Calamity. Apocalypse. The ultimate pit of despair.

There was no irony in Jean’s assessment, no awareness of exaggeration. She was shredded by lack of sleep, utterly bombed-out, and in this first night on her own with the baby—with Tom out of town on business—every new-mother jitter was magnified to a power of ten. Who the fuck was calling?

“Hello,” she hissed, and then instantly understood who it must be.

“ . . . Vic.” With the thick seconds-long pause between her words and his, Jean’s little brother sounded as far away, in Iraq, as he was. “Guess I woke you.”

“No, no, I’m so glad. Can you hear me?”

“ . . . hear me? Just had a minute, because we’re loading up to—”

“I thought you said you wouldn’t be able to—but this is great! I mean, are you okay, is everything okay?” She stopped, because her own words were still unspooling, echoing between them.

Pause.

“. . . Sat phone at the bigger base. About to go out on a mission, though, so I won’t be able to talk long. How’s Halley?”

“Fine. She’s fine. What do you mean, on a mission?” Jean sat on the toilet lid and pulled a towel around her bare legs. As if they, too, had been asleep, all the usual symptoms of her fear began to rise and move within her: shortness of breath, weak upper arms, a nausea that seemed to originate in her thighs.

“ . . . pictures she’s looking big. What are you feeding her, steak and protein drinks?”

“Still just—” Jean listened to steak and protein drinks echo back. “Breast milk.”

“ . . . to this other part of Anbar, be out of touch for a while so didn’t want you to worry or anything.”

“Okay,” she said, not okay with any of it. She wanted to ask how dangerous it would be, but held back. It’s not his job, she told herself, to go to war and make her feel better about it. “Should I call Dad?”

“ . . . um, gross,” Vic said, laughing. She realized he was responding to the mention of her breast milk.

“ . . . going to call him next. But can you do me a favor? When I get back—” Here the sound warbled and nearly cut out, Vic’s voice struggled up, submerged. As he spoke, she heard care package; she heard nothing too nasty; she heard any kind, I guess. Jean interrupted, speaking as loudly as she dared. “Vic? Vic? I can’t—”

But he was back. “. . . magazines, whatever. If that’s not too . . .”

Wait. Had she really heard what she thought she had? “You want me to send you . . . ”

“—weird for you.”

“Porn?”

Their phrases overlapped, and Jean quickly adjusted the priggish tone she heard in her voice. “Wow. Sure. Hey, what are sisters for?”

“—can’t really ask anyone else, can I?”

Jean picked up a tube of lanolin, a thick yellow ointment—Tom called it her axle grease—that she was supposed to spread on her nipples whenever they were cracked or bleeding. She thought of Vic’s sort-of girlfriend back home, the one she desperately hoped would keep writing him; she thought of his friends from college, worlds away in their entry-level office jobs; she thought of their father. No, there was no one else.

“I’ll put something in the mail tomorrow. I mean today.”

“—won’t be in touch for a few—out of range of—”

Lanolin oozed out from under the tube’s cap; Jean released her grip and dropped it on the sink counter. “A few what? Days? Weeks?”

“—later, okay? I love you.”

The pressure on the sound of his voice lifted suddenly. Jean spoke quickly, making her own echo—I love you, be safe, call soon, I love you—until she knew she was the only one left.

*

Victor had enlisted in the Marine Corps the day after Thanksgiving, a year and a half ago. He just drove to the local recruiter’s office, one town over from the Boston suburb where they’d grown up, and in one hour and a half signed all the papers. That night at dinner, their father toasted Vic’s decision and Jean almost vomited into her turkey leftovers. Tom put his hand on her leg, under the table; that and Vic’s boyish pride, were the only things that kept her from bolting. Instead, she lifted her glass briefly and put a fake, alien smile on her face. Instantly, Jean was ashamed of an inward childish disappointment; she was twenty-seven, had just aced the qualifying exams for her PhD in Education—good for teaching the teachers, her father liked to say—and was home for a holiday with her brand-new husband. Now Victor’s announcement was ruining everything.

Was this a made-for-TV movie? Their father and stepmother were trading lines, something about real responsibility and serving your country, but the subtext was how much Victor had struggled in the past few years after his and Jean’s mom died. He’d graduated from UMass, but just barely; there had been drinking issues and two car accidents and one low-paying job at Home Depot. Okay, even from Chicago Jean had known her brother was having a hard time—but she had struggled, too, after Mom died, after her father had remarried the perfectly nice Marie, sitting immediately to Jean’s left. Hadn’t she?

“So, going off to war,” Jean said flatly. “That’s what you want to do.”

“Jeanie,” their father said. Tom blew out a long breath, slowly.

“What? Are we pretending that’s not what’s going on?”

“That’s reductive,” her father went on. For more than twenty years, he’d taught math at the local high school; both Jean and Victor had had him for trigonometry, junior year. “That’s not the whole point of the armed services.”

“We don’t know a single person who’s in the army—” Jean began.

“Marines,” Vic put in.

“—nobody in this neighborhood, none of your classmates, I’ll bet.”

“That’s all the more reason to be proud,” their father said, with a touch of triumph in his voice. “If the only people we depend on to serve are from certain sectors of society, certain income brackets—”

“Fine,” Jean said, reversing course. “But last time I checked, nobody at this table thought invading Iraq was a good idea!” She half-wanted to stop. “Did that change? I mean, did they find some actual WMDs over there today?”

“Whether or not it was the right thing to do—” Jean tried to interrupt but her father spoke over her. “—in this house, at least, we support the troops. No matter what.”

“A lot of times marines are stationed on ships, way out in the ocean,” Marie put in. “I’ve read that.”

Everyone avoided looking directly at Jean, as if she’d made a bad smell at the dinner table. Tom said nothing, but Jean forgave him; he was new enough to the family, he couldn’t be expected to leap to her defense. Only Victor seemed to get it; he cocked his head toward the back porch, their signal since childhood for let’s talk about this later, without them.

“I just wish your mother—” Their father turned toward Victor, struggling to speak, and Vic put a hand on his shoulder. But this outraged Jean further. Mom would have been horrified—at the war, at Vic in the marines, at all of it! Wouldn’t she? Jean coughed quickly, to cover her snort of disgust, but the faux cough turned into a real one, and soon enough she was choking. Tom half-stood, and thumped her on the back; Marie jumped up to get some water. As soon as she recovered, Jean used the excuse to go upstairs to her old bedroom, where she could rage silently to the rock-stars in their faded posters, to her narrow bed with its pink comforter.

*

In the morning, Halley made wet sucking noises, rocking happily in her blue bouncy chair; thwack went her little bare heels against its plastic base. Thwack. Thwack. Jean switched on the radio and positioned the chair on the floor next to her laptop on the coffee table; if Halley lost her bouncing momentum, Jean could get her going again with her own foot. Still, she knew the chair worked for only five minutes, ten if she was lucky. By then it would be squirming and straining, grunts of displeasure, and then a full red-faced wail. So she skipped the Times, glanced at the front page of the Tribune just for the weather, and went straight to email. Last night was still a blur; Halley had nursed three times, which was definitely a step back, according to the baby books piled everywhere. By now, infants (hence mothers) should be sleeping six hours at a stretch, Jean had read, and underlined with a savage swipe of her pen.

“Six hours my ass,” she muttered now, clicking open Yahoo. There were emails from a neighborhood new-moms group she had joined (in desperation), and two friends from college, but the one that caught her eye was from Victor. “Go back to sleep!” was the subject header, and last night’s phone call in the bathroom came back in fuzzy fragments.

“Sorry we got cut off,” Victor wrote. “Heading out soon but I have a few minutes. Don’t worry about that stuff I asked you to get. I know your busy with Halley and its not like babies should be exposed to all that dipravity anyway haha. But if you do get it that would be awesome. And also find a way to hide it when you mail the package because my CO is pretty tough and also other guys sometimes take peoples stuff. But you can just forget it okay that’s cool. Love you say hi to Tom and talk to you later. Vic.”

Well, she had mailed him everything else he’d requested: high-tech long underwear, individual packs of tuna, beef jerky, skin lotion, chap stick, Gummi Bears, X-Men DVDs . . . and now porn. How was it different, really? To a twenty-two-year-old guy, porn was probably just another item on a basic supplies list.

Suddenly a muffled splatter came from the seat of the bouncy chair, and then another; Halley, who had startled herself, began to cry.

“Whoa,” Jean said. She unbuckled the baby and lifted her up. They had a situation: poop had exploded out the sides of Halley’s diaper and up her back, soaking through her onesie and onto the blue cloth of the bouncy chair. Hoisting Halley under the armpits, far away from her own body, Jean carried her to the changing table. Halley screamed and arched her back as Jean tried to contain the damage with wet wipes, a towel she managed to grab out of the hamper, and finally a baby blanket they’d never really liked that much anyway.

Later, she was scrubbing her arms and hands, surgeon-style, in the hall bathroom. The NPR woman’s voice was low and calm and crisp, floating toward her.

“From Baghdad. AP news is reporting that six marines died when their convoy—”

Jean froze. In the mirror above the sink, she saw and didn’t see a smear of baby shit on her forehead. “Nah,” she told herself, wiping it away. “Impossible, so don’t even. Just don’t.”

Halley was on a red and white mat in the living room, bobbing her head up desperately. Jean went in and lay down on her stomach, too. “Good,” she whispered. “See? Tummy time. Works for neck strength, or something.” The news update had ended, and the story was now about a proposed gay, lesbian and transgender high school on Chicago’s north side. Halley dropped her face onto the mat and let out a yell. “There’s no way,” Jean explained, touching the bald spot on the back of Halley’s head. “He was just at the big base, where . . .” She trailed off; Halley flailed, face-down, and Jean rolled her onto her back “He’s probably still there,” she told the baby, whose gaze drifted elsewhere.

Victor’s email was still on the computer screen. The day/time stamp read “Thursday, August 19th, 4:49 pm.” Well, did that mean Iraq time, or U.S. Central, or neither? What was Iraq time? Jean Googled it and stared at what she found, uncomprehending: “three hours ahead of Greenwich mean time (GMT + 3).”

But wait. Today was Friday morning, and Victor had called last night. She could figure this out: the call had come between the first and second nursings, so . . . around one or two A.M., then. Or had it been later? Between the second and the third? And was that better? If he was going out on a trip, a mission—a convoy, she thought, with a sick pain of dread—then there couldn’t have been enough time for the chain of events to unfold: the leaving and travel, the blown-up truck, the finding out, the reporter filing the story, the calm, calm voice of the NPR woman reading aloud. No, this was someone else’s tragedy.

On the screen: “heading out soon.” Vic’s echoing voice, on the phone: about to go out. Jean forced herself to find the AP story: six marines believed to be dead in Anbar Province; convoy of trucks; suspected IED.

She stood, shaking, and stepped over Halley on the mat. Jean dialed Tom’s cell and quickly hung up; he was in an all-day conference and had told her he’d only turn on his phone at lunch. Who else? Not her friends, because they wouldn’t know what to say. Not her father, although she thought about this for a long time. He wouldn’t know anything, though—he’d be in the dark, just like she was. And also, they weren’t speaking. So: no one.

“Playboy,” Jean said aloud, looking out the window at Cottontail Park, the lazy traffic on State Street, an orange-line El train stopped at the platform at Roosevelt. Behind her, Halley began to fuss, hungry again. “Penthouse. Um . . . Juggs.” There. The words themselves kept the nightmare at bay, and she needed to do something, to fill all the panicky hours ahead. All right, then: today’s mission would be porn for her brother. But first, the baby needed her morning nap.

*

When Victor was at boot camp, Jean coped mainly by keeping busy. At Northwestern, there was research, putting together a dissertation committee, and teaching the first of many freshman-comp courses to come. She and Tom moved to a one-bedroom condo in one of the renovated high-rises springing up everywhere in the South Loop. This was 2004, and almost a thousand U.S. soldiers had already died in Iraq; Bush was still talking about “weapons of mass destruction” but no one was listening any more. The photos of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib were released, were everywhere; a contractor named Nicholas Berg was captured and executed on video. In November, Jean’s favorite professor led a student-wide walkout to protest complicity in the war. Jean didn’t go to her afternoon seminar, but she avoided the campus rally outside Norris, skirting the stage and the microphone and any friends who might catch sight of her. Instead she went to see The Incredibles, and sat alone in an empty theater, sobbing throughout the entire cartoon.

Victor’s dispatches from Parris Island confused her. On the one hand, Jean couldn’t help but find the idea of “boot camp” reassuring, the word “camp” itself, and those college-prank hazing overtones, Vic’s references to bunks and mess hall and the constant yelling. He wrote them, with pride, about having lasted the longest in some simulation that involved a dark, sealed room, gas, and pretend grenades. “Remember how he used to go the length of the pool?” is what their father had to say about this. “Underwater the whole way!”

But it was around then that the dreams began, touched off by some detail in an email from Vic, or a headline in the paper, or the unable-to-be-escaped word behead. At the time, Jean wouldn’t notice the effect on herself because if she looked away quickly enough, if she burrowed into grading papers or into bed with Tom, it was possible to dodge that increasingly familiar hit of fear. Except when she slept.

“He said,” she gasped, bolting upright before dawn, in their still-unfamiliar apartment. Tom held her, stroked her sweaty hair. “The dog tags, they go . . . they go . . .” But when she awoke to it, the horror of realization that this was not a nightmare, not unreal, she couldn’t finish the thought out loud.

Dog tags, Vic had mentioned. How it worked was, you wore one around your neck. The other you tucked deep in one of your boots.

*

Jean still flinched almost every time she took Halley out in the stroller. It was too jarring, even today. Especially today. The noise and speed of the cars, the jostling of people rushing past, even an errant spray of water from a sprinkler—all of it came unbearably close to tiny Halley, buckled in and facing her, who was delighted by the sights and the feel of the hot August wind on her bare arms and legs. Jean walked eight long blocks north to the light at the intersection, rather than cut across State Street. Then eight blocks back down, a full twenty-five minutes, only to end up at the dingy White Hen corner store directly across the street from their apartment building.

Inside, the odors of stale coffee and cleaning fluid. A black man, about fifty, was behind the counter, flipping through the Sun-Times. He nodded at her pleasantly, but Jean felt uneasy. She steered Halley around the Slurpee machine to the rack of newspapers and magazines: Time and Newsweek, stacks of the Tribune, one battered New York Times, three or four candy-colored celebrity weeklies. Then Jean saw something promising: Maxim, with its trashy red font and unrecognizable actress whose airbrushed breasts strained to be released from their slutty top. She picked it up and flipped through—but weren’t there too many articles here? Ten Greatest Video Game Movie Adaptations, Eight Questions for a Bengals Cheerleader, Hometown Hotties and Celebrity Lookalikes. This couldn’t be what Vic meant by porn.

“Excuse me—”

“Help you?”

Jean held up Maxim. “Do you have any other magazines? Like this, but, you know . . . the kind that are wrapped in plastic?”

The man behind the register slid his eyes, once, at Halley in her stroller. “Just what’s out there.”

Jean stuffed the magazine back in the rack. Sweat beaded her upper lip, and she was woozy with the effort of walking. Could she risk a soda, even after that half-cup of coffee earlier? But her baby books were relentless on this, how caffeine absorbed right into breast milk. And if Halley didn’t nap later, or do any better than she had last night—with Tom gone until Monday . . . No, that was unimaginable.

She wheeled Halley up to the counter to pay for a Sprite. Was the man at the register avoiding looking at her?

“The toll from yesterday’s suicide bomb in a Baghdad market is up to thirty, say observers—”

A television in a corner of the store had somehow sprung to life; Jean’s eyes flew up to the bland, grim-voiced news announcer, the ticker of words running inexorably below him—

“Warm out,” she said loudly, the man slowly making change for her soda. “But maybe a little better tomorrow, isn’t that what they’re saying?” She talked on, desperate to block out what the announcer might say next: six marines, truck, Anbar province. The man muttered to himself, having trouble with a tightly wrapped cylinder of quarters. Halley’s fed-up, let-me-out cry began, and Jean began to smile. It built to a wail, and Jean pretended to coo a fake baby-talk, the kind that Halley never responded to. She left the stroller entirely still, knowing that the only thing that might help in this situation was a firm, back-and-forth pushing motion. Halley yelled on and on, drowning out the man on television, Jean’s hurried thanks, and whatever it was the man behind the cash register said as they left.

*

Victor deployed to Iraq four months after boot camp. Just before shipping out, he was given a ten-day leave from Camp Pendleton and flew out to Chicago for a quick weekend visit. Jean was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with Halley, and for most of the time, Vic and Tom joked nonstop about the baby, the birth. Jesus, don’t point that thing at me, Vic would say, about her huge stomach. Tom: she’s loaded and ready to discharge. Jean encouraged it all; every lame comic routine took them another step away from Iraq.

And who was this man, anyway, tan and bulked up, with his head shaved into a precise, government-decreed design? Vic had arrived with a stuffed animal in a plastic bag, a tall and purple synthetic bunny that he’d clearly bought at an O’Hare gift shop. Jean made a fuss over it, exclaiming over the unlovable thing. She put it in a place of honor in the empty crib. When had her little brother last brought her a gift?

She remembers flashing her bare stomach at him one morning, thinking it would be funny to show her brother the way her belly button had recently popped out, a distended half-inch of turned-out flesh. But Vic had turned away, a flash of revulsion on his face. They turned it into a joke, but Jean regretted it, her stupid attempt to make things light.

One day the three of them walked, slowly, up through snowy Cottontail Park, stopping in a tiny deli in Dearborn Tower. The woman behind the counter knew Vic for a soldier as soon as he pulled off his wool cap, and she wouldn’t let any of them pay for their coffee. “God bless you,” she said, and Vic ducked his head, muttering some thanks. Jean’s eyes welled up, and she felt a rush of fury at herself. No, this wasn’t allowed. You didn’t get to have the pride, when you seethed at the war, the marines, your brother’s involvement—all of it. It wasn’t fair, to accept the coffee or the blessing or the look of respect in that woman’s face, with your secret anger burning all the while. But she did.

When it was time for him to go they stood outside the Blue Line turnstile. Jean could barely hug him the way she wanted to; the bulk of her stomach kept them apart. And luckily, too, because she was crying and Vic had set his face, hard. It interrupted that with something to laugh about.

Halley was born nine days before Vic left for Iraq. They had emailed him some photos from the hospital; he called twice from base camp to say congratulations. But it was clear her brother was now in a different mindset. He spoke loving things about his new niece, but he made no jokes. Vic was upbeat, brisk; he hadn’t left yet for the war, but even over the phone, even through her haze of pain and euphoria and sleeplessness, Jean could tell. He was already there.

*

Jean pushed the stroller hard up State Street, and turned east to Michigan as soon as a quiet cross street presented itself. Halley was grappling with the cell phone she’d been handed, occasionally gumming it, and the few minutes of contentment this bought seemed worth the risk of a broken phone.

“Hey, sweet mama,” some guy at the corner on Wabash sang out. “You looking—”

“Back off,” Jean spat. He held up both hands in surrender and they blew past him.

She’d heard there was a new Borders bookstore in the ground floor of one of these anonymous glass-fronted buildings—hard to tell if they held offices or residences—and just as she was about to give up—sweating, breathing hard—she saw the familiar red sign.

Luckily, the magazine racks were just inside the front door, which a nice woman held open for her. But Halley had had enough; Jean unbuckled her and put her on her hip while she wheeled the empty stroller through the aisles and around people browsing. Halley burrowed her face against Jean’s bare shoulder and started sucking at her skin, wetly.

“Not yet, baby girl,” Jean murmured. This wouldn’t take long—they could definitely be home by the next nursing. There! Finally. Naked women. Well, the covers were mostly blocked out by black bars across their plastic wrappings, but Jean could tell, even from the shoulders up—and by the look in their eyes—that these women were naked. With her free hand, she pulled out three or four magazines that seemed promisingly dirty, and dropped them into the stroller.

The line to check out was long, and now Jean had to use both arms to hold Halley, bouncing her and blowing gently in her face, to keep the baby calm. She kicked the stroller ahead with her foot each time they moved.

“Jean?”

Fuck. Sarah Grisholm, from school, standing with her husband two people ahead of them in line.

“I thought that was you! Oh my God, and this is your adorable Callie.”

Jean surreptitiously reached down into the stroller basket for a blanket, and dropped it casually on top of the magazines. “Hi, Sarah, how are you?” She ignored the Callie.

“Go ahead of us, please,” Sarah said to the people behind her.

“No, that’s okay—”

But Sarah had already moved closer to Jean, eyes alight and hands stretching out to Halley. “Give me this sweet pumpkin. Oh, look at you! You are a cutie-pie, aren’t you?”

Jean handed over the baby—she had no choice—and made small talk with Sarah’s husband. They were standing in an awkward clump in the middle of the roped-off line, and she tried to calculate how she could get out of this situation, absently answering Sarah’s rapid-fire questions about Halley’s weight, sleep schedule, and how things were going at home.

“Here, let me help you,” Sarah’s husband said, and put a hand on the stroller.

“No,” Jean said, and grabbed it back. “I mean, I’m good. So, how’s the department?” She scooped up the blanket and magazines underneath.

“Who’s next?” A cashier called.

Pretending to listen to Sarah describe the latest gossip about their fellow grad students, Jean slid the magazines from under the blanket and stuffed them behind a display of travel coffee mugs. Sarah’s husband gestured for her to go ahead, so she took an Us Weekly from the stand at the counter, and paid for it.

“Guilty pleasure, huh?” Sarah said, about the magazine, reluctantly handing Halley back to Jean. “Good for you—hey, you’re on vacation, right? We have to get together soon. I want to hear everything about everything.”

“Totally,” Jean promised, buckling an unhappy Halley back in her seat. She waved goodbye and shoved the stroller back out onto the street, eyes burning. It wasn’t the magazines. Jean didn’t really care if stupid Sarah or her no-name husband saw her buying Playboy—although, she had to admit, it wasn’t a fun idea. What she found impossible was what would happen next: for my little brother, she would have explained, with a nervous shrug, he’s in Iraq. Jean can picture the couple’s faces: chastened, respectful, understanding. Perhaps even admiring. But then, their polite questions: where is he, how is he, when will he be back? And how could Jean respond, when she had no answers? Is that how you fit anguish into a socially acceptable exchange. . . with a daughter in one hand and some porn in the other?

I am embarrassed. Jean wondered at it, this strange truth, as she fled. Embarrassed to allude to it—that Vic could die. Could have died.

*

When Halley was five weeks old, Jean and Tom took her to Boston to meet her grandparents. That first airplane ride went fine for Halley, less so for Jean, who leaked through two shirts and all her breast pads, and arrived at her father and Marie’s house feeling frazzled, incompetent, and fat. But the first day and a half went well: Marie took the baby on long walks, Jean and Tom slept as much as they could, and her father grilled steak and corn on the cob.

On the morning before they left, Jean finished nursing Halley in the guest room, and then brought the baby out to a blanket on the floor of the living room. It wasn’t yet seven, and Marie and Tom were both still asleep. Her father was in his usual chair, reading the paper; he handed her the sections he was finished with. For several minutes they read together silently, drinking coffee, Halley making humming noises among her toys.

Her father made a tcch sound, and turned a page noisily.

“What?”

“This Cindy Sheehan. Why some people think their own tragedy qualifies them to become grand-standing know-it-alls who speak for the rest of us, I’ll never figure out. All she’s doing is hurting her own cause.”

Jean could have let it pass. She could have handed the baby another rattle, she could have started scrambling an egg or gone to take a shower. Instead, she said, “She’s got a right to speak out. I mean, her son died there.”

“Well, maybe this is news to Cindy, but she’s not the only one. And that doesn’t give her the right to hurt the other troops who are in harm’s way—”

“How is protesting outside Bush’s ranch going to—”

“She’s as much an enemy to Vic and the guys out there with him as the Iraqi terrorists are. All people like that want is attention—look at me, look how hard I have it. Some of us bear our sacrifice with a little more dignity. A little more self-respect.”

Jean hated to remember what happened next. In fact, she didn’t even fully know how it all happened, so fast and brutal. Glimpses remain: herself, standing over her baby in the middle of the living room, shaking, yelling at her father. Her father, in his worn blue robe and a forced half-smile, patiently explaining as if she was one of his students. And the things they said . . . Jean said if Vic died in Iraq she wouldn’t hesitate to devote her life to making George Bush’s a living hell. She said that anyone who pretended that serving in this war was honorable was either totally deluded or worse. Her father said that to imply any American death in Iraq was a mistake, or a waste, meant you might as well take up arms with the Shiites. He called her naïve and sheltered. She called him a righteous asshole; she said if Vic were hurt or killed she would never forgive him, her own father, for his part in all of it.

Halley cried and then was taken away by Marie and Jean didn’t even notice. After a while Tom pulled Jean out of the room, out of the house, and walked her in hysterics around the block in the hot sun—both of them still in pajamas—and talked her out of immediately leaving for the airport. Back at the house, there were stiff, unfelt apologies on both sides, and then a grim silence for the next eighteen hours. Jean barely made eye contact with her father when they said goodbye.

Since then, she and her father spoke only when necessary, or when Marie made them, and when they did, it was brief and hardly meaningful. Occasionally she would email him a picture of Halley, no other note, and receive a one-word reply: cute! Whether or how much her father heard from Vic, she had no idea.

*

Big mistake. Jean was almost running now, the stroller jolting hard against cracks in the pavement; Halley was crying, twisting this way and that against the car seat straps. She must be starving by now, Jean thought—she could tell from the painful pressure in her own breasts. It had been three and a half hours since the last nursing, and Halley almost never went that long in the middle of the day. But they were still at least eight blocks from home—how had she let this happen? Soon Halley’s wails and the guilt inside Jean combined with the anxiety of racing along these empty, ominous sidewalks to lay open a shattering possibility. Victor. Maybe it had been him, in that truck. What if it was his body being identified, right now, a world away—the information passed from marine official to marine official until two of them were dispatched in matching uniforms to Longfellow High School, in Somerville, Massachusetts. Would they go directly to her father’s classroom? Would they interrupt him at the chalkboard, drawing yet another sine curve?

One hand on the stroller, the other on her phone: Jean speed-dialed Tom. When it went right to voicemail, though, she hung up. What she wanted—she needed—was something very specific, and there was a chance he might bobble this, even in his always-good-intentioned way, and that would be worse than not talking at all. What she needed was for Tom to say exactly the right things in the right order (and in the right tone), that would convince her that Victor was not one of those six marines.

By now, Halley was exhausted from screaming, and she was starting to fall asleep. But that was a problem, too, since it would wreck the chances of an afternoon nap, and if that happened. . .

While Jean was trying to parse all the infant combinations of feedings and sleep, and their consequences, a gleam of something caught her eye. Porn. Through the grimy window of a hole-in-the-wall bodega she’d never noticed before, on State Street above Thirteenth. A bell over the door tinkled while Jean backed it open and hoisted the stroller up two stairs and in—the noise, and the jolt, sent Halley howling.

“How much are the magazines?” Jean called to the lone dark-skinned woman working there. “Those porn ones. Never mind, I’ll take two. Or make that three.”

She unbuckled Halley to soothe her, but gentle bouncing only made her wilder. The woman was saying something to Jean, who had pulled out her wallet and tossed it on the counter. “Could you just take the money out?” she said. “I don’t need change. I’m in kind of a hurry.” She thought she might start crying, too, alongside Halley’s repetitive siren wail. And why was this woman still talking? It was a simple fucking transaction—what was her problem?

“Come on,” Jean said. “I need help.”

The woman came around the counter and very close up to Jean. Her brown eyes were lined with thick black kohl. “Feed your baby first,” she said, enunciating. “Then, you buy.” And now she was guiding Jean—with a firm hand on her back—to a dusty plastic chair in the back corner of the small store. “You have the bottle?”

But Jean was already pulling up her shirt—the tank-top now dark with wet patches—and unsnapping her bra. Halley gasped, and latched on airlock-tight before Jean could even sit down. Her little hands scrabbled against Jean’s bare skin. The baby’s sucking sounds filled the room; both women were silent, listening.

“Thanks,” Jean said. Her voice wobbled. “I didn’t realize—I should have—”

The other woman shook her head. With one hand she gestured, just sit still. With no words she said, you’re fine now. Everything is fine. So Jean sat, and rested her head against the cool glass of the soda case. Halley nursed fast and then slower, deeper. Jean watched the woman putter around the store, straighten a display of pre-wrapped muffins, replace a bag of chips to the shelf. Every so often, she would glance back at Jean, and smile a little.

“You want newspaper?” she said. “I’ll get it for you.” The woman moved to the front area where a moment ago Jean had been ranting.

Jean sighed. “No, I wanted a couple of the girlie magazines. You know, the dirty ones.” She was feeling sleepy and content, as if Halley’s satiation was her own, too. She expected the other woman to be startled, perhaps disgusted, and was mildly surprised to see her immediately pluck three porn magazines out of the top rack and hold them up for Jean’s approval.

“Oh, great. Actually—” The woman began to stack them by the register. “Can I see one of those? Um—that one, with the girl in the—what are those . . . overalls? Right.” With her free hand, Jean took what she’d been handed. “Mind if I unwrap? I’m definitely buying it.” This time, the woman’s hand gesture meant, suit yourself.

Jean tore open the plastic with her teeth. She shifted Halley around and began to leaf through the magazine. No, this wasn’t Maxim, and it wasn’t even Playboy. Full-color, glossy nudity hit her like an icy breeze—not so bad, Jean thought, on such a hot day. Women posed themselves playing the guitar, changing tires, painting walls, sitting on low stools: naked, all naked. Some held their big, shiny breasts out to the viewer with exaggerated expressions of delight, as if the women themselves were surprised—as if they had just glanced down to find these glorious, silicone marvels and wanted to share the good news. Others squatted or reclined, hands framing their own bare labia, somewhat more resigned: well, let’s see what we’ve got here.

“I don’t get all this waxing,” Jean said to Halley. “Is that mandatory?” Halley cocked an eye up at her mother, but went on nursing. Jean considered the appeal of so much female nudity. Wearily, she eyed the taut bellies of the naked women. At the moment, sex itself was a foreign country, one she could only vaguely imagine wanting to visit. And wasn’t there something inherently thin and useless about nudity on paper, something flimsy? Still, Jean guessed she could see what Vic—and perhaps Tom—would enjoy here. Objectively speaking. After all, she herself liked to flip through the latest issue of Food and Wine while she ate dinner; reading a recipe for beef bourguignon could enhance even macaroni and cheese from a box.

“You like this one?” The woman at the counter held up one of the other magazines. “Better for you, maybe?”

Jean glanced up and Halley popped off, finished on one side. For some reason, Jean hardly cared that her own breast—with its wet, elongated nipple—was exposed in front of a stranger. Usually she fumbled under a blanket, but now Jean merely burped Halley and got her started on the other side before refastening her bra.

“We have more in back,” the woman said. “I bring for you?”

“No, these are fine,” Jean said. She thought about explaining, about correcting the assumption that the magazines were for her, but found that it didn’t matter. Halley was slowing, getting full; Jean drifted, the porn magazine lying lightly in her lap. Why have I never been in this store before? she wondered. We’re coming back tomorrow. And the day after.

But the television, bolted to a ceiling corner, made her flare awake. Even with the sound off, Jean could see the grainy, washed-out images of war, helicopters and empty streets, intercut with the bright colors of a frowning reporter in the studio. Jean struggled to sit up. She felt the beginnings of a dark terror stir; Halley clamped down hard, a toothless bite.

Then the screen went black. The woman behind the counter was aiming a remote. “Not good,” she said. “No good for babies to see.”

Jean could have hugged her, this bodega angel in a blue cotton smock. She looked more closely at the woman’s smooth dark hair, her deep olive skin. . . . And her accent—wasn’t it . . .

“Are you Middle Eastern?”

The woman stared at her. Jean flicked her chin towards the television. “Are you . . . from over there? From Iraq?”

The silence was long enough for Jean to regret her question, but not long enough to figure out what to say instead.

“From India,” the woman said finally. She turned away to gather up the magazines and stack them in a firm pile by the cash register. This time, when she held her hand out to Jean, it meant, are you finished?

*

Halley had been bathed and changed into snap-up pajamas; she rocked herself in the bouncy chair and sucked on a fist. Sitting cross-legged on the floor next to her, Jean wiped her face. The latest AP report said that the Pentagon was withholding names of the six dead marines in Anbar until each one had been identified. With every ragged breath, Jean fought back the images in her head, coming in waves: shredded metal, blown-apart limbs, young men smeared across a bloody desert road. But she had things to do, she had a plan: the porn magazines were rolled and rubber-banded into a tight cylinder.

“It’s our little art project,” she told the baby.

Halley’s gaze drifted up to the pipes running along the ceiling.

Jean picked up the bunny, the purple synthetic one Vic had brought for his unborn niece. She took the kitchen shears and slit the seam running up its back. Inside, coarse white stuffing; Jean pulled and cut until the bunny was mostly gutted. Halley watched with little interest, even when Jean had to tug open the back of the bunny’s head and its face flattened out. Jean found herself singing a little song while she worked; the actions were calming. She had tried a few other ways to hide the magazines, as Vic had told her to do—camouflaging them in a copy of the Sunday Tribune, wrapping them in an old sweatshirt of Tom’s—but nothing had worked. Then, changing Halley, she spotted the purple bunny, propped in a corner of the crib.

It was a tight fit, but eventually she got the magazines in. Jean had to squeeze the bunny between her knees, though, to stretch its sides back together. She tried to sew quickly as a tired Halley began to fuss. Jean—who usually counted down the minutes until she could put the baby to bed—had pushed back the schedule, tonight. What would she do, alone, when the bad thoughts came back?

