feeling exposed, and the sudden ring of her phone made her jump. It was her sister. The driver had the windows rolled down and it was hard to hear at first. She rolled her window up until she could hear her sister practically yelling.

“You’re still alive, right?”

“You know that joke’s not funny.”

Myra could picture Elizabeth shrugging her shoulders. Even when they were kids, Elizabeth believed in hiding emotions. “You know what I mean. How’s the trip going?”

“Oh, you know.” Myra pictured herself in a locked room, thousands of feet underground. “It’s just as beautiful as I remembered.” She looked out the window to the white sky, the sun so bright it threatened to disappear the landscape. In the areas absent of city fog, this almost seemed possible. She wondered what would happen if the end of the world started here, if anyone would notice the disappearance of these little pocket towns, everything turning to dust.

“Have you made it to Delhi yet?” Her sister’s tone suggested she was repeating the question.

Myra swallowed hard. “We’re…getting there. Chand Baori is supposed to be really amazing, though. We’re in a car there right now.” Tom turned around momentarily from the front seat to smile. He had books spread out over his lap and had been carrying on a conversation with the driver in Hindi. “Tom says hi.”

“Tell him I want an ancient relic from an ancient place.” Someone was yelling on her end. Elizabeth shuffled the phone and Myra could hear her voice, muffled, and a child crying. Myra knew it was probably her youngest niece, so she closed her eyes until Elizabeth’s voice became normal again. “Okay, sorry I’ve got to run so fast, but major pigtails catastrophe. Call me later?”

“Wait—” The word choked out before Myra even registered it and now that it was here she had to do something with it. “How’s it going?” Her voice was thick. “You know, the case.”

“Oh!” Elizabeth coughed. “Well, the case is over, darling.”

“Please stop trying to be funny.”

“You know…the usual. The kid was finally moved to his permanent detention center a couple of days ago. Warranted a small blurb in the newspaper.” Elizabeth’s voice had sobered up considerably.

“Oh, ok. Good.” She opened her eyes just enough to see Tom looking back at her, his face worried. She could make out his facial features easily even in the all-consuming sun. “And has anyone asked questions?”

“If anyone asks questions, they know what to expect.” Elizabeth was eager to pull out her My husband is a lawyer card when necessary.

Myra nodded slowly. “Good. Good.” She certainly didn’t feel good. “Well, call you later.”

Myra held the phone to her ear long after the call ended.  She knew Tom would have questions, so she closed her eyes and let her head fall back. A few moments later, she felt his hand on her knee.

***

Graham had rushed home from school one day, excited to show Myra something in one of his textbooks. It had been India week in his Social Studies class and he had taken a different souvenir from his parents’ collection to class every day. They’d made a game of it: Graham would win the challenge when a site or monument was discussed in class that his parents had never visited.

“I’ve found it.” Graham announced, sitting down across from his mom at the kitchen table with his backpack and coat still on, using his gloved fingers to turn the pages until he found the earmarked one. “Chand Baori.” He pronounced the words awkwardly. He shoved the book across the table to Myra.

“Well, will you look at that.” She vaguely recognized the stepwell in the photo, she and her friends having considered visiting it when in Jaipur. She ran her fingers over the steps in the picture, as if expecting to feel tiny ridges under her fingertips.

“Right?” Graham asked, his eyebrows arched excitedly. He slid his backpack off him and let it drop to the floor.

Myra smirked. Tom hadn’t made the visit out there either, meaning Graham had won the challenge. His award would be a puppy. He’d been begging for one for months. They were using the challenge as a way to consent.

“Well, you know we’ll have to wait until Dad gets home.” Myra hid her smile.

That had been in November. By May of the next year, he was gone, his bedroom forever frozen in time.

Myra tried not to think about this as she shielded her eyes and looked at the green water pooled at the stepwell’s bottom. The intricately designed stepwell climbed up into the sky around her. What would happen if a giant lid was pushed over the top of them, she wondered. Could they climb the steps fast enough to get out?

A child screeched for his mother across the pond and Myra snapped back to the present. Tom was a few feet away from her, discretely taking pictures of a family shadowed by the steps behind them. Their driver was smoking at the car, she knew.

Graham’s smile when he realized he had won the challenge flashed through her mind. He had been so excited to win that he hung a printed-out picture of Chand Baori on his bedroom wall.

“I feel guilty for coming here.”

“Hmm?” Tom asked, momentarily glancing at her before turning his full focus to his wife, switching his mind from stair designs to Myra’s slumped shoulders. The trip to India had been Elizabeth’s idea, and it wasn’t until they were on the flight that Tom had questioned if Myra was really ready for an immersive international trip. But now that they were here, Tom found himself distracted by the architecture, his mind called back to why he had originally visited India all those years ago. He often had to forcibly switch that part of his brain off, and only then did he see Myra clearly. The horrible truth was that he often found himself at a loss for how to comfort her, when he was still unsure how to comfort himself. Something, of course, he knew he would never tell her.

“Graham wanted to come here, I—I don’t know if we should have come here.”

Tom let his camera swing around his neck, pulling Myra to him. “We don’t have to stay any longer.”

They climbed the steps together, but Myra couldn’t help feeling something was pulling her back down, like a child’s fingers wrapped around her forearm, pulling hard.

***

Tom had never really considered being a father. He started a master’s program because he wanted to compete in the job market with all the other aspiring architects in the large cities to which he was drawn. He had grown up in Wyoming, accustomed to his parents’ complaints when they ventured into a big city to go shopping, tssking over the sizes of the buildings, the clutter, the abundance of small windows glittering like diamonds. But he instead saw design, an intricate interweaving of concrete and brick structured perfectly to fit together just right.

He chose the India program from a list of campus connections around the globe. His plan was to study there for half a year, and return a budding expert on the architecture of one of the oldest places on Earth. This was the upper hand he needed. But after knowing Myra for just a month, he knew he wanted her in his life for all the months to come. He was willing to change his plans for hers.

But Myra just wanted to be a mother. She moved with him to Boston for his first big job, and they were pregnant soon after.

Graham loved his dad’s passion even at five years of age, begging to come along with him on new building sites. At the groundbreaking ceremony for a new building, Graham convinced his mother to dress him in a three-piece suit, like his Dad. In his wallet Tom carried a picture of the pair, donning their suits, its edges crinkled from being forced to fit alongside business cards and loose change.

They had a game they played together—Graham would be the architect and Tom would be the contractor and together they planned a building. The challenge was making sure it would not only fit in with its surroundings, but that it wasn’t identical to another building in the area.

They later learned during the court case in England that this was the game Graham and the other boy had been playing before his death. Before the other boy suggested a new game.

Like most other sensational news stories, the boy’s name was printed right alongside Graham’s, as if the two were interchangeable, the newsprint not seeming to care that one was the victim and one was the perpetrator. For weeks now, he had heard that boy’s name over and over, threatening to drown out the name of his own son. But Tom refused to call that boy by name.

***

When Tom and Myra reached Agra, their trip’s halfway point, they were too exhausted to deal with the rush of cab drivers that greeted them when they exited the train station, so they simply accepted the first reasonably priced offer. The man ushered them to his cab, a small orange car, two young girls in dirty saris following them. Myra only gave them coins because they were persistent in their poking and begging, muttering half-alive words. She refused to look at them but heard them arguing over who got the most coins.

“God, I don’t remember it being like this last time,” Tom commented wearily once they were in the car, taking in the overwhelming crowd of cabs and autos cluttered around the train station like chickens at a feeding station. Myra nodded in agreement, thinking it was easier to see the sky last time. This time all she saw were people, trees, dust, people. A small hole at the top that provided breathing space.

It wasn’t fair that so many survived here, when the person she cared about most in the world had not made it ten years.

“Do you?” Tom looked at Myra, expectantly.

Myra shook her head again. She leaned her head against the hot window, watching welcoming signs to “The City of the Taj Mahal” as the cab passed underneath. All around them, the city was moving, sluggishly, yet she felt still, immobile, and not in a calming way. Like in the way when you’re the only one seated at a busy airport.

