Little Lost River: A Novel (WEST WORD FICTION)

A Novel

PAMEL A JOHNS T ON

Little Lost River

[ west word fiction series ]

[ pamela johnston ]

university of nevada press

Reno & Las Vegas

west word fiction series University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 usa Copyright © 2008 by Pamela Johnston All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Design by Kathleen Szawiola Display type on title page designed by Kimberly Glyder library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Johnston, Pamela, 1964– Little lost river / Pamela Johnston. p. cm. — (West word fiction series) isbn 978-0-87417-744-2 (alk. paper) 1. Tennage girls—Fiction. 2. Boise (Idaho)—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. I. Title ps3610.0389l58 2008 813'.6—dc22    2007048451 The paper used in this book is a recycled stock made from 50 percent post-consumer waste materials and meets the requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r2002). Binding materials were selected for strength and durability. first printing 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1 Portions of this novel appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “The Girl Who Almost Died” in Orchid: A Literary Review; and “Delta” (as “A Girl Like You”) in Oklahoma Review.

[ part one ]

The Crazy Girl [ cindy ]

t he day after my mom put the gun in her mouth, I went back to school. My dad stayed home and watched tv. If I’d stayed with him it would have meant four hours of game shows and a lunch of chicken pot pie or tomato soup, then an old movie or reruns of Bewitched! and I Dream of Jeannie until the five o’clock news. Even algebra sounded better than listening to him try to work out the puzzles on Concentration. But he’d decided to take a few days off, to recuperate from the day before, and I couldn’t blame him. It really hadn’t been one of our better days. For a long time we’d had no in-between with my mother: On her better days she got out of bed sometime before noon, got dressed, lit a cigarette. Sometimes she even made coffee. Then she sat on the back steps and stared at the trees that ran thick and dark around the edge of our yard. She got up when she heard the mailman come by at noon, made a sandwich, got more coffee. Then she went outside again. It was easy to tell how long she’d been sitting there by looking at the mound of bent and broken cigarettes in her ashtray. Strange but true, the one thing sure to set her off was cigarette butts anywhere but in an ashtray—on her bad days, she could spend a whole afternoon picking the little foam filters out of the peony beds, where they washed in from the street every time it rained. No one thought twice about throwing cigarette butts out their car windows in that part of Boise, which was nearly the [  ]

country anyway, except that the roads were still paved for another mile past our house. I’d come home from school, walk up the street after getting off the bus, and there she’d be—hunched over between the peony bushes, strands of her hair caught on the sticky blooms, the pockets of her robe soaked through with dirty water bleeding from the filters. I’d try to talk her into going back inside the house, but that conversation always ended with her crying. She tried so hard to keep them up, but nobody cared, she said. It broke her heart. It was too much. We lived at the end of the school bus route, almost outside the city limits. We didn’t have anything like a neighborhood—the closest house was half a mile away. My dad had moved us out to the edge of town years earlier because it was easier to keep an eye on my mom when that was all we had to think about, when we didn’t have to waste our energy making excuses for things that couldn’t be explained in a way normal people would understand. So he just gave up. And I couldn’t blame him for that, either. I’d given up on trying to make my mom seem normal, even to myself, a long time before all this happened. Though we had our moments. That October, for example. I came through the front door one day after school and left my muddy shoes sitting on the rubber mat. It had rained the night before, and the flower beds were still a mess—always a good sign. For nearly two weeks I’d been doing this, coming home to find everything just as I’d left it. I walked into the kitchen and found myself something to eat. Then I stood behind the back screen door, not opening it, not wanting to scare her. I said hello, but quietly, so she could pretend not to hear me if she wanted to. Her ashtray was full, almost but not quite overflowing onto the step. “You’re home already?” she asked. “It’s four o’clock.” “I didn’t realize it was so late.” She turned around and smiled at me over her shoulder, shading her eyes from the sun with one hand. It was a [  ]

bright fall day one week before Halloween, and her brown hair looked almost red in that light. “Could you do me a favor and make dinner tonight? I just don’t feel like cooking.” “Sure,” I said. “No problem.” She said this like I’d really be filling in for her, but the truth was she hadn’t tried to cook anything in over a year. That last time, she’d set the hem of her blouse on fire when she leaned across a burner. None of us— not even my mom herself, I think—were convinced that this had been an accident. s o i did the cooking , and the laundry. My dad went to work every day and took care of the car. Together, we cleaned up the yard on Saturdays, the house on Sundays. Between the two of us, things got done. But nothing ever got finished. That fall it stayed warm longer than usual—the leaves turned, but they stayed on the trees. Then a storm blew through on Halloween night, and the next day our yard looked like someone had thrown down a huge patchwork quilt. I couldn’t even see the grass underneath. My mom got up that morning, took one look at the yard, and went right back to bed. I knew how she felt: there was more work to do outside that window than one person could hold in her head. I ate some toast, read the funnies, went to the shed for a rake. My dad was outside already, trying to shove wet leaves off the front walk with a push broom. “Everything’s soaking wet,” he said. “We can’t use the lawnmower. I don’t know what we’re going to do.” I held up the rake. “I’ll get started.” “You’re not going to make any headway with just that. It’ll take all day.” I shrugged, because what else did I have planned? I was sixteen, but I didn’t have a driver’s license yet—I didn’t have a car, so I didn’t see the point. My friends had cars, but they’d finally just stopped asking if I wanted to go anywhere, because I always said no. I’d stopped trying to [  ]

explain why I couldn’t ever do anything, why I had to be home right after school and all the time on weekends. So I got busy with the rake. It felt good to start a job I knew I could actually finish, given enough time and the right tools. My dad came out and bagged the leaves once I’d raked them into piles, and we carried the bags to the curb where the garbage men would pick them up on Monday. We worked all morning, and by noon we’d cleared one narrow strip down the middle of the yard. “It’s okay,” my dad said, when I just sat down in a pile of wet leaves. “It’s a lot of work for just two people.” The old rain soaked through the seat of my jeans, but I didn’t even care. I let the rake fall to the grass in front of me. “There’s still so much,” I said. “I know.” He sat down beside me and reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette. “You do what you can, that’s all. No one can ask for more than that.” Which was true. In fact, my mom didn’t ask for a thing. But that was the problem—you could never know what it was she needed, and I was tired of trying to guess. “You’re doing fine,” he said, and handed me a cigarette of my own. I wondered when he’d noticed the packs disappearing from his cartons, but I didn’t ask. I just took the cigarette, and he lit it, and we sat there and smoked like any two people taking a break together. It was obvious, even to him, that there was no point in trying to treat me like a kid. I heard the screen door slam shut behind us. My dad turned his head, fast, like what he’d heard was a gunshot. I turned toward the house, and there was my mother standing calmly on the front porch in her pink robe. She wasn’t smoking—she wasn’t even looking around the yard to see what we’d accomplished so far. She just stood there for a moment, looking at us like she sometimes did—like someone had hit her personal pause button and left her no choice but to watch the rest of us go on without her. [  ]

“Come on outside, Alice,” my dad said. “It’s warming up a little. It’s nice out here.” My mom stood there for a moment longer, then turned around and went back inside. My dad turned to face the yard again, stubbed out his cigarette against the bottom of his wet shoe. He put an arm around me, squeezed my shoulder lightly, then stood up. “We’ll get this done,” he said. “We’re a good team. And there’s no hurry, right?” I nodded, and then I got up too. I couldn’t tell him that was what scared me more than anything else—the thought of my whole life eaten up by days like these, blank as the boxes on a calendar, only waiting for an X to show their passing and make them count for something. i n november, my mom had a run of good days longer than either my dad or I could remember: every single day for three straight weeks she was out of bed by the time I left to catch the bus. One morning she even made me breakfast—she put a box of cereal and a clean bowl and spoon beside a jug of milk on the table. That morning I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor for a long time, paralyzed by the sight of that box of Captain Crunch, convinced that someone had been in our house during the night and left it sitting out. Then my mom stuck her head around the corner.