Tom’s message—she missed his call while Halley was in the bath—had come from outside a noisy bar packed with coworkers. He asked all about Halley, but he was rushed, and he sounded happy and a little drunk. Jean had started to call him back, and then she dropped the phone on her bedside table.

“There,” she said, biting off the thread. She held up the bunny and turned it this way and that. “What do you think?”

Halley groaned and drummed her legs.

“I know,” Jean said. “It’s totally warped.” The bunny, once floppy and soft, now had a bloated, rectangular shape. Still, it might pass—she’d put it in a box with some candy bars and a couple paperbacks, and hope for the best. Vic would love it, she told herself. It was the perfect touch, using the stuffed animal he’d brought for the baby. It could be the centerpiece of their next funny story.

*

In the middle of the night, the phone rang. Or did it? Jean sat up in bed, confused, her heart pounding. Had she dreamt it? There was no sound now. And Halley . . . Jean groped for the clock: 2:41 A.M. No, that couldn’t be right. Because she hadn’t nursed Halley once since putting her to bed at nine. Could Halley actually be sleeping for more than five and a half hours? (She had to count this on her fingers.) For the first time ever?

Jean slipped from bed and tiptoed to the nursery door. Sure enough, Halley’s rumbly breathing was slow and steady, with no sign of waking. She crept back into the bedroom, took the phone off the charger, and went into the bathroom. More awake now, she could have sworn it was a ring—a single one—that had wakened her. Caller ID showed nothing, but then again just one ring wouldn’t register. What if it had been Victor? She knew it wasn’t possible, but still . . . what if it had been him? One of the bad images rushed up: Vic, with a hood over his head, handed a phone.

Jean dialed quickly now, with no hesitation.

Her father answered right away. “Jeanie?”

“Dad, I thought I heard—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That was me. I thought I heard our phone ring, but it was a wrong number. I started to call you before I figured it out. It’s stupid, I know, because we just spoke to him last night—but I thought it might have been Vic . . .” Her father’s voice was warm, and worried, and filled Jean’s small, harshly-lit bathroom. She shut her eyes.

“What if it’s him,” she whispered. “That truck, yesterday. Those six marines.”

“No,” her father said. She heard him move around, say something muffled to Marie. “Okay, I’m in the office now. Let me just get my glasses on. Here—I found something online about it, I’ll read it to you.”

“I tried to do the time difference but I couldn’t—”

“Seven or eight hours ahead, depending on daylight savings time,” her math-teacher father said automatically. He was comfortable, as ever, in the world of numbers and probability, and his matter-of-fact tone began to lift Jean out of her loneliness, out of her panic. She could picture him exactly, in the blue bathrobe, grey hair awry, under a cone of yellow light at the orderly desk where he graded papers, where he’d checked her and Victor’s homework every night before bed. She had known this voice since childhood—her father picking his way slowly and calmly through thickets of confusion. “That’s another reason it couldn’t have been him. But also, I found about three different websites where they say that convoy was from the Second Brigade—Vic’s in the Third, you know—and I’m going to send you the links now. Let me just type in your . . . okay, got it. I also made a list of the different areas in Anbar Province where Vic could have been heading—he can’t tell us exactly where, of course, but it’s not hard to figure out if you spend a little time reading the various blogs. So then, if you calculate the circumference in miles there’s just no way he could have been anywhere near the . . . Jeanie?”

Her breasts, full from Halley’s unprecedented night, began to ache. Jean wanted to say something to her father, about how she felt a little better, about how he was helping her. There was still anger between them; it hadn’t gone away. But it had ceased to matter, here at three A.M., in her bathroom, on the phone. And even though she knew—in a tiny, hard-lodged place buried deep inside—that her father’s efforts and diagrams wouldn’t erase the possibility that it could be Vic, that they couldn’t know for sure, at least not now . . . it was helping, nonetheless. Sustenance: a little sleep, the math, his kindness.

“I’m here,” Jean said. “Go on.”

© by Emily Gray Tedrowe. Used by permission.

Read more about Emily here . . .

Read about Commuters here . . .

And read a bit of it here!

The infant—whose features included blue slit-eyes and an obscenely small nose—lay drowsily in his crib, while his parents both snapped open matching purple cans of Tab. Jack and Jenna Friddle were unsurprised and uninspired by their baby, as they had been by the pregnancy, which they mistook for months as gut fat.

“How soon do you think we can tell if he’s ‘special’?” his mother wondered. “You know, like affected?”

“Let’s just hope he’s not faggoty,” Jack Friddle said, leaning over the baby, a toothpick quivering between his lips.

The rest of their parenting could adequately be described as hands-off.

They rented a trailer on a week-by-week basis from a chain-smoking woman with a brown dog chained outside her trailer. She usually rented to migrant workers who roomed five to a trailer and split the two-hundred-dollar rent, or disappeared before it was due. The woman, Mary-Beth Unruh, had white-blond hair and deep vertical lines down her cheeks. She also had few expectations in life, so used was she to being swindled.

Like the Friddles, like most everyone in Comanche, Mary-Beth viewed life as a vast, flat plateau. Everything you saw was everything you ever would see, past and present, unless you went and did something stupid to put yourself over the edge. She didn’t bat an eyelash when the Friddles brought home their baby to a trailer that smelled of migrant sweat and barbed wire, with flesh-colored asbestos leaking from the closets, though she did feel quite sorry for the child.

Deacon grew up terrified of Mary-Beth Unruh. She was always coming over to yell at his parents, mostly his mother—his father would be gone soon, off to drive semis in the desert with an Indian named Delia—for not paying their rent. His earliest memories were of his mother placing him belly-down on the green shag carpet, trying to buy another free week in the trailer. He couldn’t crawl yet, but he’d lace his fingers through the carpet and keen. He remembered his mother’s toes out of their work heels, all gnarled up, and the dirty tennis shoes of Mary-Beth Unruh. Words were exchanged, voiced raised, all bouncing flatly from the fake wood walls.

Mary-Beth Unruh knew that Jenna Friddle brought out the baby for sympathy, let him drag himself around on the floor like a seal, but it worked anyway. Sometimes she got the rent, and sometimes she didn’t. Either way, when she was leaving, she’d pick Deacon up and jiggle him a bit. “Po, po, pitiful thing,” she’d say. “How’d you get so pitiful?”

*

Deacon was also afraid of the dog chained to Mrs. Unruh’s trailer. When he was older, his mother would send him with a wad of twenties to pay toward the rent, and he made sure to give the dog a wide berth. It was a mix of something, yellow with a small head and big body, seemingly always pregnant, with big, purple nipples that hung down to the ground. The dog’s name was Martha the Terrible.

Once, a few years after his father left for good with the Indian, Deacon went over with fifty bucks. He was twelve. Outside smoking vigorously on the steps of the Unruh trailer was a stocky, dark-haired man with what looked like fur on the tops of his hands. Deacon had never seen him before. He wore a shirt that said Comanche City Volunteer Fire Department. In smaller print, it read Beware: Oversized Hose. The man flicked ashes off into the gravel, and Martha the Terrible gobbled them up, her tongue stained black.

Deacon wasn’t paying attention and made the mistake of surprising the dog. Its head swung around like a hammer. Martha really only nipped him, her teeth pinching the back of his hand, but he screamed for five full minutes, even after the man kicked the dog in the ribs and it ran back yipping to its ashes. “Boy, cut it out,” the man said, shaking Deacon by his skinny shoulders. “It ain’t like she took your wizzer.”

This is how Deacon met Mary-Beth Unruh’s husband, Grandad. Grandad Unruh was not a grandfather, it was just that everybody called him that. His real name was Kim.

Deacon figured it was a safe bet no one would have mistaken Grandad for a grandfather anyway. He was a womanizer who dyed his beard brown to match his hair and liked telling dirty jokes and playing the lottery with his wife’s money. He was a fraud, like Deacon’s parents. None of them were what their names suggested them to be. False advertising. It shook off them like gold dust.

Grandad Unruh had a separate place a little ways down into the divide, a small thorny ranch.

Mrs. Unruh used to live down there with him until he started getting on her nerves, not to mention the cheating and the lotto. She had been a teacher at the technical college in Cheyenne, and she used her savings to buy the first trailer for herself as a vacation home away from Grandad, and the other trailers as an investment. Then she bought Martha the Terrible as a guard dog after the migrant workers tried to rob her, and after Grandad tried to get back in her bed. Fortunately for Mrs. Unruh, the dog hated Mexicans; unfortunately, it liked Grandad, who brought it elk legs he found up in the mountains, with muscle and fur still attached.

Deacon grew up with the Unruhs. They understood his parents were losers without ever acknowledging it in any way. They paid him a little something to help out at the ranch. His mother didn’t care, so he went, sometimes for hours after school. Grandad showed him how to prop up the sheep for vaccinations and sheering. Deacon loved the heavy feeling of their wooly backs pressed against his legs, like suitcases.

*

Deacon was a smart boy. Eventually, he noticed the ranch beginning to fail, and Mrs. Unruh beginning to fail.

The dog died first, after crawling up under the back wheel of the trailer. You could smell it before you got close to the trailer park. Mrs. Unruh called Grandad in tears, and he came over to get it, pulling it slowly out by the chain. Deacon stared down at Martha, who didn’t look like Martha anymore. She didn’t even look much like a dog. Small flies made determined inroads beneath the skin around her eyes.

“Goddamn, they don’t wait long, do they, boy?” Grandad said. “Wanna help me bury her?” He wrapped his furry fingers around the handle of the rusty shovel he had used to kill the marmots Martha only maimed. Even Martha was a fraud that way, not finishing the job, leaving the sandy things flopping around, all bloody and legless.

Grandad showed Deacon how deep to make the hole. To discourage the wolves.

“Might as well bury Mary-Beth at the same time, she’s gonna be so broken-hearted,” Grandad said. He was right.

After the death of Martha the Terrible, Mrs. Unruh never came over to ask for the Friddles’ late rent, or for anything much at all.

*

In a few years, Deacon grew up. His mother liked to say it was all the milk and clean Wyoming air, but that was a lie, like all things. The air around the trailer smelled of oil, rust, and waste from the nearby ranches; and most of the time, the milk was sour, unless it was the chocolate milk Deacon bought with money he took out of his mother’s purse, the chocolate tending to stay good longer. Deacon got to over six feet tall pretty quickly, and his blond pompadour scraped the low trailer ceiling. He developed something like muscles, small lumps at intervals down his white arms. Everyone in high school looked at him like he was an alien.

“Does anybody smell horse shit?” the boys would laugh when he walked into class.

Deacon never talked to anyone. He got to school late and left early, hurrying back to the Unruhs,’ though lately that place was equally depressing.

Mrs. Unruh had become senile. Her eyes were cloudy like she could see into the future. Sometimes she held her cigarettes out away from her face, forgetting them in her hands until there was nothing but ash. She liked to play dress-up with her old schoolteaching clothes.

Grandad kept his marbles but had had a heart attack the month before his sixtieth birthday; now he walked around the ranch aimlessly, shirtless, with a zipper-scar on his chest. He remained, by his own admission, a thoroughgoing pussy hound. Supposedly recovering, he was still taking women, smearing them with the dirt under his nails.

Deacon believed that he was on his way to discovering the truth about Grandad, like finding a hard, sweet seed at the center of a sour fruit.

No kin, no care. It was something his father used to say, though he had never really understood it.

Deacon looked at the Unruhs with occasional disgust. They disappointed him. He was a teenager, and he had hoped to stay on with them at the ranch. Now the ranch was a joke. They called themselves ranchers long after the ranch had been reduced to skeletal sheep and blooming weeds.

Deacon began to think about college as a way out. He didn’t really understand what it would mean for him, or what it would enable him to do, if anything. Late at night, Deacon read his textbooks, brushing his blond bangs from his eyes, and he listened to his mother’s drunken sleep-talk in the next room, dreaming the accident of his birth. “Goddamn Jack,” she’d slur, affectless. “I’m pregnant, don’t you see?”

*

One day Deacon landed a job interview and Grandad agreed to lend him his pickup.

Grandad hadn’t been allowed to drive for some time. Doctor’s orders.

It was the first time the truck had been started in weeks, and it choked to life, expelling a family of tiny field mice from the muffler. Standing in a cloud of exhaust, Grandad stared down at the mice, their brown fur stained with oily condensation. The mice trembled like homunculi in the yellow grass, stunned. He laughed and gently kicked them out of the way so Deacon could throw the truck in reverse before it died.

“Better light out, boy,” he said, secretly fingering himself through his pocket. With his other hand, he waved goodbye in big, ridiculous circles.

Deacon drove slowly to his interview, not sure what to expect.

The advertisement had been almost buried in the paper, for it was spring, and there were chickens and small ducks listed for Easter. Need House Cleaner, the ad read. Prefer all-natural products.

“But that’s for girls,” Mrs. Unruh had said, knitting her brows.

“Doesn’t say nothing about girls or boys,” Deacon said. “Can’t hurt to call.”

Mrs. Unruh tilted her leathery face, confused. “But you can get a job right now, on the ranches,” she said. To her, Deacon was a puddle of strange ideas.

“Not on your ranch,” he said. “Anyways, I need to save money for college. Then I can have a career,” Deacon pointed at the television. A show was playing with high-powered lawyers in business suits. The lawyers stood and argued outside on marble steps for what seemed like forever. “Like them lawyers, see.”

Mrs. Unruh stared at the men in suits. By their side were women with briefcases. The kind of women Grandad called femi-nazis, the kind he said needed a good roll behind the barn. Get their hair all tousled.

Mrs. Unruh’s white-blond hair was pulled back into a chignon. She was playing dress-up again. “Wanna come look at my purses?” she asked.

“No ma’am. I gotta get home and make my mom some dinner. Ask Grandad when he gets back if I can use his truck, ’kay?”

She looked at him for a moment, and then her frail hand wandered toward his cheek. He had the first traces of stubble, like the legs of a caterpillar.

“Po, po, pitiful thing. How’d you get to be so pitiful?” she asked.

*

Turned out the dirty house belonged to Dr. Scully, the heart doctor.

It was the first time Deacon had ever been in a rich person’s house. He tried not to stare at the artful spiral of a wine rack, or the gold enameled Buddhas everywhere, or the skylights. He made a point of wiping his feet thoroughly on a mat that read HOME IS WHERE YOUR OHM IS. Though the house was a mansion and full of expensive-looking knickknacks, it was furnished with secondhand furniture, ugly futons and stained chairs.

During the interview, Deacon sat at the Scullys’ kitchen table, which glittered like snow. Melodee Buttress-Scully, the wife of the doctor who operated on Grandad, explained that it was made of recycled glass from wine bottles all over the world. Deacon thought about his mother passed out on the brown couch after work, her lips stained grape-purple.

“A male house cleaner must be pretty controversial in such a provincial town,” Mrs. Buttress-Scully said, turning her head from side to side as if addressing an unseen audience.

“I dunno,” Deacon said, noticing a framed picture on the wall with a man suspended by a bungee cord in a canyon. He wondered if it was Dr. Scully or if it came with the frame. “I guess it’s not that different from being a janitor.” He didn’t know what else to say. He was about to mention his plan to save for college, when she said:

“Van and I pride ourselves on being progressive in all areas of our life. Do you know what that means—progressive?”

Melodee Buttress-Scully and her husband were not like anyone Deacon had ever met before. They had lived everywhere, never one place for long, and Deacon had the sense that they didn’t intend to stay in Comanche very long either. During the interview, Melodee Buttress-Scully seemed distracted, as if she was running late, and her wiry black hair rose up in the dry air. It seemed as if she might have to move again by the afternoon.

She explained what she wanted of Deacon, and that she was very, very busy, and as she described her high standards, she lifted a thin arm above her head. She wanted him to pay attention to the smallest things. She wanted him to take a Q-tip to the places between the numbers on the clock.

Deacon nodded, barely saying a word.

“And I will check after you,” Mary Buttress-Scully said, with a tone that was serious but still polite. “I’ll run my fingers along the baseboards.”

“I understand,” Deacon said.

When he got back to the trailer, he found his mother smoking something that made the house smell of beef jerky. She was still in her work blouse, though it was open at the neck, revealing a small patch of freckled skin. “Where you been all day, Deac?”

“At school. Then the job interview. I took Grandad’s truck.”

“What?” She rolled over on the couch, wrinkling her clothes. A gray cloud of jerky smoke hung down over her, making her a little blurry. “You know I don’t like you hanging around that old fucking pervert.”

Deacon started pulling things out of the refrigerator, one by one. An onion. A bag of egg noodles. Chocolate milk.

“Don’t worry about him, he just wants people to think he’s an ignoramus. He’s really an old soul,” Deacon said, using a term he had heard his English teacher say. He liked it, even though he didn’t completely understand what it meant. “How was work?”

“Old soul.” Deacon’s mother laughed, her teeth blue. “Work’s same-old. Honey, you said something about a job?”

“It’s a cleaning job I found in the paper. I interviewed with Dr. Scully’s wife after school, and I guess I’m hired.”

“Fucking rich people,” Deacon’s mother said. “Can’t even clean their own houses. You want me to make some dinner?”

“I’m making it. Don’t trouble yourself.” He glared at his mother, folded over like a pile of dirty clothes.

“Call your aunts before you do that. Tell them about the job. They’ll be proud of you, like I’m proud of you.”

She was always telling Deacon she was proud of him for doing the littlest things, for putting his shoes on in the morning. Deacon’s Aunt Jeanette once told him that his mother had been convinced that Deacon would be born retarded because she couldn’t stop drinking the wine boxes during the pregnancy, even though she had been warned to quit. Maybe, Deacon thought, that was why she was so proud when he could even breathe or take a shit.

As he made powdered mac ’n’ cheese, Deacon cradled the phone against his shoulder and called his aunt. His mother was right. Aunt Jeanette was proud. She said she’d hang up and call the other aunts.

When the family matriarchs heard that Deacon had taken a job as a cleaning person, they were pleased and nodded sagely, their small heads rolling like grouse eggs. Though they universally acknowledged his mother to be a mess, they figured there was still hope for him. A job was a job. Frankly, they said, they were just grateful he hadn’t driven off with his father and that Indian.

*

Deacon started the next day. He took Grandad’s truck again, and Grandad waved goodbye and shouted at him as he drove off. “They don’t make you wear an apron, now, do they?”

Deacon felt no remorse asking Grandad for the use of his truck, or for money, not that there was much of that anymore. Grandad felt guilty for Deacon’s pitiable life, and being a whip-smart boy of the prairie, Deacon exploited Grandad’s tender shame. Also he had been eyewitness to Grandad putting his tongue down a sixteen-year-old Mexican girl’s mouth the summer before. The Gomez family spared Grandad’s cheekbones only because his wife rented them the trailer, and because Deacon—now tall enough to look at least mildly threatening—offered to intervene. After the Gomezes left, kicking up a cloud of dust and threats to crush Grandad’s balls with their monster truck, Grandad patted Deacon on the shoulder.

“What you say, boy? You really saved me that time.”

“Don’t forget it,” Deacon mumbled, sounding a little like his father.

That morning when he got to work, Deacon learned that the Buttress-Scullys had children. They were all different colors—a black boy, a brown girl, and a white boy. The children were restless, beginning games and puzzles in brief bursts of activity while breathing heavily. Sometimes they spun in rapid circles, their bony arms outstretched like fan blades, and shouted the names for animals in English and French until the two names became almost indistinguishable. Then they’d fall to the carpet laughing, vomiting up frothy saliva from their lips. With each game, they focused themselves completely with piercing concentration, only to abandon their endeavors abruptly with a barely a flinch.

Deacon was frightened of them. He hadn’t spent much time around small children. There were Grandad’s farm animals, but it wasn’t the same. There were rules with them, like the horses you had to approach from the side, leaving them ample room to move. But these children were smarter and therefore more unpredictable.

The white boy, Torrance, ran up to Deacon when he was dusting and shoved him in the gut.

Melodee Buttress-Scully, who sat on the futon reading a story in Spanish to the brown girl, said “Boys will be boys.” She ran her fingers nervously through her frizzy hair. “I’m sure you remember from your own childhood.”

Deacon thought of crawling on the carpet, being a pawn for his mother.

“Actually, my dad would have tanned me pink,” he lied. It felt good.

Mrs. Buttress-Scully shrugged. “I don’t believe in corporal punishment. Van and I believe you should talk to and treat children like people.” She looked out the window at the mountains, as if unsure of them. “Of course I realize that’s not how everyone was raised.”

“That’s okay,” Deacon said, and went back to dusting. He cautiously observed the children while carrying out the remaining tasks of the day.

“How was it?” Grandad asked when he came home.

“It was a job,” Deacon answered, throwing him his keys. “I don’t see how it’s going to pay enough for college. And the kids are weird. Paloma, Torrance, and Kwezi.”

“Kwezi? That doctor cut open my chest, he didn’t look foreign.”

“I think they’re adopted,” Deacon said, going in to wash his hands. “Or two of them, at least. Your truck needs work, old man,” he shouted over his shoulder.

“Who you callin’ old?” Grandad said, thrusting out his damaged chest.

*

Melodee Buttress-Scully was too different for Comanche. She ran fourteen miles every morning, pushing Kwezi in a stroller the whole way. She gave herself beet juice enemas. After dipping her fingers in olive oil, she stood in front of the mirror and smeared her fingertips down the length of each strand of hair, letting the loose hairs fall to the bathroom floor where Deacon knelt, scrubbing the base of the toilet. Sometimes Mrs. Buttress-Scully rolled out a little mat in a patch of afternoon sunlight on the carpet, and bent her back into the shapes of constellations.

Her greatest passion—beyond raising worldly children—was her involvement in an organization called Leche Internacional, a Spanish-based operation celebrating the joys of breastfeeding. Most of the information Deacon gleaned about Leche Internacional was from the papers on the Scullys’ desk, which he frequently, clandestinely, flipped through hoping to see pictures of breasts. He listened as Mrs. Buttress-Scully took phone calls in her “office” regarding the Comanche startup branch she was attempting, which mainly seemed to consist of women in Sheridan. She spearheaded an effort to ship the frozen breast milk of American women to Bhutan.

She didn’t seem to care for Deacon. “You could have done a better job in the kitchen,” she’d say, her bony fingers pinching at her waist. When she made lunch—usually recipes from back issues of a health food magazine that he had to stack neatly on the counter—she never offered Deacon anything. If people came to visit Melodee Buttress-Scully, as they sometimes did, usually people Deacon had never seen around town, she gestured to him with a degree of embarrassment, as if he were an unfortunate water stain on the ceiling, but did not introduce him.

One day, as he was Windexing the living room window, Deacon noticed a man on a skinny racing bike wending up the hill to the house. The bike was the gray-metal color of a cattle prod, and the bicyclist wore a serious black helmet bisected by green stripes. Dr. Van Scully. Deacon had been working for the Scullys over a month and had never even met him.

Dr. Scully was the bungee jumper from the picture. He was probably in his forties, Deacon figured, but even from within his spandex biker’s suit, his muscles protruded in shiny, rubbery waves. In the absent-minded manner of one following a ritual, Dr. Scully bowed at the gold-plated Buddha squatting near the front door before coming in.

“Hey there!” Dr. Scully walked through the house with his hand extended. “You must be the wunderkind. What did we ever do before you came?”

Deacon put down his dust rag to shake the doctor’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you? Ah, so formal!” The doctor boomed with geniality. “I feel like I’ve known you forever, everything Melodee says about you.”

What had Mrs. Buttress-Scully said about him? Deacon couldn’t imagine what she’d tell Dr. Scully, except maybe that he sometimes skipped the top wine bottle when dusting, but that was because he couldn’t reach it and the Scullys didn’t own a ladder, plus their chairs were made of flimsy hemp. He scrambled for some kind of response but was distracted by the image of Dr. Scully with his helmet still on. His head looked like a sideways almond.

“Hey. You’re a godsend, I’m telling you. She was going crazy before, with the children, balancing all her international work, trying to hold things together here. I’m sure you can imagine. You probably wish you had someone to clean your own house, huh?” He laughed raucously, causing the Tibetan prayer flags to tremble in the doorway.

Deacon tried to laugh back. He tried to imagine the doctor stitching closed Grandad’s chest, sealing up his well-worn heart.

Dr. Scully pulled a lunch bag out of the refrigerator. “Well, I’ve gotta run back to the office, but I’m glad to finally meet you, and thanks for keeping down the fort.”

“Van? Is that you?” Mrs. Buttress-Scully had been doing one of her detox soaks in the upstairs bathroom. Deacon always avoided the upstairs when she was there, as she had the habit of walking naked from her bedroom to the bath.

“Who else?” The doctor cheerfully rummaged through some papers on the kitchen counter.

“Are you staying?” She descended the stairs, pulling closed her green silk robe. In a dramatic motion, she crossed the room and embraced Dr. Scully, who kissed her open-mouthed while holding her face.

Deacon, deeply embarrassed—he had never even seen his own parents kiss—looked away, but not before glimpsing the inside edge of Mrs. Buttress-Scully’s small breast as her robe stretched open.

“I was going to go for a run, if you could watch the children for a while,” she murmured into his mouth.

Dr. Van Scully looked up, surprised. “I’m due back at the office.” He turned and clamped his hand on Deacon’s shoulder. “But I’m sure our good friend could watch them for an hour or so. Those scamps aren’t too much of handful.”

From the Spanish girl’s bedroom came a crashing sound, and Kwezi appeared in the doorway, staring at his parents with huge ghost-eyes. Deacon froze in terror, but forced himself to nod and smile fakely at Kwezi, all the while realizing that Dr. Scully either didn’t know or had forgotten his name.

*

Though that afternoon passed without incident, everything soon began to unravel.

Grandad and Mrs. Unruh announced they were leaving. They had decided to move to Florence, Oregon, where apartments were relatively cheap and the weather decent, rain notwithstanding, and where Grandad knew someone who could get him a Parks & Recreation job and someone who could keep an eye on Mary-Beth, who had begun to set small toaster fires and leave the door unlocked. In late spring, they sold all the trailers to a rental corporation called WestSky and the ranch with the starving sheep to a couple from Los Angeles.

“Can’t you wait till summer?” Deacon asked. “At least then I wouldn’t have school, and I could help you move. I could drive with you.”

“Nah, we don’t need no help, boy. There ain’t nothing to be moved,” Grandad said matter-of-factly, taking off his shirt. His scar had become brown and scabby. It was hot for April, and Grandad and Deacon dragged the hose out to fill up the water buckets. “Besides, you can come visit when you get done. Before college. They got them huge sand dunes there, people ride ‘em with dune buggies and skateboards and all.”

Deacon didn’t have it in him to tell Grandad he hadn’t even applied for college.

In the window, Mrs. Unruh stared out at him, one hand shielding her brow. Her eyes were nearly white with cataracts. She waved at him once with one of her patent leather purses. Deacon was surprised to have to swallow something down in his throat.

“You think you’d like to run them dunes like that, boy?” Grandad asked, yanking hard on the hose.

“How the hell do you skateboard on sand?” Deacon wondered, pulling one of the sheep down into a squat against his legs. Grandad aimed the hose at the sheep’s mouth, but it turned its head trying to avoid the water. Against his shins, he could feel the sheep’s spine.

“Fuck if I know,” Grandad said.

After they finished with the sheep, Grandad dropped Deacon off back at his mother’s trailer.

It was scorching hot, and Deacon went from room to room, opening the windows. Each one was limned with black mildew.

His mother had acquired a boyfriend of one month, a man from work named Nave Goodall. He was one of her two bosses at the shady utility company. He had a habit of driving his car through the small patch of grass Mrs. Unruh had seeded years ago in the center of the trailer park, a square of green in the midst of yellow prairie grass and gravel, and his tires left ugly dirt tracks where the grass had been.

When Deacon opened the door to his mother’s bedroom and found her pinned beneath Nave Goodall, his sweaty ass bouncing above her bed like a rubber kickball, he was not surprised. Nave Goodall, however, stopped in midair, and Deacon’s mother craned her head from under his pink shoulder.

“What is it, Deac? You want me to make some dinner?” she asked.

“Nah. I just wanted to tell you Grandad and Mrs. Unruh are moving to Oregon. Somebody else is going to be renting us the trailer from now on. Some corporation. They’re raising the rent two hundred bucks.”

Nave Goodall gently lowered himself back down on Deacon’s mother.

Deacon’s mother laughed, her purple lips crinkling. “Fucking old pervert, Unruh,” she said. “How am I supposed to afford that?”

Deacon shrugged and pulled the door closed behind him. “I’ll go see if there’s anything in the fridge for dinner,” he mumbled.

“Seriously,” Deacon’s mother said into Nave Goodall’s fleshy shoulder. “How am I fucking supposed to afford that?”

*

At school, Deacon was barely there, just counting the days until the end of the year. Sometimes it felt like he really was invisible. He could go a whole day without a single person speaking to him. No one even made the horse shit jokes about him anymore.

At work, his responsibilities grew, though he suffered less and less supervision. The doctor’s wife disappeared for hours at a time, and Deacon was asked to listen out for the children during their afternoon naps. He prayed that they wouldn’t wake up; he wouldn’t know what to do if they did.

When she was home, Mrs. Buttress-Scully had little patience for Deacon. Her irritation seemed worse as the weather grew warmer, when it became too hot to jog and her hair frizzed up in the desert heat. “Do you have to do that?” she would snap when he ran the vacuum during her stretching sessions.

Once, when he yelled at Torrance for pulling cat turds out of the litter box, she grabbed his wrist hard. “You aren’t allowed to discipline him,” she barked.

“I wasn’t going to touch him,” Deacon said, reddening. “You saw him. He was getting his hands in cat shit.”

She flinched, and he was sure in that moment that she would fire him, cut him a check for the rest of the day’s work and let him go. Instead she slowly released her grip like she was coming awake, and left the pink bruise of her fingers on his skin.

Deacon told himself he didn’t care. He didn’t want any part of her, with her honey hair treatments that clogged the tub, or her new ability to place her legs behind her head while using prayer hands; though, truth be told, he sometimes did think of her instead of girls at school when he touched himself late at night. He didn’t understand how it was that he could be aroused by a woman he didn’t even find all that attractive, with her skinny fingers and flexible legs—but just the same, when he came staring at the wood paneling in his bedroom, it was her small breast he thought of.

Still, she was a bitch, as Grandad had always said.

Deacon developed a technique of cleaning several rooms at once, allowing him to move freely to a different room if Mrs. Buttress-Scully came in. He worked diligently and quickly in the hopes of being released early. Unfortunately, with the children running around, Deacon’s work was frequently undone by the end of the day, and he found himself staying later and later, and ultimately subjected to Dr. Scully’s idle chitchat when he biked back home, energized from a day of cutting open people’s hearts.

More and more, Deacon thought about quitting, now that it was clear he couldn’t afford college. But he knew his mother would have to forfeit the trailer if he did. Despite the fucking, Nave Goodall wouldn’t give her a raise.

Sometimes, when he came home from school and work, he’d stand around in the empty lot where Mary-Beth Unruh’s trailer used to be. The trailer itself had been moved to the edge of the park, back where the Mexicans lived, to make room for a new trailer office that the WestSky people were going to build. Once or twice, a man in a white shirt with a notebook had come to look around, taking measurements, bringing other men who took more measurements. Deacon avoided them, but he heard his mother talking to the man in a loud voice, and then later, in a strange, desperate voice, fingering the open button on her work blouse. Since WestSky had taken over, she had upgraded to nearly two boxes of wine a night.

Deacon stood in the empty square, kicking at the gravel. He thought about Grandad in Oregon, getting rained on, and Mrs. Unruh’s cloudy eyes looking out at the sea. Deacon wondered if they ever missed Comanche. He kicked harder, deeper, and imagined he was rattling poor dead Martha the Terrible’s chains.

*

Just before school let out, Deacon slipped in Melodee Buttress-Scully’s personal lubricant and nearly cracked his skull open on the imported Greek marble floor. He landed with his head at an awkward angle behind the toilet, where there was more lubricant, and also the greenish stain of old urine from Dr. Scully’s prostate. He lay there gathering his wits for several minutes until it became clear that no one was home, and even if they had been, they would not have concerned themselves with him.

He finished cleaning the remainder of the upstairs, gently picking up the Scullys’ things. Dr. Scully’s palm tree-decorated boxer shorts, their meditation manuals, wooden statues from their travels, and books about Gandhi, about the Donner party, stacked next to pictures of their children. Kwezi somewhere in what looked like Africa, Paloma in a swimming pool at SeaWorld, flanked by killer whales.

Deacon considered how little time it had taken for what once seemed so exotic and strange to him to become commonplace and boring. The doctor who stuck his fist into people’s chests. The woman who had never breastfed a child, shipping milk around the world. Would his life have been different had he been given clean milk, untainted by cheap wine?

Around the house, he had begun to notice change-of-address forms. There was talk of Dr. Van Scully taking a fellowship in Canada, of Mrs. Buttress-Scully joining The Yoga Institute of Vancouver, raising the children among a bilingual people. The Scullys would move on soon, taking their children with them—maybe even adding to their brood—to the next town, where they would include a small cowboy statue for Comanche, WY, on their shelf of curiosities. Deacon wondered if they would even remember him in a year’s time, that strange local boy who cleaned their house for a time.

He had the sudden urge to smash their Buddhas, to carve his name into all of their belongings.

*

At the end of summer, after school was over and after he had quit the Scullys with a firm but polite letter, Deacon Friddle took the Greyhound from Sheridan to Oregon to visit Grandad. His mother didn’t mind. It meant an uninterrupted weekend with Nave Goodall.