Tom nodded, his mind racing. “I think our hotel has a view.”

Myra wanted to care, wanted to be excited, but she wasn’t. She found it hard to believe that among all this traffic, sky foggy from pollution, cable wires hung from building to building, dust and trash on the street, people moving in every direction like ants fighting to reach the mound first, that one of the Wonders of the World lay hidden. Graham had loved things like that, finding treasures in in the most unlikely, incongruent places. Opening Matryoshka dolls hoping to find something other than air inside. Opening all the boxes in the house yearning to find something, anything, even if it was just tissue paper from an old present. One summer, he dug holes all over the backyard hoping to find more arrowheads to match the one he had stumbled upon in a stroke of luck. Tom had been furious over the pockets in their yard, but he was too amused at the same time to let it show. They never lost anything because Graham always found it. Myra was terrified of losing anything in the future because she knew it would be gone forever.

***

Graham and Myra had decided in December the year prior that enough time had passed between their last England trip and that it was time to visit again. Graham would turn eight in March, and they figured this meant he was old enough to actually remember the trip this time. They cleared their schedules at the end of May and flew out of Boston two days after Graham finished the second grade.

Myra’s family lived in London and prepared Myra’s old bedroom for her and Tom to stay in while they were there. After much debating, the couple agreed to let Graham stay at Elizabeth’s, where he would share the bunk bed with her middle child. The boys were the same age with almost identical faces.

Sometimes Myra tried to justify the way her son died by how closely he resembled Jonathan, Elizabeth’s son. That maybe the other boy had actually been after Jonathan and had just made a mistake. But she always felt horrible for thinking this and never told anyone.

The boys quickly bonded, Graham following Jonathan to the nearest parks, playing the games he played, practicing each other’s accents. Things would have been fine if they had been able to stay together the whole trip. But halfway through, Elizabeth took her kids to visit their father, who was working on location on Edinburgh, and Graham came to stay with Myra, Tom, and his grandparents. They were gone for just two days.

Graham was obedient, often taping classroom rules on the refrigerator before Myra even got the chance to read the list. When he didn’t return from the park near Myra’s parents when he promised he would, she immediately began to worry. She lingered by the kitchen window as her mother told a story from her bridge club, unable to keep her eyes from looking outside constantly. It was unusually bright, the plants in the front garden reaching eagerly up to the sun.

“Let’s just go to the park,” Tom finally suggested, opening the front door as he spoke. “He probably just lost track of time.”

“But he wears a watch,” Myra said, as if this made all the difference. The windowpanes were imprinted on her eyes. Later, she remembered how irritated her words must have sounded.

“But he’s also an 8-year-old outside on a nice day.” Myra remembered Tom chuckling when he said this. Laughing, as if they would eventually take the whole situation lightly. The laughter of innocence, of not knowing. “Come on, let’s go.”

The only reason they caught the boy was because he lingered by Graham’s body, like some museumgoer admiring a painting. The park was unusually empty that day and when they found the two boys, there was no one else around. One boy alive and one dead. No one to interfere with Myra’s path as she broke out into a run toward Graham’s body, skidding as she landed beside him. She remembered how floppy his head felt, how much already gone he was.

The other boy backed away but didn’t flee. It was as if he was in a trance. Myra didn’t give him any mind until she noticed blood on his hands, the same color of blood that was pooling around Graham’s head and sticking to his blonde hair. Later, Myra remembered how Tom didn’t have to notice the blood to understand something had gone horribly wrong. How he grabbed the other boy’s upper arms and squeezed, so tightly Myra expected his arms to pop out, like a doll’s if you yanked too hard.

They later found out that a few others had passed the two boys as it was happening, but no one stopped. No one bothered to interfere as the boy beat Graham with a rock. Repeatedly. “I just wanted to see what would happen,” the boy kept saying, his voice soft, unclear if it was purposely affected or truly distraught.

He entered an insanity plea. Something about a sociopathic disorder; words like dissociative, antisocial, emotionally stunted littered the psychiatric reports. When Myra focused in on the name of the words themselves, her mind started spinning, unable to rectify something so logical sounding with her son dying in a way that would never make sense.

Right after it happened, Myra wanted to hate this boy. Wanted to hate Elizabeth for leaving for the weekend. Wanted to hate Tom for suggesting too late that they go find Graham. But instead she hated herself, and she wasn’t sure the feeling would ever go away.

***

Elizabeth called constantly after Myra and Tom returned to Boston, three suitcases in tow for two people. “She’s doing okay,” Tom said their first week home, the house empty and huge around him. “She put his suitcase in his room and closed the door. I think it’s—too hard for her right now.”

“I can come, you know. Within 24 hours, I’ll be at your front door.”

“No—it’s okay.” Tom appreciated Elizabeth’s sympathy, especially since it was so rare. “I just think time…time will help, I think.”

He wasn’t sure. But someone had to be, so he elected himself.

After he got off the phone, he stood in the doorway of their bedroom. Myra had the covers pulled over her head, the room dark save for the light streaming in from the window. Graham’s Labrador, less than half a year old, was curled up at the end of the bed, his head resting on his front paws. Tom considered joining her and experiencing for himself the allure of the enclosed darkness. Instead, he walked to Graham’s room and perched on his twin bed until it was time for dinner.

A few months had passed when Elizabeth suggested they make the trip to India. Visit the place they talked about so much and so fondly. Return to the steps where they met. It wasn’t that she saw any need to rekindle a fire in their relationship, she said. She just didn’t want them to become prisoners of their house, where they had all the time in the world to relive the death. At least a vacation would allow time for movement, a change of pace, things to distract them. Tom had agreed eagerly, at a loss himself on how to both move forward without drowning and also help his grieving wife. He usually felt ill-equipped to take on just one of those tasks; two felt impossible. Myra agreed with little hesitation, but he wasn’t convinced it was because she was eager to go. Even when he tried his hardest to share her grief, his body switched back into survival mode.

***

As Myra listened to the street moving outside, smelled the hot, musty, all-consuming air, literally felt the world moving around her, she was stuck. Like a car that couldn’t shift gears.

“Oh, there’s a vegetable vendor right outside.” Tom was excited, sticking his nose out of the window that faced the street outside the hotel gates. The other window had a small view of the Taj Mahal. A miniature version, one that you could pluck in your thumb and forefinger and pocket forever.

Something Graham would have loved.

“Hmm?”

The vendor’s voice rang out, aloo, gobi, tamatar, gajar. Tom didn’t repeat, just remained in place with his head sticking out the window, letting in the outside world. Myra placed her hands over her ears until the noise stopped.

She felt trapped.

“Why are we here?”

“What?” Tom shifted to face her, the sun collecting in beams around him.

“Why did we come here?” Myra had expected her voice to be angry, but instead it was just sad.

Tom shrugged his shoulders. “You know, to get away and everything. To visit the place we love so much—”

“I know that’s what Elizabeth said. But why did we come?”

Tom slowly sat down on the edge of the bed, his mouth twitching as if he was afraid to answer.

“I mean, I know why Elizabeth wanted us to come. But I never stopped to consider whether I wanted to do this, I just listened.” For a moment, Myra imagined the room opening up, revealing the light outside, but the feeling quickly passed.

Tom moved closer to her in the bed, until they were facing each other, both cross-legged, like kids sharing secrets in kindergarten. He reached forward and cupped her cheek in his palm. She was thinner than she had been before they met, her bones sticking out at awkward angles. Any time he held her, he felt like he was holding a pile of tinker toys wrapped in clothes. His heart ached. He had spent months ruminating on the right things to say, but now his brain was blank, frantic. He blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

“You know we haven’t said I love you to each other the whole time we’ve been here?”

Myra tried to wrap her head around the statement, understand why Tom thought it was important in the moment.

“I mean,” he laughed softly, “It’s a lot different from our first trip here.” Even as the words came out, Tom heard how slimy they were, and averted his eyes so he wouldn’t have to witness Myra’s response, her recognition of her husband’s failure at comforting.