“Hurry up and eat,” she said. “You’re going to miss your bus.” I told myself to wait until I left the house to start crying, but by then I didn’t feel like it anymore. For that one moment, I was just like any other girl on her way to school. I decided to be that girl while I could, because I knew it wouldn’t last. But we let ourselves hope anyway, just because it had been so long since we’d had anything to hope for. Dozens of doctors and all kinds of pills, and nothing ever worked for long. We couldn’t be with her all the time, and we didn’t have the money to hire someone who could—not that this would make any difference, the doctors said. She had to want to save herself. We didn’t even talk about putting her in the hospital anymore, because she always came home eventually. And it was harder to think [  ]

about how almost normal your life had been while she was gone than to just forget it could ever be that way. So now we hoped things were changing on their own. We hoped she’d figured out how to pull herself together, because nothing that was supposed to help her do that had worked for long. For almost a month we tried to make ourselves believe my mom was turning things around. We knew there were two possibilities, two completely different reasons for her sudden change of mood, but it was almost Thanksgiving, and we were looking for something, anything, to be thankful for. she woke me up that morning by brushing the hair off my face. “Cindy,” she said. “Wake up, honey. Time for school.” I was there all at once, the way you wake up in the middle of a dream that’s just too strange to stick with anymore. She’d been waking me for school for almost a month by then, but that morning she was dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a crisp white blouse that still smelled like a hot iron. Her hair looked clean, and she’d pulled it back with a dark green scarf. Her ponytail slid forward over one shoulder when she leaned across my bed. It touched the top of a cornucopia pin on her collar. No robe, no cigarette. Her breath smelled like mint. “Get dressed and I’ll make you some breakfast,” she said. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move. It was one of those moments you’d rather watch than actually be a part of, because you’re just not sure what’s going on or even what you’re supposed to do. “Are you awake?” she asked me. I nodded then, and I sat up to prove the point to both of us. It was all too normal to be scary. Still, I was more afraid in that moment than I was ten minutes later. I tried to talk my hands out of shaking—this was the morning I’d been hoping for most of my life, I told myself. I should enjoy it. But as normal as it might have seemed to anybody else, this wasn’t the way my mom worked. I knew that, the same way I knew which one of the two explanations for her sudden change of mood made more [  ]

sense. What I didn’t know was how to stop what was about to happen, or if I was even supposed to try. I started getting dressed, and that’s when I noticed the empty hanger in my closet—the blouse my mom was wearing actually belonged to me. It surprised me that we wore the same size. She always seemed shrunken up from weeks of not eating, the skin on her hands and face sagging over the empty spaces below it, making her look closer to something like sixty instead of forty. I picked out a sweater to wear with my jeans, a cardigan, and it took me longer than normal to dress. The buttons gave my fingers trouble. Then I walked down the dark hall and into the kitchen. My mom wasn’t there, but she’d set the table for breakfast with a plate and silverware and a glass of orange juice already poured. The electric skillet was plugged in and sitting on the counter. I lifted the lid and looked at the mound of scrambled eggs she’d pushed into one corner, flecked with pepper, fingers of link sausage lined up beside it—more food than I’d ever be able to eat by myself. Toast popped up on the other side of the kitchen sink, and I jumped at the sound of the spring releasing. And then I heard the gun. And because I’d already been surprised too many times that morning, I didn’t move at all. You’d expect a thing that drives through muscle and bone to make more noise. What I heard was something that could have been a cork popping out of a bottle. But the sound had come from down the hall, back toward my bedroom. I took a few steps toward the kitchen doorway, until I could see a sliver of yellow light cutting into the edge of the hall carpet from under the bathroom door. Then I took a few more steps, and I stood in front of that door for a moment before I could do anything else. I tried the knob. Locked. Years later, I would remember this and thank her for that final act of kindness. “Mom,” I said. “Are you okay?” She didn’t answer, of course. I walked through the rest of the house, turning lights on in every room, and then I opened the back door. It was [  ]

early, still dark. The windows gave me enough light to find a rock in the flower bed, and I backed up a few steps before I lobbed it through the frosted glass. A basket of dried yellow flowers hung calm and dusty beside the mirror, right where it always had been. Below it, a splattering of something dark had streaked down the wall. I went back to the kitchen after that and made phone calls: first for an ambulance, then for my dad. “What happened?” he asked. In the background, the letter-sorting machines were chugging along as always. “She shot herself, I think.” “What do you mean, you think?” “She’s in the bathroom and the door’s locked. But I think I heard a gunshot.” He didn’t say anything else. “You need to come home,” I said. “I know that.” He paused. “Okay. Sit tight. I’m on my way.” I sat down at the table after I’d hung up the phone. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate what she’d made me for breakfast. I didn’t know if she’d meant it all for me, or if she’d been thinking of my dad coming home; I only knew I wasn’t letting any of this go to waste. So when the police arrived, I was still chewing on the last bite of sausage. I answered the door and wiped my mouth with a paper napkin before I told them where they’d find her. the next day, when I went back to school, people knew everything. Boise was still a small town then, and kids whose fathers were policemen and doctors always had the latest news. Since we’d moved to the edge of town, though, where she couldn’t bother anyone, my mom had fallen off their radar. People had almost forgotten about her, until now. Now, they knew about the window. They knew about the sausage and the eggs. They even knew about the napkin. “I heard she broke the window with a rock just so she could look at her mother laying there on the bathroom floor,” someone said in the locker room, after gym. “God, I’d puke if I saw something like that.” [ 10 ]

Her voice was coming from the row of lockers behind mine. Over the noise of slamming doors and chatter, I wouldn’t have heard a thing that girl was saying if I hadn’t been listening for the way people would tell this part of my story. “She even made herself breakfast afterward,” someone else said. “Sausage and scrambled eggs. And when the ambulance guys came, she was just sitting there eating it, like nothing had happened.” “I wouldn’t be able to eat for a year if I saw that,” the first girl said. “Seriously. I would puke.” I finished getting dressed and walked down the hall to the door. I leaned against the wall, arms folded across my biology book and folder, waiting for the final bell. A pair of girls walked past me. One of them looked back over her shoulder and smiled what could have been sympathy, if I’d been another sort of person, then tipped her head and whispered something to the girl beside her. I didn’t need to hear what she was saying. That girl is crazy. And after that, I was.

[ 11 ]

The Lost Children [ frances ]

i don’t know how many children my mother wanted or tried to have. I do know that I was her only successful attempt at motherhood for a very long time, and that success is a relative term when it’s applied to children. There are people who will tell you that being the only child in a house full of adults is a lonely business, and at times I suppose it was. But what child doesn’t find herself longing for the kind of company adults seem to share so easily? The obvious conversations that come with the shared routines of your daily lives, the clear sense of how things should be—none of that belongs to children. I had less interest in my sister, once she was born, than I’d had in any one of the women in our neighborhood. My mother spent her free moments at our kitchen table, talking with our neighbor, Mrs. Hadley, and drinking iced tea in the summer and coffee through the long winter afternoons. She was the one with a child at home, so Mrs. Hadley always came to our house; her children, Donny and Jane, were in high school and often praised (in our neighborhood, at least) for their good manners and grades. I was six. I’d just started first grade, but I often came home after half a day with the unverifiable symptoms of what could have been a real illness: nausea, headache, sudden lethargy. I’d thrown up at school more than once, which had made me famous in my own right among the children in my class, and made my teacher more [ 12 ]

than willing to respond with a nurse’s pass when I said I didn’t feel good. My mother told the attendance secretary that I was under a doctor’s care, which seemed to satisfy everyone at school. But not Mrs. Hadley. “Frances is a sensitive child,” my mother said, when Mrs. Hadley wanted to know why I was always home so much earlier than anyone else on our block. My mother made it sound as if that were something of which she was very proud. “But how’s she ever going to get along, Helen?” Mrs. Hadley wanted to know. “Frances is very smart,” my mother said. “She does her work at home, and the teacher says she’s doing just fine.” “Smart is all good and well, but you know that’s not the only thing school is for. You can’t just let her come home whenever she feels like it—she’s going to have to toughen up sooner or later. She has to learn to get along on her own.” My mother shrugged and stirred her coffee. The truth was, she didn’t like being away from me either. That only left her alone in the clean little house where we read stories together in the rocking chair, baked bread for dinner or cookies for my father to eat when he came home from work. And whenever I was gone, the other children—the ones she’d lost—came back to her. Their absence filled the space beside her in the overstuffed chair, sat on a high kitchen stool and watched her roll out cookie dough. For a long time I thought that losing a child meant simply looking until you found her again, like losing anything else. Some of my classmates had stories of getting lost at the grocery store, finding a kindly cashier to call their mothers to retrieve them. But all the women in our neighborhood, it seemed to me, were said to have lost a child at some point, and clearly none of those children were being returned. Mrs. Merrigan, across the street, had lost a stillborn baby before we’d moved into the neighborhood. (“Which explains,” said Mrs. Hadley, “why the poor thing cries at the drop of a hat.”) Mrs. Shelton was supposed to have twins, but lost one of them [ 13 ]

before it was born. Mrs. Hunnicutt lost her daughter Charity, who had a brain tumor no one even knew about until it killed her. She was outside jumping rope with two other girls, and when she fell down and didn’t get up the girls ran to tell her mother. But Charity never did get up; she stayed in a coma for a few weeks, and then Mrs. Hadley broke the news that the Hunnicutts had lost their only daughter. I thought about Charity most often, afraid the same thing could happen to me: that someday I could simply fall down and die, without even making the mistake of stepping in front of a car or climbing too high on the jungle gym at school, things I’d already been warned against. It seemed unfair that the rules I observed so assiduously weren’t enough to protect me. But if that were to happen, I thought, if I were to be lost, I wanted to know what to expect. “Where do the children go when you lose them?” I asked my mother. She was putting me to bed. My father had come in to say good night already, so all that was left was to be kissed on the forehead before she turned out the light. “Where do what children go?” she asked. “The ones that get lost.” My mother was confused for a moment. She sat down on the side of the bed, trying hard not to answer the wrong question. She was surprised, I think, that I knew about this part of her life; it wasn’t something she had talked to me about, of course, and since her first miscarriage I had not been promised a new little brother or sister—an act of superstition disguised as kindness in her mind. All the others, however many there had been, were made known to me through my father’s suggestion that I be extra nice to my mother, who was feeling a little sad. “Are you talking about a lost baby? Like the one I told you I lost, a long time ago?” “All the children,” I said. “Like Charity.” “Oh.” My mother smiled her relief, then reached out to brush a piece of hair from my eyes. “Well, they go to heaven, Franny. To be with God.” [ 14 ]