Deacon had never been more than one hundred miles away from Comanche in his entire life. He was privileged with the window seat, his only company a business man who slept with his mouth open for almost the duration of the journey. Watching the scenery change as the bus carved its way through mountain passes, the rolling yellow hills becoming studded with pines, and eventually the white, misty blankness of the coast, Deacon was thrilled. His blood pulsed to his face and seemed to set his blond pompadour ablaze.

Finally, there was the Pacific Ocean, crashing with a violence he could not look away from.

Grandad met him up on the dunes. He had rented him a board. “Turns out they don’t have wheels after all, boy,” he said, smacking Deacon on the back. He stood back and laughed as Deacon made an honest effort to surf his way down an enormous, rock-hard dune, ending up flat on his face with a mouth full of sand.

Afterward, Grandad took Deacon out for lunch at a crab shack. Grandad’s hair and beard had gone completely white. His hands shook a little when he went to break off the crab legs. Grandad asked after Deacon’s mother. Deacon shrugged, as if to say, more of the same.

“Some people aren’t meant to be parents,” Grandad said sadly. His shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, and his skin was dark, darker even than it had been back at the ranch. The zipper scar alone was white as abalone.

“How do you know?” Deacon asked. “You never had any kids. You’re not even a real Grandad.”

Grandad waved his hand dismissively. “She shoulda never done it if she weren’t gonna do it right. Drinking and lazing around like that.” He shook his head and sighed, making a small whistling sound as he exhaled. “Ended up treating you something pitiful.”

“I don’t want to talk about her,” Deacon said. “I want to hear about you.”

So Grandad told him about his life, which had mostly been good, with some bad spread in between. The Parks & Recreation job wasn’t much of anything, basically cleaning public toilets and picking up trash. But there was one great part: Every so often a whale would wash up on shore. Usually a fin whale, sometimes a blue. There was no way to get rid of them once they died, and they’d stink up the beach for tourists if they weren’t disposed of. Grandad’s job was to pack them with dynamite and blow them up.

“Boy, you should see it, like goddamn Fourth of July!” He grinned. “You really should.”

Grandad talked and talked. Mrs. Unruh had died. Grandad said the worst part was how confused she got at the end, talking about her imaginary children. “She mentioned you a lot. I think she somehow got in her head you were hers,” he said. But he was not too grief-stricken; he had convinced himself it was for the best. “She’s out of her suffering. Doesn’t have to worry about scoundrels like me.” What he felt most bad about was the fact he couldn’t bury her with the dog back in Comanche.

Deacon stayed with Grandad for five days. Grandad showed him a good time, doing his best to erase the previous pitiable eighteen years of Deacon Friddle’s life. They walked along the shore, and Grandad took him up the dunes near the fancy houses, where there were remnants of gray-white blubber from one of his recent whale explosions. It glittered on the grass.

On the last day they went to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, where they observed the fragile movements of jellyfish and the stalking, stiff-legged gait of giant crabs, and Grandad made a joke about butter.

They watched a young, attractive girl diving in a tank with small sharks, cleaning the walls of a fake coral reef with a toothbrush. Every now and then a nurse shark would swim up behind her, and she’d turn around and take stock of it.

“That one’s sure pretty to look at,” Grandad said. “Must be a pistol to take a job like that.”

“Shut up, pervert.” Deacon said.

The diver continued swimming through the reef. Her blond hair—buffeted by the mechanically engineered currents—rippled out from her mask.

Deacon stared at her slender body as she scrubbed at the fuzzy algae.

Suddenly she looked up at him and waved.

*

© by Elizabeth Eslami. Used by permission.

Visit Elizabeth here . . .

Read her excellent essay “Traveling By Faith: Thoughts on Being an Iranian American Writer” here at The Millions . . .

View the trailer for her first novel, Bone Worship, here:

And see her read at Oregon’s Broadway Books here:

“Who’s calling, please?” I desperately needed to know.

But Claudia was a slave to the telephone and always aware of its ringing. She’d smack the back of my head before I could get any information. “Give it, June. Now.”

She was cruel and lovely and totally awesome. I snuck into her room to riffle through her shoebox of tapes any chance I got.

*

Our parents were awed by the latest catastrophe they’d created. First, two daughters. And now this: The Separation. They talked about it as though it had capital letters, and they both seemed to want to make it as crazy as the parties they liked to throw.

They didn’t seem to notice that, separated, they were more married than ever. Each obsessed over what the other was doing, or might be doing. They sent messages to each other through Claudia and me: Tell your father/Please inform your mother. These messages were angry or heartbroken or flirtatious. They were articulate, defiant, or funny. Usually, Claudia and I forgot them entirely, or forgot the most important part of them.

The Separation happened this way: first my mom left, and stayed with one of her sisters for a week. Then she came back and my dad stayed in a hotel for two days. Then he came back because the hotel was expensive—separation was expensive!—so for a few days the house was exactly like before: messy, crowded, loud.

But one evening, there must have been an argument. Claudia and I didn’t hear it because we were in her bedroom listening to music. It was one of the few times my sister let me hang out in her room, and sometimes I wonder if she was protecting me, if she knew there was a fight going on downstairs. The point is, I never the separation knew what caused The Separation because I was with Claudia, and Mickey DeSadist was singing us a lullaby.

*

We were raised on lentils, brown rice, Neil Young, and solstice celebrations. Our mother ran a local grocery co-op and wore skirts made of hemp before hemp was chic. Our dad was a ceramics artist who sold cups and bowls at the local farmers’ market, had lost most of his short-term memory, and never got any of the big commissions that the tourist board gave out.

As young children, Claudia and I were encouraged to be wild. We were always outside, and often naked. The neighbours complained because our parents never mowed the lawn, believing that children should have high grass to play in and dandelion seeds to blow. There was a picture of us on the fridge: Claudia with ripped overalls and hair that looked like it had never been washed, and me, naked except for a T-shirt that read, I Hate TV. We took vitamins, ate vegetables, and recycled. We’d been humiliated countless times when our parents dragged us to marches against apartheid and solidarity dances for Cuba. One summer, when I was eight, we’d been forced to stand outside the local supermarket and protest the importing of grapes from Chile.

No wonder Claudia found it difficult to be a teenager. She wanted to rebel, but our parents didn’t make it easy. Her first attempt, the one she undertook the year of The Separation, centred on music. Instead of Crosby, Stills and Nash, she listened to Minor Threat and Bad Brains. She went to concerts in people’s basements and all-ages shows at Little Fernwood. She moshed and stage-dived, and spent so much time thrashing around with other dirty, sweating kids that once she got scabies.

And one evening, while Mom and I were in the kitchen, she cut herself thick bangs, bleached them, and dyed them purple. I was doing homework, and Mom was drinking tea and reading a book about the Buddhist practice of non-attachment. Then Claudia stomped into the room, with her purple hair and her boots that left marks on the lino. She heaved the fridge door open then slammed it shut.

Mom looked up from her book. “Hey,” she said. “Great hair.”

Claudia froze. She stood in front of the fridge for about three seconds. Then she stomped out of the kitchen.

Mom sipped her camomile. “Did I say something wrong?”

“I think she hoped her hair would annoy you.”

“But I think it’s cute. I think it suits her.”

I twirled my pencil through my own hair, which had almost reached my chin, and wondered if Claudia had any of that purple dye left.

“It’s oppressive,” I said, trying out a word I’d heard Claudia use.

“What is?”

“How much you love us.”

Mom set down her clay cup, one that Dad had made. “Do you have any idea what motherhood is like? It’s like taking an endless multiple-choice exam, and none of the available answers are
correct.” She added, “Your father never understood that.”

I’d never taken a multiple-choice exam. My homework still consisted of memorizing how to spell difficult words, like friend and people. Mom was always forgetting how young I was.
the separation

“Claudia Sky!” she yelled toward the other room. “Get back here, young lady! We need to talk about that stuff in your hair!”

Then, quietly, to me, “How was that?”

“Great.” My pencil was completely tangled in my hair and I wondered if I’d have to cut it out. “Very convincing.”

*

Dad went as far away as he could on fifty dollars. He took the Greyhound up-island, as far north as it would go. Then, from a payphone, he called us. Had my mom answered the phone, he probably would have spoken triumphantly: “I’m in Port Hardy. I bet you don’t even know where that is.”

Instead, because I thought it might be a boy calling for Claudia, I ran to the phone, almost tripped over the cord, and grabbed it before anyone else could. The sound of my young voice over the line really did him in. “I’m in Port Hardy,” he said. “I bet you don’t even know where that is.” Then he burst into tears.

“Hold on, okay?” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and screamed, “Mom! It’s Dad! He’s crying again!”

She took the phone from me. “Where are you? Port what? I don’t even know where that is.”

When she got off the phone with Dad, she called her sisters, her friends at the veggie co-op, and her Amnesty letter-writing group. That was one thing Claudia hated about The Separation: she’d lost her tyranny of the telephone. Mom was always talking to her sisters, women friends, and anyone else who was up for a little schadenfreude. Even her friend who lived in a tree stump in Beacon Hill Park found a way to call.

“Breaking news,” Mom said each time someone phoned that night. “He’s now sleeping in a bus depot in Port Hardy. I bet you don’t even know where that is.”

*

Claudia’s teenage rebellion was awkward, an adolescent flail. In her twenties, she came to understand how to really get to our parents, and her techniques became much more sophisticated. But when I was eleven, I didn’t understand how young and stupid she was, so I copied everything she did. I ripped my jeans the way she ripped hers. I coloured my hair with markers from school, so that my head looked and smelled like blueberries. I made mixtapes and listened to them until they unravelled. I took the music seriously—more seriously, it turned out, than Claudia ever did. It started as imitation, but in the end, it stuck.

*

“On a scale of one to ten, how much do you think your father and I have messed you girls up?” This was the kind of question Mom started asking over dinner. “A moderate amount? Or more than average?”

“You’re so weird, Mom.” Claudia brushed her fork over the quinoa on her plate.

“Yeah.” I tried to copy Claudia’s nonchalance, her way of averting her eyes from our mother’s.

“You’re weird.”

“We always tried to make sure you were happy.” Mom covered her face with her hands. “We tried so hard.”

It was sweet of Mom to worry, but I knew that, for Claudia, The Separation had its advantages. She had been the only one of her friends who lived in a two-parent home, and that had embarrassed her. And, bonus: she’d been able to fake tears—my parents are getting divorced, etc., etc.—to get out of gym class.

There was one thing I liked about it too. It meant that, every month, Claudia and I got to visit our dad in Port Hardy. This was farther from home than I’d ever been, and I loved the bus trip. On the first Friday of each month we caught the Greyhound at 5:45 in the morning. Claudia liked it because it meant we got to miss a day of school. I liked it because it meant a whole day—ten hours, including stops—with Claudia.

*

The bus had gray seats with little footrests that flipped down, and wide windows that didn’t open. Claudia and I always took a seat close to the back, because we knew from riding the school bus that this was where the cool kids sat. My sister always took the window seat and put the armrest down between us.

I can’t speak for Claudia—she’s still mysterious to me—but I can be almost sure that what we both loved most about those trips was the freedom. It’s true that we were limited. Really, how much cool stuff can you do on a bus? When all you had was the ten bucks that your mom had given you to buy lunch? But still, when the door was sealed shut, we were fully separated from our parents—and this hardly ever happened, since school was full of parental replacements. That bus was our territory. Who cares that its seats made me lose all feeling in my ass? Or that the air that shot from the vents above our heads smelled like old carpets? Or that the sun poured in the windows and made us sweat? Our only responsibility was to call our parents from Campbell River, because they both insisted, separately, that we check in. Other than that, we could do or eat or say whatever we wanted. For ten hours, between Victoria and Port Hardy, we travelled fast, suspended above the road and outside supervision.

Of course, it turned out that when we were left on our own, we didn’t usually feel like doing anything wild. I’d read adventure novels—Mom’s old Trixie Beldens, or a Famous Five. Claudia would arrange herself so her sneakers were against the seat in front of her. She always brought a pillow, which she propped against the window. She listened to her Walkman and either slept or pretended to sleep. And I sat beside her, which was my favourite part. For once, she couldn’t kick me out of her room, slam the door, or tell me to go somewhere and die.

*

There was one bus trip that was different. It was September, and it would be our last trip up-island, but we didn’t know that yet. Things started out wrong: after Mom dropped us at the depot, Claudia waited until she had driven away—so I couldn’t run and tell on her—then insisted that we sit in separate seats. As we dragged our backpacks through the parking lot toward our bus, Claudia said, “I’m not sitting beside you. I feel like being by myself.”

“Yeah, right. Mom says some guy will sit beside us and fondle us if we don’t stick together.”

“Oh my God.” Claudia stepped onto the bus and showed the driver her ticket. “You’re such a crybaby.”

Another thing that went wrong was that the last seats of the bus were already taken by people who were obviously cooler than us. So Claudia chose a seat in the middle. She sat near the window, and put her legs up so I couldn’t sit down. “I’m not kidding,” she said. “You’re not sitting here.”

I sat directly behind her. “You’re such a bitch.” I spoke through the space between the back of her seat and the window. “I hope you do get fondled.”

*

In Port Hardy, our dad moved from place to place, and finally ended up renting a room in a house where people like him—people without luck or money—ended up. It was a big, rumbling house by the water. The wind coming off the ocean was so loud that when Claudia and I stayed there, I couldn’t sleep at night. There was a smokehouse in the back, but Dad didn’t know how to use it and had almost burned it down accidentally. After that, the other tenants teased him by calling him White Man, even though most of them were white too.

Living there for less than a year had aged our dad. Maybe it was all that wind battering his skin. His hair was always tangled, and he wore clothes I’d never seen before: fraying plaid shirts, jeans that were too big for him, rubber boots.

He spent a lot of time with one of his neighbours, a woman named Laura. She had a tattoo of an eagle on her back and a baby named Roger that she carried in a Snugli. She was pretty, with shiny dark hair and a round face. I liked her because she gave us jujubes and other petroleum products that we weren’t allowed to eat at home. Claudia liked her because Laura shared her makeup.

And she would let us take turns holding Roger, teaching us the right way to carry him. His soft baby breathing even calmed Claudia’s hormonal rages.

Mom was convinced that Laura was Dad’s girlfriend, but I was never sure. I think Laura just felt sorry for him, and for us. But when Mom found out about her, her hands and her voice got shaky. With a new urgency, she phoned everyone she knew.

“Breaking news,” she said. “He’s now dating Pocahontas.” She paused. “Not that I don’t respect the Salish people and their culture.”

Then she inhaled and exhaled, deeply and calmly, the way she’d learned to do from a book.

*

One good thing about being separated from Claudia was that I got a window seat. I was able to look out at deer munching broom on the side of the road. I saw birds in their flight. I had views of the vast and untamed ocean.

It turned out that I got bored of that pretty quick. By the time we hit Ladysmith, it was all I could do not to lean over Claudia’s seat and start smacking her head with my book.

The only reason I didn’t do that was because there was a stranger beside me—an overweight woman with a winter coat, despite the fact that it was hot in the bus. She sat next to me, purse on the floor, coat spread over her legs like a blanket. She turned on the little light above her seat and started to read a novel.

The book’s cover had a picture of a dark man in a feather headdress, holding a pale woman in his muscular arms. The woman looked like she’d swooned or died or had low blood sugar. Her eighteenth-century dress was slipping off one shoulder. The man in the headdress looked like some of the guys my dad hung out with at the Legion, except a lot less hunched and exhausted.

He had huge pecs and there was a forest behind him. I could tell from the cover and the tag line—In the wilderness of New America, she found a wild stranger—that this book was full of sex. From Victoria to Nanaimo, I kept trying to read over the fat woman’s shoulder.

*

Each visit to our dad’s was pretty much the same. After we arrived on Friday night, he’d take us to the Legion. All the guys there recognized us and said, “Hey, little ladies. How are the princesses this evening?” They asked us about school and we told them stories. Usually Claudia and I invented some adventure about the bus trip, some fantastic thing that involved several near-death experiences.

Then, on Saturday, Dad always wanted us to do something in nature. We went hiking or fishing, and after, we’d usually hang out with Laura and Roger. And at least once over the weekend, Dad would cry.

Usually, it started like this: “Do you girls want me to come home? I mean, if you do, then I will. You know I love you like crazy. Just say the word.”

Sure we wanted him to come home. But we’d been raised to let people go on their own journeys, to allow others to grow and change. So we just stood there with our hands dangling at our sides. Anyway, we figured that Dad would sort it out on his own, since he was our dad, since he was a grown-up.

“If you want to come home,” I said, “why don’t you just say so?”

“That’s very sweet, June. But life is more complicated than that.”

“No, it’s not.”

That’s when the tears started. “I just need to know that you girls are okay.” He knelt down so he was at our level. “I hate to think of you being harmed by The Separation. I hate to think that my children have been damaged.”

“Hey!” I said, suddenly remembering a message I was supposed to pass on. “Mom says you should pay for therapy for us.”

“She said what?”

“Dad, you’re the one who’s damaged if you think I’m still a child.” Claudia was good at ending these sorts of conversations.

She understood something that our parents didn’t get: that they could never really damage us. That we transcended them, lived outside of them. They were them and we were us. We had our own concerns: Claudia had her period and boys who called her on the phone, and I was growing out my hair and memorizing the lyrics from 13 Flavours of Doom. What our parents didn’t understand was that we were busy.

*

When we stopped in Nanaimo, a stranger got on and sat beside Claudia. He must have been a young guy, but he seemed old to me at the time. I could easily tell a ten-year-old from an eleven-year-old, but everyone over twenty seemed vague and dangerous. He carried a backpack and wore a toque. He said, “Is anyone sitting here?”

Claudia said, “Nope. Go for it,” despite the fact that I should have been sitting there, that I was her sister, that I was stuck next to a woman who wouldn’t share her sexy book. Mark put his backpack on the shelf above the seat and sat down beside Claudia. I knew his name because, once he was seated, he turned to my sister and said, “How’s it going? I’m Mark.”

He asked my sister where she was headed and she said, “Port Hardy,” which was the truth. Then she added, “To visit some friends,” which was a lie.

Mark said that he was going to Port McNeill, the stop before hers. “I work in Nanaimo. But I go back to Port on weekends.”

“Cool,” said my sister, as though it really was. “What do you do? When you work?”

“Construction. I’m an industrial welder. You?”

“That’s so cool.” Claudia sounded fascinated, intrigued, amazed—I’d never heard her exhibit so much interest in anything in my life. “I don’t really work. I’m a student.”

“Oh, yeah? At the college?”

I could feel Claudia’s elation in the air. I could almost inhale it.

She might have told the truth: that she was only fourteen and attended Vic High. But the purple bangs and the makeup had paid off, and she was going to cash in. “Kind of,” she said. “At the
university.”

“Sweet.”

“Yeah. It’s all right.”

Then they didn’t talk for about twenty minutes. Mark didn’t get out a book or anything, and I imagined that he was sitting there with his legs spread wide, staring at the seat in front of him. When we’d passed Wellington, my sister took out her Walkman and Mark said, “What are you listening to?”

“D.O.A. They’re this band from Vancouver.” Mark didn’t say anything, so my sister, her voice full of hope, asked, “What kind of music do you like?”

“I like tons of stuff. I listen to pretty much everything.”

And it became official: I hated him. I was only eleven, and my musical snobbery was in its embryo stage, but still I knew a fraud when I heard one. Everything. The only people who claim to listen to everything are the ones who know nothing, who are happy to swallow whatever the radio feeds them.

“Totally,” said my Judas of a sister. “Me too.”

*

Claudia and Mark talked for the next three hours. She let him listen to her tapes and gave him the kind of musical education some people pay money for. He told her how his girlfriend had cheated on him when she went on a three-week tour of Europe, and Claudia seemed to feel real sympathy for him. “That totally sucks.”

He said that, since the breakup, he’d just focused on work. “You’re pretty much the first girl I’ve talked to since then.”

He showed her pictures of his two dogs, and at one point they both held up their hands to compare them. Next to his the separation workman’s hands, Claudia’s looked like they belonged to a child.

Which they did.

Between Bowser and Courtenay, I couldn’t hear what they were saying because they started talking more quietly. I couldn’t make out words, but I could hear their soft voices and Claudia’s laughter. They leaned close to each other, and in the space between their seats, I could see that their heads almost touched.

*

When we hit Campbell River, where we had a forty-minute stop, they acted like best friends. They got off the bus together and my sister didn’t wait for me, didn’t even turn around to look at me.

I followed her into the depot’s bathroom, which had only two stalls, an empty soap dispenser, and an overflowing garbage.

Names and life stories had been penned onto the walls, and usually Claudia and I hung out in there and made fun of people who wrote things like Linds B. wuz here and I wanna do Kris 4ever.

“Thanks for waiting.” I kicked the door of the stall Claudia was in, but she didn’t say anything back. I heard her peeing, and I said, “That guy you were talking to was such a loser.”

Claudia flushed the toilet and came out of the stall. She didn’t answer me or look at me. She turned on the faucet and ran water over her hands.

“And the woman beside me is so fat. And she’s reading this sickening book.”

“Shut up!” Claudia slammed her wet hand against the mirror, against the image of her own face. “Who cares? Who cares if she’s fat? Who cares what she’s reading?”

“What’s your problem?”

“You are. I don’t want you to talk to me anymore.”

“I have to talk to you. Mom gave you the money, and I’m hungry.”

“Here.” Claudia took a five-dollar bill from her pocket and threw it at me. “Take this and leave me alone. Don’t look at me. Don’t breathe on me. And every time you want to talk to me, just remind yourself that you don’t even know me.”

*

Usually, in Campbell River, we bought chips and pop from the vending machine and ate them while sitting on the depot’s row of plastic seats. We weren’t used to carbonated beverages, so they made us hyperactive and strange. We jumped from seat to seat, and competed to see who could jump the farthest. Claudia always won because she could leap over four seats at a time. I’d been hoping to break her record.

But instead, I sat in one of those seats alone. The hard plastic dug into my neck. I bought a bag of chips and ate them by myself. Actually, I didn’t eat them. I licked the dill pickle flavour off them and left them in a wet pile on the seat beside me. But even that was no fun without my sister to tell me I was disgusting. I used some of the change to phone our parents, since Claudia seemed to have forgotten that we were supposed to do that. When Mom picked up, she said, “Is that you, Juney-looney?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s great—you’re ahead of schedule.”

“Yeah.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you have lunch?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you have?”

“Sandwiches.”

When I called our dad, he said, “Hey, June-bug!” He spoke in his ultra-happy voice, the one he used when he was trying to convince us that he was ultra-happy in his new life. “You in C.R.?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re ahead of schedule!”

“I know.”

“Is your sister behaving?”

Through the bus depot’s dirty window, I could see Claudia and Mark. They sat in a sunny part of the parking lot. She’d taken off her hoodie and wore just her Converse, jeans, and a black tank top. One of the straps had slipped off her shoulder, and Mark kept looking at it. And she kept looking up at him, through her purple bangs.

“No,” I said.

Dad laughed. “You keep her in line, then. You lay down the law.”

For the rest of the stop, I leaned against the payphone and watched my sister and Mark. They talked and laughed as they shared fries and a cigarette. If our parents had found out, Claudia would have been so dead. It was one thing to smoke weed that the neighbours grew. But to support the big tobacco companies was out of the question.

*

When they got back on the bus, they acted awkward, like strangers. All the way to Sayward they didn’t talk. Mark slept with his face turned toward my sister. If I had leaned forward, I would have smelled his cigarette breath coming at me from between their seats. He’d taken off his toque and exposed his blond hair. I don’t know what my sister liked about him. maybe it was that he looked as vulnerable as a baby: pale skin, wet lips, fly-away hair.

She listened to her Walkman, and I could hear the tape rewind, play, rewind again. I wanted to ask her which song she was listening to, but I didn’t dare. I tried to read my book, but it seemed boring and childish now that I’d seen the kind of book I could be reading.

As we passed Woss, Mark woke up from what I imagined to be dreams about fondling my sister. He jerked awake, and his twitch made him and my sister laugh. Just like that, they were friends again. They started swapping party stories.

I’d had no idea that Claudia had ever been drunk. Our parents had always said that they didn’t mind if we experimented with alcohol as long as we did it in their house. They’d rather we tried
that kind of thing at home, where they knew we were safe. Every time they said this, Claudia crossed her arms. “I don’t drink anyway,” she’d say. “I’m pretty much straight-edge.”

But she had some good stories. About throwing up off a balcony. About passing out then waking up beside her friend’s hamster cage with the hamster kicking wood chips into her face.

About eating mushrooms and walking down Government Street to watch the tourists’ faces melt. After a while, I realized that her stories sounded familiar. They belonged to our parents.

“That’s fucked.” Mark laughed. “That’s awesome.”

He told about the times he dropped acid, went skinny-dipping in Duncan, and lost a pair of shoes in Vancouver. Then he said, “We should hang out sometime. How long are you in Hardy for?”

“Just the weekend.”

“Maybe you and your friends could come down and party with us.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Or you could just get off with me at the McNeill stop today and the two of us could hang out tonight.”

“Really?”

He said this after we’d passed Nimpkish. This far north, it was visibly colder. Some muddy snow was scattered along the side of the highway. It looked like it had been left behind, forgotten, though it must have been the first snowfall of the year. We were ten minutes away from Mark’s stop, from the town on the edge of the ocean where he lived, from the place where I was going to be separated from my sister forever.

“You could stay at my place for the night. It looks out over the water. You’d like it.”

“I don’t know. My friend’s sort of expecting me.”

“You can call her. And I’ll give you a ride up to Port Hardy tomorrow.”

Claudia must have understood how easy it would be to go with him. She knew she’d get away with it because I’d never betray her.

I’d tell Dad that she’d stayed in Victoria for an extra day, for volleyball practice or something, and that she’d arrive tomorrow. Dad was so disoriented and absent lately that he’d believe anything.

“You have a car?” she said. “That’s really cool.”

I didn’t say a word. I didn’t even kick the back of her seat to remind her of me, of us, of the secret and unspoken pact we’d had since we were too young to speak. A pact to stick together, to be sisters, no matter how much we hated each other. I didn’t say anything because part of me wanted her to do it. I wanted to see that it could be done. I wanted to watch my sister grab her backpack and strut away. I wanted to watch her hop off the bus and into the arms of a wild stranger, or anyone else she chose. I wanted to know that separation was possible. That we could cut ties, break free.

“I can’t,” she said. “My friend would shit. We’ve had these plans for practically forever.”

I didn’t understand why she said that, just like I didn’t understand why our dad came home a couple of months later. Maybe Laura got sick of him, or he was tired of being so poor, or he missed us, or he missed the way Mom swayed heavily through the house in her hemp skirts. He would leave again over the years, and Mom would leave him too––whenever they craved some entertainment––but they always came home.

I didn’t understand, but I was relieved.

“Okay. That’s cool. That makes sense.” Mark sounded genuinely disappointed, as though he actually liked my sister. “But maybe I could give you my number? In case you change your mind?”

“Sure. Yeah. I could call you.”

Mark wrote on a scrap of paper and handed it to her. “It was awesome meeting you.”

“You too.” Claudia put the paper in the back pocket of her jeans, and I felt her movement in my knees, which were propped against her seat. “Thanks.”

What I did understand, later but still way before Claudia did, was that it was impossible. That we could never break free. No matter what we did, we could never separate them from us. Our bodies were built by the lentils and flax they’d fed us. Their bone structure lingered in our faces. Their humour and neuroses were planted deep in our brains, and we’d inherited their voices, their sayings, their stories. They were our parents. Even when Claudia’s rebellion was complete—when she ditched the punk scene and left that territory to me, when she started wearing brand names and married a stockbroker—even then, they forgave her and loved her and got really high at her wedding.

*

A couple of nights before we left for Port Hardy, Claudia listened to Nomeansno in her room and I sat at the kitchen table, using my pastels to draw a picture of Sid Vicious. Mom was in the kitchen too, rolling her evening joint. And I knew that, twelve hours away, Dad was doing the exact same thing. “Juniper?” said Mom. “Why don’t you come sit on my lap?”

I looked up from Sid’s pretty snarl. “Because I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Mom, it’s gross. I’m not a baby anymore.”

“I know that.” Mom lit the joint and I heard the paper crackle as it burned. “I’m just sad tonight, I guess.”

The truth was that I did want to sit on her lap. I still liked the way she smelled, of tea and smoke and lemongrass shampoo. And I liked the way she ran her fingers through my hair. It felt soft and ticklish and usually put me into a trance.

“I’ll sit on your lap for ten seconds,” I said. “As long as you promise not to tell Claudia.”

Mom smiled in this way that made me think that maybe, in secret, my sister still liked to sit on her lap. Maybe Claudia liked the hair thing too.

“Okay,” said Mom. “Promise.”

*

When Mark got off the bus, I tossed my backpack over onto his seat and said “’Scuse me” to the woman beside me, who had almost finished her novel.

I sat where Mark had been, and the seat was still warm from his body. For a second I almost understood my sister—why she might want to be close to him, or someone like him. Then I said, “He was so ugly.”

“Fuck you.”

Claudia put on her earphones, adjusted her pillow, and closed her eyes. I sat beside her, and I was hugely, oppressively happy. She was my sister and I loved her. I stole one of the buds from her ear, stuck it in my own, and Joey “Shithead” Keithley yelled at us as the afternoon sun poured through the window. I leaned against Claudia as though she was a pillow. “Get off me,” she said, out of habit, without meaning it. I rested my face against her bare arm, and the moisture of our skin stuck us together.

*

From Vanishing and Other Stories. © 2009 by Deborah Willis.

Vanishing can be found here . . .

Read a bit more from the book here . . .

And Deborah can be found here!

It was getting late. Louise was beginning to show signs. She had an easy tell: Her left eyelid drooped as if part of her brain were shutting down. Henry said “banana leaf eco-coffin” and Martin saw Louise’s eye began to twitch and her head cock to the right. She was prone to compromised vision. Martin excused himself, maneuvered his way past two women whom he knew his wife disliked and who smelled he thought like chlorine, took Louise by the elbow, and led her from the room.

Louise struggled to keep up. She said, “excuse us, excuse us, oh, excuse us,” as they walked down the empty hall.

“Martin,” Louise said. “I was enjoying myself.”

“Precisely,” he said. The last time they had stayed too long at a party, Louise spent much of the next afternoon on the Internet, purchasing replacement butterflies and dolphins for a shattered collection of glass animal figurines.

Earlier there was rain but it had passed. They walked to the car and Martin kept his eyes on Venus. The planet, he had read online, had been visible in the night sky for the last month or so. Lately, Martin had discovered that he enjoyed reading about astronomy.

“Anyway,” Louise said as if she were picking up a conversation they’d been having. “It’s all very tragic, apparently. Totally heartbreaking.”

“Heartbreaking,” Martin said.

“Carol’s son was nearly finished with the boat when some idiot set fire to the whole marina,” Louise said. “For insurance money, of course.”

“People will do that,” Martin said.

“It’s a terrible thing. You can’t imagine.”

“Fraud? It happens every day.”

“I think I see the car,” Louise said.

“Did they salvage the boat?”

“I didn’t catch the whole story,” Louise said. “You know how it is. A lot of voices everywhere. But I guess Henry, that’s the son’s name, had been working on the boat for two years. He was planning to sail it to Peru. Can you imagine?”

“Unimaginable,” Martin said. “There’s a lot of ocean between here and Peru.”

“That’s where Henry comes from, Peru. He’s adopted. Handsome boy, don’t you think?”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Martin said. “He talked a lot about death.”

“He’s getting reimbursed, you understand. The marina was well insured. But you can’t put a price on all that work. Two years.”

“Two years is a lot of work down the toilet.”

“Henry has contacted his birth mother. He did it behind his mother’s back. Carol is very upset. Can you imagine?”

“He’s an adult,” Martin said.

“I just try to imagine how hurt I would be. Can you imagine anything so hurtful?”

“We don’t have children,” Martin said.

Louise stopped to remove her shoes. She balanced herself with a hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Well,” she said. Martin concentrated on providing resistance. Louise lifted her foot and reached to take off her shoe. She turned around and repeated the process with the other hand and other foot. She held one of her shoes against Martin’s shoulder. He smelled a flimsy odor of leather and feet. “I can’t imagine,” she said.

“Can he speak Spanish?”

“There’s a person running on the sidewalk,” Louise said. “I wonder if we left something.” She looked down at her dress as if she were searching for some forgotten object.

“Louise!” Henry trotted toward them. His shoes made a thin, sharp grinding noise on the sidewalk.

“Hi, Henry,” Louise said. She had a shoe in each hand and lifted them up in front of her. “We were just talking about you. You’re not supposed to be real.”

Henry looked down at the sidewalk, scratched his arm. “Are these yours?” He held a small pink purse about the size of an overstuffed envelope straight out in front of him. There was a pink rosette sewn onto the side of the purse.

“That’s only one thing,” Martin said.

Henry dropped the purse to his side. It dangled from its strap, grazed his knee. “I thought it might be yours, I thought.”

Martin watched the dim orange light from the house as it spilled into the street a block or so behind Henry. It was a distant fire, harmless and inviting. He had not enjoyed himself at the party, particularly. The other guests annoyed him—he never felt comfortable around the husbands and children of his wife’s friends—and it was exhausting to keep such a close eye on Louise. But, from this distance, Martin had the dull, cold urge to return to Henry’s parents’ house and get in out of the night as if it held some waiting menace he was unprepared to face. “You should get that purse back before someone misses it,” he said.

“Look,” Henry said, looking at Louise’s breasts. “Can I have a ride? If it’s not too inconvenient. I mean, I’ve been drinking a little.”

“Of course,” Louise said.

“It’s getting late.” Martin said.

“Where are you going?” Louise asked.

“Downtown, I think,” Henry said.

“We’d be delighted,” Louise said. She insisted that Henry ride in the front.