But instead, Myra’s thoughts went to their first visit together, the weeks spent staying together in inexpensive guesthouses and Tom’s small apartment in Delhi, how morning and night were marked by the movement of the sun on their bed sheets, finding it hard even when in public to not do things that made Indian women pull their saris over their mouths.

She noticed a sliver of sunlight snaking up the right side of their bed, the curtains closed partially over the open window.

It was so hot she could barely breathe.

“Why would you bring that up?”

Tom stuttered. “You know I love you.”

“That’s not the point here though. Tom, I asked why we came here?” She paused. A melody of car horns floating through the window. “Why did we come here?”

He focused on the wall behind Myra. He realized his hand was still cupping her cheek, so he dropped it, let it rest on her thin leg. “To see the country.”

“We’ve already seen the country.”

“To save ourselves.”

“Don’t say that.”

Tom leaned forward, hoping to coax Myra’s eyes to look away from her lap. What if they grew old here? In a country so crowded even family members sometimes couldn’t find one another? Would anyone miss them? Would anyone notice? Surely no one would ever be able to find them. They could do it. Disappear, slip into this hot lifestyle that only demanded you be able to survive through the beating sun every day.

But she would never do that. She would never live somewhere where Graham hadn’t existed, not wanting to assume a lifestyle that ignored their son.

He regretted ever starting down this road. He hadn’t planned on having this discussion until they were well back in America, in Graham’s time zone, in Graham’s house, with Graham’s dog. But now they were in the midst of it, and Myra had never been someone to change topics in the middle of a conversation.

“I know you blame yourself.” Tom’s hand grazed her chin, trying to coax her face. “That if we had gone looking for him just a little bit earlier, maybe he would have—”

“No. No. Don’t say that.” Myra instinctively pulled back, her hand pointing, aggressively, shaking.

“Would have lived.”

Myra remained motionless for a few moments, her finger slowly moving toward his chest until it crashed into it. Then, it was as if her finger was the impetus holding together a trigger-release bomb: tears flowed down her face like a sudden summer rainfall.

Tom knew he should say something, apologize for the blatancy of his last statement, admit that he really blamed himself. That if he hadn’t brushed off her worries than they would have made it to the park on time. Before the rock. Before the blood.

But instead, he cried too. Created their own monsoon in a place that was still covered in dust.

***

Graham had pretended not to be impressed by the Taj Mahal when he learned about it in Social Studies class. He didn’t want to like the monument because everyone liked the monument. He had been tasked to create a miniature Taj Mahal for class, rolling his eyes as they picked out the materials at the crafts store. White Styrofoam for the columns and domes. Blue felt for the water.

“I bet aliens really did make it,” he commented while in the fake greenery aisle.

“What are you talking about?” Myra picked up two different fake grass patches, one darker than the other, and held them up for Graham’s inspection. He picked the lighter one, leaning half-heartedly against the other side of the aisle. But Myra noticed he continued to keep an attentive eye on the fake grass as she placed it in the shopping cart.

“That’s what this kid in my class said, Johnny Mascowitz. He said that the Taj Mahal was too perfect to have been built by humans. That God sent aliens down here to do it who disintegrated after its completion.” Graham stumbled over disintegrated. Myra couldn’t help but laugh, Graham’s serious expression making it all the funnier. “What?” He asked.

“Well, I think you should tell Johnny that aliens probably have more interest in weapons and destroying our energy sources.” She moved out of the aisle and Graham followed her. “Besides, how would you explain Jama Masjid then?”

“What?”

“You know, where your dad and I met.”

“Yeah, I know that.” Graham loved this story, finding it fascinating that his parents, both from different countries, had met in a foreign place, by chance. The story was almost too perfect. “What about it?”

They stopped their cart when they reached the check-out line, the windows revealing the sun that had started to slip into the earth. Myra looked directly at her son, who was fingering the items in the cart. “Well, the same Emperor executed the design of both of those places.”

“Really?” Graham’s head shot up, his eyes meeting hers. They were sparkling with excitement. “Which was built first?”

Myra considered this. “Hmm…the Taj, I believe.”

Graham’s forehead was scrunched up, as if he was mentally viewing pictures of both structures in his mind. “They do look alike. Was that on purpose?”

Myra laughed, again. “I’m not sure, honey.” Ever since he was young enough to put together full sentences, he had questioned everything. Tom had joked that it was for people like Graham that Wikipedia was invented in the first place. “We can look it up when we get home.”

“Okay.” He suddenly couldn’t take his eyes off the materials for the miniature Taj Mahal.

Over the next few days, he insisted on talking about the subject any time the three of them were together, quizzing them on what they remembered about visiting both places. Jama Masjid again performed miracles in their lives, turning the story of the Taj Mahal into something magical. Something that existed outside of India, outside of textbooks. Something that was real.

On their first visit to the Taj Mahal, Myra remembered standing in awe for hours, taking in the structure from every angle. They moved from bench to bench on the grounds, staring at the sparkling white that was nearly blinding in the morning sun. The green grass, the majestically blue pools. She couldn’t believe that this was it, the structure that caused hearts to skip a beat, that drew in millions of visitors a year. But there She was, shimmering and silent, as if waiting for someone to uncover her secrets. Find the secret tomb within the mausoleum and expose the world’s stories.

This time, Myra found all she could concentrate on was the other stuff. The tour guide that followed them until Tom told him firmly, Nahi, Nahi. How the teenage boys with their cell phones pushed you out of the way to take pictures if you lingered too long, purposefully including you in their photos if you didn’t move fast enough. She felt herself being pushed along in the group of people systematically moving through the grounds. The sun was hotter than it had ever been, threatening to turn them all into a melted pool of skin, expose their secrets to the known universe. Reveal to everyone that they had one dead child and had never been able to have another.

Graham had been buried in the family plot in London. Gravestone. No white marble palace to protect him. Just dirt and grass. And that, eventually, rains away into mud. Then to nothingness.

She was about to ask to leave, return to the security guards that had snatched up electronics at the entrance like they were collecting toys for a Christmas drive, risk the pickpockets disguised as tour guides that tricked money out of unknowing tourists, when Tom handed his camera to another white tourist, and motioned for Myra to take a picture with him. Even though they put their arms around each other, she didn’t feel him. She almost expected to see Graham in between them when they looked at the picture in the camera.

But, instead, it was just the two of them, dwarfed by the massive white. Their smiles disgusted her.

***

She told herself that Graham would have found something he hated about India. Complained about the heat. Found the beggars annoying. Asked to eat at McDonald’s. That they would have traveled to India without him anyway, so it was okay to be here now. They would have talked on the phone every night, sharing kisses before going to bed just as he started another day.

But she knew none of this was true.

They had flown into Delhi nine days earlier and now returned there, Myra watching wearily as their auto maneuvered through the congested city streets, the morning sky hazy with pollution, the sun more an idea than an actual thing. Motorbikes slipped by the cab, ten to one, zipping off in a flurry of noise. Any time a car paused more than a second, people started crossing the street, not bothered by the impressive amount of metal that thrusted eagerly forward.

Myra found it nearly unbelievable that so many millions lived in this city. She watched people cross the street, looking for Graham’s face in every single one of them.

***

They had decided on their morning train from Agra to Delhi that there was no point in pretending visiting Jama Masjid hadn’t been the purpose of the entire trip, and so they headed there almost immediately after arriving. The streets of Old Delhi were unbelievably crowded, people pressing up against their auto as the driver pushed through, like squeezing a marble out of straw. She noticed the driver wasn’t wearing any shoes, his sandals placed neatly beside his feet. Everything seemed to be making noise, conversations whizzing by, tunes from car horns and storefronts, the screech of tires. At one point, Myra looked to her left to find a man less than six inches away staring back at her. She could have reached out and pushed him off his rickshaw if she had wanted to.

She didn’t see Jama Masjid until they were right on top of it, the minarets and marble domes appearing in the sky like apparitions. The sky hung lazily behind the mosque. She squeezed her eyes shut.

Last time, she had been the most excited among her friends to visit the mosque, already mesmerized by the enormous domes, the countless archways. They all donned long sleeves and skirts and packed themselves tightly into autos.