We went to church on a regular basis—I was a standout in my Sunday school class, capable of memorizing, if not exactly understanding, the most ornately worded Bible verses—but for some reason, I hadn’t envisioned those missing children enjoying the perfection of the afterlife. Lost was different than dead, I had thought. “So God just takes them?” My mother’s eyebrows disappeared under her long, dark bangs. She was young herself, and the fact that her response might not answer my question really hadn’t occurred to her. It was the only answer she’d needed, up to that point. “I don’t really know if God takes them, or if they go to Him on their own. But I do know that all little children go to heaven, no matter how big or how little they are. Even the ones that haven’t been born yet.” “How do you know?” She was still for a long moment, looking at her hands as they pulled the sheet closer to my chin. When she looked at me again, she wasn’t smiling anymore. “Because that’s what the Bible says, Franny.” She stood up then, turned off my lamp, and closed the door behind her. It seemed to me, even then, that faith was an awfully slight comfort in the face of everything that could go wrong: babies could disappear before they’d even been alive outside of you. And even afterward, when you could hold them in your own two arms, God could snatch away the thing that made them be alive, whatever that was. They could just disappear. a year later, my mother got pregnant again, and I started to stay in school all day. The few times I had come home early, she’d made me stay in bed while she and Mrs. Hadley talked. “If you’re well enough to play, you’re well enough to be in school,” she said, and Mrs. Hadley nodded, stirring her coffee. No one told me anything about the baby until it was obvious what would happen, and when I asked her my mother said only that I would [ 15 ]

have a little brother or sister sometime in May. After so much weeping over babies who hadn’t arrived, it seemed almost anticlimactic to discover that a child was actually going to make an appearance, and apparently without incident. But neither of my parents really trusted that the doctor knew what he was saying, that the baby and my mother were fine this time. I came home every day to find my mother on the couch, her feet propped on a pillow. She’d be listening to the radio or reading a magazine, but as soon as I came in the door she’d roll to her side, sit up, and ask about my day at school. We’d have a snack together in the kitchen. It was the same routine we’d always followed on the days when I stayed in school, and it felt almost as if nothing had begun to change between us. And then my sister was born, as promised, in May and in perfect health. Robin came home from the hospital wrapped in a pink and blue striped blanket, and she spent her first few days being passed from one pair of adult arms to another. All the neighbors came to visit and brought food with them, so my mother didn’t have to cook. Mrs. Hadley made potato salad with pickles and mustard, which was different from the kind my mother made. Mrs. Merrigan brought a banana cream pie—and because no one told me to stop, I ate half of it at one sitting. “Anyone who eats half a pie deserves to be sick,” my father said, when he found me in the bathroom later, curled around a stomachache. But my mother came in and sat down on the edge of the bathtub, patted my back until I felt better. “You’re still my baby, too, Franny.” She held a pink washcloth under the cold water, wiped my face, and smiled at me. “I have two beautiful baby girls now. That’s something we should all be happy about.” I nodded, even though I was crying. I’m sure I was worried my mother would love me less, dividing her heart between the two of us. But more than this, I was afraid that if I were to get lost, my mother wouldn’t come looking for me right away. It might be awhile before she even had time to notice I was gone. [ 16 ]

.  . . i saw robin briefly when my mother first brought her home from the hospital; after that, I saw little more than the hand she sometimes managed to free from the blankets my mother wrapped around her like bandages. I wasn’t allowed to go into her bedroom when she was asleep, and she was always sleeping, it seemed, or waking up just when it was time for me to go to bed. But my mother let me hold her once that I can remember. Her hand was larger than a doll’s, and that surprised me; I had always assumed my babies were as close to the real thing as someone could get without using actual skin and bones. Now I saw that they were nothing like this child. They were lighter, for one thing, almost weightless really. Robin felt heavy when my mother put her in my arms. “Sit there and hold her carefully, but don’t try to walk around. You’ll drop her on her head,” my mother told me. And because there was no doubt in my mind that this baby could easily disappear, I sat there until my mother took her away.

[ 17 ]

[ part two ]

Flight [ cindy ]

a nd then we were flying —and then we were not. The front tire on my side dipped into the gravel on the shoulder in the same moment Rick brought both hands up to the wheel, trying to recover. “Hang on,” he said, but I was sliding already, slammed against the passenger door, my hands combing dead air. You don’t expect the whistling. Just like in cartoons, high pitched and falling right along with you. If I’d tried to imagine that moment, I would have made the car completely quiet, floating, suspended coyotelike before what you know is going to happen, the return to where you came from. I would have been way off. w e’d been up at the corral since nine o’clock, pulling beer from kegs in the back of a truck. No one knew exactly who owned the corral, if anyone did. There was no house left near the animal pen, just a big stone chimney that used to be part of one and a barn that was falling-down rotten. Rick thought the whole setup was left over from when people made a living out of breaking wild horses they’d round up on the high mountain plains. That night I was like a wild horse myself: restless, roaming. Everyone else was standing close by the fire in the middle of the big corral, just trying [ 21 ]

to keep warm. It’s hard to see in that kind of darkness, but I knew if I kept the fence to my right I’d end up back where I’d started, eventually. “What’s the matter?” Rick asked. He’d come out of nowhere, out of the black space in front of me. “Nothing,” I said. “Just taking a walk.” He stood square in my way. “Is that a problem or something?” “No,” he said, and stepped aside. He stayed to my left, hands jammed in the pockets of his coat, and he didn’t say anything else. I was mad from before he’d even picked me up. In my head, I was still having the fight I hadn’t finished with my dad. You just want to run wild all the time, you want to go out with your friends and have fun and forget about school and everything else that really matters—like your family. Well, that’s not going to happen. Not on my watch. As if he were actually watching me. As if he knew when I was home and when I wasn’t. You don’t know anything about my friends. You don’t know anything about me anymore. And he stood there, slapped. And I couldn’t let it go now, not even when I wanted to. I wanted to stand by the fire and lean back against Rick, drink a beer and feel it flush my cheeks red. I wanted to turn around and hold myself upright against his slick winter coat, kiss the soft space in the bottom of his jaw while he stared at the fire and pretended not to notice what I was doing. I wanted to stand there and breathe until the warm and empty space inside me filled with this air, cold and high and thin, as close to clear as you can get. I wanted to start over, but I didn’t know where to begin. We rounded the end of the corral and I watched my friend Mitzi start dancing by the fire when someone turned up his car stereo, swinging her hips in tight little circles, her arms in the air. She was giving herself to the night. “Just go back to the party,” I told Rick then. “I’m not going to be any fun tonight.” [ 22 ]

“We can leave, if you want.” “No,” I said. “Go talk. Have a good time.” And he kissed the top of my head before he peeled away to join the crowd shifting in the circle of the bonfire’s heat. Before long it was too cold to be outside anyway, even standing right by the fire—whichever side you turned away from the flames hurt the minute you stopped moving. By that time people were standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle, spinning like chickens on a spit. Rick pulled his keys from his pocket and tipped his head toward the car when he saw me look at him. This time I took his suggestion and let him open the door for me. And then we were flying: on the road, relieved to be getting somewhere together, even going downhill, heading back toward home again. The valley is only one possibility from that distance. You can look out across the big flat and see what you think must be the Oregon border, it looks so far away. But really it’s just another little farming town—Eagle, Meridian, Star. One of those places people don’t move out of, even when they’re old enough to do what they want. Rick drove with his left hand and smoked with the other. I slid across the bench seat, close to him. The heater blasted so hard, lifting my hair on the hot wind, I almost couldn’t hear Rick’s voice in my ear, even with his lips brushing right against my skin. “So what do you feel like doing now?” he said. “Anything. I don’t care.” “You want to go home?” “No,” I said. “Then you do care.” He smiled and kissed my temple. “Anything but that,” I said. “That’s the only thing I care about.” He was staring at me then, looking down and in, the way he’d looked the first time we sat together on the back steps at my house. That night he’d been trying to figure out why I had to work so hard to talk myself into going back inside that house. Because I had to give up everything before I could do that—my dad wouldn’t want to know where I’d been, or even [ 23 ]

who with. He’d just be angry that I’d left him in the first place, when he had nowhere to go. “I’m sorry about before,” I said. “My dad—” My head snapped left. My forehead cracked against his jaw. Then right, hard. The only thing I could think to do was lift my arms, brace my hands against the roof, press my feet against the floorboard, now overhead. And that’s when we fell right off the edge of the world, left the ground entirely. I felt my stomach give out, and I couldn’t breathe. “Hang on,” Rick said. “Oh shit. Hang on. Hang on!” Below us, somewhere, was the reservoir. I remembered that now. We were headed for the water with no way to stop.