They had not been on the road more than a few minutes when Henry rolled down the window. It was November and cold. Martin watched Henry put his hand out into the wind.

“Henry,” Louise said. “It’s cold.” Henry rolled the window up. In his lap he held the purse.

“Whose purse is that?” Martin asked.

“I found it,” Henry said. “It’s probably mine.” He rolled the window down again, leaving it open now to the biting wind. He then began to remove coins and small pieces of paper from the purse and toss them out the window.

“Henry,” Louise said.

“Whose purse is that?” Martin asked again. “What are you doing?”

Henry took a small mirror from the purse and held it up to his face, examining it closely. Martin stopped at a light and turned to watch Henry watch himself in the mirror. “It’s green,” Louise said.

“Henry,” Martin said. “What are you doing?”

Henry took a cell phone out of the purse. He pushed a button on the phone and its face lit up blue. “Hello,” Henry said and threw the phone out the window. It shattered against the curb. He found a tube of lipstick and turned it in his hand as though he were curious about its owner and then tossed it out the window too. Next to go were a pair of nail clippers and what appeared to Martin to be a teabag.

“Henry,” Louise said. “That belonged to someone.”

Henry put his hand into the purse and moved his hand from side to side. “That’s it,” he said. He rolled up the window. Louise made a concerned face at Martin in the rearview mirror. With his free hand, Henry switched on the radio without asking. It was tuned to talk. “Should we go back?” Louise asked. “We should go back,” she said.

“It’s late, Louise,” Martin said.

“Talk radio,” Henry said.

Martin pressed one of the preset buttons to tune it to a classic rock station. “Everyone likes classic rock,” he said to no one in particular.

Henry removed his hand from the purse. “I wonder who this belongs to,” he said. “There’s nothing inside.”

“You threw everything out of it,” Louise said. “You emptied it out the window, dear.”

“I guess so,” Henry said. He fussed with the clasp on the purse. The sound it made was like a key going into a lock. “Is it yours, Louise? I thought it might be yours.”

“It’s not,” Martin said.

“Martin,” Henry said.

“I’ve been drinking a little more than I’m comfortable driving on,” Martin said, putting his hand up in the space between them. “So I hope you don’t want to go too far. You know how it is.”

Henry coughed into his fist. “No, nothing like that. It’s only that I think I love your wife.” He turned around to face Louise in the backseat. Martin noticed the way the skin on Henry’s neck stretched taut across his throat. “It’s true,” Henry said.

“Martin,” Louise said very slowly, “I think this boy is high on drugs.”

“Not me,” Henry said. The leather of his seat creaked a little as he turned back around. “I just love your wife, Martin. No drugs.”

Martin considered this. He listened to a commercial on the radio—it was for a used car dealership not far, he noted, from where they were at that moment—and also to the loud whisper of tires outside on the wet street. Martin wondered if the high-pitched scratching noise he heard meant he should have the oil changed. He wished he knew more about cars. There was something wrong with a person who did not know about cars.

“Yes, I’m pretty sure about it now,” Henry said. “I love your wife. One hundred percent.”

“Two thousand cash back. Low APR. Low monthly payments. Zero down,” the commercial said.

“Oh my,” Louise said.

“You don’t know my wife,” Martin said, a little angry now, but committed to seeing how this all played out. “You don’t know my wife, yet you love her. Well, I do know my wife and—”

“Martin!” Louise said.

“I do know my wife,” Martin said again. He looked at Louise in the mirror. Her lips were pressed together in such a way that Martin thought she looked like her father.

“I love her,” Henry said.

“Exactly how is that?” Martin asked.

“I’m a very spiritual person. It’s in my heritage. I recognize love easily.”

“If only it were that simple,” Louise said. “Can you imagine?” Martin felt an almost imperceptible change in his wife when she said this. It was as if she had been very far away from him, living in a foreign country or stuck on a mountaintop somewhere, and had, just at that moment, finally figured out how to get home. “Can you imagine, Martin?” Louise said.

“Unimaginable,” Martin said, which is when he failed to see the red light at the intersection. He swerved to avoid the broad, white side of a speeding van. There was a loud scraping noise as the car overtook the curb at the opposite end of the intersection. They passed over the soft patch of grass between the sidewalk and a parking lot. The car dropped off the grass with a bounce into the empty parking lot and came to a stop in a dark corner. They were not far from the street. Martin heard the steady honk of a horn behind him but was too scared to turn around to see if he had caused an accident.

“Stop honking the horn,” Louise said. “Stop honking the horn!”

Martin removed his hands from the steering wheel and said, “In twenty thousand years many of the most familiar constellations will appear differently than they do today. From a human perspective here on earth, that is.”

“He’s become interested in astronomy recently,” Louise said.

“I think I’m bleeding,” Henry said.

“I don’t see any blood,” Martin said.

Louise unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned forward between the seats. “Neither do I. Are you sure?”

“It’s probably internal,” Henry said.

“We drove over grass,” Martin said. “There wasn’t even an accident.”

“I may exsanguinate.”

“You may what?” Louise said.

“It’s the medical term for bleeding to death,” Henry said and burped.

“What a strange word,” Louise said.

“It makes sense in Latin,” Henry said.

Martin started the car. The heater pushed a throaty whisper of air through the vents. “Where can we drop you off, Henry?” He drove across a row of empty parking spaces and fell in line with a series of large yellow arrows on the wet pavement. “It’s one-thirty in the morning,” he said. His arms and legs felt very light.

Louise placed her fingers on Henry’s shoulder “Are you feeling all right, dear?” she asked. Martin admired her fingernails.

“In the spring,” Henry said, “I’m traveling to Peru.”

“How nice,” Louise said.

“It’s one-thirty in the morning,” Martin said. “Where can I drop you off?” He missed the turn to leave the parking lot and made a wide circle around two light poles.

“I’ve always wanted to see Machu Picchu,” Henry said. “It’s part of my heritage. Do you know I’m adopted. Has Carol told you?”

“Your mother told me about your boat. I can’t imagine how you feel,” Louise said.

“I’ll have to fly to Peru now. With the insurance money from my boat I should live pretty high on the hog for at least a few months down there.”

“What’s our destination, Henry?”

“Lima is located inside a basin. From the surrounding hillsides, the city looks like an enormous bowl. I’ve only ever seen pictures, of course. I have family there. They’re going to let me stay with them when I arrive. Of course, I haven’t asked them yet, but I’m sure they will.” Henry yawned. “I’m sure they will.”

“Sounds like a beautiful city,” Louise said.

“I’ve always wanted to see where I came from,” Henry said.

“It sounds breathtaking,” Louise said. “I can only imagine.”

“Destination,” Martin said.

They circled the parking lot again. Martin turned the heater off. He listened to the scratching noise from the engine and struggled not to lose his temper with Henry—or with Louise, who, he suspected, was enjoying all this. She was always mistaking inconvenience for adventure. Technically, because they had crossed First Street going south, they were downtown. He could kick Henry out of the car and be over with it. But it was late, and Henry had now leaned his head against the window and was taking long, even breaths as though he were going to pass out. Leaving Henry alone and drunk in a dark parking lot would mean trouble. Martin was reasonably sure of this, but took another lap around the parking lot to consider his options.

“Henry,” Louise said from the back seat after a long time.

There was no answer. Martin looked at Henry. “He might be asleep. I think he is.”

“I was going to ask him something about Machu Picchu. It sounds like such a spiritual place. Intensely spiritual.”

“He’s asleep.”

“He must be very upset about his boat. I can’t imagine,” Louise said. “Carol didn’t mention any other sorts of problems, but at Henry’s age, well, you remember how it was.” She stroked Henry’s shoulder. “We were that age. What happened to all of that, Martin? Where did it go?” She sat back in the seat and scratched the side of her nose. “Peru seems like such a spiritual place.”

Martin turned left out of the parking lot and headed back toward Henry’s parents’ house. At the stop light he had run earlier, he leaned forward and looked up through the windshield but could not see Venus. He had begun to feel tired. He looked at Louise in the mirror. Her gaze was fixed on some distant object. Henry’s breath fogged the window.

Martin parked on the street outside the house and walked around the car to help Henry out. He slapped Henry’s face lightly and said, “Henry.”

“Not so hard,” Louise said.

“Henry,” Martin said and slapped his face again.

“Martin,” Louise said.

“Henry,” Martin said.

Henry opened his eyes and looked at Martin. Martin reached across Henry’s midsection to unbuckle the seatbelt. His wrist brushed Henry’s side. Henry mumbled something and then stepped directly into a few inches of water that had collected in the gutter. Water splashed onto Martin’s shoe.

“Water,” Henry said.

“Don’t forget the purse, Henry,” Louise said. “Someone must have been looking all over for it.”

“Careful now,” Martin said.

“I don’t think he’ll feel very well in the morning,” Louise said. Henry crossed the lawn and disappeared inside the house. Through the large front window, Martin watched the few remaining guests turn their heads to look at Henry. They appeared to find Henry’s entrance funny. A man Martin remembered speaking with earlier clapped his wife on the shoulder and they both let out enormous silent laughs. In a corner, a woman was dancing alone.

“Let’s go,” Louise said from inside the car. She had moved to the front seat, but Martin hadn’t noticed until he heard her voice much closer than it had been.

He turned the radio back to talk, but it was a rebroadcast of a program he had already heard, so he switched it off. The streets were empty. Martin stopped at every light. “How about that,” he said after a long time. They had turned onto their street. He put his blinker on before pulling into the driveway. The garage door was opening. “I’m exhausted,” Martin said. He inched the car forward until the hood touched the tennis ball he had hung on a string for just this purpose. The headlights narrowed to sharp yellow points on the wall in front of the car.

Martin cut the engine and the overhead lights came on inside the car. No one moved. “Exsanguination is quite a word,” Louise said. “Exsanguination. Exsanguination,” she said over and over until the steering wheel became cold in Martin’s hands.

*
Jensen Beach blogs here . . .

Gets interviewed here . . .

And he keeps some of his necessary fiction here!

“I’m not ashamed of it,” Gretchen says. “It just didn’t work for me. Some people can’t, you know. Many people. And I completely resent the pressure.”

“It’s not anybody’s business,” Jenny says. “You don’t owe an explanation.”

Gretchen lies on her back on the deck with her knees bent and her clean, white sneakers resting on the rail. A delicate bracelet of freshwater pearls dangles from her thin wrist. “You feel like you have to, though. You have to justify the whole thing. It makes me uncomfortable. The baby hangs off you, and you feel like you’re some kind of animal. And you’re supposed to love it. You’re really supposed to just want to. Well, Sammy has a bottle and he’s fine. And Milagros can give it to him.” She looks at her watch, a slender silver disc with a madras strap. “She’s probably giving to him right now.” She sits up and looks into the cooler.

Jenny wants to confess that she breast-fed Delia until last year, when the child was two. Instead she says, “There are more important things than what a baby eats.”

“Like having some goddamn time to yourself.” Gretchen shuts the cooler with such force that the boat rocks.

“My wife, the wet nurse,” Randall shouts, looking at them over the center console. Gretchen ignores him. He rests his forearms on the wheel and squints into the distance, hardly appearing to steer at all. He wears a broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses with metallic lenses. His nose is red and peeling, but the rest of his body is tanned light brown. “I can’t see when you stand up,” he says to David, who has just risen to his feet.

“Seems like it’s taking us longer to get out of Town Cove than it took to get in,” David says. He steps over Jenny’s legs and moves toward the stern, steadying himself on the gunwale. The boat lists from side to side. “We didn’t come in this way.”

“It’s no problem,” Randall says.

“I’m not sure I remember anything like this.”

“It’s no problem, for Christ’s sake.”

“That was a nice lunch.” Gretchen tilts her head back and closes her eyes.

“It was very nice,” Jenny agrees. “Thanks again. I enjoyed the wine.”

“We should remember that wine. What was it again?” Gretchen sits up. “Randall, what was the wine at lunch?”

“Some kind of pinot gris.”

“So there you go.” Gretchen turns to Jenny and smiles.

David and Randall stand side by side, squinting into the sun. The motor drones.

“I think I’ll just turn around,” Randall says. “We’ll go back to the dock and start again. I may have taken us down one of the smaller channels.”

“Well, one of them leads out. We’ll find it.” David glances over his shoulder at Jenny.

Randall turns the boat around, and they go back up the waterway.

*

Jenny and David are both taller than most people. David is well-proportioned, but Jenny’s arms and legs seem too long for her torso. She feels as though she has never outgrown the graceless stage of adolescence. Now, at thirty, she understands that she will always be awkward. She has developed the habit of drawing her arms in close to her body as she moves and bending forward to seem more compact. David encourages her to stand up straight. He is exactly her height and has the same pale white skin. They both have red hair, though David’s turns to copper in the summer, and freckles all over their faces and limbs. When they are together, people always assume that they are brother and sister and are often startled to realize that they are married. At their wedding, when David introduced Jenny to his cousin, Randall, and Randall’s wife, Gretchen, Randall laughed while shaking Jenny’s hand. “You two are the map of Ireland. You’re Irish twins.”

“For God’s sake, Randall,” Gretchen said as she helped herself to a canapé, “that’s not even what that means.”

*

Randall has taken them on a day trip to Town Cove in Orleans, where they tied up at the dock and ate lunch at the Admiral Inn. They lingered until the sun shone through the dining room windows at an orange slant and the other tables were empty. They are now winding their way out of the cove, along the broad, shallow channels that lead through a salt marsh to the ocean. Once they reach open water, they will follow the shoreline back around the point at Chatham. Randall will jam the throttle forward, racing down the coast to the harbor where he and Gretchen have a summer home. David and Jenny plan to stay the night and drive to the suburbs of Boston in the morning. Jenny pictures David taking the train into the city on Monday, while she pushes Delia in her stroller past the other houses in the new development. She imagines the sound of the carriage’s rubber wheels gliding over the fresh asphalt sidewalks, and the click and hiss of automatic sprinklers moistening recently sown lawns. Unless it’s raining, she will walk until Delia falls asleep and continue around the quiet neighborhood until the child has slept for an hour.

*

The four of them met at Wychmere Harbor at nine o’clock in the morning and boarded Randall’s boat, Fair Fortune, a sixteen-foot Roballo big enough for eight adults. Until that morning, Jenny had never spent more than a few minutes with Randall and Gretchen, and then only in the company of many other people. Randall traveled frequently, and David kept in touch with him by e-mail. Jenny was nervous, but had agreed to the visit because David was looking forward to it.

Jenny held onto the deck rail and swung a leg over. For a minute she hesitated with one foot on the pier and one foot in the boat, feeling unsteady.

“On or off, Jenny,” said David. He stepped in and held her hand. She grabbed his arm and pulled her other leg over.

“Do we have to wear lifejackets?” said Jenny.

Randall dragged the red cooler off the dock. “Nope.”

Gretchen untied the painter from a thick metal cleat. “There are lifejackets under here. Look.” She flipped back the cushion that covered most of the deck and opened a compartment underneath. Jenny could see a jumble of adult-sized orange lifejackets below. She thought of Sammy and Delia, tiny second cousins, back at the house with Milagros, Sammy’s Peruvian nanny. “You have a good time,” Milagros had said. “You do not worry.”

The boat moved slowly away from the dock and past the commercial fishing vessels tied in a row: the Annabelle, the Marguerite, the Lucky Betty.

“How come the fishermen aren’t out today?” Jenny asked.

“The fishermen?” Gretchen pulled a rubber band out of her pocket and smoothed her pale yellow hair into a ponytail. Wisps sprang out and moved in the steady breeze.

“They’ve already been out and back,” David said.

“Do you know how much you can get per pound for an Atlantic Bluefin Tuna?” Randall turned the metal wheel.

“No,” said Jenny.

“Five hundred dollars a pound. A god damn pound. For a forty pound tuna, that’s, what, twenty grand?” Randall looked at Jenny. “Twenty thousand dollars.”

“That’s a lot,” Jenny said.

“Sure is,” Randall replied.

“Maybe you should have been a fisherman,” said Gretchen.

They puttered in between moored sloops and catamarans, and a few bobbing rowboats. Surrounding the harbor, houses with weathered gray shingles and white trim stretched from one end of their lots to the other. Smooth green lawns reached down to meet the edge of the water. It was a clear morning. The sun was already warm. The air smelled of newly cut grass, the sea, and the coconut-scented sunblock that Gretchen was rubbing onto her long legs. She wore a white tank top, a navy blue nylon windbreaker, and a red baseball cap.

On their left they passed the Yacht Club with its multi-colored flags flapping in the wind. Families were already playing on the beach and children in yellow life vests were rigging up the club’s teaching skiffs for the Saturday morning races. Along the grey edge of the horizon, small white triangles fluttered in an even line. The blast from an air horn reached them, carried by the wind. Randall was excited. “See that? We just missed the start.”

“I wish we could see more from here,” David said.

Randall pushed the throttle forward. “You have to be in a good position at the start,” he shouted. “You can’t let somebody get ahead of you.”

They roared along parallel to the coastline, close enough in that Jenny could see the houses along the beach with windows glinting in the sun. The wind blew around her. The bow rose and slapped down over small waves. White foam curls appeared and disappeared on the surface of the ocean. Jenny held onto her pink canvas hat with both hands. After forty minutes, they slowed until the engine was very quiet. David pointed ahead, where the grey outline of an island was visible to the east, low against the water. “That’s Monomoy Island. We used to camp there when we were boys.”

“No girls allowed,” Gretchen said.

“Not that it ever stopped you, Gretch.” Randall winked at Jenny.

David put his arm around Jenny’s waist. “Look at how shallow it is here, between the coast and the little island. We need to follow these markers so we don’t run aground.”

“Couldn’t we go around the far side of the island?” asked Jenny. “It doesn’t look big.”

“There’s a very strong current on the other side.” David squeezed her hand. “It could pull a boat clear out into the Atlantic.”

They followed the markers along a twisting route so clear and shallow that Jenny could see the sandy bottom. It looked only a few inches deep, but David explained that it was an illusion. The engine needed at least three feet of clearance.

*

Jenny had seen Gretchen’s picture the first time she visited David’s apartment. He had taken her out to dinner at a restaurant in the city, where she ate lobster for the first time and got a little drunk. He lived in a one-bedroom on Beacon Hill, near the hospital where he was a resident. The picture, a five-by-seven black and white image in a walnut frame, was displayed on his bedside table, next to a copy of Atlas Shrugged and a bag of honey-lemon cough drops. Gretchen’s head was tipped back slightly, and her blond hair curled around her ears and neck. She was laughing, and her eyes were focused on something beyond the frame of the picture, as though she had been distracted at the last minute and had forgotten to look at the lens. The image had such an artful, candid quality that, for a moment, Jenny thought it was the picture that had been in the frame when David purchased it. She straightened the edge of the blue comforter, and he came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. The pads of his fingers were smooth and warm against her skin. “I should probably put that away,” he said.

The photograph was still there the next time Jenny came to the apartment, although it had been moved to the top of his chest of drawers, behind a pile of neatly folded black socks. She didn’t ask about it, didn’t want to be the sort of person who needed to know. The woman in the picture, she thought, would never ask. Months later, looking through albums with David’s mother on the breezy screen porch of the summer house, Jenny turned a mildewed page and came upon the image of a group of adolescents clustered around a canoe. She recognized David, stretched out and lanky in the way boys are when their height has come on suddenly. Behind him stood a burly teenager holding the paddle above his head as though in triumph, and, in front of both boys, the girl who had unquestionably grown into the woman in the picture in David’s apartment.

“Who’s that?” asked Jenny.

“Oh, they were the loveliest children, dear.” David’s mother touched the picture gently. She wore a sleeveless blouse made of pink linen, and sinewy muscles, the result of doubles tennis played three times a week, were visible in her upper arm. Without meaning to, Jenny thought of her own mother, who cooked chili, taught piano lessons and wore lumpy, hand-knitted sweaters on all but the warmest days of the year. David’s mother went to the beauty parlor every Tuesday and Saturday and collected hummingbirds made of blown glass. She explained to Jenny that the three children had grown up together, spending each summer swimming and sailing in the water by the yacht club beach. They had fished for shiners, jumped into the harbor from the roof of the clam bar, and broken the neighbor’s plate glass window playing ultimate Frisbee. After college, David and Gretchen had been at Georgetown at the same time, he in medical school and she at the School of Foreign Service, although she hadn’t finished. “They had everybody fooled,” said David’s mother said. “We were all surprised when she and Randall went to Spain and came back married.”

When Jenny and David moved into a condominium together in the Back Bay, Gretchen’s picture remained packed in a box of books and old school papers. That carton and many others were now piled on plywood in the eaves of their house. One day, while David was at work and Delia was sleeping, Jenny climbed the pull-down ladder to the attic and picked through the dusty containers, looking for the photograph. When she found it, she was struck again by the freshness and vitality of the woman in the image. Jenny sat cross-legged on the splintery planks, with dust-motes drifting between the stacks of cardboard. She studied the picture for a while, memorizing the contour of the woman’s smile, the tilt of her head. Then she slipped it back into the carton.

*

Once they reached Town Cove, the ride was warm and pleasant. A natural salt marsh formed the entrance to the secluded harbor. They wound through quiet channels for fifteen minutes before they saw another boat. Gretchen looked for birds through a pair of small black binoculars. She insisted that she had seen an egret and consulted a tattered field guide she pulled from her jacket pocket. They tied up at the public dock and had lunch at the Admiral Inn, a white Colonial building with orange daylilies lined up in front like an obedient crew.

“This is wonderful,” David said, as they waited for their food to arrive. “I’m so glad we could finally get together.” They had each finished a cocktail. The warm air slipped in through the open window, ruffling Jenny’s hair and bringing with it the smell of salt. Across the harbor, a bell sounded, and the wind carried the noise into the room.

“We meant to have you sooner,” Gretchen said.

“Is this your first time on a boat, Jenny?” asked Randall. “I understand you’re a city girl.”

Jenny wondered what David had told them about her, how he had explained their relationship. “I’ve taken the ferry to Logan airport, but that probably doesn’t count.”

Gretchen smiled.

“I love this, though,” Jenny said. “It’s such a beautiful day. I’ll bet every day is like this here.”

“Not really,” Randall said.

“Too many beautiful days in a row and they all sort of run together.” Gretchen took a sip of the wine she had ordered.

“You see, my wife is never satisfied.” Randall smiled, and his white teeth flashed in his ruddy face.

“You understand,” Gretchen said, turning to David.

A faint flush appeared high on the skin above his cheekbones. “I’m not sure I do.”

“I don’t think I’m like that,” said Jenny. “I’m satisfied with things the way they are.”

There was a pause, during which Jenny could hear the hum of the ceiling fan in the whitewashed rafters, stirring the humid air.

“I meant about me.” Gretchen patted her lips with her napkin. “He understands about me. I’m not easily satisfied.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” David looked over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

“Let’s get the waitress over here,” Randall said.

“Randall thinks I’m a dilettante,” Gretchen said. “Here’s a question for Jenny. What do you think you would have been if you hadn’t had children?”

“What kind of question is that?” asked David.

The waitress came to their table, took their order, and disappeared through the louvered doors that concealed the opening to the kitchen.

“I’ve never really thought of it that way,” Jenny said. “I mean, I could still do something else, afterward. I don’t think it’s just one or the other.” Jenny had been a third-grade teacher at a Catholic school, but she and David had agreed that she would stay home once Delia was born.

“Oh, but it is, when you think about it.” Gretchen shifted in her chair. “Your whole scope is narrowed. Everything is different. I would have been a diplomat. I would have lived abroad.”

“But you decided against that years before you had Sammy.” David took a sip of his wine. “You can’t pin that choice on motherhood.”

Gretchen twirled her water glass in her hand so that the ice cubes clinked against the side.

“Sammy’s so beautiful,” Jenny said. “He’s so sweet. But it’s hard to have an infant, isn’t it? It can be so isolating. I remember taking a walk to the park in the early days and just wanting to run up to other women and say, ‘Be my friend, please.’”

“Well, there you go, Gretch,” Randall said. “Women in search of women at the park.”

Jenny blushed and wished she hadn’t said anything. “I think a lot of women feel that way. Men don’t always understand.” She pushed the ratatouille around on her plate.

“So, no regrets, at all, Jenny? You’re completely satisfied?” Gretchen arched one eyebrow.

Jenny looked up to see both men watching Gretchen, who folded and unfolded her napkin as though she weren’t aware of the attention. Randall picked up his bottle of beer and drank, tipping his head back. Jenny could see the Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat.

After lunch they left the Inn by the back door and walked down the wooden steps to the dock. Beach roses grew up wild through the openings between the wooden steps, winding over the railings. David untied the lines and gave the boat a push. They began to drift away from the pier, nose first. For a minute, Jenny thought David hadn’t jumped fast enough, that the gap between the boat and the wharf had widened too much. She felt a surge of panic that surprised her. Then his long legs stretched and the soles of his sneakers connected with the deck.

Randall steered past slip after slip of fat white cabin cruisers with double engines on the back. Jenny saw one called My Lucky Day, with three chubby tanned women sitting on the bow, laughing and drinking wine from plastic cups. A man with a double chin leaned against the rail, smoking a cigar. He wore a white baseball hat with the words “Betty Ford Clinic” printed in green letters. He raised his hand and waved. Randall waved too. “You’re a funny bastard!” Randall shouted. The man smiled.

“Why is that funny?” said Jenny.

“It’s hilarious,” said Gretchen.

“I don’t see what’s so funny.”

Gretchen turned away and opened the cooler. Jenny looked down and traced her finger along the seam of the cushion. David sat down next to her. “How’re we doing?” he asked. His pale eyebrows, nearly transparent, drew together, wrinkling his forehead.

“I’m fine,” said Jenny.

“Fine?” he asked.

“Oh, Jenny’s just taking the moral high ground,” said Gretchen, snapping back the top of a can of Budweiser. “This is the last beer.”

“A tragedy,” said David. He smiled.

*

They turn the boat around three times. Randall will not concede that they are having trouble finding their way out of the salt marsh. Each time, they meander back along a narrow channel until it opens into a larger one. They turn east, expecting to see the reeds and grasses give way to the open water of the sound. Their shadows stretch out ahead of them. Gretchen swats a mosquito that lands on her knee. The noise of the engine ceases and they stop short. Jenny slides forward on her seat.

“I think we’re aground,” David says.

“Aground,” repeats Randall. He lifts his hat and wipes his forehead.

“When is low tide?” David asks.

“Jesus, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“What difference does it make? Town Cove wouldn’t be a popular spot if you couldn’t get out of it at low tide.”

“We need a tide chart.”

“You’ll have to push.” Randall pulls his hat back down over his forehead.

David looks around. He sits down and removes his socks and sneakers. Jenny takes them and holds them in her lap. He jumps over the side and lands in thigh-deep water. “Can you raise the motor?” Randall grunts and strains, and the engine tilts upward. David pushes with his arms braced against the hull, and the boat slides along until he is wet to his waist. Jenny helps pull him back over the deck rail. He stands, dripping, in front of her. Randall turns the key and the ignition catches. They motor along the waterway without speaking. Mosquitoes buzz and circle their heads. After five minutes, the path ahead of them narrows, and the boat can’t pass.

“This is unbelievable,” David says. “We’re completely lost. How the hell do you get out of here? We can’t be a quarter mile from the cove.”

Jenny stands up. Her head is even with his. The boat sways. She shades her eyes. “I think there’s a road over there. I can see cars.”

“What difference does that make?” Gretchen says. She looks through her binoculars.

“We could just, you know, swim to the road.” Jenny sits down.

Randall turns the boat around again. Spots of sweat show gray on his white shirt. The channel broadens and he turns right. “All right, I know what my mistake was,” he says. The motor hums and above that sound Jenny can hear insects chirping in the grass.

“Is there a radio in this boat?” David says.

Randall doesn’t answer.

“A radio?”

“No.”

“You’re supposed to have a radio.”

“We don’t go very far.”

“We didn’t go far today, but we could use a radio.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

Ahead of them, at the edge of the water, a man stands in black rubber boots that cover his legs to the thigh. He wears a long sleeved plaid shirt and his hair is white against his brown skin. He bends forward, peering at the mud where the grass and water meet. He looks at them as they drift by. Randall lets the engine idle. “Finding any clams?” he says.

The man stares.

“Are we near the ocean?”

“You’re near the ocean.” The man bends over his metal bucket.

“I mean, we’re completely lost. We can’t find our way out,” Jenny says. She realizes that this is true. They can’t get out of the salt marsh, and they have no radio.

The man chuckles as he places something into his bucket. They can’t hear his laughter over the noise of the engine, but his shoulders jerk up and down. Randall pushes the throttle forward and the boat roars away from the clammer, spraying water out on either side.

*

“It’s a maze,” Jenny says. “It wasn’t like this coming in.” She opens the cooler halfway before she remembers that it’s empty.

“We’ll be all right,” Gretchen says.

“Are the kids okay?”

“They’re fine.”

“Milagros does a good job?”

“Of course she’s good. She’s with Sammy all the time.”

“Gretchen isn’t the maternal type,” Randall says. Gretchen stiffens.

“I was just wondering,” Jenny says.

“Could you just quit criticizing Gretchen?” David asks.

“Because you’re around so much, Randall, at home,” Gretchen says quietly. “So you’d know a lot about it.”

Each time they come around a bend in the channel, Jenny expects to see open water. It seems as though the ocean should be just ahead. Every path, though, is impassable. They turn again and again, tracing the same route.

“For God’s sake,” Randall shouts. “Does anybody have an idea about this?”

“Getting in was so easy,” Gretchen says.

“I think it’s dead low tide,” David says. “That guy was digging clams.”

“Here you go with the god damn tide again.” Randall presses his lips together.

“No, I really think this may be impassable at low tide. It was much higher when we came in. You should have checked the chart for Town Cove.”

“Why didn’t you check?”

“It’s not my boat.”

“That’s right. It’s not.”

*

They run aground again. David pushes them free and clambers, sopping, onto the deck. Randall doesn’t speak at all. He steers and looks at the water ahead of them. Gretchen sits on the deck facing away from everyone else, swatting at bugs. The mosquitoes are unbearable. They swarm around David’s wet legs, which are already covered in red welts. His toe is bleeding. The sun is low in the sky to their left and the horizon is tinged pink above the grass.

“David,” Jenny says.

He looks at her as though he has forgotten she is there.

“The sun is setting.”

“We’ve got an hour.”

“An hour? Suppose we got out of here right now, in five minutes. We would still have to get all the way back around Chatham. Could we get through that shallow part in the dark, with the markers and everything? Is it lit up?”

David is still for a moment, and then he stands. He paces around to the center console. He bends forward while he talks so his mouth is at the level of Randall’s ear. Randall faces him and yells, “What do you want me to do?” Gretchen turns around and looks, first at Randall and then at Jenny. For the first time, Jenny notices the fine lines etched in the skin around her mouth and eyes.

*

To their surprise, Town Cove comes back into view around a bend in the channel. No one moves on the quiet docks. Sailboats sway on mooring lines and the metal stays clank against the masts. Lights are on in the windows of the Admiral Inn, and Jenny can hear laughter and piano music. She breathes in through her nose and the cool evening air fills her. David smiles and put his hand on her knee. “That was an adventure,” he says. “We can tie up here overnight and come back and get the boat in the morning.”

“What are you talking about, tie up here?” Randall asks.

“You know, rent a slip overnight. They’ve got guest slips.” David’s hand tightens on Jenny’s knee.

“Not at this point in the summer.”

“I’m sure the harbormaster would let us tie up. It’s a special circumstance.”

“Why is it a special circumstance?”

David pauses for a long time before speaking. Jenny can’t bear the quiet, the water slapping against the hull. “Because, obviously, no one would want us to try to get back to Wychmere now. There aren’t even any lights on the boat. Not that I would mention that to the harbormaster.”

Randall takes off his hat and rubs his hand back and forth over the top of his head. “It’s very expensive to rent a slip overnight.”

Gretchen sniffs, a quick intake of breath.

“I’m happy to pay for it,” says David. “You all have been so generous with us today, the lunch. I’m happy to.”

Randall lets the engine idle. He leans around the side of the console. He squints. “I’m not leaving the god damn boat here overnight. I’m going to get my bearings and head out.”

“Jesus,” David says, “that’s crazy.”

“Well, I’m not leaving my father’s boat here overnight.”

“This is your father’s boat?”

“So what, it’s my father’s boat?” Randall pounds the steering wheel with his fists. His face is red. “Something could happen to it here, overnight.”

“It’s more likely that something will happen to it if you try to take it through the Chatham cut in the dark.”

“I’ll go around the far side of Monomoy.”

Jenny thinks of Delia, sleeping in an unfamiliar house. Panic fills her, and she does not want to leave the cove. “I don’t want to do that. I’m not comfortable with it.” She tries to match David’s even tone.

“You haven’t been comfortable all god damn day,” Randall says.

“Randall,” Gretchen says, without turning around.

“Don’t you start. And she hasn’t been. She’s not comfortable with us.”

“That’s enough.” David stands up. “You can do whatever the hell you want to do. We’re getting off. You can just pull up alongside the dock and drop us off.”

“I’m not getting anywhere near the dock. I’m heading right out.”

“You’ll drop us off at the dock first. We don’t want to stay on the boat. I bet you don’t even have enough gas to get back.”

“So I’m not wasting any more. I’m not dropping you off at the dock. If you want to get off the boat you can fucking jump.”

“Let’s not do anything hasty,” Gretchen says. “God knows we don’t want to make any rash decisions; nothing we’d have to live with.”