She looked down at her body now, the auto shaking them both back and forth. She was wearing short sleeves.

Looking over at Tom, she noticed his eyes and his camera facing out, the street turning into watercolors around them as their speed increased. Ever since their Agra hotel conversation, Tom had stopped ignoring the reality of their lives when around her, as if before she had been protected by a wall of glass that had now shattered. Even though he continued to place his hands on her knees or back or face protectively, his skin felt all the more real.

The driver stopped directly in front of the steps, in a tangle of autos and people pushing through, shoulder to shoulder, to continue walking. Some entered the mosque, ascending the wide stairs, which were dull in the afternoon sun. Most walked right by it, not even turning their heads to look, accustomed to passing the largest mosque in India on a regular basis. Myra got out of the auto, her eyes on the steps, as Tom handed the driver a few crumpled rupees. For years after they married, Myra daydreamed about the steps fondly, idealized them even. She fantasized revisiting, she and Tom reliving their first encounter with the impressive red gate looming over them. She had expected her heart to stop like it did last time, thinking of all the times she had shared this story with Graham, painting the mosque as a magical place every time.

“Like Disney World?” he had asked once, when he was four. She had said yes, like Disney World. Like Cinderella’s palace.

Thinking of this, her heart jolted forward, as if something was calling her from inside. She had never been a religious person, finding religion more overwhelming than helpful. Faith had always perplexed her; she was bothered by how something she considered private was always turned into a family matter among certain groups. She had never felt God tugging at her heart, like so many people described when having a religious experience, no matter their particular faith. The only times she had ever had such a feeling were when it came to her own family.

She quickly eyed the spot where she and Tom had first spoken. An Indian family was sitting there, the young children sharing an ice cream cone. Almost immediately, the youngest dropped the cone, as if Myra’s eyes had been the trigger that released this action. Surely the ice cream would immediately melt on the warm stone. The mother scolded the child, rapping her lightly on the back of her head. Myra looked away. She began to deliberately ascend the steps on the opposite side, following the thing that attached itself around her heart and was pulling hard.

Men in white and women covered in long saris were streaming down the steps, a group of people cluttered by the front entrance as they readjusted their shoes, re-wrapped shawls around their necks. Hearing the bells, Myra realized afternoon prayer had just ended. Those who had been praying inside now descended the steps. They disappeared into the tangle of store awnings, dangling electric wires, and water stands. The travelers began to stand, slowly disappearing through the entrance, guarded by a few men wearing white, their arms crossed and their faces sour, and into the vast emptiness beyond. She remembered learning last time that 25,000 people could fit inside if they wanted to. Even just the number made Myra feel suffocated.

She took a breath.

“Wait—should we get a picture on the steps?” Tom asked just as they reached the line at the entrance, a few girls picking through the long tunics required to don if your clothing wasn’t sufficiently modest. Myra shaded her eyes as she looked at her husband, shrugged her shoulders. She felt on the verge of tears but didn’t know why. She didn’t really feel like crying. She didn’t feel like standing still either. He passed his camera to another traveler, who captured the two of them, arms around each other, the mosque disappearing into the sky behind them. She was very aware of their sweaty skin sticking to each other.

“I don’t feel like—”

“I know.” Tom strung the camera back around his neck and placed his hand on her back, turning toward the entrance.

“Three hundred rupee,” one of the men, sitting, a gut poking out of his tunic, barked at them, another younger man holding out his hand aggressively.

“Lekin yaha per likha hai ki entry free hai.” Tom said, pointing to the sign that read NO ENTRY FEE. The older man waved his hand demurely, while the younger man pointed at Tom’s camera before holding out his hand again. Tom glanced at Myra before digging the money out of his pocket. He knew what she wanted. Last time they hadn’t actually visited the inside together, just the steps.

This time she wanted it to be different.

After Tom had paid, the younger man pointed at Myra and then at the long tunics, colors piled on top of each other. She was putting on a blue tunic when she noticed a sign advertising a look-out point from the minaret currently towering directly over them.

She pointed at the sign. “Let’s do this first.” The words choked themselves out, as if spoken by a different being. Before he fully registered what was happening, she had disappeared behind the entrance to the minaret.

The steps were steep and winding, constantly turning inside the thin structure. She placed her hands on both sides of the wall, stumbling over the cloth as she made her way to the top. She felt as if something was pulling her higher and higher, a force she couldn’t detect, an all-consuming power that only allowed her to go up.

Or a child’s fingers wrapped around her forearm, pulling hard.

Halfway, they emerged on a flat platform that provided a perfect view of the mosque. She stopped to take in the structure, spread out wide, tiny people in bright colors spreading themselves over every inch. The far gate, nearly identical to the Taj Mahal’s South Gate, stood impressively. As if it was smiling at her, waiting to share something. She felt Tom’s presence on her left and looked to find him taking pictures of all the others below them.

“Wow.” The wind whipped momentarily around them before falling deathly still again, as it had been all day. Sluggish. “Makes you feel powerful, huh?”

Myra’s eyes on the gate, she suddenly felt as if it was shaking its head, telling her to continue going up. “Let’s keep going.” They re-entered the minaret, the cool stone wrapping around them, disappearing all the street sounds from below, the hundreds of conversations and endless noise. Silent, even when they reached the line of travelers pushing to make their way to the top, eliminating any notion of private space.

A silence that was actually silent, as opposed to all her recent silences that had been threateningly loud.

As if pushed by some force from behind, Myra and Tom finally broke through the crowd to the landing. But unlike the motion of the crowds at the Taj Mahal, this was different. A persistent force that was also gentle, patient, that let her go just as she reached the far windows, facing back onto the steps they had just come from.

From above, she noticed how the thrash of autos started just as the steps ended. Like the edge of land meeting water, or two forces colliding.

At first, she didn’t understand what had led her here, just to look back on the place where she had come from. She was about to turn away when she stopped. Her heart paused and sat down.

There was Graham, standing on the exact spot she and Tom had met, waving and smiling at her. The blood was gone and every hair was in place, the same clothes he had been wearing before his death. His smile was so big it was almost painful. He was waving and waving, and smiling, and waving, and she no longer noticed the chaos of Old Delhi, or the outside world that stopped just at the base of the mosque, as if some invisible force was rejecting it. She only noticed him, who looked so much like Tom she started crying, tears crashing down on her tunic and disappearing into the blue.

Something inside of her released and let go. Sun rays pushed through the clouds in great, jagged stripes, everything breathing around her.

Myra blinked. And like that, he was gone, their meeting space vacant, the remnants of their footsteps so many years ago covered with millions of others. She stared motionlessly at the spot, the mosque around her taking a breath before settling down again, as if it had been holding in the same air breathed on the last day they had been there together. When she had begun her during. Tom appeared, and she peripherally noticed his face change, his hands reaching up to wipe tears from her cheeks, but she kept her gaze on the steps.

Below, the streets continued moving, the horns continued honking, the children continued yelling. Maybe it was their high position in the sky, or the sun’s emergence through the haze, but Myra felt that they were above it all, the darkness receding.

 

 

 

Though you grew up in the city, you always liked to look up at the stars.

On those rare visits to Grandma in the country, you’d always take the time to sit on the porch at night once she fell asleep, open-mouthed in front of the TV.

Lightning bugs would pop off like spark plugs in the field, and you would trace the constellations with your pointer finger. You liked the idea that way out there, galaxies away, they had their own planets spinning around them. From where you were standing, they were small enough to be afterthoughts, inconsequential. Yet they were still beautiful, still worth tracing with your finger. You’d always liked that.

Though, you liked them less with the dirt in your mouth. The muddy sticks piercing your back.

And even less with his hands around your throat, squeezing.

You didn’t see his face. You hadn’t the entire time. It’s not as if he had covered it, so you had in fact seen it. Still it floated at the edge of your mind – a shape beneath the surface of the water, dark and distant. You could smell him, though. Sweat and desperation. His breath reeked of cigarettes. He had offered you one. You wondered where that butt was, imagining it smoldering in the wet grass, maybe seething between the cushions of his passenger seat. It felt like the smoke was burning your lungs. You scratched at his hands, knowing your fingernails were broken, but that made them sharp. You hoped they hurt.