sounds are all I remember now: the windows exploding like bottles you throw from the roof just to see how long it takes for them to hit the ground. I’d say now, and nothing. Now. Then, half a second later, the pop you hear when things let go. It was just like that, only louder. The car pitched end to end every time it rammed against something heavier, and when we finally stopped I lay there for one bright and completely silent moment. The dome light had come on whenever the doors bowed out, like the car had tried to sprout wings. Nothing hurt, or nothing in particular. My whole body was humming. I lay inside the roof of the car, on my back, my right leg wedged against my chest, my left foot where the windshield had been just seconds before. One more roll and I’d be out. And that’s when I saw Rick wasn’t with me. I tried to push myself along the roof and felt glass everywhere I put my hands. When I tried to slide out the windshield hole I cut my fingers on picky little jags around the edges. My left leg stayed locked out, stiff as a log even when I tried to bend it, to drag myself with my heel. Then a piece of something smooth and dry slid under my right hand all of a sudden, and I closed my fingers around it. A ten dollar bill. I slipped it into the pocket of my coat. [ 24 ]

And then, somehow, I was outside. I had a circle of light to work with, but Rick was nowhere. I called his name, thinking I should, not expecting him to answer. My voice came back hollow, just an echo of itself. And then a different one. “Hey!” I turned around and looked uphill. A girl was waving at me from the shoulder of the road. “Up here! Are you all right?” A boy appeared behind her. It surprised me how well I could hear them when they seemed so far away. “How many people in there?” he asked the girl. “I don’t know. There’s someone.” She pointed at me. “Right by the car. She just got out.” “Can you climb up here on your own?” the boy called. “Are you okay?” “You don’t have to yell,” I said, and I started up the hill. My eyes were still adjusting to the sudden dark: sagebrush, rocks, the occasional scrubby tree. But Rick was nowhere. The boy started sliding, bracing himself with his downhill leg, grabbing at the brush for balance. The girl stayed up on the shoulder, hands in her pockets, bouncing to keep herself warm. Once in a while she’d look up the highway, scanning for headlights coming toward us. “Can you make it?” the boy asked, when I got as far up as he’d come down. “I’m all right. I don’t know where my boyfriend is, though.” “You go up there with her,” he said, pointing at the girl. “I’ll find him. What’s his name?” “Rick,” I said, and he went on sliding downhill, calling Rick’s name, getting only that back. I dragged my leg as far as I could, until the weight of it was more than I could carry. Then I sat down and waited. “Hey,” the girl said, when she saw me stopping. “Are you okay? You need some help?” [ 25 ]

I didn’t say anything. I just watched the boy sliding, calling for Rick. When he got to the car he bent over and looked inside, like maybe I just hadn’t noticed Rick in there with me. “Hey,” the girl said again. Then she started downhill herself, sending rocks and dust and uprooted brush ahead of her. I looked at my left leg sticking out, a dam for all the debris piled up against it. “Are you okay?” she asked again, when she got to where I was sitting. “Something’s wrong with my leg. I just need to rest for a minute.” “Oh. Okay. Sure,” she said, and seemed to think about sitting beside me for a minute before she did. “Was it just you and your boyfriend in there?” “Yeah.” “It’s going to be okay. I’m sure Tom will find him.” Tom was nowhere now, too, farther into the dark than we could see from where we were. “Where’d he go?” I said. “It’s okay,” she said, misunderstanding me. “Don’t worry. Tom’s going to find him.” Her hand fluttered up to pat my back, then disappeared again. “I’m Frances, by the way.” I nodded. She was no one I recognized from the corral, but I thought I might know her from school. Round face, straight brown hair pulled back in one of those stretchy white headbands most girls give up in third grade. Clean. Not the kind of girl you’d expect to find near the corral on a Friday night. Definitely not the kind of person who would stop to talk to me, under normal circumstances. But I didn’t mind the company while I sat cold and humming in the dark, waiting to see what was going to happen next. She kept staring hard into the nothing ahead of us. My leg felt squeezed now, like my pants were too small for it. My face felt hot and tight. I pretended to be looking up the highway for help when she turned her head toward me again. “There’s no one coming,” I said. “It’s okay. I’m going to help you and Tom’s going to find your boyfriend.” [ 26 ]

She put her arm around my shoulders then. The weight of it hurt me, but I let her leave it there. a few minutes later , a truck came up the highway from the valley. Two guys got out and ran across the road. “We saw you go over,” the tall one said. “I turned around and found a place to call for help. There’s a house right off the highway back there.” “Her boyfriend got thrown out,” Frances said. “My boyfriend’s down there looking for him now.” “You okay?” the other guy asked me, the shorter one. “Yeah. There’s something wrong with my leg, though.” “You’re lucky your legs are still attached,” he said, looking down at the car. “Jesus Christ. I can’t believe you walked out of that.” Then he turned to Frances. “You keep her warm, or she’ll probably go into shock.” “I’m already in shock,” I said. All three of them turned to look at me, and then the guys took off downhill. Frances stood up and watched them go until they disappeared in the dark, until we could hear their voices coming from a place we couldn’t see. “Give me your hand and I’ll help you climb up to the car,” she said. “We’ll run the heater for a while.” I didn’t feel like moving. I was suddenly very tired. But the thought of going home didn’t sound so bad now: I could take a long bath, clean my face. So I let her help me pull my dead leg up the hill. I sat in the front seat of Tom’s nice car, my leg stretched across the plush gray upholstery. Frances started the engine and blew the heater all the way out, then climbed in back. “I wonder if I should go down there and help them look for Rick,” she said. “Go ahead.” I didn’t want to sit by myself in the dark, but it was clear Rick might need all the help he could get. “I’m all right. It’s just my leg.” “No, I should probably stay here with you,” she said. “Just in case something happens.” [ 27 ]

“Like what?” “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “You could have internal injuries.” I wondered what tv show that had come from. “It’s just my leg,” I said again. In the light from the dashboard I saw a dark patch of blood had soaked through my jeans. It started above my knee and ran all the way down to my shoe. I thought about stuffing my jacket underneath it then, to keep the blood from making a stain Tom would have to clean up later. “You don’t know that. Sometimes serious things don’t show up right away.” Frances looked out the window. “I knew this girl who got in a car wreck. Not a big one like this or anything, she just sort of ran into the back end of another car. Anyway, she thought it was no big deal. But that night she started getting these terrible stomach pains and had to have her mom take her to the emergency room.” She looked at me, for emphasis. “Perforated intestine. The doctor said she could have died.” That’s when I started laughing. It was the look on her face that did it—that, and the way she said the words: per-for-a-ted in-tes-tine. Like she’d practiced to get them right. “I don’t think there’s anything funny about a perforated intestine,” she said, turning her face away from me again. It hurt to laugh so hard, my whole body shaking and everything already jangled loose. She got out of the car and I leaned my head against the cold window. I tried to take a deep breath, to calm myself, while she walked back and forth at the edge of the shoulder, looking downhill. Two more steps and you’d know for yourself, I thought. the police and the ambulance got there before anyone had come out of the ravine. I said I wasn’t leaving until they found Rick, until I knew he was okay. They loaded me up and wrapped my leg and stuck an iv in my arm: no one listened. Frances watched the whole thing up close, holding my hand for an excuse. “We’ll find Rick,” she said. “You go on to the hospital with these guys. They’ll take care of you.” [ 28 ]