David moves toward Randall, and Jenny thinks he might hit him. She is filled with wild excitement. She feels she could grab the wheel and steer on her own. What would Gretchen say about it? Randall? She’ll maneuver to the dock. They’ll never let her do it. David will suggest that she calm down. Better, though, to be rid of the boat altogether. She’ll jump. She’ll swim home, take Delia and run away. She’ll do it right now. Now. David will never let her come back. She never would. Delia is at the house—where? In Milagros’s arms? In a crib? Having supper? She’ll do it now. David will stay with Gretchen, whom he has always loved. Now. She is standing and lifting her feet. The boat vibrates beneath them. One foot is on the edge of the rail. She wobbles for a moment. She dives.

*

Jenny breaks the surface with her hair in her eyes. She flounders for a moment and then gets her bearings. The white hull of the boat is in front of her. Small waves slap against it. There’s a cry and splash as David lands behind her. She swims around, and he grabs her arm.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“I wanted to get off the boat.”

“I guess so.”

“They weren’t going to let us off.”

A few feet away, the engine churns. Gretchen is looking at down at them. “I swear to god, I’m leaving in thirty seconds,” Randall says. David waves him on, and then he and Jenny are alone, treading water in the middle of the cove. They swim several yards until they can stand. Their feet squelch in the muddy bottom.

“What’s the plan?” David says.

“Can’t we just go up to the Inn and call a cab?”

“We can do that.”

They walk along the shore. Overhead, a few stars are visible, bright and strong in the deep blue of the sky. The reeds and cattails give way to mowed lawn and the long shadow of a house falls over them. David pulls Jenny down into the prickly grass next to the wooden lattice of a porch and draws her wet shirt up. As though they were teenagers, he touches her stomach and breasts. He kisses underneath her soaking waistband. She laughs and rolls and is thrilled to feel him inside her while the grass rubs against her back. The porch light clicks on and they freeze. A door squeaks twice and slams shut. Jenny tries to exhale without a sound. After five minutes have passed, they pull up their shorts and run, crouching, across the lawn to the water.

*

They take a cab back to Randall and Gretchen’s house. The gray pebbles of the circular driveway crunch under the wheels of the taxi. The windows are dark, but hurricane lanterns on either side of the front door spill light onto the steps. Beside the house, Wychmere Harbor glistens as though slick with oil. Jenny goes inside to check on Delia and finds her sleeping in the playpen with a pink blanket covering her legs. Milagros is asleep in an easy chair, her feet propped up on an ottoman. Jenny picks up the sleeping child and carries her, wrapped in the blanket, out to the car where David is waiting. They pull away from the quiet house, and the whine of their tires on the road is the only noise in the easy darkness.

*

© by Kathleen Foster. Used by permission.

“Well, you could use that.” Laura nudges the ceramic angels on the mantelpiece into a precise line. “It wouldn’t hurt it, I guess. The thing is, I buy only organic cleaning products. I’m trying to go completely organic. They’re a little more, though, so it’s probably silly. Do you ever go to Natural Foods? Oh, maybe not. Anyway, it’s all in a bucket under the sink. One of them is like Windex but it’s vinegar-based.”

“Vinegar?”

“I’m trying to keep chemicals out of the house.” Laura talks faster than anyone Erin has ever met. Her sentences tumble into each other until she runs out of breath and has to inhale in a quick gasp before beginning again. She’s short and compact, with no discernable waist. Her chin-length blond hair is cut and blow-dried in layers, but in the large wedding portrait above the sofa, Erin can see that she was once a brunette.

Erin follows her through the living room, noticing the pristine set of artificial logs in the fireplace, the thick pink rug that retains a temporary impression of their shoes, and the porcelain candy dish on the coffee table. In the dining room, Laura points out the oversized china cabinet stacked with the gold-rimmed plates that belonged to her grandmother. “I’m the family pack-rat,” she says. “I have another set in the basement from David’s mother.”

“Do I dust these?”

“You can do around the edges and on top. That should be enough.”

They continue down the hall to the three bedrooms. Peeking into the first one, past the four-poster, Erin wonders if Laura expects her to move all the lipsticks from the dressing table and dust underneath the doily. I’ll do it the first time, she thinks, and then we’ll see. The guest room will be easy. She’ll run the vacuum under the bed and go over the surfaces with a cloth. The third bedroom is completely empty. “What should I do in here? Just sweep?”

“Oh, you can leave that one alone. We haven’t done anything with that room yet.”

*

Riding home afterward, Erin rests her forehead against the cool window glass as the bus rattles over the Fore River Bridge. In the long-closed shipyard, the rusted boat cranes, large enough to raise a tanker, hulk against the sky. She closes her eyes so she won’t have to look at them. Staring at the huge, barren structures seems an unlucky thing to do, like walking under a ladder. She shouldn’t have agreed so readily to the amount Laura suggested—sixty dollars every two weeks. The job will take four hours, at least, and she could have asked for eighty or eighty-five. Michael won’t be happy. When it comes down to it, she always accepts the first price right away. She isn’t really a businesswoman. She doesn’t negotiate. Michael points this out whenever he has the chance. He says she doesn’t know how to value herself. When she gets back to the apartment, she tells him that they settled on sixty. He drums his fingers on the table and looks out the window. Then he goes into the bedroom and shuts the door.

*

She met him five years before, when she was twenty-two, while working as a clerk at Marion’s Shoes in Weymouth Landing. Michael McNulty came in to buy a pair of wing-tips. She noticed him right away. He was nearly six feet tall with bright blue eyes, a flush of color in his cheeks, and a very close crew cut. As she measured his feet he said, “Well, you’re just lovely,” in a heavy brogue that reminded her of her mother. Her arms shook so much that she was afraid she would drop the stack of shoe boxes, sizes ten and a half and eleven, all over the stock room floor.

Erin knew she was not lovely. However, over the weeks that followed Michael’s first visit to the store, as he continued to drop in, she had begun to imagine that he might find her so. She was pear-shaped, but not too heavy, and her hair was red if she stood in a certain angle of sunlight. She had freckles, not only on her nose and cheeks but on her forehead and chin as well. He took her to the movies and to dinner every Friday night, although, after the first two times, she paid. Before long, it was just as easy to sleep at his apartment as to return to her own. He encouraged her to stay with him—practically insisted. Sometimes she would catch him watching her as she moved through the apartment and a little shiver would run through her. He needs me so much, she told herself, delighted.

Still, though, there were times when she wondered about him. One day, two months after they met, she collected the mail from his box downstairs and found an issue of Glamour magazine addressed to Jennifer McNulty at his apartment number. She pointed it out to him as she dropped the mail onto the table. “Who’s Jennifer?”

“What?”

“Here on this magazine.”

He inspected the periodical, turning it over in his hands and flipping through the pages. “It’s a mistake with one of the downstairs neighbors. It’s happened before.”

“But it’s this apartment number.”

He blinked several times and leaned toward her. “If you’re going to be this way about everything, it’ll be over before it starts. I tell you, it’s a mistake. I thought I got it straightened out but I didn’t.” He touched her gently under the chin and his expression softened. “You’ll have to trust me.”

“All right. I’m sorry.” After a few seconds she held out her hand for the magazine. “I’ll bring it down.”

“What?”

“I’ll take it downstairs.”

“You will not,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.” A full twenty-four hours elapsed before he would speak to her again.

*

Two weeks later, Erin returns to Laura and David’s house, as scheduled. She opens the door with the key Laura gave her and is surprised to find the woman at home, lying on the sofa. Erin hesitates at the threshold, but Laura calls out, “No, no, come in. I was expecting you.” Her feet, clad in white sport socks, are propped up on a pillow.

“Are you sick?” Erin asks.

“No, just resting.”

“I’ll try to be quiet.” Erin walks as softly as she can to the hall closet to get the vacuum.

“It’s fine.” Laura raises herself onto her elbows. “I’m fine. Actually, I’m dying to tell someone. I hope you don’t mind. I’ve left my job. It was too much for me.”

The vacuum is heavy. Erin sets it down again. She would prefer to dive right into her work but there seems to be no way to avoid the conversation. “What line of work were you in?”

“I was a social worker.”

“Well, that must have been a tough job. People and their problems. No wonder you wanted to quit that.”

“I liked it, actually.” Laura sits all the way up and swings her feet to the floor. “I’ve been doing it a long time. It’s hard, but there are good moments too. I handled a lot of adoptions, which is nice. I remember one where this family had been a foster family for a baby that was taken out of a home in the middle of the night, right in the middle of the night, a domestic violence situation. Anyway, we had to call the emergency foster family in the night, you know, and so they picked up the phone, and we brought the baby over. They had such a tough time, you know, with the birth mother, and her not getting her act together, and finally we terminated rights and they could adopt. It was a long road.”

“I guess so.”

Laura looks at Erin as though she expects her to say more. Her eyebrows are raised slightly and her lips are parted to show her perfectly even teeth.

“So why did you leave?” Erin asks, finally.

Laura smiles. “Because I’m expecting a baby.”

“Oh, wow. That’s great.”

“We’ve had a lot of trouble, so I have to take it easy, just to be on the safe side.”

“That’s wonderful. Good for you. Just put your feet up and relax, and I’ll try to go around as quickly as I can.”

“Don’t rush.” Laura lies back again and closes her eyes.

Erin vacuums the rugs in the hallway and the two furnished bedrooms. She moves the lipsticks on Laura’s dressing table as well as the lace doily and dusts the wood all around. She makes the bed, taking care that the comforter is even on both sides. As she passes the third bedroom, she realizes why it’s empty. Even though she doesn’t need to, she runs the vacuum around it, sucking the dust out of the corners. When she is finished, she takes the bucket of cleaning supplies from under the kitchen sink and goes to work on the bathrooms. Erin doesn’t mind cleaning bathrooms. She doesn’t mind cleaning at all, actually. It’s so satisfying, so predictable. When she scrubs a toilet with Lysol and a sponge, it’s clean. Every time.

Michael has a part-time job with a painting company on the South Shore. He paints most mornings and is often home in the early afternoon. Erin walks into the apartment to find him sitting at the kitchen table, eating an Italian sub.

“Hi.” She takes off her sneakers and leaves them next to the door.

He looks up and wipes his mouth against his sleeve. He has streaks of paint on his shirt and upper arms and a dirty rope bracelet around his wrist, which she gave to him last summer when they went for a day to Salisbury Beach.

“I did my first job over at that new house I told you about,” she says.

“Big house?”

“It was okay.”

“Probably one of those great big houses.”

“It was kind of weird because the lady was home.”

“She was there watching you clean the freaking house?”

“Kind of. She’s pregnant, so she quit her job.”

He crumples up the empty sub wrapper and throws it away. “My mother took care of seven other kids when she was pregnant and this lady can’t go to some office job?”

“I think she had some kind of problem, so she has to lie down.”

“What kind of problems?”

“I just think she had trouble getting pregnant.” Erin begins to wash the dishes they left in the sink that morning.

“Oh, yeah? Did you tell her about your problems?”

Erin freezes with her back to him, her hands soapy. “My problems?”

“You know, your problems. Why we can’t have a baby.”

She turns around. “It’ll happen, Michael. Sometimes it takes a while.”

“Jesus, you’ve been saying that for three years. Go to the doctor and find out what’s wrong with your plumbing.”

“It’s expensive to do all that.”

He stands up abruptly and goes into the bedroom. She hears the television go on.

Erin isn’t sorry that they haven’t yet conceived a child. Although she doesn’t often admit it to herself, and hasn’t spoken about it to anyone else, she knows that Michael is difficult to manage. She keeps hoping, though, that if she can find the right combination of words and actions, she will return him to the lighthearted, romantic man he seemed when he walked into the shoe store. She tries not to let the little things bother her. The long view is what’s important, she tells herself. Where they are headed, not how things are day to day.

*

Erin’s mother read tarot cards in their apartment in Weymouth until she died of emphysema—a fate, surprisingly, she did not foresee. Erin was seventeen years old when her mother received the diagnosis and twenty-one when she died. During the time in between, Siobhaun tried to teach Erin her craft. They spent long afternoons with the deck arranged on a TV table beside the couch. Erin squinted at the cards, watching her mother’s tired face and trying to give her readings that sounded genuine.

Erin explains this to Laura in a loud voice as she vacuums around the coffee table. Laura lies on the couch, which now has a pile of books and magazines stacked beside it.

“Should I move these?”

“Oh, no. Just go around. Actually, do you want a cup of tea?”

Erin turns off the vacuum. “Tea?”

“It’s just so nice to have someone to chat with. I’ve got my mother, of course. I can call her, but I talk to her about three times a day, so it gets a little tired. Most of my friends are working, of course, or busy with kids. If you don’t mind making it, I’d love to have a quick cup.”

Erin goes into the kitchen and finds two mugs. She fills them with water and puts them in the microwave, adds teabags, and then brings them back into the living room. She settles into a wing back chair across from Laura.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” Laura says. “Emphysema is terrible.”

Erin nods. “Thanks.”

“Do you have other family?”

“No. Well, yes. I’m with someone. We’ve lived together for six years.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s nice. A bit overprotective. Just looking out for me, though.” Erin tries to drink her tea quickly.

“Overprotective?”

“I don’t know why I said that. He’s Irish, so sometimes they can be a little, you know, protective. He’s a painter.”

“He’s Irish? Where from?”

“Oh, well.” Erin blushes. “You know, we don’t talk too much about the past.”

“Why not?”

“I guess I don’t know. He’s just not that way.”

“Do you mind that?”

“Oh, no. It’s fine with me.” All of a sudden, Erin feels her eyes begin to fill. She stands up quickly and a drop of tea splashes over the rim of the mug and onto the pink carpet. “I’m so sorry. I’ll get it up. It won’t stain.” She dashes into the kitchen and grabs a dishtowel.

“I don’t care if it does stain,” Laura calls from the living room. “Don’t worry about it. Are you okay?”

Erin dabs at the spot on her hands and knees. “There, it’s up. I think it’s up.”

“Please don’t worry about it. It’s nothing. Maybe it’s a sign.” She smiles.

“What do you mean?”

“Tea leaves. That’s your gift.”

Erin looks up. “What?”

“Instead of tarot. Tea leaves. You have a great future in leaves.”

“Oh.”

“I’m just teasing, Erin. Just trying to get you to smile.”

Erin does smile, and then a shiver of fear runs along her neck.

*

She wakes just before seven to wash her face and put on her velour sweatpants. She eats a banana and stuffs a magazine into her backpack. When she emerges from the bathroom, Michael stands by the door. “Where are you going?”

“I have to clean the dentist’s office today.”

“Don’t you do that on Tuesdays?”

“I did, but Laura, you know, my new house, asked if I could start coming every week instead of every other, so I rescheduled the dentist. He doesn’t see patients on Saturday mornings, so he didn’t care.”

Michael leans against the doorframe with his hands in his pajama pockets. “Why does she want you to come every week? So you can sit around and chat?”

“I think she just wants a clean house.”

“Somehow, I don’t think so. She’s lonely, so you sit over there telling her everything about our lives.”

“It’s extra money, though.”

“I don’t care about the money. I want you at home on a Saturday. Tell her to forget it.”

Erin feels a weight like a stone in her stomach. He puts his hands out. “It’s you I’m worried about, after all. I don’t want you to get your hopes up thinking she’s your dear friend. She’s not your friend.”

She lets him pull her in toward his chest and wrap his arms around her. She thinks of her mother, sitting propped up with pillows on the embroidered wing chair, her breath rattling in and out. Siobhaun would glare down at the cards on the folding table. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Erin. Sometimes you can’t read them straight on. You have to change it a little to help the person along. There’s no harm in it, if your intentions are good.”

*

Erin doesn’t have the close friends her mother had, years ago. On afternoons of her childhood, the kitchen was filled with women sitting around the table smoking Benson and Hedges and drinking Bewley’s tea. As a teenager, she often joined them after school, watching them flip tarot cards and emptying the green plastic ashtrays with a decade of soot ground into them. While Erin knew very little about her peers at the high school, she was aware that Ailish’s husband did not come home one night and had been trying to make up for it ever since. She heard that Roisin had been crowned Rose of Tralee when she was seventeen and it had been her finest hour, and that Maeve’s daughter had three boys already with another one on the way and was worn out at twenty-six.

Maeve was the one who convinced Erin to give up the baby. “You don’t want to end up like my Michelle,” she said, “still a young girl and with your best days behind you.” Her mother agreed, and Erin did not regret the decision. She was only fifteen, and she had hardly known the boy. Years later, after Erin’s mother’s death, Maeve had tried hardest of all of them to stay in touch. Her Michelle needed so much help, though, with the four children running all over the apartment, and her husband working nights that Maeve didn’t have much left over for a grown woman who, after all, wasn’t her own child.

*

“I think it’s nice you’re able to come more often,” Laura says. “The house looks great, which is nice, and the whole thing’s such a bright spot in my day. How much television can a person watch?”

“It’s true. There’s never much on. Sometimes I try to catch Oprah if I’m home.”

“Oh, I watch that too.” Laura takes a sip of her tea. Her bare feet rest on the coffee table, and most of her hair is pulled into a bristly little ponytail on top of her head. Erin hasn’t even taken the cleaning supplies from under the sink. Each week for the past five she has spent so much time talking with Laura that she has to run around afterward doing the cleaning. Even skipping the corners and swishing the toilet only once, she has been late to her afternoon house twice in a row. Without telling Michael, she dropped the dentist as a client altogether, but with the additional money from an extra day at Laura’s things are coming out even.

“Do you think you and Michael will ever get married?” Laura asks.

Erin wishes she wouldn’t look at her with such a direct gaze. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Michael says the important thing is that we’re together because we love each other, not because some law says we have to be.”

“And what do you think?”

“I suppose he has a good point.”

“What about children? Is that in the plan?”

Erin fidgets with the string of her teabag. “He wants kids so badly. He brings it up all the time.”

Laura leans forward, eyebrows raised. “You’re kidding.”

“What?”

“He just doesn’t sound like the kids type.”

“We’ve been trying for a couple of years but nothing’s happened.”

“Oh, my God. Erin, I had no idea. I should’ve been more sensitive. Me, of all people.”

“It’s okay, really.” Erin takes a deep breath. “Here’s the thing. I’ve never told Michael this, or anybody else for years and years. I don’t think it’s my fault that we can’t have a child. I mean, it could be, but I doubt it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t tell anybody.”

“Erin, for heaven’s sake.”

“I got pregnant when I was in high school. I was fifteen. The baby was healthy—a girl. I gave her up for adoption.”

“You poor thing.”

“That’s why I don’t want to have any tests or anything like that, the way Michael wants me to. I think they’re going to show that it’s not me.”

“Why is that a problem?”

Erin stands up and gathers the empty tea cups and the plate with the blueberry muffin crumbs. “I’d better get started.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Is everything okay at home?”

“Of course it is.”

“That’s great. I’m glad about that.”

*

“I’ve planned something for you,” Michael says. It’s a Saturday morning, and the early October light is coming through the bedroom window at a slant, illuminating the foot of the bed. Erin opens her eyes and turns to face him. “What is it?”

“Get dressed.” He pulls back the covers, slides out of bed, and shuffles to the shower.

When they are dressed, they get into Michael’s pickup truck and drive south along Route Three. Although the sun is out, the air is crisp. Erin is glad she has worn a jacket. They drive to Nantasket Beach and park in the large empty lot by the concrete seawall. The shops along the tinny boardwalk are shut up for the season. The carousel is closed as well, the doors on each side of its faded gazebo padlocked tight.

“Let’s take ourselves a walk,” Michael says.

“All right.”

They get out of the car and climb over the wall. Erin zips up her coat. Michael reaches over and grabs her hand, and they walk along the edge of the water. Erin marvels at the strangeness of walking through the sand in sneakers. It’s too cold to take them off, but it seems nearly obscene to deny her toes the chance to curl around the tiny grains. Michael stops suddenly. “I know I’m not easy to live with.”

“I don’t know.”

“No, it’s true. I’m not easy, but you put up with me.”

Erin smiles. “It’s okay.”

“I’ve been planning to do this for a long time, but it’s hard to find the right moment.” He puts his hand in his pocket. She feels as though her stomach has dropped out onto the sand. He pulls out a heavy gold claddagh ring and holds it up between his thumb and forefinger so she can see the pale blue sky through its center.

“So, I’m asking myself, is this the right moment?”

It was only a matter of time, thinks Erin. Of course he had been planning to do this.

“It’s a bit big,” Michael says. “It was my father’s, but I thought I could have it sized down.”

She holds out her hand to touch it, to feel its weight in her palm. He closes his fist around it. “The thing is, I’m not sure it is the right moment.” A faint color has appeared on his neck, spreading upwards toward his chin. “See, I have to put up with a lot too. From yourself.”

“What?”

“What I mean is, could I really marry someone who lies to my face? A deliberate lie?”

Erin’s arms begin to shake.

“See, I asked you one small thing. Don’t go every week. And not only do you do it, but it’s the lie that gets to me.”

She can hardly speak. “Michael, I’m so sorry. I should have—”

“But you did.” He raises his arm, the ring clutched in his fist. “And I don’t think I could marry someone who treats me like that.”

Her cheeks are hot. “Wait.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

He pitches his arm forward. Erin sees the glint of the sun on metal and the gentle plink as the ring hits the water.

“See what you’ve brought me to,” he says.

After he drives away, Erin sits for a long time on the seawall, watching the gulls circling and diving for fish. Finally, she hears a honk behind her. She turns around. Michael pulls up alongside the curb. He reaches over and rolls down the passenger-side window. “Just get in.” She hops down from the wall and climbs into the truck. He puts the oldies station on the radio and taps his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music as they drive home.

*

The following Tuesday, Erin rides to Laura’s on the bus, one minute thinking she will explain that she’s dropping her as a client and the next that she will reveal exactly what happened over the weekend. When she arrives at the house, she notices two cars in the driveway. She lets herself in with her key and finds herself face to face with a man in jeans and a Notre Dame sweatshirt. He wears round glasses and, though he does not look older than forty-five, his hair is gray all over. He has a day’s growth of stubble on his face.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Oh, David, I completely forgot,” Laura calls from somewhere inside the house. “It’s the cleaning girl.”

“We’re going to have to reschedule,” David says.

“No, she can come in.” Laura’s voice comes from the bedroom. “Let her in.”

David shrugs and allows Erin to pass by him into the house. He closes the door. The place is untidy. Laundry and magazines are scattered around, mixed in with empty plates and cups. Before she gets the vacuum from the closet, she creeps down the hall and peeks into Laura’s bedroom. Laura lies with the covers pulled up to her chin. The small television in the hutch is on, but Laura stares in the other direction. She smiles faintly when she sees Erin.

“Hi,” Erin says. “I’m sorry to bother you. Should I come back another time?”

“It’s okay. I completely forgot that you were coming. It’s a good thing you’re here, actually, because the house is a disaster.” She closes her eyes.

“But what happened?”

“I lost the baby.” Laura keeps her eyes closed. “It happened over the weekend.”

“Oh, God,” Erin says. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s the sixth pregnancy I’ve lost. It was our last chance.”

“It was?” Erin wants to sit at the foot of the bed but is afraid it might be inappropriate.

“We’ve tried everything. This was our second round of in vitro. At a great clinic, too. There are just so many things wrong with me—eggs, womb; it’s never going to work.” Her voice trembles. “I’m just so disappointed.”

Erin decides she doesn’t care if it’s inappropriate. She comes into the room and sits down at the end of the bed. “Have you thought about adopting?”

Laura pulls a tissue from the box beside her pillow. “Oh, we’ve thought of everything. As a first step, we’re going to look into trying to find a surrogate. At least that way, the child would be biologically David’s.”

“Oh.”

“But we don’t want to ask a stranger.” Laura blows her nose. “It’s hard to approach somebody about it. You want to hear something crazy? I even thought about asking you if you’d consider it. I’m probably just grasping at straws.”

“What’s involved in being a surrogate?”

Laura sits up. “You’ve got to— I guess you’ve got to be willing to get pregnant, and then, well, give us the baby. I mean, there’s a contract and everything, but there’s a lot of trust involved too.”

Erin feels herself blush. She lowers her voice. “But how do you actually get pregnant?”

“Oh.” Laura grimaces. “I think there are a couple of options. I mean, everyone would have to be comfortable with the awkwardness of it.”

“Wouldn’t that be hard? For you, I mean?”

“I just want to have a child. I feel like I’m getting old so fast, and we’ve wasted so many years.” She dabs at her eyes with the dirty tissue. “Obviously, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but here’s something to think about. Surrogate mothers are well compensated, you know, living expenses. From what we’ve read, twenty thousand is the average. We’d pay all your medical costs too.”

“Twenty thousand?”

“You could start over, Erin, if you wanted to. I was a social worker for fifteen years. I can tell that you have problems at home. Just think about it.”

Erin stands up. “Okay. I’ll think about it.”

“Thanks.”

*

Erin finds she had nothing to say to Michael. She thinks about Laura’s offer every day and tries to consider it from all sides. She makes breakfast in the morning and puts away the dishes afterward. She leaves on the bus and returns in the late afternoon. She reads magazines, makes dinner, and goes to bed early. She answers all of his questions with the shortest responses possible, and she goes to Laura’s every Tuesday.

One evening, when she returns to the apartment, he has made a meatloaf and potatoes dinner and opened a bottle of wine. She almost walks past the table on her way to the bedroom, but she’s hungry. “I’m so sorry,” he says as soon as she sits down.

She picks up her fork and begins to eat the meatloaf.

“It’s terrible, what I done. I shouldn’t have.”

“Probably not.” Erin butters her potato.

“I’ll never do anything like that again.” He pours wine into her glass. “I’m going to buy another ring, one with a diamond in it. You deserve something new, one of your own.”

“I liked the other one just fine.”

After dinner Erin stands for a while on the rickety back porch, listening to a squirrel rustling in a tree in the next yard. She can hear two men arguing through an open window several houses away, and inside, the sound of Michael cleaning up the dinner dishes. Although the night is clear, it isn’t dark enough to make out more than one or two faint stars. Even if she could see them, she isn’t sure she would remember any of the astrological signs her mother tried to teach her. It’s always so hard to tell one from another.

*

Laura insists that Erin take prenatal vitamins for a month. Erin keeps the container in her purse and enjoys hearing it rattle as she swings the bag onto her shoulder. The three of them review the options, and after much discussion, in the interest of keeping things as organic as possible, Erin and David do it the old-fashioned way, on the four-poster bed within sight of Laura’s dressing table. Laura goes away to Newport with some of her girlfriends for the weekend, so she’ll have something to distract her. David is older than Michael, but he seems less confident. He is overly solicitous and keeps asking Erin if she’s all right. He keeps his eyes closed most of the time. Erin looks around the room at the elaborately framed family tree, the two diplomas on either side of the lamp, the quilts folded neatly in a wicker basket on the rug. She stares at David’s salt and pepper hair, his smooth, hairless chest and back, and, suddenly, it’s over. David covers her up gently and goes into the bathroom to take a shower. Erin lies in the bed for a couple of minutes, then dresses slowly and let herself out.

*

Over time, the idea of another baby, once unimaginable, begins to take shape in Erin’s mind. She pictures herself sitting on Laura and David’s sofa, watching an infant crawl around, her chubby red knees making little divots in the thick pile of the carpet. She allows herself to consider that somewhere, her child, surrendered at birth to an unknown couple, is twelve years old. That girl does not know how to lay out a tarot deck, would not understand how an ailing woman with brittle white hair could tell the future, could sum up all a person’s possibilities in the time it took to exhale a plume of smoke: Ace of Cups, Three of Swords, the Lovers, the Tower, the High Priestess.

*

Erin has planned the moment carefully. She buys a bunch of red and white carnations at the supermarket and brings them with her to Laura’s house. Laura has not been there for the past few weeks when Erin came to clean, but instead left handwritten instructions on flowered note paper on the kitchen counter, reminding her to wash the inside of the microwave, or change the towels in the bathroom. Erin is delighted to see Laura’s car in the driveway this time, as she walks up the road toward the house. She considers whether she will present the flowers before or after she makes the announcement. She slides her key into the lock and pushes the door open. The smell of vinegar fills her nose the moment she steps into the house. It turns her stomach and she gags, leaning over and putting her hands on her knees until the feeling goes away.

“Is that you, Erin?”

She stands up and the sensation subsides. She climbs the stairs to the living room. Right away she notices that the coffee table has been dusted. The candy dish sparkles. The mirror over the fireplace, its curved surface polished, reflects light and color into the room.

“Erin?” Laura looks up from her newspaper as Erin enters the kitchen.

“Hi. I brought you these.” She meant to do it more gracefully.

Laura looks embarrassed. “Let me get a vase. How are you feeling?” She takes a ceramic container from the cabinet and fills it. She unwraps the carnations and drops them into the water without cutting the stems.

Erin watches her. “I’m fine. The house seems clean already.”

“Have you taken a test yet?”

Erin hesitates. Laura glances up.

“Not yet. I’ll take one tomorrow,” Erin says. I’ll call with the news, she thinks. Calling is even better.

Laura turns around, realizes she has forgotten the flowers, retrieves them, and puts them in the center of the table. “I wanted to talk to you. Sit down.”

“Should I make some tea?”

“Tea? Oh, well. Why don’t you just sit down. Have you looked at those apartments? The one on Broad Street is lovely. I talked to the landlady, and you can be in at the beginning of next month.”

“I’ll be sure to call her.” Erin shifts in her chair. She wants to look at the dining room to see if it, too, has been done.

“We want you to be comfortable. It’s really important to us. And we’ve found someone else to clean the house. It just doesn’t seem right to have you continue, under the circumstances.”

“But I don’t mind. It’s no problem. I’ll stick with it.” She can’t give up sixty dollars every Tuesday. How will she explain it to Michael? She remembers suddenly that she won’t have to explain it. She’ll be leaving him and moving into her own place at the end of the month.

“It just doesn’t seem appropriate.”

“Appropriate?”

“There’s more to it than that, even. I just need to create some distance, to prepare myself. David and I both need some distance. It will be easier for everyone as we go forward.

Leaving him for what? The thought comes like a rush into Erin’s abdomen. And what will she have then? “I don’t think it will be easier,” she says.

“We’ll help you with all the arrangements, don’t worry. We’ll take care of everything. It’s for the best if we can just be a little less familiar.”

*

When Erin gets home, she turns on the fan in the kitchen of the apartment. It oscillates back and forth on its rickety pole and stirs the curtains above the sink. It’s unseasonably hot for late November. She takes two pork chops out of the refrigerator, dips them in egg and breadcrumbs and fries them in a pan with butter. The smell of them bothers her stomach but she cooks them anyway, because Michael likes them. When he comes out of the room to see what she is cooking, he smiles and sits down at the table. He isn’t wearing a shirt, and on one of his shiny, freckled shoulders she can see a thin wisp of a line, milky white, where a scar formed some time in the past, before she knew him. The words come bursting out of her before she can stop them, and they feel like the truth. “I got fired. That newish home I picked up, you know, the Tuesday house? She let me go.” Her cheeks are hot and she thinks she might cry.

He reaches up and pulls her down on his lap. “I don’t believe it. And after all you’ve done for her? I mean, what she put you through? And me as well? She really put us through something.”

She nods.

“So she wasn’t your friend. I told you she wasn’t.”

With a shock she realizes he was right. She stands up. He stretches out his long legs under the table. She puts boil-in-bag rice in a pot on the stove and opens a can of green beans. Something about the canned vegetables makes her think of her mother, who bought Veg-All by the case and stored it in the hall closet. “You really don’t have the gift,” she said before she died. “You’ll just have to pretend.” An idea comes to her, fully formed, as though it has been in her mind all along. She waits until she can hear him shifting restlessly in his seat, and then she serves him a plate of supper. She takes a sip of water. She looks him straight in the eye. “I have some wonderful news,” she whispers.

*

© by Kathleen Foster. Used by permission.

“You took a half-day off for this?” Annie asked.

“I called in a favor,” Candice replied with a flick of her head. A stranger would think that this and her other pet gesture, a wave of her hand over one eye, were neurotic tics. But those who knew her recognized that they were left over from when she had long, wavy hair that was always falling in her face. Or maybe they were neurotic tics that had just been laid bare by the cutting of her hair, like the bones of her long neck that been made visible by the sinking of her skin. She was approaching fifty. Still, her skin was fresh and her jaw strong. A challenging kind of beauty remained in her large-featured face, even when it confronted you squarely as a road sign, as it tended to do.

“Well, I appreciate it,” Annie said.

Candice gave another head-flick, this one accompanied by a shrug of her shoulder. “No biggie. I wouldn’t want some new friend to take you, or some student. Someone who didn’t know Sarah.”

“Well—” Annie said, but didn’t go on. They both knew that it wouldn’t have come to that. Annie had many friends old and new to drive her places since her license had been revoked after a series of fender-benders.

They were quiet as the neighborhoods on either side of the expressway gave way to walls of green, and overpasses became less frequent.

“Are you still seeing that fellow, James?” Annie asked.

“Your memory is starting to go. No. Not for a year.”

After a pause, Annie asked, “How are Joan and the others?”

“Fine, fine,” Candice said airily. Then she caught herself. “No, they’re not. They’re all getting dogs. Every time we plan something, someone has to cancel because her dog is barfing on the rug. Susan actually brought hers to tai chi! She leashed it to a tree, and it paced and whined all class long. In the corner of my eye I could see Susan waving at it from Repulse Monkey position.”

“Upward-facing Dog,” Annie offered.

Candice patted her hand. “That’s yoga, dear. I’ve told them all, my house is canine-free zone. If you want to stay home teaching Sparky where to poop instead of coming over for lunch, then fine. I hope the conversation’s as good.”

“Dogmatic.”

“I swear, I want to round them all up and put them all to sleep.”

“The dogs or the gals?”

“The dogs. Why not? I don’t love them. Is there a law that you have to love every dog?”