Even when the switch turned off and you were gone, your eyes stayed open. Looking at the stars.

 

You don’t remember being told you were dead. You just knew. You were dead and sitting in a chair and there was a woman in front of you and you didn’t understand that, because you were dead. Welcome, Graciela, the woman said, or she must have, though it didn’t look like she had.

On instinct, Gracie.

Welcome, Graciela.

I’m dead.

Yes.

Okay. What else are you supposed to say?

I’ll show you to your room.

You got up and followed her because, again, you didn’t have any idea what else to do. Walking as a dead person didn’t feel any different than walking as a living person. At least not yet. You were in a long hallway that did not turn, did not twist. There were doors far as you could see. The woman opened one. This is where you’ll stay for now.

Why?

No one knows you’re dead yet. This is the first step.

The room was long and skinny and full of girls. All girls no one knew were dead. There was some furniture, but as you’d learn, you didn’t have to sleep or eat or do anything bodily anymore, so it was more for show than for use. When you turned around to ask where you actually were, the woman was gone, but in her place was another girl. She looked like she was blown out of brown sugar and air.

I’m Trina. She told you she’d been dead for two months. Welcome to Saint Maria’s Home for Murdered Girls.

 

Time flowed differently when you’re dead. It seemed to be passing all at once and not at all. You learned the ropes fairly quickly. Your room designation depended on where your case stood. You were in “dead, not presumed dead.” There was “dead, presumed dead,” and “dead, body found,” and then “dead, no leads,” “dead, suspect identified,” and on and on and on, a million different doors for a million different situations for a million different girls.

Where do you go at the end? you asked Trina

The end?

When your case is solved.

Into the case solved room.

You never leave?

Only when you get justice.

And that isn’t always when your case is solved?

No. Usually isn’t.

For the most part, girls couldn’t go from room to room freely, but there were special circumstances, special girls. Normally if their case was infamous. If they were martyrs of legend. One in particular jumped around, bleeding through the walls, standing behind you until you turned around, whispering in your ear.

My name is Elizabeth Short; maybe you’ve heard of me.

No.

Well, they’ve made a lot of movies about me. Books and shows, too.

Oh.

Elizabeth seemed a little too old to be in a home for girls, but what do you know? She sought out newcomers. She acted drunk, delirious, always too close, always too happy. She had been dead for almost seventy-five years.  Do you know what he did with my tattoo? He cut it off and he put it up my-

You always tried to plug your ears whenever she was around. But of course, you could hear her anyway.

You spent most of your time with Trina, trying to do things that normal girls would do, like sit or talk. You tried braiding her hair once, but your hands couldn’t grasp onto anything solid. The brown strands just sifted right through your fingers like sand through an hourglass, spiderwebs in air. You gave up on that idea quickly.

Trina was killed by her stepfather. Her body was behind his work shed, disintegrating under feet of gravel and dirt. He convinced her mother she had run away.

She doesn’t realize what he did?

She never realized what he was doing.

Why did he do it?

Because I said I would tell her.

It felt to you that there was nothing more transient than the life of a girl. You’re there until you’re not anymore. Until someone doesn’t want you there anymore.

Every so often, you met with Maria to talk about your murder. She met with everyone; the first time Maria summoned you, you asked Trina who she was, and she reacted as if you were supposed to know. As if it was natural that a saint did something as benign as show you to your room or call you to chat. Even though that was the name of the home, you didn’t realize that she was the actual Saint Maria. You wished, not for the first time, that you had paid more attention in Sunday School.

Saint Maria was old and young all at once, morphing from a waxen-faced child to a wooden-faced woman in the same instant, never one or the other long enough to definitively be either. She asked you if you knew the man who killed you. You told her you didn’t know.

I want you to think about it, the girl told her. Then the old lady, really try.

You remembered asking for a ride. You remembered the stain on the passenger seat armrest. The cigarette, the wet leaves, his hands on your neck squeezing squeezing squeezing. He still had no face. You remembered until you didn’t want to remember anything else.

She let you go.

 

That morning had been one of those oppressively hot daybreaks only a Midwestern August can deliver. By the time you got up – not unreasonably late you thought, though Mama disagreed – everything was flattened under the weight of the humidity. The cicadas were even taking the day off, their crescendo of sound barely registering. The rising heat made the pavement swim before your eyes as you biked down Fourth Street, your drawstring bag secured over one shoulder, the other cords flying out behind you.

You were taking algebra that summer, surprisingly your own choice. By taking summer school, you freed up your semester enough to sign up for woodshop. You were in the second six-week session, July to mid-August. As the temperature ticked well into the nineties, you sat in an unair-conditioned classroom with two dozen other fuck ups and early planners, learning about quadratic equations with sweat pooling in the crooks of your elbows. You weren’t bad at algebra, you actually didn’t mind it, but the long days and the teacher’s droning voice were enough to make anyone want to crawl out of the open yet ineffective windows. But it was Friday, and that meant you had the day off.

As you pedaled past the Buckhead Strip Mall, you contemplated stopping to get a Big-Gulp but knew that Isabella was probably already waiting for you. The 7-Eleven was nestled between a beef jerky outlet and the Diamond Deli and Video Gaming, a place you went to once before realizing that ham sandwiches and arcade games are too strange a combination. You kept going.

 

Sometimes you visited your body. Or what was left of it. Even the lowly maggot had to eat, and on you, they feasted. You hadn’t thought about doing it until you once looked down and the sinews of your fingers were exposed, all bones and gaping flesh. You thought there might be something crawling under your skin.

Trina told you that a lot of your existence at Saint Maria’s depended on what was going on down there. If there was energy in your case, then you had energy. You looked as you did before death. Like a person. But the longer time went on when no one was looking, or nothing was happening, or it went cold, then your energy began to wilt. You didn’t have the stamina to keep up appearances. You could see that in the girls who died decades ago, just skeletons, but honestly, they weren’t so bad. It was the recent girls that no one cared about at all that were the worst. Rotting. Mangled. Especially if their death had been brutal. Some were missing pieces.

You could use your energy to check in on things on earth if you wanted.

So far, you hadn’t looked in on your parents or Isabella because you thought it would make you sad. So, you went to see yourself instead, the watery images coming to you when you closed your eyes, like peering through a slightly mottled mirror.

You were still lying face up. He had covered you with dirt, but barely. No one came out here but to hunt, and it wasn’t deer season yet. Your lips were gone, and that was the part that perhaps scared you the most, more so than your eyes or other fleshy bits. Without your lips, you looked old. Without your lips, your teeth, slightly crooked, which still bothered you even though you had better things to worry about at that point, were exposed for all to see. One of them was chipped, which was new. It must have happened during that night. You must have swallowed it.

You wondered what your Mama would do when they found your body. Perhaps if. When Abuela had died, Mama yelled at your dad when he even suggested cremation. They were still together then. Over her shoulder, the clock on the kitchen wall had ticked loudly, slightly crooked. It fell into one of the angles of the crucifix nailed below, giving the illusion that the splintered wooden cross held it up.

You couldn’t imagine your Mama letting them bury you like this. At least you hoped she wouldn’t. You didn’t want anyone to see you like that. But at the rate it was going, you wouldn’t have to worry about that for a while. She didn’t even know you were dead.

 

The community pool was nothing special, a lap pool with two diving boards on one end and a snack shack in a corner of the cement lot. But in the summers, it was the only place to be if you were in high school with even a grain of a social life. You and Isabella always claimed chairs near the boards, which had prime views of anybody taking the plunge. Sometimes Isabella would take a turn, but not you. You never went off the high dive. It felt too high, too precarious, and you always had the sneaking image of the water turning to concrete beneath you as you fell, a splat instead of a splash. You preferred to watch instead.

“You’re late.” Isabella didn’t look up from her phone, oversized sunglasses perched on her head. You knew she wasn’t mad, though. She’d saved your chair with a towel.