“You’re not coming with me?” I asked, because I felt bad about laughing at her, and it seemed like the kind of thing she might enjoy. “You want me to?” I nodded. She looked at the ambulance guy. “We have to leave right now,” he said. “Your friend could have serious internal injuries.” Frances looked at me: See? She looked into the ravine again, wondering what Tom would think, figuring someone would explain to him where she’d gone. Then she climbed up beside me in the back of the ambulance, folded herself into one of the jump seats. And then we headed downhill, faster even than Rick had been driving, but apparently safe this time. I wondered if anyone had called my dad, if he’d be there to meet me at the hospital. Ever since my mom died, we’d been moving in opposite directions. When he wasn’t at work he was home, watching tv or staring out a window—it was all the same: it had nothing to do with him. I was gone all the time now, school or something else. Because there was room enough, finally, for something else. Sometimes I tried to believe that what was happening to him would turn itself around, that he’d learn to be outside himself again. I knew he’d had to give up all his friends and anything like a life of his own a long time ago, but now my mom had pulled the handle off of everything. My dad just couldn’t figure out a new way of holding on. The only way he’d managed to get through his life so far was to focus on taking care of someone who couldn’t take care of herself. So now I was the problem, because I could. I always had. I felt sick to my stomach and closed my eyes. “Hey,” Frances said. And then, when I didn’t open them again, she spoke to the ambulance guy. “I think she’s losing consciousness.” He said nothing to her, but I felt his cold hands on my chest and my neck. Frances was holding my hand again, but she let it go when he told her to sit back, out of the way. “Talk to her,” he said. “What’s her name?” [ 29 ]

“Cindy,” Frances said. “Cindy?” he said. “Can you hear me, Cindy? I need you to stay awake for me, Cindy.” “Cindy?” Frances said. “Come on, Cindy. Talk to me, Cindy.” I didn’t remember telling her anything, but somehow she knew my name. I just wanted to sleep, to see my dad, to apologize and make him understand that there would be something else he could devote himself to, something not me. i woke up the next morning, my dad asleep in a chair, his head tipped back against the wall. I looked out the window. It was March, cold one day and warm the next. For now, rain. But you never really knew what to expect. I stayed quiet and let him sleep until a nurse came into the room. “Good morning,” she said, when she saw my eyes were open, and my dad stood up before he was even completely awake. He reached one hand toward the wall for balance. “How are you feeling?” I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought about it yet. The humming was gone, that much I noticed right away. I felt quiet, warm, still tired. “Fine,” I said. “Fine?” My dad moved toward the bed. “I don’t know. My leg doesn’t hurt anymore.” “That’s because you’re on twenty kinds of drugs,” he said. “Is Rick okay?” I asked. The nurse smiled at each of us, one at a time. “I’m going to page the doctor,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll want to know that you’re awake.” And then she left us there alone. My dad looked at my leg, at the cast around it, the sling holding my toes tipped up and pointing at the ceiling. “What were you thinking?” he asked. “I wasn’t thinking.” “Obviously.” He turned and walked three steps away from me, staring [ 30 ]

out the window. “Do you know what I thought last night, when they called me and told me you’d been brought in to the hospital?” Please don’t let her die. Please let her be all right. But I didn’t say anything. “I thought maybe you’d hurt yourself on purpose. But then I thought, ‘No, she wouldn’t do that to me. We’ve been through so much together, she knows that could finish me off.’” He turned away from the window again, the hand in his pocket jingling keys, loose change, all the collectible pieces of his life. “But that’s exactly what you did, isn’t it.” I stared hard at the ceiling. The holes in the white tile above my head changed places, swam together, broke apart and came into focus again. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say.” “Nothing you can say now will change how I felt when they told me they were taking you to the hospital.” He watched his feet walk back toward the bed. “I want you to remember that.” “I said I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen.” He looked up at me then. “You got into a car with a boy who’d been drinking beer all night. Then the two of you tried to drive down a mountain road. Exactly what part of this outcome is a surprise to you?” I sighed. “So what about Rick—is he okay?” My dad shook his head, still staring at the floor. “They were going to start looking for him again this morning, when it got light.” I bent one arm across my eyes. He went back to his chair. But we stayed there together, with nothing more to say until the doctor came in. i t rained all day; divers searched the reservoir that afternoon and came out of the water with nothing. Someone on the news said the spring runoff had forced the floodgates all the way open that week. Rick’s body might be carried miles downstream before it turned up. I slept half the day. I dreamed of things catching fire without warning, tiny spaces I wedged myself into and couldn’t get out of again. But each time I woke up, I was still a miracle—still the one in a million who would, it seemed, survive. [ 31 ]

The Girl Who Almost Died [ frances ]

tom was tall and thin and not particularly handsome, but that didn’t matter—I was short, not petite, with plain brown hair and light blue eyes. I was the kind of girl mothers would like because their sons did not. Already I knew that much about myself. At school I read through the lunch hour, outside on the lawn or in the library, depending on the weather. I’d had the same best friend since seventh grade, Annabeth Sorenson, and the two of us had grown into a kind of mutual silence that had nothing to do with being comfortable together. We were like sisters who’ve lived together all their lives, so long that their routine no longer needs to be negotiated: when the noon bell rang, we met at our locker and gathered our books and lunches. We walked out the west doors and found a tree to sit under, or stretched our legs across the cold stone banisters flanking the main stairs, two bookish gargoyles. But we were not alone, and so we were not conspicuous. Weekend evenings I worked at the Egyptian Theater, earning money toward college, scooping popcorn into cardboard tubs and ice into waxed paper cups I’d fill with soda. Between shows I talked to Wanda Moss, seventeen like me but already married, a stepmother to her husband’s two little girls, whose mother had left them behind when she’d decided to make a new start on her life a year ago. “What makes a woman leave her own kids, I don’t know,” Wanda said, [ 32 ]

telling me the story of her life the very first night we worked together. “Jamie and Jenny are beautiful girls. Good, too, no thanks to her.” “You get along with them okay? I mean, they like you and everything?” I asked her. “Sure they like me. I’m their mom.” She smiled, reached into the popcorn warming under a bright yellow lamp and stuffed a handful in her mouth. “You didn’t see that,” she said, still chewing. I liked the nights I spent with Wanda. She was the only person I knew, or the only one anywhere close to my age, who was done with high school and everything else that made up my days: parents, homework, waiting for my life to assume a shape I’d chosen for it. I forgot, sometimes, that she didn’t know much more than I did about anything, and probably less about a lot of things; I forgot that seventeen was just seventeen sometimes, even if it did mean being married already and buying shoes for someone other than yourself. “That guy,” Wanda said, pointing at Tom one night while we watched him run a sweeper over the low red carpeting. “You think he’s cute?” I shrugged. I didn’t, actually, but what I thought about any boy’s looks seemed irrelevant then. I knew he was kind; he said hello to me when I came in to work at night, smiled whenever he passed the snack bar, not necessarily at me. “He’s not bad,” I said, a thing I’d heard other girls say with a coolness that indicated the boy in question was, in fact, precisely bad. “You should go out with him,” Wanda said, as though it were all in my hands, simply a question of my making the decision. “He’s got a nice car. You don’t buy a car like that with nothing. And anyway, just look at him.” We were leaning on our elbows over the candy counter, watching his reflection in the wall of mirrors. “He looks like somebody,” she said. I thought she meant he reminded her of someone else, a name she couldn’t remember at the moment. But in fact she meant exactly what she’d said: he was the kind of boy who knew himself, what he wanted [ 33 ]

and what he didn’t. He would grow up to be that same kind of man. Tom looked up from the floor when he felt us watching him and caught my eyes in the mirror wall. When he didn’t look away again immediately, I smiled. That’s when I knew what Wanda had seen. Tom smiled back at me, and his teeth were unnaturally straight; his red hair had been parted carefully and combed to the side. He wore a white oxford shirt underneath his blazer, neatly pressed without creases—no boy knew how to iron like that. He ran the sweeper into every corner, careful in doing what his job required. It was obvious someone had already provided him with a future that had nothing to do with cleaning up after other people, and yet he did this as though it actually mattered. It occurred to me that he went to the high school across town, that he would know nothing about me other than what I decided to tell him. I had this chance to be somebody, too. So when he asked if I wanted a ride home from work one night, a week later, I said yes. It was an easy walk home, ten minutes, but I saw no point in saying this—all he’d hear was the no, and the thanks that followed would be lost, along with every other opportunity to talk to him. He’d dart away, embarrassed, before I could explain that I’d be home in the time it took to find his car, pull into the weekend traffic, and wait for a chance to make a left turn at the first intersection. “That would be nice,” I said, before I had a chance to scare myself into giving him the more likely answer. He was leaning over the candy case on his folded arms, looking down through the glass top as though he’d never even noticed the boxes of Milk Duds and Junior Mints on display below. He nodded, still considering his choices. “All right then. I’ll help you close out the snack bar later.” But I was ready by the time he came to help. When the late show drew a thin crowd, I could almost always rely on getting done early. Wanda waved me on when I looked back over my shoulder. Tom and I pushed through the glass doors together, turned the corner, headed for his car in the lot behind the theater. [ 34 ]