“No, but you can’t blame the poor animals if your luncheons aren’t what they used to be.”

“Who can I blame, then? You?”

The old Annie would have volleyed that one back. Together they would have built it into something crowned by laughter. But she had become feeble. Her best feature had always been her big eyes that seemed to implore to be understood, especially when she was explaining an idea. This made her students feel like they could save her just by nodding. But several years ago she had stopped wearing contacts, and the thick glasses she wore instead not only shrunk those eyes but crowded into the lens warped funhouse figures from the world behind her. Annie now blinked those miniaturized eyes at Candice. Her mild smile didn’t falter, but her head turned to gaze out the window.

An hour later, they took an exit and passed through a small town into the countryside. Out here, Long Island held onto its last bit of charm. Fields here were still used to grow crops, mailboxes were cloaked in climbing flowers, clusters of sleek-coated horses turned their heads in unison to watch the car pass. The old fence posts that ran along the road listed this way and that, held up, it seemed, only by the wire that ran between them. “Left up here . . . ” Annie quietly directed. “Now right.” In a hollow, thick trees threw a night-like shadow over the road. Then they retreated, and it was day again. “Up here on the right. This is it.”

“Here? This looks like any other spot.”

“See where people park?” There was a flat area at the side of the road where broken glass glinted in the weeds. “The path starts there,” Annie said, indicating a gap in a mossy, vine-strewn stone wall.

Candice pulled over and killed the engine. Flicking her head and pushing back her phantom bangs, she asked, “Do you need help?”

“No, no. I’ve gone down this path a hundred times.” She hoisted herself out of the car and took a shopping bag from where it sat wedged between the two overnight bags.

Candice was suddenly flustered. “Are you sure? I could help you partway down, then wait.”

“Nope,” Annie said with a practiced kind of cheer. “I’ll be back. Half-hour at most.” Holding the bag high out of reach of the weeds, she waddled toward the gap in the wall.

Annie had always been stocky and a little crooked in hip and shoulder. The extent of her daily exercise was the five-minute walk to the subway. It had never been beauty or grace that made women love her. But now as she disappeared around the bushes, she seemed even denser than before, heavy in the step, as if during those endless hours in the study all her weight had settled into her feet.

Using buttons in the door, Candice opened all the windows. It was cooler here than in Brooklyn, and there was a pleasant nutty flavor to the air. Wind stirred the tops of the trees, and the insects’ drone ebbed and flowed. She took out her book, knowing she would read only a page or two before she fell asleep. Lithium. In the past three years it had done her a great service, but it had robbed her of her chief pleasure, reading by the afternoon sun. Despite her doctor’s claim that it would have few side effects, sleep now waited in every gap in her day.

All her adult life, Candice had turned down therapists who suggested she try a mood stabilizer. The problem wasn’t in her brain. The problem was in the world, which was run by good old boys who used religion to trick everyone else into maintaining the status quo—tilling the fields, putting dinner on the table every night in the hope of a reward in heaven. Wasn’t that what she and her generation had been arguing in all those chants and folk songs? Must she now give in and take a pill to reconcile her with this world? Was part of growing old betraying your younger self?

She did suffer, though, more than was fair. At last she had given lithium a test run, and it had worked.

Even now she would never submit to Prozac or Zoloft or any of those other pills that had turned her friends into happy monsters. But lithium was just a salt. A salt that reined in her rampages and softened her falls.

*

Candice was awakened when Annie sat heavily into the seat, mopping her forehead with a handkerchief and struggling to catch her breath.

“What happened?” Candice cried.

“Had a bit of a tumble on the hillside.”

Candice took the shopping bag, which was torn, from Annie and put it in the backseat. The box inside had been emptied and flattened.

“I should have helped you, Annie. Look at you! You’re covered in dust.” Candice began patting down her shirt, raising a white cloud. Then she froze. “It’s not—”

“No,” said Annie, “just dirt. I had already scattered the ashes when I fell.”

Candice swallowed and continued dusting her off, a little less vigorously now.

“Some water would be nice,” Annie said.

Candice handed her the bottle and started the car, to get the air conditioner going. Annie drank, then let her head fall back against the rest. After a minute, she sat up and said, “All better, captain.”

Candice started to say something, to chide her, but found that her throat was constricted. This was how far Annie had come. It was time for a cane, maybe an I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up alert button. A Craftmatic adjustable bed, a Clapper. They had made fun of the commercials together, quoting the velvet-voiced welcomes to old age—Just look at what your AARP membership gets you—and now Annie had gone and reached it. Candice drove, focusing on pretty aspects of the countryside until the lump in her throat went down. Then she started afresh: “So, where did that path go?”

The words burst out of Annie as if she had been hoping to be asked: “A fishing hole. We used to fish there. There’s the biggest weeping willow you’ve ever seen. Its branches kind of lash the water’s surface, gently. You can watch it for hours. You don’t catch much, but it’s a lovely place to spend a day.”

“It sounds beautiful.”

“I can take you if you’d like.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s your and Sarah’s place. We have our own places.”

Annie poked her thigh. “Café Loup.”

Candice took her hand and squeezed it.

Annie had taken Candice to this cavern of a restaurant on Thirteenth Street after class one evening, and that was the start of their affair. Annie was a literature professor and Candice an adult student, a divorcée slowly meandering toward a master’s degree. Annie didn’t mention on that first dinner that she had a lover at home. Later, when they lived together, Candice would come in from Brooklyn at the end of the day and meet Annie at Café Loup. On the long banquette, editors sat next to their authors and spread manuscripts among dishes and wine glasses. This was the New York Annie had fought her way east to find many years before, one Candice had never imagined growing up in Sheepshead Bay. Once, they had been seated near Allen Ginsberg, and what followed must have been the quietest dinner of their life together. Usually they sparred and joked and talked over each other, but now they said very little, hoping to catch a few words from the poet and his companions. Annie had taught “Howl” for years in her Literature of Protest class. She had taught it to Candice.

Annie didn’t take back her hand, and neither did Candice. The sun grew red and touched the mottled black line of the treetops in the distance. When they reached the inn and walked into the restaurant, Annie had a noticeable limp.

“You hurt your leg in the fall,” Candice said.

“Might have twisted my ankle a bit.”

“We’ll have to ice it.”

“Ice will do the trick. It’ll be better by morning.”

They ate under a sloped, stuccoed ceiling with exposed beams in the little four-table restaurant. There were plug-in fountains humming and bubbling in every nook. After dinner they went to the adjoining office where a teenaged girl checked them in. She had golden skin and black curly hair and wore jeans that rode so low Candice could see where the curve of her belly began to flatten. The innkeeper’s daughter, mused Candice. She spends her evenings here, a summer job. Daytime, she’s all coconut-oiled up on her towel, with boys lined up all the way down the beach. For a second Candice ached for those summers of necking with boys in the woods just out of reach of the campfire’s unsteady amber light. The crackling logs would collapse, and she’d pull away to watch the crazily swirling sparks rise like demons into the night.

“We have you in rooms four and five upstairs,” the girl said. “The bathroom’s in the hall.”

“Two rooms?” Candice said.

The girl flinched.

“Annie, you’re being ridiculous.” She turned her face back on the girl. “We’ll only be needing one room.”

The girl looked to Annie, who shrugged.

“I swear, Annie,” Candice said as she trudged up the narrow staircase behind her, carrying both suitcases, “two rooms. What a waste of money!”

“Just wanted to do what’s appropriate.”

“For a radical, you’re such a fuddy-duddy. How many years did we share a bed? Really, Annie, this late in life you should be more worried about what’s left in your bank account than what’s appropriate.”

*

In the middle of the night, Candice rose and crept down the hall to pee. Then she returned, shut the door behind her, and stood for a while to let her eyes adjust. Annie lay as if in state, with her arms at her sides on top of the blanket. She had always been such a neat sleeper. During spells of insomnia, Candice would sometimes watch her, and feelings of adoration would turn to panic. She wasn’t breathing! She’d shake her, and those eyes would open and implore, and Candice would be caught—crazy again.

Now she lay beside her and copied her so they were like twin Lenins laid out in Red Square. It wasn’t comfortable to sleep this way. How did Annie do it? Candice took her hand and felt Annie apply a gentle pressure. This made her sleep seem even more like wakefulness, like she was faking it, writing books in her mind as she waited for morning.

*

Candice woke in the morning feeling an unnamable, unreasonable anger. She returned from a shower to find Annie sitting on the bed, waiting her turn.

“You look like a little old lady,” Candice said. “All you need is some pigeons at your feet.”

“I am a little old lady. I’m little, old, and a lady.” Annie moved to rise.

“Hold it. I want to look at that ankle.” Candice held Annie’s legs in either hand. The taut, speckled skin was veined with blue like Roquefort cheese. While one ankle showed a little through the puffy flesh, the other didn’t. “It’s swollen. You probably have a sprain. We’ll have to ice it in the car. So much for our walk on the beach. We’d better just head back. I have things to do around the house anyway.”

Annie sighed. “I suppose I should get back to writing, myself.” Then she shuffled into the hall, leaving Candice to stew. Of course Annie didn’t insist. A walk on the beach meant nothing to her.

They drove. At one point Annie said, timidly, “You miss your hair.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You still push it out of your face, even though it’s not there.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“Well, why wouldn’t I? I do miss it. When I still had my hair, young men would still ask me to dance. Ask Joan. There was one she called Tarzan who kept sending me drinks at the bar, and that was just—what?—three years ago. He couldn’t have been over thirty-five. Big and handsome.”

“Then why don’t you grow it back?”

Candice toyed with the idea of telling her that the lithium had made it thin, to see her eyes turn contrite. “Because I’m getting old, Annie, and I don’t want to be some gray, frizzy ex-hippy. Maybe if I moved to Vermont or Sedona, but not here.”

“You may be getting old, Candice, but you’ll always be younger than me.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better? Well, it doesn’t. We were going to have a beautiful day on the beach, but instead you hurt yourself and bring up my thinning hair.”

“I don’t want to fight, Candice.”

“Of course you don’t. You never did. You wanted me to do the fighting, while you sat there like some sort of angel or patient mother or something. Oh no, to join in the fight would make me seem less of a nut. Then we would just be a couple arguing the way couples do. But this way you get to play the saint while I’m the hysteric. Yes, just like that, bow your head like I’m going to beat on you. Do you know what an anti-feminist thing that is to do? To put another woman in the position of the hysteric. I can’t believe you get to teach that stuff. Do you still use feminism in your classes? Honest to God, you shouldn’t be allowed. You telling young girls about feminism. The idea. You clearly value men over women; you act like one.”

Annie sat stiffly watching the road ahead. Sometimes Candice’s rage spent itself quickly like a roman candle, and a docile comment offered five minutes later would elicit a docile answer. But not this time. An ember remained:

“I’m going to write the department a letter. It really is my responsibility. I should have done it years ago. The fact that I haven’t makes me complicit, in a way. They should know what a hypocrite you are, using feminism in your classes when you manipulate other women this way, forcing us into these old-fashioned roles. Only you do this to me, Annie. All the men treated me with respect.”

Candice could feel Annie aching to be rid of her, longing for her books in her dim study with its French doors onto the garden, unopenable because they had been bound with vines. What a fitting metaphor. Sarah had humored her wishes to let the vines grow—gentle Sarah. She was so perfectly accommodating that she hadn’t even cut them during the years Annie lived with Candice.

“Did you do it to Sarah? Did you drive her to fits?” Candice asked. “I know you didn’t before me. You said yourself, your house was quiet as a chapel. But after me? Did you practice the tricks you had invented on me in the meantime?”

Annie inhaled as if to speak, then let out a long, rattling exhale.

After a few minutes, Candice removed her foot from the gas pedal. It took a while for the car to slow, and when Annie noticed, she made a little jump. That jump. She said nothing, but now one shoulder rode a little closer to that ear. Weeds made a gentle hiss against the car side as Candice pulled onto the shoulder. She swiveled to face Annie.

“I want you to answer me. I always let questions go unanswered, but I feel like I owe this one to Sarah. Did you drive her to fits and sit there watching quietly?”

“For Christ’s sake, Candice, stop it.”

Candice recoiled. Annie’s responses were always so embarrassing, somehow—so abject and real. Why was that? Candice’s own anger was, to her own ear, elegant and rhythmic, like Beethoven. Annie’s was like something hacked up from the bottom of her lungs.

Candice settled back to wait. To the left of the road lay miles of marsh leading to the Great South Bay. The grasses dipped their fuzzy heads in the sea breeze and cast a rippling border onto the road. To the right, a brush-covered slope led up to a forested hill. Everywhere, tiny gray moths flitted into the air then back into the brush. It was like a paper fight was going on down there. No cars passed. This used to be a busy road before they built the expressway. Candice considered stating her demand again, to let Annie know that she would not drive on until she and Sarah were paid this respect. Annie could be so selfish and small, the way she sat squinting at the road. In her mind she was probably already back in her study. Candice shook her head, adjusted her seat, sighed loudly.

With a bold step of its backward-bending, powder-blue leg, a bird emerged from the marsh and into the road. Candice gasped when she saw it. Annie looked over and said “Oh!” with delight. The bird’s narrow beak, black and shiny as its eye, curved up at the end, like an ice pick which had been bent by hard use. Its head and body bobbed with a grace that contrasted with its jerky footsteps. There was something human in this contrast. The foot poised with its long toes hanging like a handkerchief before being splayed again on the asphalt. Hang, splay . . . hang, splay . . . went the feet. Each step comprised alternating gestures: demure, obscene . . . tentative, overt . . . dangle, splat . . . dangle, splat. Candice had never seen this kind of bird before. It crossed the border, and the sunlight revealed its head to be not gray, as it had appeared in shadow, but a rich rusty red with a white ring around the eye. “What is it?” Candice wondered aloud.

“An avocet. An American avocet. I’ve never seen one this close. We’d get them in the back field when we flood-irrigated.”

“The back field?” For a moment Candice thought she meant the backyard—hers and Sarah’s.

“In Utah. Growing up.”

“Ah.” Sometimes she forgot that Annie had grown up in the fields out west. It explained some of her rough-edged naïveté. She could endlessly explore the subtleties of literature, but had a farmer’s love of the concrete when it came to her own emotions. With a tug of sympathy, Candice remembered how she had to tie all the bows at Christmastime—even on her own presents—since Annie’s fingers were too big and blunt.

The avocet, which was passing close by before disappearing behind the hood of the car, tilted its head to eye Candice, then blinked. A white lid came up from below to cover the onyx bead. It was less like the drawing down of a curtain—as humans did over their eyes—and more like the pulling up of wrinkled trousers.

Backwards knees, upside-down eyes. Candice emitted a little chuckle of wonderment. She lifted herself to see that the bird had safely entered the brush, then she stared up the car. She would let Annie off the hook. If she was really going to get any housework done today, it was getting late.

*

By the time they reached Annie’s house, Candice felt only a hangover of anger, as pressure behind her eyes. She pinched the bridge of her nose as she came around the car to where Annie stood with suitcase in hand.

“Thanks, Candice,” she said. “And sorry about all that at the end.”

With a toss of her head Candice made it clear that it was best left alone. “I’ll come in with you,” she said. “I want to take another look at that ankle.”

“No. It’s fine.”

“You always want everything to be fine. You’re clearly injured.”

“I’m fine.”

“You need to put it up.”

“Look.” Annie did a circus tightrope walk up the path, holding her suitcase out as a balance, twirled, and walked back. “See?”

Candice’s giggles quickly turned to sobs. “I worry about you. You’re all alone in that house with all those stairs. What if you fall and break a hip? That’s always the beginning of the end, the broken hip. It’s silly for you to be alone. Maybe it’s time, right? For you to come back?”

Annie put down the suitcase, drew near, and looked up into Candice’s face. “Kind of late in life to be starting again, don’t you think?”

“Why?” Candice demanded. You did with her, was her unspoken thought.

Annie took her by her shoulders. Candice tucked her chin, but her hair wasn’t there anymore to hide her tears. Annie petted Candice’s arms a few times, then took her face in her hands and gave her a tender smile.

“I hate these,” Candice said, removing the glasses.

Annie did love her—it was there in her eyes; she just couldn’t take her. She had lived too long in peace and quiet to trade it again for fights and noise and laughter.

I should have left Sarah alone, Candice thought. The plan had been to selflessly drive Annie out, wait while she spread the ashes, then comfort her over dinner, all without mentioning the dead wife’s name. But Candice always broke her own rules.

Back when they lived together, Candice had spent a winter doing research for Annie’s book on George Eliot. When it was released, Annie toasted her at a department dinner: “To Candice. She wrote the damn book, you know.”

As Candice blushed at all the applause and grinning faces, a voice inside her said, You can never say what she said—that you wrote this book. But of course she had said it, again and again. As soon as she had a few cocktails in her at any party, she’d tell some handsome student, “I wrote the Eliot book, you know. Annie just put her name on it.” And in arguments, while the author herself sat silent with averted eyes: “That’s my goddamn book. You said yourself I wrote it.”

I didn’t write it. She now silently flogged herself with the truth. I didn’t write it. You wrote it.

Annie kissed her on either cheek. In an utterly kind voice free of any irony, she said, “Find yourself another Tarzan.” She took back her glasses, put them on, and went into the house, leaving her suitcase on the sidewalk.

Candice stood for a while, arms folded, waiting to greet Annie with a victorious expression when she came back out.

When Candice and Annie had been together nearly ten years, Sarah, that old lover who Annie had left at home while she took Candice to Café Loup, underwent a mastectomy. Annie started dropping by Sarah’s house—this house—with groceries. When the cancer returned, she took her to appointments. Then Candice came home from work one day to find Annie packing her things. “It’s better this way,” she said.

Candice baited her to add, I owe it to her, or, I’ll come back after she’s dead. But, of course, she wouldn’t. She was too kind.

No, Candice now said, she wasn’t being kind. She didn’t owe her. She loved her! It felt good to slap herself around like this. I am unendurable. No wonder they’re all getting dogs.

At the beginning, Annie would go to Brooklyn once or twice a week and Candice would make dinner. Annie would let off steam about the endless chemotherapy appointments and Sarah’s failing mental focus. They would have sex in the urgent, wrestling way they always had, then Annie would come back here to sleep at Sarah’s side.

One night, Candice put her foot down. “You’re treating me like your concubine,” she said.

Annie acquiesced, as she always did. “Right, absolutely. I’m being horrible. We can’t do this anymore.”

What a fool Candice had been, throwing back that last precious bit of love! She had assumed that Annie would come back once Sarah was gone. Or, when that failed, once her grief had faded. Or, when that failed, once she had spread the ashes.

She didn’t owe her. She loved her.

The masochistic thrill of facing facts faded, and Annie still hadn’t reemerged from the house. Candice had half a mind to leave the suitcase here on the sidewalk to be stolen. Or, better yet, to be returned by a concerned neighbor who regarded Annie as a doddering old granny. In her embarrassment, Annie would see that Candice had been right. It was time. She did need her.

But Candice decided to take the high road. She took the suitcase and put it just inside the front door. As expected, Annie had already closed herself in the study.

Now righteous, Candice was able to put a new spin on things as she drove home. How condescending it had been of Annie to pat her on the head like that! Go find yourself another Tarzan. As if men were a dime a dozen. Annie had recently told her that she was envious—envious—that Candice could sleep with both women and men. “It gives you twice the options,” she had said, unaware of how callow and insulting and cruel a thing this was to say. Annie had always acted as if everything you needed from life was there on a banquet table, and all you had to do was fill your plate. Always the optimist. Love would be served up again and again in endless courses, all you could eat. Well, for her it was that way; she was born with that kind of heart. So she could afford to sit there, sated and smug.

Now Candice sat parked before the brownstone, one floor of which was hers alone. Geraniums in the window boxes. Curlicued wrought iron. It would take the strength of hundreds to get her up those stairs.

Annie would not have been envious if she knew the truth. Candice had to push and fight. Life had not offered her endless servings of love. Only one.

*

© by Vestal McIntyre. Used by permission.

Read more about Vestal’s superb debut novel, Lake Overturn, here!

I hate myself for that, and nothing will ease that, not even what happened that night, on the side of the mountain.

I had searched for nearly ten years, although the trail was cold. I would say that I found him by accident, but I do not believe in accidents. If you walk the path, eventually you must arrive at the cave.

But that was later. First, there was the valley on the mainland, the whitewashed house in the gentle meadow with the burn splashing through it, a house that sat like a square of white sky against the green of the grass and the heather just beginning to purple.

And there was a boy outside the house, picking wool from off a thornbush. He did not see me approaching, and he did not look up until I said, “I used to do that. Gather the wool from the thorn-bushes and twigs. My mother would wash it, then she would make me things with it. A ball, and a doll.”

He turned. He looked shocked, as if I had appeared out of nowhere. And I had not. I had walked many a mile, and had many more miles to go. I said, “I walk quietly. Is this the house of Calum MacInnes?”

The boy nodded, drew himself up to his full height, which was perhaps two fingers bigger than mine, and he said, “I am Calum MacInnes.”

“Is there another of that name? For the Calum MacInnes that I seek is a grown man.”

The boy said nothing, just unknotted a thick clump of sheep’s wool from the clutching fingers of the thorn-bush. I said, “Your father, perhaps? Would he be Calum MacInnes as well?”

The boy was peering at me. “What are you?” he asked.

“I am a small man,” I told him. “But I am a man, nonetheless, and I am here to see Calum MacInnes.”

“Why?” The boy hesitated. Then, “And why are you so small?”

I said, “Because I have something to ask your father. Man’s business.” And I saw a smile start at the tips of his lips. “It’s not a bad thing to be small, young Calum. There was a night when the Campbells came knocking on my door, a whole troop of them, twelve men with knives and sticks, and they demanded of my wife, Morag, that she produce me, as they were there to kill me, in revenge for some imagined slight. And she said, ‘Young Johnnie, run down to the far meadow, and tell your father to come back to the house, that I sent for him.’ And the Campbells watched as the boy ran out the door. They knew that I was a most dangerous person. But nobody had told them that I was a wee man, or if that had been told them, it had not been believed.”

“Did the boy call you?” said the lad.

“It was no boy,” I told him, “but me myself, it was. And they’d had me, and still I walked out the door and through their fingers.”

The boy laughed. Then he said, “Why were the Campbells after you?”

“It was a disagreement about the ownership of cattle. They thought the cows were theirs. I maintained the Campbells’ ownership of them had ended the first night the cows had come with me over the hills.”

“Wait here,” said young Calum MacInnes.

I sat by the burn and looked up at the house. It was a good-sized house: I would have taken it for the house of a doctor or a man of law, not of a border reaver. There were pebbles on the ground and I made a pile of them, and I tossed the pebbles, one by one, into the burn. I have a good eye, and I enjoyed rattling the pebbles over the meadow and into the water. I had thrown a hundred stones when the boy returned, accompanied by a tall, loping man. His hair was streaked with grey, his face was long and wolfish. There are no wolves in those hills, not any longer, and the bears have gone too.

“Good day to you,” I said.

He said nothing in return, only stared; I am used to stares. I said, “I am seeking Calum MacInnes. If you are he, say so, I will greet you. If you are not he, tell me now, and I will be on my way.”

“What business would you have with Calum MacInnes?”

“I wish to hire him, as a guide.”

“And where is it you would wish to be taken?”

I stared at him. “That is hard to say,” I told him. “For there are some who say it does not exist. There is a certain cave on the Misty Isle.”

He said nothing. Then he said, “Calum, go back to the house.”

“But da—”

“Tell your mother I said she was to give you some tablet. You like that. Go on.”

Expressions crossed the boy’s face—puzzlement, hunger, happiness—and then he turned and ran back to the white house.

Calum MacInnes said, “Who sent you here?”

I pointed to the burn as it splashed its way between us on its journey down the hill. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Water,” he replied.

“And they say there is a king across it,” I told him.

I did not know him then at all, and never knew him well, but his eyes became guarded, and his head cocked to one side. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

“I have claimed nothing,” I said. “Just that there are those who have heard that there is a cave on the Misty Isle, and that you might know the way.”

He said, “I will not tell you where the cave is.”

“I am not here asking for directions. I seek a guide. And two travel more safely than one.”

He looked me up and down, and I waited for the joke about my size, but he did not make it, and for that I was grateful. He just said, “When we reach the cave, I will not go inside. You must bring out the gold yourself.”

I said, “It is all one to me.”

He said, “You can take only what you carry. I will not touch it. But yes, I will take you.”

I said, “You will be paid well for your trouble.” I reached into my jerkin, handed him the pouch I had in there. “This for taking me. Another, twice the size, when we return.”

He poured the coins from the pouch into his huge hand, and he nodded. “Silver,” he said. “Good.” Then, “I will say good-bye to my wife and son.”

“Is there nothing you need to bring?”

He said, “I was a reaver in my youth, and reavers travel light. I’ll bring a rope, for the mountains.” He patted his dirk, which hung from his belt, and went back into the whitewashed house. I never saw his wife, not then, nor at any other time. I do not know what colour her hair was.

I threw another fifty stones into the burn as I waited, until he returned, with a coil of rope thrown over one shoulder, and then we walked together away from a house too grand for any reaver, and we headed west.

*

The mountains between the rest of the world and the coast are gradual hills, visible from a distance as gentle, purple, hazy things, like clouds. They seem inviting. They are slow mountains, the kind you can walk up easily, like walking up a hill, but they are hills that take a full day and more to climb. We walked up the hill, and by the end of the first day we were cold.

I saw snow on the peaks above us, although it was high summer.

We said nothing to each other that first day. There was nothing to be said. We knew where we were going.

We made a fire, from dried sheep dung and a dead thorn-bush: we boiled water and made our porridge, each of us throwing a handful of oats and a fingerpinch of salt into the little pan I carried. His handful was huge, and my handful was small, like my hands, which made him smile and say, “I hope you will not be eating half of the porridge.”

I said I would not and indeed, I did not, for my appetite is smaller than that of a full-grown man. But this is a good thing, I believe, for I can keep going in the wild on nuts and berries that would not keep a bigger person from starving.

A path of sorts ran across the high hills, and we followed it and encountered almost nobody: a tinker and his donkey, piled high with old pots, and a girl leading the donkey, who smiled at me when she thought me to be a child, and then scowled when she perceived me to be what I am, and would have thrown a stone at me had the tinker not slapped her hand with the switch he had been using to encourage the donkey; and, later, we overtook an old woman and a man she said was her grandson, on their way back across the hills. We ate with her, and she told us that she had attended the birth of her first great-grandchild, that it was a good birth. She said she would tell our fortunes from the lines in our palms, if we had coins to cross her palm. I gave the old biddy a clipped lowland groat, and she looked at my palm.

She said, “I see death in your past and death in your future.”

“Death waits in all our futures,” I said.

She paused, there in the highest of the high lands, where the summer winds have winter on their breath, where they howl and whip and slash the air like knives. She said, “There was a woman in a tree. There will be a man in a tree.”

I said, “Will this mean anything to me?”

“One day. Perhaps.” She said, “Beware of gold. Silver is your friend.” And then she was done with me.

To Calum MacInnes she said, “Your palm has been burned.” He said that was true. She said, “Give me your other hand, your left hand.” He did so. She gazed at it, intently. Then, “You return to where you began. You will be higher than most other men. And there is no grave waiting for you, where you are going.”

He said, “You tell me that I will not die?”

“It is a left-handed fortune. I know what I have told you, and no more.”

She knew more. I saw it in her face.

That was the only thing of any importance that occurred to us on the second day.

We slept in the open that night. The night was clear and cold, and the sky was hung with stars that seemed so bright and close I felt as if I could have reached out my arm and gathered them, like berries.

We lay side by side beneath the stars, and Calum MacInnes said, “Death awaits you, she said. But death does not wait for me. I think mine was the better fortune.”

“Perhaps.”

“Ah,” he said. “It is all nonsense. Old-woman talk. It is not truth.”

I woke in the dawn mist to see a stag, watching us curiously.

The third day we crested those mountains, and we began to walk downhill.

My companion said, “When I was a boy, my father’s dirk fell into the cooking fire. I pulled it out, but the metal hilt was as hot as the flames. I did not expect this, but I would not let the dirk go. I carried it away from the fire, and plunged the sword into the water. It made steam. I remember that. My palm was burned, and my hand curled, as if it was meant to carry a sword until the end of time.”

I said, “You, with your hand. Me, only a little man. It’s fine heroes we are, who seek our fortunes on the Misty Isle.”

He barked a laugh, short and without humour. “Fine heroes,” was all he said.

The rain began to fall then, and did not stop falling. That night we passed a small croft house. There was a trickle of smoke from its chimney, and we called out for the owner, but there was no response.

I pushed open the door and called again. The place was dark, but I could smell tallow, as if a candle had been burning and had recently been snuffed.

“No one at home,” said Calum, but I shook my head and walked forward, then leaned my head down into the darkness beneath the bed.

“Would you care to come out?” I asked. “For we are travellers, seeking warmth and shelter and hospitality. We would share with you our oats and our salt and our whisky. And we will not harm you.”

At first the woman, hidden beneath the bed, said nothing, and then she said, “My husband is away in the hills. He told me to hide myself away if the strangers come, for fear of what they might do to me.”

I said, “I am but a little man, good lady, no bigger than a child, you could send me flying with a blow. My companion is a full-sized man, but I do swear that we shall do nothing to you, save partake of your hospitality, and dry ourselves. Please do come out.”

All covered with dust and spiderwebs she was when she emerged, but even with her face all begrimed, she was beautiful, and even with her hair all webbed and greyed with dust it was still long and thick, and golden red. For a heartbeat she put me in the mind of my daughter, but that my daughter would look a man in the eye, while this one glanced only at the ground fearfully, like something expecting to be beaten.

I gave her some of our oats, and Calum produced strips of dried meat from his pocket, and she went out to the field and returned with a pair of scrawny turnips, and she prepared food for the three of us.

I ate my fill. She had no appetite. I believe that Calum was still hungry when his meal was done. He poured whisky for the three of us: she took but a little, and that with water. The rain rattled on the roof of the house, and dripped in the corner, and, unwelcoming though it was, I was glad that I was inside.

It was then that a man came through the door. He said nothing, only stared at us, untrusting, angry. He pulled off his cape of oiled sacking, and his hat, and he dropped them on the earth floor. They dripped and puddled. The silence was oppressive.

Calum MacInnes said, “Your wife gave us hospitality, when we found her. Hard enough she was in the finding.”

“We asked for hospitality,” I said. “As we ask it of you.”

The man said nothing, only grunted.

In the high lands, people spend words as if they were golden coins. But the custom is strong there: strangers who ask for hospitality must be granted it, though you have a blood feud against them and their clan or kind.

The woman—little more than a girl she was, while her husband’s beard was grey and white, so I wondered if she was his daughter for a moment, but no: there was but one bed, scarcely big enough for two—the woman went outside, into the sheep pen that adjoined the house, and returned with oatcakes and a dried ham she must have hidden there, which she sliced thin, and placed on a wooden trencher before the man.

Calum poured the man whisky, and said, “We seek the Misty Isle. Do you know if it is there?”

The man looked at us. The winds are bitter in the high lands, and they would whip the words from a man’s lips. He pursed his mouth, then he said, “Aye. I saw it from the peak this morning. It’s there. I cannot say if it will be there tomorrow.”

We slept on the hard-earth floor of that cottage. The fire went out, and there was no warmth from the hearth. The man and his woman slept in their bed, behind the curtain. He had his way with her, beneath the sheepskin that covered that bed, and before he did that, he beat her for feeding us and for letting us in. I heard them, and could not stop hearing them, and sleep was hard in the finding that night.

I have slept in the homes of the poor, and I have slept in palaces, and I have slept beneath the stars, and would have told you before that night that all places were one to me. But I woke before first light, convinced we had to be gone from that place, but not knowing why, and I woke Calum by putting a finger to his lips, and silently we left that croft on the mountainside without saying our farewells, and I have never been more pleased to be gone from anywhere.

We were a mile from the place when I said, “The island. You asked if it would be there. Surely, an island is there, or it is not there.”

Calum hesitated. He seemed to be weighing his words, and then he said, “The Misty Isle is not as other places. And the mist that surrounds it is not like other mists.”

We walked down a path worn by hundreds of years of sheep and deer and few enough men.

He said, “They also call it the Winged Isle. Some say it is because the island, if seen from above, would look like butterfly wings. And I do not know the truth of it.” Then, “ ‘And what is truth?’ said jesting Pilate.”

It is harder coming down than it is going up.

I thought about it. “Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.”

Calum MacInnes looked down at me and said nothing. Then, “You are wrong. The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside.”

We crested the ridge, and we looked down to the coast. I could see villages below, beside the water. And I could see high black mountains before me, on the other side of the sea, coming out of the mist.

Calum said, “There’s your cave. In those mountains.”

The bones of the earth I thought, seeing them. And then I became uncomfortable, thinking of bones, and to distract myself, I said, “And how many times is it you have been there?”

“Only once.” He hesitated. “I searched for it all my sixteenth year, for I had heard the legends, and I believed if I sought I should find. I was seventeen when I reached it, and came back with all the gold coins I could carry.”

“And were you not frightened of the curse?”

“When I was young, I was afraid of nothing.”

“What did you do with your gold?”

“A portion I buried and I alone know where. The rest I used as brideprice for the woman I loved, and I built a fine house with it.”

He stopped as if he had already said too much.

There was no ferryman at the jetty. Only a small boat, hardly big enough for three full-sized men, tied to a tree trunk on the shore, twisted and half dead, and a bell beside it.

I sounded the bell, and soon enough a fat man came down the shore. He said to Calum, “It will cost you a shilling for the ferry, and your boy, three pennies.”