“My apologies,” you said with mock formality. You peeled your tank top over your head, unbuttoned your shorts. “What did I miss?”

From across the pool, you could feel Mr. Gregson’s eyes on you. He had been the sole operator of the snack shack for as long as you could remember, and he’d never been shy about looking just a little too long at girls’ chests, just a little too hungrily. Sometimes you and Isabella joked about flirting with him for free food, but you never actually did.

Isabella adjusted her top, blue with frills, definitely a push-up even though she claimed otherwise. Her nail polish was chipped. “There’s a Barn Party tonight, did you hear?”

Barn Parties were notorious, though not true to name. They took place not in a barn but in a fallow field about a half-hour west. There used to be a barn there a long time ago, and the name stuck long after it rotted. Current high schoolers and graduates alike went to those parties, and they were said to get wild. One of your homeroom friends went last month, and she said there were college boys there. You had never been. Neither had Isabella.

“I didn’t know.”

“We’re going, right?” She swung her legs over the side of the chaise, leaned over. “It’s probably the last one of the summer. Jason said he could give us a ride.”

Her brother was a few years older than Isabella and you. He’d always been friendly enough, if kind of awkward.

“Are we going to know anybody there?” you asked.

Isabella nodded a little too hard, her sunglasses slipping from their spot on her head. “We’re almost sophomores; anybody who is anybody starts going now. If we want to meet people, this is the way.”

She looked at you expectantly. You looked over at Mr. Gregson. He was looking at one of the lifeguards, her hip cocked, whistle in her mouth.

You turned back to Isabella. “Barn Party, here we come.”

 

After you’d been dead for about three weeks, the police still weren’t looking for you.  Your parents had been worried. Very worried, in fact. When you hadn’t shown up at the party, Isabella had tried calling you, but you didn’t answer. The next morning, she went to your house. Mama ran up the stairs before Isabella finished speaking, throwing open your empty bedroom door. She called your dad. Then, she called the police.

They told her that, in all likelihood, you had run away and would show up again soon, either back home or at your Dad’s, and that they should just be patient. In any case, they had to wait forty-eight hours to file a missing person’s report. As soon as the time allowed, your parents filed a report. Nothing came from it.

There were over a hundred missed calls on your phone. You didn’t know where he put it.

If you had enough energy, you could stir up interest in your case from the dead. It was called giving a nudge. You could target anyone, parents or detectives or reporters, to renew interest in the case. The more energy you had, the more nudges you could give your investigation, but you got all your energy from the effort being put into your case. A snake eating its own tail. At the moment, the police just considered you a runaway. You wanted them to care.

Everyone said that a girl named Caroline was the best person to talk to if you wanted guidance on how to give a nudge. Considering she, too, was still in the “dead, not presumed dead” room, you wondered how helpful she could actually be, but Trina swore by her. Apparently, two of the girls she had guided got their cases featured on podcasts, so she sounded reliable enough to you. Elizabeth also offered you opinions because, you know, she was on so many TV shows, but you didn’t want her advice.

You sat down with Caroline. She looked pretty enough; occasionally, she would glitch, and you caught a glimpse of a nasty hole in her head, but she seemed to keep it under control pretty well. Someone told you that her boyfriend killed her. He was older.

You told her you wanted to know how to get the police to look into your case.

Were you a cheerleader?

No.

What about an animal lover?

Not particularly.

She pouted a bit. Did you ever win a science fair or something? Anything to stand out?

I was pretty average, I guess. I didn’t like school that much. What you didn’t say is that you sometimes did run away, though just for a day or so at a time, jumping from one parent’s house to the next. What you didn’t say is that you occasionally smoked with some older kids behind the 7-Eleven, but when they offered you anything harder than weed, you refused. What you didn’t say is that sometimes you were tempted by the harder drugs.

Did that matter now?

Well, what about your parents? She crossed her skinny arms. Are they rich or important or anything like that?

Not really. They’re split up. My dad lives in Rockford now. You realized that she probably didn’t know anything about Rockford, but your tone of voice got the point across that it sucked.

 I don’t think I can help you right now. She shrugged. Maybe just wait and see if your mom or dad can get them going. I’d save your energy for when your case really gets underway.

Anger felt the same dead as alive. So, you’re saying I should do nothing?

What I’m saying is that you don’t exactly look like a Miss Teen USA, and there aren’t any photos of you smiling with a piglet in 4H club. Caroline looked down at her hands as if to pick at a nail. You realized, then, that she didn’t have any.

Look, she tried again, softer this time. Have you ever seen a crime show? The richer, the whiter, the weirder your disappearance is, the more people care, and we’re both out of luck in those departments. I wouldn’t waste energy trying to get the police to reconsider your case.

Then what do I do?

They’ll think you’re a runaway until they find your body. She looked back up to you, cocked her head. I hope he didn’t hide it too well.

 

You learned that even if there wasn’t sex, there was always sex. It was just disguised as stabbing or choking or burning.

Saint Maria encouraged you to keep checking in on your loved ones. It helps you feel more connected, she said. It was easy to see the people you loved in life; it required little energy. If you had enough juice, you could even check in on him. See what he was doing now. Where he was. What he had done with your things. You weren’t sure if you wanted to. But you kept returning to your body, watching yourself wither and wilt and melt and be devoured. Turn to dirt. To bone.

Why were you in his car? Where were you going? Why him?

Why you?

 

The fight had been about something stupid. It always was. When Dad still lived with you, he’d always say that you and Mama were his “two strong-willed women,” though you didn’t know if that was what you would call your frequent arguments. Little ones that spilled and roiled and sharpened into screaming. This one might have started when you remembered that you were supposed to drop off a new year enrollment form at the school that afternoon. You’d forgotten.

In any case, there was no way in hell that Mama was allowing you to go to that party, but as you slammed the door to your room, you knew that wasn’t going to stop you. She went to bed early, she was eternally tired, and in the morning, you two would act like nothing had happened as you always did. She would kiss you on the cheek on the way out the door, her scrubs always immaculately pressed.

The house was old, creaked when the wind blew, or when it rained, or the sun shone. But if you stepped just so, foot by foot along the far edges of the hallway, arms spread wide to support yourself, you could minimize the creaking. Make it down the stairs, out the door. It wasn’t the first time. You knew she had gone to sleep once the TV in her room turned off, but that night it was taking longer than usual. You checked your phone. Isabella had sent you four texts, variations of, “Where are you?” You were supposed to meet her at her house a half-hour ago.

Finally, you heard the low hum of the news fade away, a light snoring soon after. You made your break. Outside, the night air was crisper, wetter than it had seemed possible during the day. You made your way quickly down the quiet street, tennis shoes making a light, rubbery thunk with every step. The streetlights look like melted sunlight on the pavement.

 

When North High started again, Isabella put up missing flyers around school. The bulletin boards, doors, the light posts outside. Bring Gracie Home. She’d chosen one of your favorite photos. She had taken it during the school trip into the city, on the deck of one of the architectural tour riverboats, your hair slightly wild around you, the background a mixture of water and glittering steel. Mama loved that photo, too.

In those first couple of days, the attention your posters got did increase your energy level. You could feel it, a hum of electricity under your skin that wasn’t really skin. You wondered what your classmates were thinking about you or if they thought of you at all once they turned away from the posters. If they thought you ran away. If they even knew who you were – most did not. The missing sophomore, that girl, Graciela, Gracie. You were more popular now than you had ever been. People parted the halls when Isabella walked past. It was the attention you’d always wanted. This isn’t how you wanted it.

But despite the attention, the weeks turned into months and then several. Your parents kept appealing to the police, but not much came of it. Isabella had talked to them too, showing them your last texts from that night, which they thanked her for. You felt even more buzzing after that, but still, no leads. The longer you were in the “dead, not presumed dead” room, the more the skeletonized girls scared you; you didn’t want to become like them, disjointed wrists and elbows and knees, pits where eyes should be. A visual reminder of how little you were worth. Since Caroline wasn’t any help to you, you and Trina hatched a new plan.