This was my favorite part of the evening, walking out of the red and gold lobby and into the cool black night. On the sidewalk, hands in my pockets, I could turn toward home and watch the headlights streaming into town. All those people with different plans for the evening—it made me think my life could be full of possibilities, too, though it didn’t usually feel that way. “You live on Hays, right?” he asked. I nodded. How he knew this, I didn’t know: maybe he’d followed me home one night, or looked up my name in the employee files. In any case, he knew something about me already, something I hadn’t told him. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or scared. “Do you have to go right home?” he asked then. “I mean, you know, do your mom and dad get mad if you’re not there right after work?” My mother would be standing at the window to watch for me coming up the street if I wasn’t home in the time it usually took me to get there. My father wouldn’t notice anything strange until he saw my mother waiting; then he’d look at the clock over the fireplace and wonder what was keeping me, not panicking. Not yet. Not like my mother, walking toward town to look for me, leaving my father to stay with my sister, already safe in bed. “No,” I said. “It’s no big deal. Whenever I get there is okay.” “Good,” he said. “Because I thought we could drive up to Lucky Peak or something first.” I nodded again. What I’d agreed to now was more than his plan for the evening: I’d agreed to be someone else entirely, a girl who went out with boys after work, who didn’t care what her parents would say when she came home late—a girl who went to Lucky Peak knowing exactly what would happen there, or at least what could. We had turned another corner. Now the wind blew the smell of wet concrete and traffic in our faces, and we bent our heads to it. I watched our feet moving forward beside each other, step for step. He took a warm hand from his pocket and found mine beside him. He moved ahead of me, and I held on. [ 35 ]

.  . . we drove out Warm Springs Avenue, past the old penitentiary and the new golf course, past the octagonal house I’d always watched for on this drive when I was younger, headed for a Saturday outing at the reservoir with my family. “My sister called that the stop sign house,” I told him, pointing uphill. “We’d never seen a house that looked like that. I just thought it would be the coolest place to live because whichever direction you turned, you’d be looking out a window.” “I’ve been inside that house,” Tom said. “Really?” “Yeah. The guy worked for my dad. They moved to Seattle, though, a long time ago. I don’t know who lives there now.” It occurred to me that I’d never really thought of those buildings perched on the mountainside as places where people lived; they were more a part of the landscape, something to watch for as you passed through this part of town, and so far removed from the squat little house where I lived with my own family that they seemed to be something else entirely. The fact that Tom knew people who had lived here—that he’d been inside the house itself—was enough to make him seem exotic, as though he had an accent. We drove past the Crow Inn, where my father liked to stop for a bucket of clams whenever we were on our way home from a day of swimming at Sandy Point. We drove along the river and past the dam, its white fantail of water shooting through the spillway, all the spring runoff channeled into this basin. I thought about the winter snow passing right through the middle of town, water from so many different places running together in a long gray ribbon that would finally lose itself in the darker ocean. I watched the mist bead patterns on my window, watched the beads stretch into strings that thinned and broke in the wind streaming past us. Tom kept driving, past the picnic grounds, past the swimming area, until we’d reached the observation point above the reservoir. There was nothing to see after dark, but someone had unhooked the chain meant to cordon [ 36 ]

off the parking lot for the night. It was dotted with cars parked a discrete distance from each other. “I heard there was supposed to be a big party up at the corral tonight,” he said, nosing into a space near the back of the lot. The corral was a place I’d only heard of, an abandoned ranch site in the foothills where people from high schools in the valley took kegs of beer and danced in the dark, where the police could ignore them and claim not to know what was happening. “Yeah,” I said. “I always have to work weekends, though, and then I’m so tired I just want to go home and crash.” “I know what you mean.” He turned off the engine and settled back in his seat. “Your parents have a thing about you working during the week?” I thought about this for a moment, considering the kind of parents I would have. I didn’t want them to be uncaring, only more flexible. I nodded the truth. “Mine too,” he said. “I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m getting bad grades or anything. I mean—” He shook his head and laughed without making a sound, something like a sigh he’d cut into pieces and strung back together. “All you have to do is show up and breathe and you can make B’s in high school. As long as you’re not making trouble for anyone.” He turned to look at me then, for the first time since we’d gotten into the car. His fingers worked the bottom lip of the steering wheel, fluttering a dull, frantic heartbeat against the molded plastic. “So are you going to college next year?” he asked, when I didn’t offer a response. I thought about this too, then nodded again. It was much more difficult than I’d imagined, being someone else. All the details required a kind of attention I didn’t usually give my own life, which had so far seemed to lie in front of me like a hallway with one door at the opposite end. On the other side of it was the rest of my life: college, a husband who’d be proud to have a wife as smart and sensible as I had always been. My mother had spent her whole life assuring me that a man like this existed, and at some point I’d started to believe her—to think of myself as simply waiting, not [ 37 ]

missing out on anything. But here I was: miles from town in a car with a boy I hardly knew. This was not the life I had been living only hours before. I had to come up with something that made me seem like the girl who’d smiled at him in the mirror. “I’m going to a private college in Washington,” I said, remembering one of the dozens of mass mailings I’d received that fall. “It’s insanely expensive, but my parents really want me to go to a private school. My dad went to Harvard, so he’s kind of got an attitude.” “But you go to Boise High?” I nodded again, looking away from him and into the less distracting dark while I considered how to keep this story going. “That’s just high school, so I guess he thinks it’s not such a big deal. And anyway, the only other choice is Bishop Kelly, and he wasn’t big on me getting all Catholic.” Tom drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, looked out across the black water in front of us, and nodded. Whatever I said, it wouldn’t strike him as the least bit unbelievable: he wasn’t trying to put the pieces of me together and come up with something. He wasn’t even listening, really, just being polite. “I don’t know where I’m going to college yet,” he said. “I haven’t heard anything back.” “I guess private schools do their admissions stuff earlier.” He was still nodding, as though I hadn’t said a thing. “All I know for sure is I’m going out of state. I don’t really care where. I applied to Oregon, Washington, and Utah, so I guess I’ll see where I get in. But I’m getting out of Idaho, that’s for sure. I don’t care if it means just getting some punk job. I figure if I’m going to sweep up popcorn, I can do that anywhere.” “You’d do that?” I asked. “Just move away somewhere and get a job?” “Sure. Why not?” He shrugged and looked at me. “I mean, you know, not forever. But for now, why not? I’ve got plenty of time for school if it doesn’t work out this fall. And there’s no reason for me to stay here.” He gestured out the window, at the darkness in front of us. I saw what he meant. [ 38 ]

So I pretended to be impressed by his spirit: I smiled, and I nodded, and I shrugged. Why not? I said. I could think of a hundred reasons, but I didn’t offer even one. He leaned across the gearshift and kissed me then— happy that I hadn’t contradicted him, I guessed, told him that college was important, that a boy like him should make the most of his potential. He was not the sort of boy I’d thought of kissing. The boys I’d imagined were always more hesitant, shy and grateful to find a girl like me, someone who understood what it was like to be afraid of the things other people did as casually as putting on a coat in cold weather. And Tom wasn’t really there with me, I understood. He was already counting the hours until he could leave. This would be no reason to stay. But after he’d left, I thought, I could start over with a better story, an improved version of myself to offer the boy on the other side of the door, where my real life began. I decided to think of Tom as practice, a dress rehearsal for whoever would be the real thing. w e followed a car down the mountain later, our headlights filling in the space it left behind when it passed our car on the left and pulled ahead on the highway. “That guy’s going way too fast,” Tom said, and then we watched them miss the curve. It happened exactly the way the movie version of that moment would have played: One tire left the road. The car swerved hard to compensate, and one of the back wheels came up off the ground. Then the whole car flipped, fell off the shoulder of the road, and disappeared. I could have been looking somewhere else, at the stars overhead or the valley on the other side of the highway, and missed the whole thing. Tom hit the brakes, and still we rolled right past the place where the car had gone over. We came back up the highway in reverse. I got out of the car and looked downhill, expecting bodies on the ground, someone screaming for help as the car filled with water—the movie version of the aftermath, too. But the car had stopped moving downhill before [ 39 ]

it got to the reservoir, and everything was quiet as it would have been if nothing had happened. I could see the car, though, upside down and lit from the inside, nearly flat. I turned around and looked for Tom. He was still inside his car, rummaging through the backseat for something. I thought about starting downhill and wondered if there was any point, if anyone would be there for me to help. And then I saw the girl beside the car. She called out, a word I couldn’t understand. “Hey!” I waved an arm when she turned around. “Are you all right?” Tom was beside me then, zipping his coat to the neck, looking for the person I was calling to. “Did you see how many people were in there?” “No. Someone just got out.” I pointed at the girl, still standing in the little patch of light around the car, as though she were afraid to step into what she couldn’t clearly see in front of her. “Can you climb up here on your own?” Tom yelled. “Are you okay?” She started uphill without answering. “You stay here,” he said, and he started downhill toward her. The girl kept climbing, dragging one leg behind her, clawing at the rocks and brush with both hands. She stopped for just a moment when Tom got to where she was; he pointed at me, and the girl started climbing again. Tom ran to the car and looked inside, then turned around and looked downhill, into the dark. He was thinking about the water, I knew, not even five feet from where the car had stopped. There was only so much space between here and there, only so many places a body could be. “ hey,” i said again, when the girl sat down before she got to where I could reach her. “Are you okay? You need me to help you?” She watched Tom bend to look inside the car again, avoiding the obvious. Then he disappeared into the dark, and I started downhill toward her. “Are you okay?” I asked again, when I got closer. “Something’s wrong with my leg,” she said. “I need to rest for a minute.” [ 40 ]