I stood tall. I am not as big as other men are, but I have as much pride as any of them. “I am also a man,” I said. “I’ll pay your shilling.”

The ferryman looked me up and down, then he scratched his beard. “I beg your pardon. My eyes are not what they once were. I shall take you to the island.”

I handed him a shilling. He weighed it in his hand, “That’s ninepence you did not cheat me out of. Nine pennies are a lot of money in this dark age.” The water was the colour of slate, although the sky was blue, and whitecaps chased one another across the water’s surface. He untied the boat and hauled it, rattling, down the shingle to the water. We waded out into the cold water, and clambered inside.

The splash of oars on seawater, and the boat propelled forward in easy movements. I sat closest to the ferryman. I said, “Ninepence. It is good wages. But I have heard of a cave in the mountains on the Misty Isle, filled with gold coins, the treasure of the ancients.”

He shook his head dismissively.

Calum was staring at me, lips pressed together so hard they were white. I ignored him and asked the man again, “A cave filled with golden coins, a gift from the Norsemen or the Southerners or from those who they say were here long before any of us: those who fled into the West as the people came.”

“Heard of it,” said the ferryman. “Heard also of the curse of it. I reckon that the one can take care of the other.” He spat into the sea. Then he said, “You’re an honest man, dwarf. I see it in your face. Do not seek this cave. No good can come of it.”

“I am sure you are right,” I told him, without guile.

“I am certain I am,” he said. “For not every day is it that I take a reaver and a little dwarfy man to the Misty Isle.” Then he said, “In this part of the world, it is not considered lucky to talk about those who went to the West.”

We rode the rest of the boat journey in silence, though the sea became choppier, and the waves splashed into the side of the boat, such that I held on with both hands for fear of being swept away.

And after what seemed like half a lifetime the boat was tied to a long jetty of black stones. We walked the jetty as the waves crashed around us, the salt spray kissing our faces. There was a humpbacked man at the landing selling oatcakes and plums dried until they were almost stones. I gave him a penny and filled my jerkin pockets with them.

We walked on into the Misty Isle.

I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.

I say that, but my time on the Misty Isle, that is also called, by the wise, the Winged Isle, reminds me of nothing but itself.

It is a day from that jetty until you reach the black mountains.

Calum MacInnes looked at me, half his size or less, and he set off at a loping stride, as if challenging me to keep up. His legs propelled him across the ground, which was wet, and all ferns and heather.

Above us, low clouds were scudding, grey and white and black, hiding each other and revealing and hiding again.

I let him get ahead of me, let him press on into the rain, until he was swallowed by the wet, grey haze. Then, and only then, I ran.

This is one of the secret things of me, the things I have not revealed to any person, save to Morag, my wife, and Johnnie and James, my sons, and Flora, my daughter (may the Shadows rest her poor soul): I can run, and I can run well, and, if I need to I can run faster and longer and more sure-footedly than any full-sized man; and it was like this that I ran then, through the mist and the rain, taking to the high ground and the blackrock ridges, yet keeping below the skyline.

He was ahead of me, but I spied him soon, and I ran on and I ran past him, on the high ground with the brow of the hill between us. Below us was a stream. I can run for days without stopping. That is the first of my three secrets, and one secret I have revealed to no man.

We had discussed already where we would camp that first night on the Misty Isle, and Calum had told me that we would spend the night beneath the rock that is called Man and Dog, for it is said that it looks like an old man with his dog by his side, and I reached it late in the afternoon. There was a shelter beneath the rock, which was protected and dry, and some of those who had been before us had left firewood behind, sticks and twigs and branches. I made a fire and dried myself in front of it and took the chill from my bones. The woodsmoke blew out across the heather.

It was dark when Calum loped into the shelter and looked at me as if he had not expected to see me that side of midnight. I said, “What took you so long, Calum MacInnes?”

He said nothing, only stared at me. I said, “There is trout, boiled in mountain water, and a fire to warm your bones.”

He nodded. We ate the trout, drank whisky to warm ourselves. There was a mound of heather and of ferns, dried and brown, piled high in the rear of the shelter, and we slept upon that, wrapped tight in our damp cloaks.

I woke in the night. There was cold steel against my throat—the flat of the blade, not the edge. I said, “And why would you ever kill me in the night, Calum MacInnes? For our way is long, and our journey is not yet over.”

He said, “I do not trust you, dwarf.”

“It is not me you must trust,” I told him, “but those that I serve. And if you left with me but return without me, there are those who will know the name of Calum MacInnes, and cause it to be spoken in the shadows.”

The cold blade remained at my throat. He said, “How did you get ahead of me?”

“And here was I, repaying ill with good, for I made you food and a fire. I am a hard man to lose, Calum MacInnes, and it ill becomes a guide to do as you did today. Now, take your dirk from my throat and let me sleep.”

He said nothing, but after a few moments, the blade was removed. I forced myself neither to sigh nor to breathe, hoping he could not hear my heart pounding in my chest; and I slept no more that night.

For breakfast, I made porridge, and threw in some dried plums to soften them.

The mountains were black and grey against the white of the sky. We saw eagles, huge and ragged of wing, circling above us. Calum set a sober pace and I walked beside him, taking two steps for every one of his.

“How long?” I asked him.

“A day. Perhaps two. It depends upon the weather. If the clouds come down then two days, or even three . . .”

The clouds came down at noon and the world was blanketed by a mist that was worse than rain: droplets of water hung in the air, soaked our clothes and our skin; the rocks we walked upon became treacherous and Calum and I slowed in our ascent, stepped carefully. We were walking up the mountain, not climbing, up goat paths and craggy sharp ways. The rocks were black and slippery: we walked, and climbed and clambered and clung, we slipped and slid and stumbled and staggered, and even in the mist, Calum knew where he was going, and I followed him.

He paused at a waterfall that splashed across our path, thick as the trunk of an oak. He took the thin rope from his shoulders, wrapped it about a rock.

“This was not here before,” he told me. “I’ll go first.” He tied one end of the rope about his waist and edged out along the path, into the falling water, pressing his body against the wet rock face, edging slowly, intently through the sheet of water.

I was scared for him, scared for both of us: holding my breath as he passed, only breathing when he was on the other side of the waterfall. He tested the rope, pulled on it, motioned me to follow him, when a rock gave way beneath his foot, and he slipped on the wet rock, and fell into the abyss.

The rope held, and the rock beside me held. Calum MacInnes dangled from the end of the rope. He looked up at me, and I sighed, anchored myself by a slab of crag, and I wound and pulled him up and up. I hauled him back onto the path, dripping and cursing.

He said, “You’re stronger than you look,” and I cursed myself for a fool. He must have seen it on my face for, after he shook himself (like a dog, sending droplets flying), he said, “My boy Calum told me the tale you told him about the Campbells coming for you, and you being sent into the fields by your wife, with them thinking she was your ma, and you a boy.”

“It was just a tale,” I said. “Something to pass the time.”

“Indeed?” he said. “For I heard tell of a raiding party of Campbells sent out a few years ago, seeking revenge on someone who had taken their cattle. They went, and they never came back. If a small fellow like you can kill a dozen Campbells . . . well, you must be strong, and you must be fast.”

I must be stupid, I thought ruefully, telling that child that tale.

I had picked them off one by one, like rabbits, as they came out to piss or to see what had happened to their friends: I had killed seven of them before my wife killed her first. We buried them in the glen, built a small cairn of stacking stones above them, to weigh them down so their ghosts would not walk, and we were sad: that Campbells had come so far to kill me, that we had been forced to kill them in return.

I take no joy in killing: no man should, and no woman. Sometimes death is necessary, but it is always an evil thing. That is something I am in no doubt of, even after the events I speak of here.

I took the rope from Calum MacInnes, and I clambered up and up, over the rocks, to where the waterfall came out of the side of the hill, and it was narrow enough for me to cross. It was slippery there, but I made it over without incident, tied the rope in place, came down it, threw the end of it to my companion, walked him across.

He did not thank me, neither for rescuing him, nor for getting us across; and I did not expect thanks. I also did not expect what he actually said, though, which was: “You are not a whole man, and you are ugly. Your wife: is she also small and ugly, like yourself?”

I decided to take no offence, whether offence had been intended or no. I simply said, “She is not. She is a tall woman, almost as tall as you, and when she was young—when we were both younger—she was reckoned by some to be the most beautiful girl in the lowlands. The bards wrote songs praising her green eyes and her long red-golden hair.”

I thought I saw him flinch at this, but it is possible that I imagined it, or more likely, wished to imagine I had seen it.

“How did you win her, then?”

I spoke the truth: “I wanted her, and I get what I want. I did not give up. She said I was wise and I was kind, and I would always provide for her. And I have.”

The clouds began to lower, once more, and the world blurred at the edges, became softer.

“She said I would be a good father. And I have done my best to raise my children. Who are also, if you are wondering, normal-sized.”

“I beat sense into young Calum,” said older Calum. “He is not a bad child.”

“You can only do that as long as they are there with you,” I said. And then I stopped talking, and I remembered that long year, and also I remembered Flora when she was small, sitting on the floor with jam on her face, looking up at me as if I were the wisest man in the world.

“Ran away, eh? I ran away when I was a lad. I was twelve. I went as far as the court of the King over the Water. The father of the current king.”

“That’s not something you hear spoken aloud.”

“I am not afraid,” he said. “Not here. Who’s to hear us? Eagles? I saw him. He was a fat man, who spoke the language of the foreigners well, and our own tongue only with difficulty. But he was still our king.” He paused. “And if he is to come to us again, he will need gold, for vessels and weapons and to feed the troops that he raises.”

I said, “So I believe. That is why we go in search of the cave.”

He said, “This is bad gold. It does not come free. It has its cost.”

“Everything has its cost.”

I was remembering every landmark—climb at the sheep skull, cross the first three streams, then walk along the fourth until the five heaped stones and find where the rock looks like a seagull and walk on between two sharply jutting walls of black rock, and let the slope bring you with it . . .

I could remember it, I knew. Well enough to find my way down again. But the mists confused me, and I could not be certain.

We reached a small loch, high in the mountains, and drank fresh water, caught huge white creatures that were not shrimps or lobsters or crayfish, and ate them raw like sausages, for we could not find any dry wood to make our fire, that high.

We slept on a wide ledge beside the icy water and woke into clouds before sunrise, when the world was grey and blue.

“You were sobbing in your sleep,” said Calum.

“I had a dream,” I told him.

“I do not have bad dreams,” Calum said.

“It was a good dream,” I said. It was true. I had dreamed that Flora still lived. She was grumbling about the village boys, and telling me of her time in the hills with the cattle, and of things of no consequence, smiling her great smile and tossing her hair the while, red-golden like her mother’s, although her mother’s hair is now streaked with white.

“Good dreams should not make a man cry out like that,” said Calum. A pause, then, “I have no dreams, not good, not bad.”

“No?”

“Not since I was a young man.”

We rose. A thought struck me: “Did you stop dreaming after you came to the cave?”

He said nothing. We walked along the mountainside, into the mist, as the sun came up.

The mist seemed to thicken and fill with light, in the sunshine, but did not fade away and I realized that it must be a cloud. The world glowed. And then it seemed to me that I was staring at a man of my size, a small, humpty man, his shadow, standing in the air in front of me, like a ghost or an angel, and it moved as I moved. It was haloed by the light, and shimmered, and I could not have told you how near it was or how far away. I have seen miracles and I have seen evil things, but never have I seen anything like that.

“Is it magic?” I asked, although I smelled no magic on the air.

Calum said, “It is nothing. A property of the light. A shadow. A reflection. No more. I see a man beside me, as well. He moves as I move.” I glanced back, but I saw nobody beside him.

And then the little glowing man in the air faded, and the cloud, and it was day, and we were alone.

We climbed all that morning, ascending. Calum’s ankle had twisted the day before, when he had slipped at the waterfall. Now it swelled in front of me, swelled and went red, but his pace did not ever slow, and if he was in discomfort or in pain, it did not show upon his face.

I said, “How long?” as the dusk began to blur the edges of the world.

“An hour, less, perhaps. We will reach the cave, and then we will sleep for the night. In the morning you will go inside. You can bring out as much gold as you can carry, and we will make our way back off the island.”

I looked at him, then: grey-streaked hair, grey eyes, so huge and wolfish a man, and I said, “You would sleep outside the cave?”

“I would. There are no monsters in the cave. Nothing that will come out and take you in the night. Nothing that will eat us. But you should not go in until daylight.”

And then we rounded a rockfall, all black rocks and grey half-blocking our path, and we saw the cave mouth. I said, “Is that all?”

“You expected marble pillars? Or a giant’s cave from a gossip’s fireside tales?”

“Perhaps. It looks like nothing. A hole in the rock face. A shadow. And there are no guards?”

“No guards. Only the place, and what it is.”

“A cave filled with treasure. And you are the only one who can find it?”

Calum laughed then, like a fox’s bark. “The islanders know how to find it. But they are too wise to come here, to take its gold. They say that the cave makes you evil: that each time you visit it, each time you enter to take gold, it eats the good in your soul, so they do not enter.”

“And is that true? Does it make you evil?”

“ . . . No. The cave feeds on something else. Not good and evil. Not really. You can take your gold, but afterwards, things are,” he paused, “things are flat. There is less beauty in a rainbow, less meaning in a sermon, less joy in a kiss . . .” He looked at the cave mouth and I thought I saw fear in his eyes. “Less.”

I said, “There are many for whom the lure of gold outweighs the beauty of a rainbow.”

“Me, when young, for one. You, now, for another.”

“So we go in at dawn.”

“You will go in. I will wait for you out here. Do not be afraid. No monster guards the cave. No spells to make the gold vanish, if you do not know some cantrip or rhyme.”

We made our camp, then; or rather we sat in the darkness, against the cold rock wall. There would be no sleep there.

I said, “You took the gold from here, as I will do tomorrow. You bought a house with it, a bride, a good name.”

His voice came from the darkness. “Aye. And they meant nothing to me, once I had them, or less than nothing. And if your gold pays for the King over the Water to come back to us and rule us and bring about a land of joy and prosperity and warmth, it will still mean nothing to you. It will be as something you heard of that happened to a man in a tale.”

“I have lived my life to bring the king back,” I told him.

He said, “You take the gold back to him. Your king will want more gold, because kings want more. It is what they do. Each time you come back, it will mean less. The rainbow means nothing. Killing a man means nothing.”

Silence then, in the darkness. I heard no birds: only the wind that called and gusted about the peaks like a mother seeking her babe.

I said, “We have both killed men. Have you ever killed a woman, Calum MacInnes?”

“I have not. I have killed no woman, no girls.”

I ran my hands over my dirk in the darkness, seeking the wood and center of the hilt, the steel of the blade. It was there in my hands. I had not intended to ever tell him, only to strike when we were out of the mountains, strike once, strike deep, but now I felt the words being pulled from me, would I or never-so. “They say there was a girl,” I told him. “And a thorn-bush.”

Silence. The whistling of the wind. “Who told you?” he asked. Then, “Never mind. I would not kill a woman. No man of honour would kill a woman . . .”

If I said a word, I knew, he would be silent on the subject, and never talk about it again. So I said nothing. Only waited.

Calum MacInnes began to speak, choosing his words with care, talking as if he was remembering a tale he had heard as a child and had almost forgotten. “They told me the kine of the lowlands were fat and bonny, and that a man could gain honour and glory by adventuring off to the southlands and returning with the fine red cattle. So I went south, and never a cow was good enough, until on a hillside in the lowlands I saw the finest, reddest, fattest cows that ever a man has seen. So I began to lead them away, back the way I had come.

“She came after me with a stick. The cattle were her father’s, she said, and I was a rogue and a knave and all manner of rough things. But she was beautiful, even when angry, and had I not already a young wife, I might have dealt more kindly to her. Instead I pulled a knife, and touched it to her throat, and bade her to stop speaking. And she did stop.

“I would not kill her—I would not kill a woman, and that is the truth—so I tied her, by her hair, to a thorn tree, and I took her knife from her waistband, to slow her as she tried to free herself, and pushed the blade of it deep into the sod. I tied her to the thorn tree by her long hair, and I thought no more of her as I made off with her cattle.

“It was another year before I was back that way. I was not after cows that day, but I walked up the side of that bank—it was a lonely spot, and if you had not been looking, you might not have seen it. Perhaps nobody searched for her.”

“I heard they searched,” I told him. “Although some believed her taken by reavers, and others believed her run away with a tinker, or gone to the city. But still, they searched.”

“Aye. I saw what I did see—perhaps you’d have to have stood where I was standing, to see what I did see. It was an evil thing I did, perhaps.”

“Perhaps?”

He said, “I have taken gold from the cave of the mists. I cannot tell any longer if there is good or there is evil. I sent a message, by a child, at an inn, telling them where she was, and where they could find her.”

I closed my eyes but the world became no darker.

“There is evil,” I told him.

I saw it in my mind’s eye: her skeleton picked clean of clothes, picked clean of flesh, as naked and white as anyone would ever be, hanging like a child’s puppet against the thorn-bush, tied to a branch above it by its red-golden hair.

“At dawn,” said Calum MacInnes, as if we had been talking of provisions or the weather, “you will leave your dirk behind, for such is the custom, and you will enter the cave, and bring out as much gold as you can carry. And you will bring it back with you, to the mainland. There’s not a soul in these parts, knowing what you carry or where it’s from, would take it from you. Then send it to the King over the Water, and he will pay his men with it, and feed them, and buy their weapons. One day, he will return. Tell me on that day that there is evil, little man.”

*

When the sun was up, I entered the cave. It was damp in there. I could hear water running down one wall, and I felt a wind on my face, which was strange, because there was no wind inside the mountain.

In my mind, the cave would be filled with gold. Bars of gold would be stacked like firewood, and bags of golden coins would sit between them. There would be golden chains and golden rings, and golden plates, heaped high like the china plates in a rich man’s house.

I had imagined riches, but there was nothing like that here. Only shadows. Only rock.

Something was here, though. Something that waited.

I have secrets, but there is a secret that lies beneath all my other secrets, and not even my children know it, although I believe my wife suspects, and it is this: my mother was a mortal woman, the daughter of a miller, but my father came to her from out of the West, and to the West he returned when he had had his sport with her. I cannot be sentimental about my parentage: I am sure he does not think of her, and doubt that he ever knew of me. But he left me a body that is small, and fast, and strong; and perhaps I take after him in other ways—I do not know. I am ugly, and my father was beautiful, or so my mother told me once, but I think that she might have been deceived.

I wondered what I would have seen in that cave if my father had been an innkeeper from the lowlands.

You would be seeing gold, said a whisper that was not a whisper, from deep in the heart of the mountain. It was a lonely voice, and distracted, and bored.

“I would see gold,” I said aloud. “Would it be real, or would it be an illusion?”

The whisper was amused. You are thinking like a mortal man, making things always to be one thing or another. It is gold they would see, and touch. Gold they would carry back with them, feeling the weight of it the while, gold they would trade with other mortals for what they needed. What does it matter if it is there or no if they can see it, touch it, steal it, murder for it? Gold they need and gold I give them.

“And what do you take, for the gold you give them?”

Little enough, for my needs are few, and I am old; too old to follow my sisters into the West. I taste their pleasure and their joy. I feed, a little, feed on what they do not need and do not value. A taste of heart, a lick and a nibble of their fine consciences, a sliver of soul. And in return a fragment of me leaves this cave with them and gazes out at the world through their eyes, sees what they see until their lives are done and I take back what is mine.

“Will you show yourself to me?”

I could see, in the darkness, better than any man born of man and woman could see. I saw something move in the shadows, and then the shadows congealed and shifted, revealing formless things at the edge of my perception, where it meets imagination. Troubled, I said the thing it is proper to say at times such as this: “Appear before me in a form that neither harms nor is offensive to me.”

Is that what you wish?

The drip of distant water. “Yes,” I said.

From out of the shadows it came, and it stared down at me with empty sockets, smiled at me with wind-weathered ivory teeth. It was all bone, save its hair, and its hair was red and gold, and wrapped about the branch of a thorn-bush.

“That offends my eyes.”

I took it from your mind, said a whisper that surrounded the skeleton. Its jawbone did not move. I chose something you loved. This was your daughter, Flora, as she was the last time you saw her.

I closed my eyes, but the figure remained.

It said, The reaver waits for you at the mouth of the cave. He waits for you to come out, weaponless and weighed down with gold. He will kill you, and take the gold from your dead hands.

“But I’ll not be coming out with gold, will I?”

I thought of Calum MacInnes, the wolf-grey in his hair, the grey of his eyes, the line of his dirk. He was bigger than I am, but all men are bigger than I am. Perhaps I was stronger, and faster, but he was also fast, and he was strong.

He killed my daughter, I thought, then wondered if the thought was mine or if it had crept out of the shadows and into my head. Aloud, I said, “Is there another way out of this cave?”

You leave the way you entered, through the mouth of my home.

I stood there and did not move, but in my mind I was like an animal in a trap, questing and darting from idea to idea, finding no purchase and no solace and no solution.

I said, “I am weaponless. He told me that I could not enter this place with a weapon. That it was not the custom.”

It is the custom now, to bring no weapon into my place. It was not always the custom. Follow me, said the skeleton of my daughter.

I followed her, for I could see her, even when it was so dark that I could see nothing else.

In the shadows it said, It is beneath your hand.

I crouched and felt it. The haft felt like bone—perhaps an antler. I touched the blade cautiously in the darkness, discovered that I was holding something that felt more like an awl than a knife. It was thin, sharp at the tip. It would be better than nothing.

“Is there a price?”

There is always a price.

“Then I will pay it. And I ask one other thing. You say that you can see the world through his eyes.”

There were no eyes in that hollow skull, but it nodded. “Then tell me when he sleeps.”

It said nothing. It melded into the darkness, and I felt alone in that place.

Time passed. I followed the sound of the dripping water, found a rock pool, and drank. I soaked the last of the oats and I ate them, chewing them until they dissolved in my mouth. I slept and woke and slept again, and dreamed of my wife, Morag, waiting for me as the seasons changed, waiting for me just as we had waited for our daughter, waiting for me forever.

Something, a finger I thought, touched my hand: it was not bony and hard. It was soft, and humanlike, but too cold. He sleeps.

I left the cave in the blue light, before dawn. He slept across the cavemouth, catlike, I knew, such that the slightest touch would have woken him. I held my weapon in front of me, a bone handle and a needlelike blade of blackened silver, and I reached out and took what I was after, without waking him.

Then I stepped closer, and his hand grasped for my ankle and his eyes opened.

“Where is the gold?” asked Calum MacInnes.

“I have none.” The wind blew cold on the mountainside. I had danced back, out of his reach, when he had grabbed at me. He stayed on the ground, pushed himself up onto one elbow.

Then he said, “Where is my dirk?”

“I took it,” I told him. “While you slept.”

He looked at me, sleepily. “And why ever would you do that? If I was going to kill you I would have done it on the way here. I could have killed you a dozen times.”

“But I did not have gold then, did I?”

He said nothing.

I said, “If you think you could have got me to bring the gold from the cave, and that not bringing it out would have saved your miserable soul, then you are a fool.”

He no longer looked sleepy. “A fool, am I?”

He was ready to fight. It is good to make people who are ready to fight angry.

I said, “Not a fool. No. For I have met fools and idiots, and they are happy in their idiocy, even with straw in their hair. You are too wise for foolishness. You seek only misery and you bring misery with you and you call down misery on all you touch.”

He rose then, holding a rock in his hand like an axe, and he came at me. I am small, and he could not strike me as he would have struck a man of his own size. He leaned over to strike. It was a mistake.

I held the bone haft tightly, and stabbed upward, striking fast with the point of the awl, like a snake. I knew the place I was aiming for, and I knew what it would do.

He dropped his rock, clutched at his right shoulder. “My arm,” he said. “I cannot feel my arm.”

He swore then, fouling the air with curses and threats. The dawn light on the mountaintop made everything so beautiful and blue. In that light, even the blood that had begun to soak his garments was purple. He took a step back, so he was between me and the cave. I felt exposed, the rising sun at my back.

“Why do you not have gold?” he asked me. His arm hung limply at his side.

“There was no gold there for such as I,” I said.

He threw himself forward, then, ran at me and kicked at me. My awl blade went flying from my hand. I threw my arms around his leg, and I held on to him as together we tumbled off the mountainside.

His head was above me, and I saw triumph in it, and then I saw sky, and then the valley floor was above me and I was rising to meet it and then it was below me and I was falling to my death.

A jar and a bump, and now we were turning over and over on the side of the mountain, the world a dizzying whirligig of rock and pain and sky, and I knew I was a dead man, but still I clung to the leg of Calum MacInnes.

I saw a golden eagle in flight, but below me or above me I could no longer say. It was there, in the dawn sky, in the shattered fragments of time and perception, there in the pain. I was not afraid: there was no time and no space to be afraid in, no space in my mind and no space in my heart. I was falling through the sky, holding tightly to the leg of a man who was trying to kill me; we were crashing into rocks, scraping and bruising and then . . .

. . . we stopped. Stopped with force enough that I felt myself jarred, and was almost thrown off Calum MacInnes and to my death beneath. The side of the mountain had crumbled, there, long ago, sheared off, leaving a sheet of blank rock, as smooth and as featureless as glass. But that was below us. Where we were, there was a ledge, and on the ledge there was a miracle: stunted and twisted, high above the treeline, where no trees have any right to grow, was a twisted hawthorn tree, not much larger than a bush, although it was old. Its roots grew into the side of the mountain, and it was this hawthorn that had caught us in its grey arms.

I let go of the leg, clambered off Calum MacInnes’s body, and onto the side of the mountain. I stood on the narrow ledge and looked down at the sheer drop. There was no way down from here. No way down at all.

I looked up. It might be possible, I thought, climbing slowly, with fortune on my side, to make it up that mountain. If it did not rain. If the wind was not too hungry. And what choice did I have? The only alternative was death.

A voice: “So. Will you leave me here to die, dwarf?”

I said nothing. I had nothing to say.

His eyes were open. He said, “I cannot move my right arm, since you stabbed it. I think I broke a leg in the fall. I cannot climb with you.”

I said, “I may succeed, or I may fail.”

“You’ll make it. I’ve seen you climb. After you rescued me, crossing that waterfall. You went up those rocks like a squirrel going up a tree.”

I did not have his confidence in my climbing abilities.

He said, “Swear to me by all you hold holy. Swear by your king, who waits over the sea as he has since we drove his subjects from this land. Swear by the things you creatures hold dear—swear by shadows and eagle feathers and by silence. Swear that you will come back for me.”

“You know what I am?” I said.

“I know nothing,” he said. “Only that I want to live.”

I thought. “I swear by these things,” I told him. “By shadows and by eagle feathers and by silence. I swear by green hills and standing stones. I will come back.”

“I would have killed you,” said the man in the hawthorn bush, and he said it with humour, as if it was the biggest joke that ever one man had told another. “I had planned to kill you, and take the gold back as my own.”

“I know.”

His hair framed his face like a wolf-grey halo. There was red blood on his cheek where he had scraped it in the fall. “You could come back with ropes,” he said. “My rope is still up there, by the cave mouth. But you’d need more than that.”

“Yes,” I said. “I will come back with ropes.” I looked up at the rock above us, examined it as best I could. Sometimes good eyes mean the difference between life and death, if you are a climber. I saw where I would need to be as I went, the shape of my journey up the face of the mountain. I thought I could see the ledge outside the cave, from which we had fallen as we fought. I would head for there. Yes.

I blew on my hands, to dry the sweat before I began to climb. “I will come back for you,” I said. “With ropes. I have sworn.”

“When?” he asked, and he closed his eyes.

“In a year,” I told him. “I will come here in a year.”

I began to climb. The man’s cries followed me as I stepped and crawled and squeezed and hauled myself up the side of that mountain, mingling with the cries of the great raptors; and they followed me back from the Misty Isle, with nothing to show for my pains and my time, and I will hear him screaming, at the edge of my mind, as I fall asleep or in the moments before I wake, until I die.

It did not rain, and the wind gusted and plucked at me but did not throw me down. I climbed, and I climbed in safety.

When I reached the ledge, the cave entrance seemed like a darker shadow in the noonday sun. I turned from it, turned my back on the mountain, and from the shadows that were already gathering in the cracks and the crevices and deep inside my skull, and I began my slow journey away from the Misty Isle. There were a hundred roads and a thousand paths that would take me back to my home in the lowlands, where my wife would be waiting.

*

© by Neil Gaiman. Used by permission. From the collection Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.

Enter the world of Neil Gaiman here!

In August, Neil will give his first reading of this story at the celebrated Sydney Opera House, accompanied by illustrations by Eddie Campbell and a musical arrangement by FourPlay String Quartet. Start making your travel plans now!

And you can follow Neil himself at @neilhimself . . . as if you didn’t know that already . . .

“Your sister hits the shit out of the ball,” he said.

My sister, Amy Luna, rising tennis star, took the second set at love. She rocked back and forth on the heels of her sneakers during the closing ceremonies, grinned throughout her older opponent’s retirement speech as the defeated former champion bid farewell to her loyal fans. Amy threw her racquet high in the air, her hands filled with the monstrous trophy and a cardboard replica of the check for the sum of $750,000.

The camera panned over to my parents, wearing new white linen outfits, hugging, kissing—lips on lips, hands in each other’s hair. I watched, my mouth hanging agape. All year long my mother told me about her divorce lawyer. She talked about equitable property settlements and wanted to know if I’d started looking for an apartment. She took an inventory of the furniture, offered me the old living room sofa and matching armchair, a new set of white ceramic dishes from the Pottery Barn. “I’m fine here,” I said, though I wasn’t, and my mother sighed loudly before asking me to return a stack of overdue library books.

Amy handed her trophy to a ball girl and took the microphone. She spun around, around and around, taking in the crowd, the applause. Everyone at Arthur Ashe stadium was on their feet. Amy giggled. John McEnroe, a commentator for NBC, cooed about her infectious charm. He rambled on about her amazing poise on the court and the adorable slope of her nose, comparing it to the distinctive Nike stripe. They all loved her, adored her. She was seventeen. Her legs were long and skinny and nicely curved. She had a flat chest, a long blond ponytail.

David Solemn stared at the TV.

“She’s so cute,” he said.

I stared at David Solemn. He was a good-looking man, even without clothes. I ran my hand through his thinning hair but he didn’t respond. I shut my eyes. Amplified by three-feet high speakers, Dolby surround sound, I listened to my world famous, vain, selfish, giggling sister clear her throat.

“I’m so happy,” she began.

*

The next day, my family sat me down at the long oak table in the dining room. Amy wore the red velvet mini skirt that signified victory. Dad ran the palms of his hands over his new laptop. My mother drank a Bloody Mary.

“Why don’t you start?” Dad said, looking to Amy. “Put the ball in play, so to speak.”

Amy giggled.

“It’s nothing personal, Rebecca,” she said. “But I just hate looking at you in the morning, seeing how sad you are. I think about you being too broke to go to the movies or to pay for your own groceries and I feel guilty for how great my life is. Dad says I can’t give you any of my money or I would. I’d write you a check for $20,000 today, but Dad says that you have to earn your own way. Anyhow, you’re ruining the best time of my life. Sixty Minutes is coming for an interview tomorrow and I don’t want you living here in this house. It’s embarrassing. I’m ashamed of you.”

“Hmm,” Dad said, opening his laptop. “Is that it?”

“Yep,” said Amy, giving Dad a hearty nod. “I said it all.”

“Lacking in sensitivity, but to the point.”

Amy grinned. “Just like my game. No mercy.”

“Why not $100,000?” I said to Amy. “Why not $200,000?”

Mom coughed.

Dad started pressing buttons on the keyboard.

“Your mother has decided to let me speak for the both of us,” he said. “I’ve prepared a speech.”

I looked to Mom for support. She’d finished her Bloody Mary and was chewing her celery.

“I typed this up, Rebecca,” Dad said, “because I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget anything.”

Dad put his hand on Mom’s. She grimaced and then seemed to rethink her decision, smiling and deliberately covering his hand with hers. Dad lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. Amy rolled her eyes.

“As you know,” he said, “our marriage has been strained. We’ve had problems. Who could have believed we’d get through your mother’s affair with Amy’s tennis pro? My unfortunate dalliances with secretaries are also common knowledge. Your mother and I have been through plenty. Too much.

“I almost lost my business to the recession, and we were all unhappy then. You probably remember. You had to give up your flute lessons, ceramics class, even summer camp. We sacrificed. Your mother and I double-mortgaged the old house to pay for Amy’s lessons. Your mother continues to clip coupons. Everything she buys, she buys on sale even though I tell her these are the salad days. We could live on the interest of Amy’s winnings alone, not to mention the endorsements.

“Do you know what has held us together? During the hard times? The glue of the Luna family? Amy’s tennis.

“Amy’s tennis. I wanted to leave, admit my failure and start a new life, but I couldn’t give up, for years, because I had to pay for Amy’s tennis lessons. She had that kind of promise you can’t ignore. So you had to go to a state school instead of Swarthmore because I couldn’t afford tuition and the tennis academy. I asked you if you would give up a prestigious education for your sister and you did.

“Well, I look at you now, living at home, wandering around the house in your leggings after quitting that wonderful job on Wall Street, and I wonder if we let you make the wrong choice. My heart breaks for you, Rebecca.”

Dad looked up from his computer and smiled at Mom. He drank from her empty Bloody Mary glass. Amy stretched her arms over her head. When she saw me watching her, she smiled.

“We’ve made it,” said Dad. “Your sister is a star. She won the goddamned U.S. Open. We bought this new house in Connecticut. Your mother and I completed our therapy with a marriage counselor and we’ve resolved our anger. I can honestly say that we’ve worked through our problems. We are through with the lies, the infidelity. The Luna family is at the light at the end of the tunnel and we deserve our happiness. But to get to this solid ground, we’ve come to a painful realization.”