As much as it pained you, you had to give Elizabeth some credit. You overheard her talking to another newcomer who hadn’t yet learned to turn away fast enough. She was going on about her movies, her shows, did you know there are internet sleuths now? And that’s when it came to you.

It didn’t take as much energy to nudge Isabella because she did love you. She was always on her phone, during classes, at lunch, and you knew if anyone could start a social media campaign, it would be her. You found Caroline again, and this time you asked her how to actually give a nudge. Your conversation was much more helpful this time around, now that she wasn’t reminding you how little people cared about you being dead. After your last meeting, you had wondered if it was possible to dye your hair post-mortem.

To give a nudge, Caroline explained, you just have to concentrate really hard on that person. Once you can see them, imagine that you’re speaking to them. Whatever you have to say will pop into their mind like their own thoughts.

You sat back. That’s it? You imagined something a little more complicated than that. It was pretty much the same as checking in on someone, only this time you spoke.

Yeah, that’s it.

Then, thanks, I guess.

You retreated further into the room, trying to find a quiet spot to concentrate. Two skeletonized girls who always kept to themselves waved at you as you passed. You called them Bones One and Bones Two. You were happy they had each other.

Once you had settled, you focused in on Isabella, sitting at her desk at home, her room still as pink as ever. Her assignment notebook was open with nothing checked off. You always joked that she liked writing her lists but never finishing them. Then, like Caroline suggested, you pretended you were talking to her. It felt weird speaking to someone when you were utterly dead and they were still alive, but you tried. You couldn’t tell if she heard any of it, if your nudge was working. But you felt like you were slowly deflating, your non-breath getting harder and harder, and you realized that you didn’t have enough energy to keep nudging. You stopped.

Trina asked you how it went. She was contemplating nudging her mother.

I don’t know yet. You hadn’t realized how wane Trina was getting. She looked almost translucent. I guess we’ll see.

 

You vaguely recognized him when he rolled down the window. Jason was getting annoyed about having to wait, and he didn’t want to pick you up because your house was in the exact opposite direction of the party. Isabella said he was close to leaving without you. You were walking as fast as you could, bordering on jogging, when he pulled up beside you.

“Hey, you go to North High, right?”

You kept walking, not looking over, thinking if you didn’t, he would eventually go away.

“Gracie. Gracie, right?”

The sound of your name drew your attention. When you looked at him again, closer this time, you realized you did recognize him. Someone’s cousin? You thought you smoked with him once or twice. He was older than you, early twenties maybe. He’d hand-rolled the joints and hadn’t made you pay for yours.

“Oh, hey,” you said. You stopped walking.

“Where are you headed in such a rush?” Some low-volume indie crap was coming from his speakers.

“The Barn Party tonight.”

“Oh, no way, I’m headed there myself.” He paused, then, “You need a ride?”

“No, that’s all right.”

“You sure?”

You looked down at your phone. Jason wasn’t going to wait for you, Isabella had texted. She was going to go with him. You didn’t know anyone else you could ask for a ride from.

“Actually, if you don’t mind.”

“Hop in.” He leaned over the passenger seat and popped the door open.

Your jean skirt was uncomfortably short when you sat down; the fabric of the passenger irritated the backs of your thighs. It felt slightly crusty. You hugged your flannel closer to your chest.

He flipped open a pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth, offering you the pack with a lazy flick of his wrist across the console. You took one. Then you texted Isabella. “I found a ride.”

 

When you met with Maria again, she asked if you had put more thought into your murder. A sprig of forget-me-nots sat in a small glass bottle on her desk. You wondered if you grabbed it, would it feel like anything at all? You had a sudden craving for an Arizona iced tea.

Why does it matter so much if I remember it?

Why do you think I want you to remember? the old woman countered.

Her answer was so much like a teacher’s that you rolled your eyes, sparking a sudden funny feeling of your mother scolding you for disrespecting a saint. She probably would’ve melted on the spot.

I don’t know. Because it will somehow help.

Maria gave you a small smile, unfazed. The longer a case is open, the more narratives people create.

You looked down at your hands. You were having a good day; they looked whole.

If you know the truth of your case, no one can tell you differently. You don’t need anyone else’s version of what happened.

No one else has a version of what happened. No one has any clue at all.

When you looked back up, the child saint sat in front of you. Her feet didn’t touch the ground from where she sat on her chair. Just because they don’t have a clue what happened, doesn’t mean they don’t think they do.

You let your impulse get the better of you, and you reached for the bottle. It did feel remarkably like glass.

The old woman returned. Just think about it.

 

He wasn’t super weird at first. You hadn’t talked about much of anything, a few teachers that were still teaching back from when he went to North High, mostly. You confirmed that Mrs. Priestley, the European history teacher, was indeed “a real ballbuster.”

“You ever been to a Barn Party before?” he asked at one point.

“No, first one.”

“Got it, got it.” He tapped the steering wheel slightly offbeat to the music.

You wouldn’t say the ride was pleasant, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, either. You felt like it could’ve been worse. Then you felt his hand on your thigh.

You jerked your legs toward the door. “What are you doing?”

He laughed, but it sounded forced. “My bad, my bad. I was reaching for the CD on the floor by your feet. Can you grab it?”

You bent slightly and patted your hand around on the dirty floor mat, making sure to keep your face turned towards him. The carpet was slightly sticky near the console. You handed him the CD.

“Thanks.”

He put the CD in, even though the old one was only on track four. You tried to keep the conversation light. Your heart felt stiff in your chest. There was a crumpled paper birthday card laying on the passenger seat floor, crayon smiley faces leering up at you. “Who’s that from?”

“Kid sister.” Then he grabbed one of your upper arms, crossed over your chest, and rubbed his thumb over it. “What is this, flannel?”

“Don’t touch me!” Your voice came out higher than you intended. The car started to feel like it was shrinking around you, being crushed by one of those car compactors.

“All right, all right. Relax, would you? I’m not a creep.”

When he finally turned off the road, you were relieved. You shot Isabella a text saying you made it, but it didn’t go through. The service wasn’t good out here.

He parked in a small clearing, but there were no other cars. There was no music, even though you heard that the cops often busted the parties because of noise complaints. There were no other people.

“You said you would take me to the Barn Party.”

“It’s right up the road.” He turned the car off. The doors were still locked.

 

There was a news crew in front of your school. Isabella and your parents were holding pictures of you, some of the missing posters they had put up. In the background, other students cried for the camera.

Your parents didn’t fight anymore. They were just sad.

The scene was easy to see. You could feel the energy of all their thoughts buzzing. It was the most alive you’d felt since you’d been dead.

The crew focused on Mama’s tear-filled eyes. “My daughter has been missing since August 10th, and the police have done nothing but file a report. Please help us find Gracie.”

The reporter turned to Isabella. You could tell she’d curled her hair, put on the sparkly pink lip gloss you’d always borrowed from her. “Now, you’re Gracie’s friend who started the campaign, ‘Bring Gracie Home,’ the Facebook page that’s been shared more than forty-thousand times since you created it, asking people for any information they may have. How does it feel to think that you’ve done more investigating than local authorities?”

“I know Gracie didn’t run away. She was on her way to meet me when she disappeared.” Isabella was holding a photo taken earlier in the summer, the two of us sitting on her patio, cups of lemonade on the side table. “She said she had found a ride, but she never showed up.”

The reporter turned back to the cameras. “The police declined our request for comment, citing the ongoing investigation.”

After the interview with Isabella and your parents, the reporter stuck her microphone into your classmates’ faces.

“We were in summer school together. I always asked her for help on the homework, and she was super good at explaining it,” Ben Colson said.

“In fourth grade, she said she wanted to be a zookeeper when she grew up,” Hema Patel commented. “For some reason, that’s always stuck with me.”

Even Amy Cunningham, the girl who made fun of your legs in middle school gym class because Mama wouldn’t let you shave, had something to say. She had a tear roll down her perfect face as she talked. “We’ve been in school together since we were toddlers. It’s just so crazy to think something like this could happen.”