Then she turned her face to me, and I saw she was someone I knew. She was famous, in a way, and part of the group of people who spent their lunch hour across the street from the high school, sitting on the low retaining wall around the ymca parking lot. They smoked and laughed and threatened to push each other off the wall, but no one ever did. I knew her boyfriend, too, or knew his name. The two of them sat to the side of the larger group most of the time; he sat on the wall and she stood behind him, folded her arms around his shoulders, the back of his head against her collarbone. Once in a while he laughed at something, but for the most part the two of them were just quiet there, together and alone. They were my favorite couple at school. That was something I’d never said out loud—certainly not to Annabeth, who hardly ever looked up from her book and would never have noticed them, or given them a thought beyond that moment if she had—and it was not the kind of thing I would ever tell Cindy herself. She’d want to know why I’d been watching her, and I didn’t know how to explain that there was something in her I recognized, something that made me think it wouldn’t be so hard for us to just change places, the way identical twins do in movies, and no one’s the wiser: I could stand behind her boyfriend and wrap my arms around his neck, let her go home after school in my place, close the bedroom door behind her until it was time for dinner. And who would notice? One quiet girl or another—it hardly seemed to matter. I sat down beside her, seeing no one where Tom had been standing a moment before. I wondered if she understood what was happening. She seemed so calm. “Was it just you and your boyfriend in there?” I asked. “Yeah.” She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t even shivering, in spite of the cold. “It’s all right,” I said, but I was talking to myself. My body had taken on a life of its own, shaking so hard it was nearly impossible to keep my knees hugged tight against my chest, everything threatening to fall apart right there in front of her. It was cold enough for that to seem normal, though. [ 41 ]

She just stared at the dark ahead of us as if she were seeing something more definite there. “I’m Frances,” I said, when she didn’t say anything else, and she nodded. I wondered if she’d seen me watching them from across the street after all, or if she recognized my face from school and knew that her name wasn’t necessary. I asked her anyway. “What’s your name?” “Cindy,” she said, and she looked at me for a moment before she turned away to watch for headlights coming up the highway. I put one arm around her shoulders. “It’s going to be okay,” I said. I could feel all the muscles in her neck go tense, her shoulders lifting against the weight of my arm. Still, she didn’t move away. we went back to the car after help arrived, two men running downhill to help Tom look for Rick almost before I could explain the situation. “Give me your hand,” I said. “We’ll go sit in Tom’s car and run the heater for a while.” I offered her help, but she stayed on the ground a long moment before she finally held out a hand for me to grab. She dragged the dead weight of her left leg behind us, one arm across my shoulders. I moved a few steps uphill and tightened my arm around her waist, pulled her that small distance and started uphill again. By the time we got to the car I was sweating, ready to sit outside in the cooler air instead of running the heater. But I opened the doors on both sides of the car and helped her lift her heel to the driver’s seat, then slide her ruined leg across the gray upholstery. I started the car and closed the door behind her before I got in the back. Then I thought about Tom, stumbling cold through the dark with two strange men, looking for a boy who would more than likely be dead when they found him. He had plunged into a stranger’s disaster only because he thought it was the right thing to do. “I should probably go help them look for Rick,” I said. “Go ahead. I’m okay.” She stared out the window across from her, but the only thing to see there was her own reflection. [ 42 ]

“No. I should probably stay here with you,” I said. “You never know what might happen.” “Words of wisdom there.” She laughed then, shaking her head. “You never know what might happen.” “I just mean you could have internal injuries. Sometimes they don’t show up right away.” “I’m fine. It’s just my leg,” she said. I wanted her to know she was lucky, though. I knew it was easy to die without even meaning to. I told her the story of Jenny Morrow, my baby-sitter, who almost died when I was ten. Jenny was sixteen then, just learning to drive; it was nothing, Mrs. Morrow told my mother, hardly a dent in her father’s car. And then that night, Jenny waking up screaming; Mrs. Morrow driving blind to the emergency room, not stopping for traffic lights or stop signs, a police car behind her with the siren wailing, thinking she was drunk. But she saved her daughter. Jenny didn’t die. “She had a perforated intestine,” I said. “Because of her seatbelt. The doctor said she would have been dead the next morning if her mom hadn’t taken her to the hospital so fast.” “Well, lucky me. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt.” Cindy started laughing again, hard this time, leaning her head against the window. She held onto the back of the seat with one hand, the steering wheel with the other, bracing against the pain she caused herself. When she didn’t stop, I got out of the car and closed the door behind me. I walked out to the edge of the shoulder and looked downhill, at the patch of light around the flattened car and the blackness everywhere else. There were so many versions of Jenny’s story, The Girl Who Almost Died, and still only one of mine. i rode to the hospital with Cindy in the ambulance, and when she passed out I called her name over and over, trying to bring her back to me. But she didn’t wake up again, and when we got to the hospital my parents were waiting. The ambulance guys wheeled Cindy down the hall, away [ 43 ]

from me, and there was no time to ask somebody whether or not she’d be all right. The police had told my parents only that there’d been an accident, that I was coming to the hospital by ambulance. So when I walked into the emergency room, my mother just sat up straighter in the bright orange chair she’d occupied for the last half hour and stared as I came toward her, not trusting that what she could see for herself was true. There had been another girl. This was not my story.

“Hi,” I said, knowing only one way to begin.

[ 44 ]

The Water Year [ cindy ]

a t first my face was not a face: it was black fading blue into red, a yellow green patch of bloated skin around my right eye, the dark and itching gash of what would fade into a pale pink scar running toward my left eye from the top of my ear. “That gives you something to think about, doesn’t it,” my dad said, when he found me standing in front of the mirror again. It seemed like my face changed every few hours, colors disappearing or fading or moving from one place to another. The shape changed too, not as puffy in the places that had gone soft since that night. I had to check the mirror each morning to see what face I was carrying around in front of me, because the picture of myself I had in mind didn’t match what I saw from one day to the next. But I could tell it would settle back into my bones and be just the face I’d had before, except for that new pink line. I held my hair back and turned my left cheek forward, trying to imagine what it would look like in another month or so. “The doctor says you’ll have a pretty good scar,” my dad said. “Yeah, well. At least I won’t have to get a glass eye.” I pointed to the end of the railroad track of stitches across my skin. “Look at that. I can’t believe how close it came. Feel this.” I poked at the bone of my eye socket underneath the skin, hard and unmoving. In spite of the way I looked, [ 45 ]

nothing hurt anymore—no one believed me when I said that, but it was true. Most of the time, I looked worse than I felt. “One more millionth of an inch and that eye would be gone,” I said. My dad walked away without touching me and headed back to the living room. I took one last look at myself, a snapshot to keep until the morning. Then I turned off the bathroom light and leaned into my crutches for help getting back to the couch. My dad had carried me in from the car a week ago, and then I’d been so glad to see the scratchy gold couch again, the braided rug running laps in the middle of the living room floor, I’d forgotten how this house would feel after a week of sitting inside it with him. My mom wasn’t asleep in her room, but otherwise we were right back where we’d been a year ago. I set my crutches out of the way, propped against the wall at the end of the couch, then used both hands to lift my heavy leg to the cushions in front of me. My cast was covered in all different colors of writing, blue and black and purple and red, messages from all the people who came to see me in the hospital. I’d read them so many times I could have closed my eyes and dropped my finger anywhere, read off the message word for word. I would have known by the color and the place on my leg exactly who wrote it and what they’d said. I read my cast every day, to remind myself that there was something going on outside this house, even if I wasn’t part of it. “When are you going back to work?” I asked my dad. He shrugged, not taking his eyes from the late news while he answered. “I’m in no hurry. I’ve got vacation time I didn’t use up this year. I can stay home as long as you need me.” I turned my head and watched the rain splatter the window behind the couch. It hadn’t stopped pouring since the night Rick disappeared, not long enough to matter anyway. Everything else kept going, too: my dad had gone to school and talked to my teachers, brought my homework back with him. They claimed it was possible for me to catch up and graduate on time—I still had a month, no need to count myself out yet. I’d been [ 46 ]