Dad took a big breath.

“It’s you, Rebecca. You are ruining our marriage. Three years ago you moved back home for what was supposed to be a summer. You’ve shown no signs of wanting to leave. You spread your dirty dishes all over the house. You borrow your mother’s new car and return it with an empty tank of gas.

“You’ve become a walking, aching mess and without our help, I don’t think you know how to help yourself. We all love you Rebecca—your mother, and Amy, and me, your daddy. We all love you. You don’t need to win a Grand Slam to win your parents’ love. We love you as much as we love your sister. And it’s because we love you that we’ve decided you can’t live here any longer. We want you to leave the house today. Before we back down in our resolve. You have to live your own life. We all know that you can do it.”

Tears streamed down my mother’s cheeks. Amy rolled her wrists in small, concentric circles. I waited for what came next, the finale, the money. The money! Of course, the money. My parents knew I had no money. Where could I go without any money? Did they want me sleeping in a homeless shelter in New Haven? I couldn’t even afford a weekend at Motel 6. Dad shut the computer down and left the room. Amy put her hands on top of her head. She looked at me and shrugged her shoulders.

“Tough luck, huh?” she said.

When I was eight years old, not long after my sister’s birth, I stopped talking. My parents took me to a specialist in Manhattan. The tests revealed no physical impediment, but the bills were more than my parents could afford and we had to move to a smaller apartment. Dad yelled at Mom. Amy slept soundly in her crib. I hid in my bedroom closet.

*

David Solemn was thirty-five. He was an artist. For the last twelve years, he had lived at home. The Solemns had long ago stopped asking when he was going to move out. Instead, his mother got her own apartment in New York. She visited on weekends.

David had given up on finding a job or a girlfriend. So when I called him from the Dunkin Donuts where we met only the day before, there was no hesitation in his offer.

I moved right in.

During the week, when Mrs. Solemn was gone, I cooked dinners for David and his father. In October, I made a practice run at Thanksgiving. I did the turkey, the stuffing, cranberries and sweet potatoes and string beans sprinkled with slivered almonds. Gravy made from scratch. For dessert, there was homemade apple pie and vanilla ice cream. “Now this is a girl,” David’s father had said. When we were done, the three of us went upstairs and watched a TV movie—three adults, sprawled across the fluffy, white comforter on the Solemns’ king-sized bed. I gave Mr. Solemn a kiss goodnight before David and I went off to bed.

I’d been living in the Solemn house for over a month when Mrs. Solemn invited me out to the back porch for a chat.

“I’m sixty years old, Rebecca,” she said. “So when I tell you something, don’t think that I don’t know. Let’s say you’re an artist. If you are an artist and you live your entire life without making that art you might as well be dead.”

She looked at me knowingly.

I knew Jackie Solemn was taking art classes. But I had no interest in making art. I wasn’t ready to commit suicide either. I liked to cook but I didn’t tell this to Mrs. Solemn.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s how my sister feels about tennis.”

Mrs. Solemn shook her head. “Your tennis playing sister doesn’t interest me.” She put her hands on both sides of my face. “I’m talking about you. Living in my house, living in your unemployed adult boyfriend’s parents’ house. I feel like I can talk to you freely because you’re not my child. Doesn’t this situation trouble you?”

Most people, Mrs. Solemn included, will let you down. They put so much stock in employment. Making money. Working. In a previous incarnation, I’d done that. I had the fast-track job in the big city and five days a week, I wore the good clothes and sat diligently in front of a computer, performing the tasks that I was assigned, my head aching, black spots clouding my field of vision, until the clock struck five—and even then, I often put in overtime. Living this kind of life, you’re too zonked out to be properly miserable. I rode the subway, paid rent, paid the electric bill and the phone bill, parceled the remaining dividends to the dry cleaners, the deli by my office where I bought lunch, the Vietnamese place where I got spring rolls and steamed vegetables and rice for dinner. Vacations, I went to the Caribbean with coworkers from the office, drank too much, and had drunken sex with relatively good-looking strangers.

My life, as I am supposed to believe, had value then.

“I like living here,” I told Mrs. Solemn.

Mrs. Solemn tilted her head back gazing at the peeling white paint of the porch ceiling. A dog barked down the street; I listened longingly to the sounds of Sunday football on TV inside the house.

“I used to worry that David wouldn’t wake up in the mornings,” she said. “Sometimes, when he slept late into the afternoon, I’d vacuum outside of his door to wake him up. I’d cook bacon to lure him downstairs. I’d knock on the door, wake him up. I lived in dread of opening up the door to find my dead son.”

Like David and his father, I was relieved when Mrs. Solemn left at the end of her weekends.

*

Our lives were simple.

David made art during the day in the basement, elaborate cartoons based on his life, the quest to end tension and the simultaneous search for the perfect girlfriend. He’d been looking for this perfect woman for years. He even took one of the more beautiful candidates to Hawaii, bought her the jewelry she pointed to in store windows. David was tall and handsome and charming and talented and smart, the whole package, but most women want a man who has a job and doesn’t live at home. A man who doesn’t twitch.

Mr. Solemn worked in the attic. He was a distributor of rawhide bones and chews. On busy days, I went upstairs and helped out, answered the phones and helped with the invoicing.

I felt I was it, the perfect girlfriend. My love for David was so large, my affection for Mr. Solemn so pure. I wanted nothing. In their chaotic, three-story house, there were no maids to complain about the wet towels on the floor. No long-legged, bouncing sister, running into the kitchen for a Gatorade. No more breathless stories of trips to Paris and London, or tedious recounts of misplayed points. Better still, there were no three o’clock calls from my father, checking up on the day’s job search.

Mr. Solemn gave me $200 each week to spend on groceries. I cooked and cleaned and I was happy. Evenings, the three of us went to the movies. Sometimes we rented them. Other nights Mr. Solemn worked late, and David and I cuddled in the living room, reading in front of the fireplace. Mr. Solemn always finished by the eleven o’clock news. We would meet together on the big bed at the end of the day.

Of all these good things, what I loved most was watching General Hospital with David. At 2:52 every afternoon, Monday through Friday, I’d start popping the popcorn on the gas stove. By 2:54, I’d be melting the butter. At 2:56, I’d put three ice cubes into tall, frosted glasses and pour the Diet Coke. At 2:57, David would appear from the basement. We would carry the popcorn and Diet Cokes up to the den, and still have two full minutes to settle down, kiss, munch on the popcorn until the show started.

We had the same favorite character, Carly Roberts. Carly had come to Port Charles to ruin the life of her birth mother, Bobbie Jones. Within months, Carly was able to seduce Bobbie’s husband, family man and neurosurgeon Tony Jones. Soon Carly found out she was pregnant. She didn’t know if the baby’s father was Tony or A.J. Quartermaine, the young, good-looking, wealthy, recovering alcoholic, eligible bachelor.

Ours was a happiness most people are too scared to try.

*

There are four months between the U.S. Open and the next big international tournament, the Australian Open. Amy hated to practice; she often refused to train between events. She was bored. There was no other reason for her to show up at David Solemn’s house on one particularly warm and beautiful Saturday afternoon, driving a gleaming, white Mercedes convertible.

David and I were sitting on lawn chairs in the late afternoon sun, eating turkey sandwiches, while inside the house Mr. Solemn and Jackie Solemn discussed their dying marriage.

“Cool car, huh?” Amy called out.

She wore black, mirrored sunglasses, a scoop-neck pastel pink T-shirt, a pink leather jacket, pink capris, and shiny pink lip gloss. “I only have a learner’s permit, so I’m not supposed to drive. I’m seventeen years old but I’ve been so busy with tennis I haven’t had the time to get my license.” She smiled at David. “My name is Amy Luna. I’m Rebecca’s little sister. I’m appalled that she hasn’t invited me over. I’ve been wanting to meet you, the mysterious boyfriend. Come out for a drive.”

“No,” I said, fingering the barely eaten sandwich on my lap. “We’re busy.”

David leapt to his feet.

We went to the Connecticut coast, David at the wheel, driving ninety miles an hour down the interstate, Amy next to him in the front seat, laughing, her blond hair flying behind her, crying “faster, faster.” I closed my eyes, gripping the fastened seat belt.

At the beach, the blue sky had turned gray. The strip of sand where the waves broke was littered with thick white foam and dead jellyfish. Amy sprinted, showing off her speed, jumping over the glutinous corpses.

“Look at me,” she giggled. “Look.”

I thought about taking a rock hammer to her forehead.

“I’m jumping for my life,” she cried. “I’m chasing ground strokes down the line.”

Then David started running after her, tackling her from behind so that they both fell into the sand. Amy giggled and shrieked and David tickled her ribs. He slipped a handful of sand down her pink T-shirt. I walked behind them, quiet, hands jammed in my jeans pockets.

“Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t even know who I was,” I heard Amy telling David when she was back on her feet. “He doesn’t watch sports. Supposedly he has a girlfriend, some model, but I don’t think it’s going to last. He took my phone number, but he’s back in Hollywood. John McEnroe’s having a big bash next weekend out at the Hamptons. He’s always flirting with me. I promised to hit the ball around with his kids. You should come.”

“Cool,” David said.

He looked good that day. For weeks, David hadn’t been doing all that great. He’d been slouching. And the twitching was worse, his legs, even his eyebrows. He’d lost interest in General Hospital, leaving halfway through the show. But with the infectious Amy Luna around, his body remained straight and still. His skin glowed.

“Let’s go out for cappuccinos,” Amy said. “I had the best cappuccino when I was in Italy last May for the Italian Open. Connecticut blows.”

David nodded his head. I knew for a fact that he had never once left the country. He put his arms around Amy’s shoulders, guiding her back to the Mercedes. I poked at a dead jellyfish with a long stick, looking into its bulging, vacant eyes. When they’re alive, jellyfish are magical, arms long and luminescent and shimmering neon, pink and purple. It was insane to have thought I was the perfect girlfriend. Pathetic.

*

The local news showed footage of a six-week-old puppy at the ASPCA, the kind that breaks your heart, small enough to fit on the face of a tennis racquet—big, soulful eyes.

“We could use a dog in this house,” Mr. Solemn said.

“I’ve never had a dog,” I said.

It was shameful. I could hear the longing in my voice. I was feeling sorry for myself because David just called. Amy had gotten drunk on tequila shots at John McEnroe’s big charity gala in the Hamptons. She passed out in the guestroom, and McEnroe had invited David and Amy to stay on for the weekend.

“Never, Rebecca?” Mr. Solemn said. “You’ve never known a dog’s crazy love?”

I hadn’t. I hadn’t known a lot of things. I’d had my parents’ love for the entire eight years until golden Amy was born. But maybe not. Maybe my parents were too busy cheating on each other to notice when I started to crawl or took my first steps. My Dad said I didn’t need to win a Slam for his love, but once I moved into the Solemns’ house, he never called. Not once.

Mr. Solemn was a warm, honest man, and the next day, after I made breakfast, we went straight to the ASPCA. The crying began when I found out the puppy, the one I was going to love with all my heart after David dumped me, had been adopted earlier that morning. So Mr. Solemn led me back to the car and then drove onward, leading us on to the mall. I don’t think he had any plans for the day.

*

After the Gap, we headed to the food court, collapsing at a secluded table next to the waterfall. Mr. Solemn summoned the energy to buy us frozen yogurt waffle cones while I slumped over the table, head on my elbows, crying onto my knuckles. When I closed my eyes, I found myself thinking about General Hospital.

Things hadn’t worked out so well for Carly Roberts. After her baby was born, she told Bobbie that she, Carly, was her long-lost daughter, that her newborn son was Bobbie’s grandchild. After so many months of build-up, Carly’s secret was disclosed in front of the major players on the show, in the dining room of the Port Charles hotel. Outside there was a blizzard, the worst in years. And Bobbie rejected them both, Carly and the baby, her grandchild. Bobbie seemed lonelier than ever. You couldn’t be more alone than Bobbie.

Mr. Solemn returned. He patted my hand.

“It’s a good thing about the pup.” He slid a waffle cone through my fingers, and didn’t let go until he could feel my grip around the cone. “Now that I think of it, I couldn’t bear to go through the housebreaking again.”

I nodded, picking a strawberry off the smooth yogurt with my tongue. Tears continued to stream down my cheeks.

“Our last dog was in love with David,” he said. “He had no use for me or Jackie. The nutty thing actually went on a hunger strike when David went to college, literally starved himself to death. After that we stuck to cats. That is until Boots got run over by the mail truck. Then Jackie decided it was bad luck with pets for the Solemns and called a moratorium. I’d forgotten. Yes, the pup would have been a big mistake.”

“My mother never wanted pets,” I said. “She said cleaning up after me and my sister was enough. I won a goldfish once at a school fair but Amy and her tennis friends flushed it down the toilet.”

“I’m so sorry, Rebecca,” Mr. Solemn said. “It sure is a pleasure having you around. As far as I am concerned, you can stay for as long as you like. I always thought it would be easier with a daughter.”

It wasn’t necessary for me to stop crying. Whenever I thought I was done, Mr. Solemn only had to say the next lovely thing.

“What do you say about going to the Body Shop?” he asked. Mr. Solemn started to gather up the dark blue Gap shopping bags, two to each hand. “I noticed you’re low on bubble bath. How is your car running these days?”

*

Lying alone at night, waiting for David to get back from Amy’s warm-up sessions in Florida, I closed my eyes, trying to remember us when we were first together. Memories of us at Dunkin Donuts at three in the morning when we couldn’t sleep. Glazed chocolate donuts. Instead, I saw Carly Roberts.

“You’ve got to do something,” she said. “Fast.”

I rolled over, hugging my pillow. David and I had stopped having sex weeks ago, but we slept in the same bed, side by side, David’s arm tossed over my shoulders.

“Mr. Solemn is sweet,” Carly said. “But you can’t live on a couple of outfits. And the Gap. Come on. He should have taken you to Nordstrom’s. He’s a putz like Tony Jones, that pathetic excuse of a middle-aged neurosurgeon I used to think I loved. Your good father figure misses his wife. Pretty soon he’s going to start making the moves on you.”

I shook my head. The world was not as terrible a place as Carly believed. Mr. Solemn checked the oil in my car. He put fluid into the power steering gauge; he tightened the fan belts. My mother’s old Nissan ran quieter, smoother than it had in years.

“Your loser boyfriend is doing it with your sister,” Carly said. “Don’t take that kind of treatment from a man. You’ve got wiles.”

Carly had wiles. She grew up scrappy and angry. I grew up too quiet for anger. I was the one who hid in the closet while my parents fought. A couple of times, I’d fallen asleep and they didn’t find me until the next morning.

I turned on the light and pulled out a notebook. I’d make a shopping list. David Solemn would be home for dinner the next day. I would make one of his favorites: spinach lasagna, maybe, or broiled salmon with garlic mashed potatoes. There would be salad. I’d bake Tollhouse cookies, filling the house with that wonderful, warm aroma of melting chocolate. He would never want to leave.

*

I’d just taken the cookies out of the oven when Mom showed up at the Solemn house. She sat at the kitchen table, hands around the glass of milk I’d poured her, watching intently as I slid the warm cookies off the cookie sheet onto a red platter.

“Look at you,” she said. “I didn’t even know you could bake.”

The spinach was in a strainer in the sink, waiting to be washed, dried, chopped. I shrugged and handed her a warm, chocolate chip cookie. Mom nibbled around the edges.

“You put in pecans,” she said. She dipped her cookie in the milk.

David would be home in three hours and I had tons of cooking to do. I planned to change the sheets on our bed. I heard the dryer going in the basement. I had tried to plan the day perfectly but Mom was screwing everything up.

“I used to worry that she was involved with John McEnroe,” Mom said. “As if that weren’t bad enough. She’s just a teenager, but what can I do? She has millions in the bank. Millions. I can’t control her. She wants your David on the sidelines. When she could hire anybody. Anybody. Your Dad doesn’t care as long as she keeps winning. I’m sick about it.”

Mom looked pale. Her black cardigan was covered in lint; her hair was flat, dirty. I wondered how the revitalized marriage was going. My father had made promises before. They would be going to Australia soon to watch Amy play. The year before, they’d gone snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef after Amy lost in the round of sixteen.

“Do you want a hug?” Mom said.

“No,” I said, and took a step back. “What are you talking about?”

“I think you should move back home.”

I noticed Mr. Solemn standing in the doorway. Normally he made noise when entering a room. It was the middle of the afternoon; he was supposed to be working.

“Your father agreed,” Mom said. “He promised not to bother you about the job. We can redecorate your bedroom.”

Mr. Solemn looked at the floor. “I’ll miss you, Rebecca,” he said.

“I’m making dinner.” I went to the refrigerator and began removing ingredients: vine-ripened tomatoes, ricotta cheese, mozzarella. “You can stay for dinner, Mom. You can meet David.”

Mom rested her chocolate chip cookie on the table. She walked over to me, carrying her glass of milk.

“You poor, delusional girl,” she said. “He’s not coming back. He’s with your sister in Australia, helping her get ready for the Open. Amy says it’s love. She goes and picks your unsuitable boyfriend to love.”

Mr. Solemn took the bag of tomatoes out of my hand, the cheese from the other, and put them down on the chopping block.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I thought I raised him better.”

Mom shook my shoulders. “Wake up, Rebecca,” she said. “Pack your things. I’m taking you home.”

I thought about Carly Roberts. After the baby was born, after Tony left her and AJ threatened to sue for full custody, Carly took her baby to Jason Morgan, the brain-damaged, kind-hearted Port Charles mobster. They ended up safe and protected in his luxurious penthouse.

“Wiles,” Carly said.

I looked at Mr. Solemn. “I want to stay,” I said. “There’s salad. I bought artichoke hearts for the salad.”

“Which way is your bedroom?” Mom tugged at my arm. “I’ll help you pack.”

“There are croutons,” I said. I shook Mom off, and pointed to the pantry.

“Rebecca, wake up,” Mom said, and when I didn’t budge, she flung her glass of milk at me. I felt the milk splatter across my face and run down the front of my T-shirt, make a puddle on my clean floor. I sucked on the ends of my dripping hair as Mom walked slowly toward the door. Mr. Solemn rushed to the counter for paper towels.

I would set the table with place mats. I would use the good crystal.

*

© by Marcy Dermansky. Used by permission.

Check out Marcy’s delightfully evil new novel, Bad Marie . . .

Or read an excerpt!

Last year I made a mistake in this regard, and I apologize. We were out for a walk, talking, and Lee Johnson who joined the seminary overheard our conversation and told me he thought the name was disrespectful to one of our beautiful sisters. I explained to him that it wasn’t at all, that I was honoring one of the most divine aspects of you or any other sister, the woman’s form, and that he could see how it was intended if he watched me when I bent down in the morning to kiss you good-bye before I went off to the radio station for my shift. You are a beautiful sleeper. You are beautiful awake, too, except when you try to be funny, which is why you shouldn’t try to be. You look good, like I said. You’re morally certain. You notice things about people and comment upon them in a manner that almost always leads to improvement. You’re full of more love than hate. Why bother with funny? Leave that to me. You can come visit me in Malawi.

Let’s go back twelve days. You go first, and when you get there, take everything off and slip into bed. When I arrive, I’m bound to be disoriented and dispirited from the trip—no one likes going backward—and I want to get a little sugar before I head out into the cruel summer. You can leave the black bra on if you want. It does its job in the way of shaping and holding but is camouflaged against what you always like to call your African complexion. The first time you told me that, you were fourteen, maybe, and I was a year older, like always, and I was running with your brother Larry in that gang he had for a little while before he decided to become an accountant. Tough guy. The gang was called the Tigers, and Larry said we had to snatch a purse for initiation. I didn’t want to, so I went around to all the girls I knew and asked them if they had a spare purse I could borrow. The first two girls I asked looked at me crooked, like maybe I was going to wear it for my own pleasure, but you just said “sure” and ran upstairs and got me one. It was black and you said you preferred bright colors to go with your African complexion. “Complexion?” I said. “But Africa’s so simple. See lion, flee lion.” I paused. “Get it?” I said. “No cars, no bars, no drugs, no hustlers. Just a lion wanting you to be his lunch.”

You set your mouth in a straight line and sat down on the steps. “Rennie,” you said. “I won’t have you mocking Africa. It’s where we all come from. The Harlem that you see around you wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t been loaded into boats against our will. You’re a light-skinned man, but you can’t pass for white, so don’t go thinking you can turn an eye on the place you came from.” It was the first time I noticed that you got more beautiful when you got mad.

“Actually,” I said, “I know for a fact that my ancestor wanted to come. He tied himself up and hopped into the boat. He got a little sick of baobab stew and thought he might prefer some soul music and American movies.”

I thought you’d scoff at me, or at best laugh the way girls always laughed, their eyes bright but their body leaning back. Instead, you leaned forward so I could better see the twinkle in your eyes “Not funny,” you said. “That’s a historical tragedy and you’re getting A-list material from it. If you call that A-list. Please don’t make these jokes around me anymore.”

I put a hangdog expression on, though my heart was leaping. “I’ll make a note of that,” I said, “and put it in my purse.”

Here I was sure you’d finally lean back, but you jumped off the steps and threw your arms around my neck. “You heard me,” you said. “No more jokes.” Then you kissed me on the side of the face, but it was like you were kissing my lips. A girl went by behind you on roller skates. A leaf fell off a tree. There were so many other details that I’ll never recover, little things I wish I could have noticed. Instead, I was in the grasp of something broader, thicker, and darker. So were you: that is a joke but it is after the fact.

That took us back more than twelve days. Sorry. You try keeping your mind from the memory of our first kiss. Let me reset the time machine. Twelve days ago, on Saturday, we were having coffee and toast in my apartment, where you had been living since late spring. “Like a real couple,” I said. This was my move: to state the thing that truly amazed me, with a bend in my tone to make it seem like I was taking it all in stride. In my mind, I called it the Twistback. I was reading the newspaper; you were looking out the window. That’s how breakfasts went. I always brought a book or a paper. You liked to start the day making sense of the world with your eyes. Between us, we had it all covered. Near the bottom of the front page, there was an article about Malawi, newly independent from Britain. “Isn’t that strange?” I said. “That a country can be newborn after it’s been around a while?”

You tracked a bird across the window, left to right, before you answered. “It didn’t used to be called Malawi,” you said. “What was it again? Hyasaland? Something like that?”

“Nyasaland,” I said. “If it was high-ass-a-land, they would have elected you president.” I paused. “On account of the ass you have on you,” I said.

You ignored me, which was a form of accepting the compliment. “I’m all for independence,” you said. “The only problem is that sometimes when these states go that way, they end up like children who need a parent, and the parent is some dictator-for-life who never treats the people like they’re people.” You crunched your toast between your teeth.

“How a twenty-four-year-old black girl who’s never been out of New York City knows so much about the world never ceases to amaze me,” I said. Again, the Twistback.

“Well, I always paid attention to where I came from,” you said. “While you were busy studying the human comedy, I was trying to figure out human drama.”

“You’re the sad mask; I’m the happy mask,” I said. “Takes both of us to put on a play.”

“I don’t have time to put on a play,” you said. You were studying to be a lawyer, and the fact that you seemed unencumbered in the morning was only the shadow of the way you were at night: walled in by textbooks and mimeographed papers, ballpoint pen in your mouth, glasses pushed high on your head. Many times I’d go to bed by myself, and you’d show up hours later, slipping silently between the sheets. I wasn’t asleep, but I didn’t let on, and you didn’t go to sleep either, but rather stayed up repeating names to yourself: names of cases, names of judges, names of laws. That exercise filled your mind with answers, but overnight the answers turned into more questions, which you liked to ask me in the morning. That morning the questions were about belief, or at least they started that way. You asked me if I could believe that there was a time in our country’s history when there were no penalties for obstructing minority access to a polling place.

“Black people can vote?” I said. “Heavens to Betsy. No one told me.”

“I just get tired of this sometimes,” you said.

I felt a chill race down my spine. “This?” I said, waving my arm around the kitchen like a TV pitchman. “But it has everything.”

“Not this,” you said. “This, America, now. We’re all working to make it better, except for the ones who are working to make it worse. But it all goes so slow.” You looked out the window for the bird, another form of progress. You crunched your toast again. “Have you ever thought of visiting Africa?” you said.

“Why?” I said. “I like wearing pants. That way, I can take them off when I want to get with you.”

“Be straight for a minute,” you said. “It’s where you came from, the place that created both your problems and your promise. Aren’t you curious? You really should go.”

“You go.”

“I’m broke as a joke.”

“I have money, but do you really want me to crack open my Diamond Ring Fund?”

Usually this got you to stop: it was marriage talk, which sent you off into a speech about how you didn’t believe in marriage, that it was only a ceremony to verify a love that, if truly felt, didn’t need a ceremony for verification, that you were wary of entering an arrangement that made you formally dependent upon another human being, let alone an abstract idea that shared more with slavery than with salvation. This was the only time you seemed as though you were joking, and it was when you were at your most serious. You had been doing it as long as I had known you; Larry used to say you were a secular preacher with the whole world as your congregation. “I’m just saying that even a pea-brained rising radio star might want to reconnect with his own identity now and again.”

“Not guilty as charged,” I said. It’s true that I worked at a radio station, that I played a little music, made a few jokes on the air, pocketed a bit of dough. It advanced my reputation to some small degree, or, I like to say, at least cemented my reputation as a man who can only be advanced by small degrees. But I was secretly proud of what I did. I leavened moments in people’s days that were otherwise leaden. I offered a balm for the spirit. I encouraged people toward the divine without resorting to anything godly. “But if I see a pea-brain, I’ll let him know,” I said. I got up to put my plate in the sink, and I took yours, too, and you said, “Thank you,” and whatever little bit of tension was rising in the room dissipated. We went to the couch and listened to records and you let me kiss your neck a little bit. “I’m just saying,” I said, “I’m happy here in America. I know there are problems. There’s always going to be problems. I know we were kept down, and we’re rising up too slowly. But I also know other things. Do you hear what we’re hearing? Is there another place you can listen to Marvin Gaye and then the Beatles and then Chuck Berry and then Mary Wells and feel like you really know what they all mean? I love being here in this place and I love being here in this place with you.”

“It is nice,” you said, nuzzling into my shoulder.

“I would recognize this country even from the back,” I said. “You think I need to investigate my identity? This is my identity.” Then I headed off to work and proved my point, played “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Thirty Days” and “Your Old Standby,” all as messages to you.

That was twelve days ago. I didn’t even fold up the paper with the news about Malawi. I left it open on the couch, and that night, when I got home from work, I rolled you into it when we were getting down to business. Then a week passed, and it was five days ago, and it was so hot that we went out for ice cream and ended up talking to some of the kids we knew in the neighborhood. Ken Louis was there, who told everyone he was related to Joe Louis, and his best friend Paul Ordis, who liked to tease Ken by saying he was related to Joe Ordis, and James Powell, who was the worst of the bunch but still a good kid. They all had girls they were sweet on, and they wanted you to give them advice on how to act. “Don’t act like this one,” you said, pointing at me, and all three of them bagged up. Paul Ordis said he hoped one day he’d have a girl as pretty as you, and he meant it so sweetly that you told him you were sure one day he would. Then I told him stories about me and Larry and how we both got it together in time for
adulthood. “You can call him Larry, CPA,” I said. On our way back we saw two white cops sitting in a car at the corner. One made a gun with his finger and pointed it out the window. He was laughing.

That night we were closer in bed, though we couldn’t have been any closer, and not for any major reasons. It was as a result of a host of little reasons: seeing the teenagers on the stoop near the ice cream shop and remembering when we were that age, knowing how pretty you were and how smart you were and how clearly you saw the world and wondering if I could do the right things to keep you. There was a slight metallic uneasiness in my head, and I assume there was in yours, too, and that’s why you let me make love to you the way I did. “You know what I mean,” I said afterward. “Competently.” You threw your arms around me and laughed.

We both knew enough to be uneasy about the kids and the cops, but we never thought the two stories would come together the way they did. The following week it was even hotter, and all the kids in the neighborhood were out in the street, acting foolish. A group of about five of them, including Paul Ordis and James Powell, were play-fighting, mostly to make fun of Ken Louis, though they continued even after he left to go home. The play fight got louder and louder, and finally one of the neighbors called the cops, just as another neighbor came out of his door to stop the boys. James Powell was in bold character now, and he stood up tall to the man who came to stop the fight. “What do you want?” he said. “What the hell do you want, man?” The neighbor sprayed James and Paul with a hose, and James pretended to go wild and ran full-speed after him, shouting that he was going to kill him when he got hold of him. That was when one of the cops who had showed up on the scene emptied his service revolver into James’s back. I wasn’t there, and neither were you, but you were one of the first people Paul Ordis saw when he ran crying home. “Miss Angie,” he said. He couldn’t say any more and he buried his face in your shoulder.

I was at work, spinning records and making jokes, when the calls started to come in about the shooting. I did what I swore I would never do, and that was to feel ashamed that my job wasn’t serious enough for the world around it. I took the records off the turntable and let people know what was happening, how the CORE meeting later that day was now going to be a protest, how demonstrations were being planned for the next day and the day after that in Harlem and Brooklyn. Already the violence was starting, a few kernels of corn popping. I didn’t come home until late, and when I did, you greeted me at the door like a wife, silently embracing me and whispering into my ear that you were proud of me. “How can you be proud of anyone today?” I said. That night you didn’t stay up late studying. You went to bed when I did, and we were distant from one another, each in our own head, though we couldn’t have been any closer.

We ate breakfast silently the next morning. The newspaper was unopened on the table next to me. You were looking at the window as if no one would ever be able to see through it again.

“Angie,” I said.

“Why not Tail?” you said. “You should call me what you want, and I know you want it.” It was a burlesque only. I could no more have touched you that way than I could have killed you. I kissed you chastely and went off to work, hoping for the best. I didn’t get the best. I didn’t get anywhere near the best. The demonstrations started peaceful but didn’t stay that way for long, and before you knew it there were cars burning and bricks crashing into windows. What would Lee Johnson have said about any of it? I was at work again, imagining I had a new job, which involved keeping the people calm. I was at work again, failing. The calls were pouring in about how the neighborhood had already slipped out of civilization and the city was soon to follow. In the afternoon I took a call from an older white man. “I’ve been listening to your show, and I have a solution,” he said.

“Sir?” I said.

“You should go back to Africa.”

I had heard it before, of course. We all had, and much worse. But this time it sounded different. The man wasn’t angry. He had the appearance, at least on the phone, of a rational being. “Sir?” I said again.

“You heard me,” he said. “Go back. We don’t need you here.”

His comment went through my head, brick-through-window-style, and with it went many other things: affronts, confusions, challenges I had to his remark, ways I could respond. I reversed the process, pulled the brick out until the window was intact again, and in the reflection I saw a clear picture in which I had the man down on the ground, my hands around his throat. I was squeezing hard, yet it was eliciting only laughter, flushing his face a healthy pink from his cheeks to the roots of his hair. I tried to kill the pink and instead I intensified it; his face went red, then purple, then darkened until it was like mine, then darkened further until it was like yours. I put the phone to my ear and heard only the dial tone.

I left work, crisscrossed streets where I shouldn’t have felt safe but did. A store that sold fish tanks was burning. Pause. Get it? I directed myself to believe that fire was a refining force, just as I had once believed that humans are capable of kindness, or that jokes offer an adequate defense against cruelty. You weren’t at the apartment. I went to the library, then I went to a liquor store—both intoxicants, neither lasting—and then I went home and called a travel agent and asked how much it would cost to fly from Kennedy Airport to Blantyre.

“Blantyre?” the girl on the line said. She wasn’t being rude, just curious.

“The one in Malawi,” I said, “not in Scotland. Though I can see how my accent may have confused you.” It was possibly the last joke I had in me, and not one I was particularly proud of.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl, flustered, and got right on it.

When she told me the arrangements were made, I asked her if I really wanted to do this.

“Sir?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I looked through the book I had taken from the library. The city of Blantyre, named for the birthplace of the explorer Livingstone, was in the highlands, which may have strengthened the resemblance. It was surrounded by four mountains whose names I committed to memory—Soche, Ndirande, Chiradzulu, Michiru—and which I imagined as a vocal quartet performing on a street corner: first tenor, second tenor, baritone, bass. There was a joke there, but I didn’t reach for it. The book had some pictures, including one of a woman standing out in front of a small bank, facing away from the camera. She looked just like you. I shut the book and put it away so that you wouldn’t see it, and then I did what I had been waiting days to do: I took a nap. I dreamed of you when you were a little girl. You had your pigtails on and you were telling other girls jokes that were labored and earnest. You were trying to be better. You always were. Ten years from now I want to be holding you in my arms and kissing you while we listen to our children playing in the next room, and to do that I have to be newly born so that I am no longer so young. Isn’t it strange that a man can be newborn after he’s been around a while? I hope you don’t misunderstand what I’m doing with this trip. On the plane I will say prayers because I don’t like flying and also because I am trying to find the divinity in many things. On the plane I will cry because I have doubts, and then I will take the s off and have doubt. On the ground I will stay in my hotel the whole time except for quiet walks on the street. On the ground I will spend the nights reading until I understand and spend the mornings looking out the window. Let’s move forward twelve days, to when I will come back to you with my heart recharged and my vision restored. “I will reconnect,” I wrote in the note I will leave for you, and I imagine that when you read that you’ll lean forward, eyes bright. Even if you don’t understand the way I made the decision, understand that I want to be able to be the way I need to be for you, to make you laugh and make you want to laugh some more, and I just don’t see that happening if I stay around here too much longer.

*

© by Ben Greenman, from the collection What He’s Poised to Do.

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