In a way, it was sweet. All these people, who you were never really friends with, had at least always registered that you were around. You had some sort of presence in homeroom or algebra or study hall. But the part you focused on was the fact you’d be remembered on national TV for wanting to shovel elephant shit for a living.

You thought about visiting your body again, imagining all this attention reanimating your limbs, imagined crawling out of the ground to dust yourself off, walking the long road home. But you knew that in reality, you were still laying there, perhaps a little scattered now; scraps of your flannel woven into birds’ nests like prayer flags, signaling X marks the grisly spot.

 

Do all the rooms look like this? you asked Trina.

Being disappeared opened a cavernous waiting game. You were not dead in the eyes of the world, of your family, just in your own little bubble. You were at the finish line, waiting for the others to catch up or to finally acknowledge you crossed the threshold. The sense of perpetual, purgatorial limbo was echoed by where they were, an empty room with empty girls, scant furniture that no one needed. The idea that this stretched on forever, over and over and over again until… Until what? You hoped the next room would look different if you ever got there.

I don’t know. Elizabeth will, she goes in them all the time. Trina’s mother and her boyfriend moved out of the house where her body was. She didn’t have a lot of energy to keep up appearances anymore. You made a point not to look at her neck; you knew she was embarrassed.

Why can she do that? You thought about Elizabeth, tripping through walls and over girls.

Because too many people are, like, obsessed with her death. It’s too much.

People loved a dead girl. People loved a beautiful dead girl even more.

Did you know that they gave her a new name after she was murdered? Most people don’t even know that her real name is Elizabeth.

What do they call her?

The Black Dahlia.

Oh. You had heard of her, then. Not that you would let her know that.

It’s kind of sad. That has to do something to your head, don’t you think?

You wanted people to care about you. You’d felt pretty good ever since Isabella had made the Facebook page and since your parents had been on the news. People were interested in what had happened to you. But what would happen if people theorized and obsessed and fetishized for years? How could those narratives not cloud your head, make you drunk, make your murder not yours anymore?

Whose story was it then?

 

You’d sworn to yourself that you weren’t going to check in on him, that he wasn’t worth straining your energy to see. If you were honest, you were scared to see him. But your campaign was picking up traction, your parents’ interview had been on the news last week, and you wanted to see what he was doing. You wanted to know if he was squirming. If he was scared.

When you focused in on him, he was in what you assumed was his living room, the TV turned to some game show, pillows and cans and plastic cups sprinkled around the floor. He was sitting next to a young girl on the couch, a light-yellow cap on her head. She had no eyebrows. There was an orange pill bottle on the side table. His face, which you never really had a great look at, was pale and scraggly, ingrown hairs on his chin forming angry red bumps. You still didn’t remember whose cousin he was. He was drinking a beer.

Yesterday’s newspaper was rolled up in the trash can, turned to a page with big block letters. “Local Girl Still Missing.”

 

“My little sister is sick. Cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My girlfriend left me. She couldn’t take it.”

“Please let me out.” You could feel your eyes fill with tears, despite your attempt to keep them back. You knew he hadn’t taken you to the Barn Party. The nervous energy around him choked you; he wouldn’t look you in the eye. This time when he grabbed your thigh, he leaned over the console, too, and kissed you. You let him. It was sour, but you couldn’t tell if it was him or the taste of your own fear. You wondered if he could feel your heart smashing into your rib cage, into his.

“I just want to talk,” he breathed in your ear when he pulled away.

“Can we talk outside?” you asked. You sat as still as possible, the passenger side door digging into your shoulder blade. The cigarette you had was no longer in your hand.

“You’re going to leave.”

“I won’t, I promise. I just need air. It’s stuffy in here.”

He looked at you then, so sadly that you almost felt bad for him, before he leaned back into his seat. “Okay.” He took the keys out of the ignition, unlocked only his door. He walked around the car and opened the passenger side, offering you his hand as if it were a date. You took it.

He put his mouth on yours again. You tried to push him, but he was surprisingly strong, and you were saying no, and his hands were under your skirt, and then your underwear, and his breath was shuddering in your ear as he pinned you to the car. “Please,” he said. “Please, please,” his pleading mirrored your own. The heat of unspilled tears gathered in your eyes as you went limp. You imagined you felt as TV static did, crackling but immobile.

As he reached down to unzip his pants, you knew that it was time to go. To run. Eyes, nose, underarms, groin – that’s what they’d told you in health class. As he looked down, you swiped at his face, raised your knee as fast as you could, and as he stumbled back the few paces you needed, you ran for the trees. You didn’t think to scream.

There were no lights ahead and no way to know where you were, but at the moment that didn’t matter to you so much. Yesterday’s rain had made everything muddy, and you realized too late that one of your shoelaces was untied. When you fell, your face collided with a protruding root, a thwacking sound that reverberated around your brain. The taste of iron bloomed in your mouth.

You could hear him behind you as you tried to turn over. You were crying now. There was mud in your eyes, caked in your lashes. He was repeating, “I’m going to be in so much trouble.” She could hear him crying too.

“I’m not going to tell anyone. I promise. Please.”

He didn’t believe you.

 

Around the time the police finally sat down with your parents to open a formal investigation, Trina left the room. The couple who had moved into her mom’s old house had been shocked to discover the skeleton of a twelve-year-old girl in the spot where they wanted to build an in-ground pool. Her stepfather was arrested quickly, at least in terms of the afterlife. You didn’t know where she was now. You didn’t get to say goodbye.

Where do we go at the end of all of this? you asked Maria, remembering your conversation with Trina all that time ago. You imagined her there, at the end. You wished her there.

That is not something I can tell you. You can only find out on your own.

And you can’t tell me where Trina is?

No.

It didn’t seem to you that she could tell you much of anything besides to figure things out by yourself.

You’ve remembered your murder.

Yes.

On her desk, the forget-me-nots seemed to glow, illuminate, botanic neon signs that yelled, Look at me, look at me! Like a small galaxy.

And how do you feel?

Pretty bad. Whenever you cried, Dad would bring you a glass of water to calm you down. The coolness was soothing. Take a deep breath, he would say. Your nose pricked and you knew that meant you were about to cry, which apparently you could still do in the afterlife. You wished you had a drink.

Maria didn’t say anything else, just peered at you with her old woman face.

It just feels so stupid, you continued, trying to push down the choking sensation in your throat. Like, what was the point of that?

The point of what?

Me dying. It came out a squeak, the tears you finally spilled constricting your voice.  I died going to a dumb party.  I got in the car with someone I didn’t know, and he killed me, and that’s just it. It makes everything leading up to it feel pointless too.

Do you really think your life was pointless?

You thought about Isabella, your parents, who would keep being your parents even though they didn’t get to have a child anymore. You shrugged. I guess not pointless. But you couldn’t say what it was.

Despite what people may claim, there often is no point in killing. It’s a coward’s phrase of justification. She pushed a glass of water across the desk towards you. You didn’t see where it came from. But it does not make you pointless, too.

She let you sit in silence, gratefully sipping. It was a foreign action now. You worried it would spill down your chin if you didn’t concentrate. As you sat, sipping, concentrating, staring at the flowers that looked like stars, you remembered your very last night sky. The word that came to mind, again, was inconsequential. You decided it was not that, either.

 

The woods he buried you in didn’t get many visitors. The orange of the hunter’s hat splashed violently against the muted backdrop of dead leaves and early morning frost; his footsteps, a light crunch, might as well have been a gunshot. His breath made specters in the air.

The doe he was tracking couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards away from him when he stepped on an unusually smooth branch. His foot rolled over it, causing him to stumble. He knew the doe had heard him. He only really looked at the branch as he kicked it, noticing it was just a little too white, a little too round.

When the police descended, they sent a flock of cedar waxwings into flight, their whistling like a serenade.

You followed Saint Maria into the hallway, expecting to turn into her office to talk. But she brushed past it, walking further down the hall, yawning like a mouth before her.

Where are we going?

Maria reached another door, opened it. Full of girls. New girls.

Full of girls everyone knew were dead.

“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?