behind in most of my classes before this happened, so I didn’t see how I could suddenly be on track, but that’s what they told him. I figured they were cutting me slack, because of my mom and Rick and the idea of my life in general. Maybe they were just trying to pump up the number of seniors graduating. Maybe it was more about them than me: a story of how they had helped a girl to succeed in the face of what looked like her certain failure. In any case, when my dad came home with that news I saw an open door ahead of me. I planned to make a run for it as soon as possible. “It might be easier for me to get some work done during the day if you went back,” I said. “I mean, if I was here all by myself, I wouldn’t have anything else to do but study.” “You’d probably just spend the whole day watching your game shows.” He turned to me and smiled when he said this, not meaning to be mean. Not exactly. “I’m not going to watch tv all day. I want to graduate,” I said. “I want to get done with school. And anyway, I’m doing better now. I’m getting around on my own. You don’t need to sit here with me all day.” “I don’t mind,” he said. And that was it. Because what could I say? I mind. Go back to work. Leave me alone for a minute. The truth was, I’d almost died. I couldn’t expect him to just forget about that. As long as he could see me right there in front of him, at least he knew what wasn’t happening. At least he knew I was safe. When we still used to fight about whether I was going out with Rick at night, I’d thought about reminding him that my mom died right here at home: he could have watched her walk down the hall and go into the bathroom if she’d done it half an hour earlier, before he left for work that day, and he wouldn’t have had any reason to think about it twice. Not until he heard the gun go off, anyway. But I never said that to him. Everyone deserves to have a place where they feel safe, and he felt it here, with the two of us sitting together in [ 47 ]

a room where he could see anything that might be coming at him. He knew we weren’t completely sheltered; a storm could blow through, the roof could fall right in on us. Things like that happened sometimes. But at least we’d probably die together then—and if we didn’t, he could blame my death on the kind of bad luck no one brings on himself he fell asleep in his recliner before the news was over, the way he did every night. He hadn’t slept in the bedroom for years, or not that I knew of anyway—any time I saw him sleeping, he was in that chair. I didn’t know if it bothered him to think about sleeping in what we’d always called my mom’s room, or if he felt guilty for sleeping better now that she was gone. He didn’t have to listen for her getting out of bed in the middle of the night, wake up enough to wonder what she might be doing. Now, if he woke up in the dark, he’d grab the remote and switch to the Weather Channel, push back in his chair and watch the maps change in the space between his feet until he fell asleep again. “Just wanted to see what the weather’s going to be like today,” he said, if I woke up first and found him sitting there. Like I wouldn’t even wonder why he couldn’t just open the curtains and take a look. That night I got up while the blond guy rattled off basketball scores. I went to the closet, took out my raincoat and the black umbrella my dad used every day when he walked to the curb to get the mail. Then I wondered how I’d hold an umbrella and use my crutches with the same pair of hands, and I put it back. I flipped up the hood of my raincoat instead, dragged myself through the kitchen, and opened the back door as slowly as I could, playing out the long, high squeak in the hinge. When I finally got outside, I dug in with the rubber tips of my crutches so they wouldn’t slide across the wet grass and leave me sitting in the middle of the yard, where I’d have to call for him or be stuck until he came outside in a panic, looking for me. I walked around the side of the house, past the flower beds where this year’s tulips had already come and gone, down the gravel drive and all the [ 48 ]

way out to the road before I admitted to myself that there was nowhere else to go. At night, the lights from everything else made it clear how much space there was between us and the rest of the world. The buses going into town didn’t run this late, and even the people who’d built a new house up the road from ours, shrunk down to a porch light in the dark, might as well have been five miles away. I stood there beside my mom’s peony bushes and waited to see if a car would come along. It wasn’t likely, especially this late, this far from anything anyone might be doing after dark. Only a month ago, I would have been waiting here for Rick. I’d have gone to the phone in the kitchen, dialed his number and let it ring once, a signal so I wouldn’t have to talk. He’d be telling his mom he was leaving while I went to the closet, starting his car while I put on my jacket, heading toward my house by the time I’d made it out the back door. And then I’d be waiting by the mailbox when he got here, stamping my feet and blowing on my hands, or just enjoying the dark and the damp night air until I climbed into his car, the two of us flying down the road like someone might actually try to stop us. Whenever I thought about him now, of course, I had to wonder where he was exactly—miles away, probably, in a part of the river I’d never seen. Or maybe not that far from where he went in, hidden by rocks or a sunken log. So I tried not to think about Rick at all, for what good that did. Even when I could keep myself away from him during the day, he came back at night: his hair dark and dripping water, skin like melting ice, just that gray and cold and fragile, breaking into pieces when I touched him. a t first they’d talked about it all the time, on the news and in the paper: the search continues, still no sign of local teen. But after a while, Rick turned into one of those people who just disappears. The guy who goes hunting and doesn’t come home. The woman who tells her husband she’s going to the store for a gallon of milk and never makes it there. Nobody ever knows for sure what happened, but at some point you have to stop trying to figure it out. They call off the search, quit trying to think of new [ 49 ]

places to look. Rick would be officially dead when no one had seen him for a year, but it took only the first few days for me to figure out that nothing else made any sense. My friend Mitzi had been the first person to come by the hospital and sign my cast—she was the one who told me Rick’s mom was having a memorial service, just her and his sisters and a few other people who’d known him all his life, including Mitzi’s boyfriend, Joe. He’d been Rick’s best friend since second grade. Rick’s mom hadn’t called to tell me about this, so I wondered if she knew I was still in the hospital. She might have thought that would keep me from coming and decided not to make me feel bad for missing it. That was one possibility. “It’s like she just decided that he’s dead,” Mitzi said, talking down at my cast. “And they haven’t even found his body yet. Nobody knows for sure what happened to him.” “You have any other ideas?” I asked, and she looked up from her purple message. Cinful girl, your wicked ways finally caught up with you. Be careful out there! Mitzi. After her name she’d drawn a five-petaled flower with class of ’82 in the middle circle. “I just mean,” she said, “it’s wrong, you know? Until you’re absolutely sure.” “How much more sure can you get? He got thrown out of a totaled car. It’s been two weeks. If he’s not dead, where do you think he is—camping?” Mitzi shrugged, clicking down the green tab at the top of her four-color pen. She concentrated on drawing a graceful stem for her smiley flower. “You don’t seem very upset, for someone whose boyfriend is missing,” she said. Then she looked up at me, this time without actually lifting her face. People could say that kind of thing to me, and I never got mad. If I did, I knew, I’d be mad all the time. “I wish Rick wasn’t dead,” I said. “But wishing that doesn’t change anything. I’m not going to sit here and pretend it isn’t true, because it is. You know it, and so does his mom, and so do I.”

[ 50 ]

She shrugged again, put her pen back in her purse. “If he was my boyfriend, I’d believe he was okay until I knew something different for sure. Until they actually found his body. If he came back, I’d want to be able to say that I never lost hope.” “You could say that anyway,” I pointed out. “But it wouldn’t be true.” I sighed and looked past Mitzi, out the window. “If your boyfriend turned up alive after two weeks missing,” I told her, “nobody would care about what you thought.” Mitzi stood up and waited there for a minute, arms crossed over her chest, black purse hanging from her shoulder. She tipped her head to the side and looked at me the way a lot of people had, at one time or another—like somehow the person she’d thought I was had been replaced by a thing she needed to stare at until she’d puzzled it out. “I have to go,” Mitzi said, and started rummaging for her keys. “I have to work tonight.” “Okay. Say hi to everybody. Tell them I miss them.” She nodded and gave me a good-bye wave without lifting her arm. Her fingers wiggled more from habit than on purpose. I knew she’d forget to tell anybody what I’d said, but asking her to do it seemed like the important thing. i thought about calling Rick’s mom for a long time before I actually did. Then we ran out of frozen food, and my dad had to go to the grocery store one morning, and I knew I was guaranteed at least an hour of my own. So I took the receiver off the wall and sat down in the kitchen, at the table. I kept my thumb on the disconnect button, though. She’d never come to see me at the hospital. I figured she’d had enough things on her mind without adding me to the list—I wasn’t even her kid. I’d thought she might call, though, just to see how I was doing. But so far, I’d heard nothing. Though that didn’t mean she hadn’t called, I reminded

[ 51 ]

myself. It would have been like my dad to toss a message he didn’t think I should receive. But I didn’t want her to think I’d forgotten about her completely. I liked Rick’s mom. She never seemed to mind when I was at her house, no matter how much of the time or how late at night. She’d come home after working the second shift, at eleven o’clock, and I’d be sitting at one end of the couch with Rick’s head in my lap, Rick sound asleep, and she’d act like of course I was there, where else would I be. She told me once she thought I was good for Rick because I helped him keep his stuff together. I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but I thanked her for saying it. I was just glad she didn’t mind me hanging around her house. She worked at the Micron plant, which kept producing computer parts all hours of the day and night. I couldn’t remember which days she had off or what shift she’d been working the last time I saw her, so I had to take the chance of waking her up. She answered right after the first ring, sounding hoarse. “This is Cindy,” I said. “Did I wake you up?” “No, I just got home.” She cleared her throat, then didn’t say anything else for a minute. “So how are you doing? Out of the hospital?” “About a week ago. I can’t go back to school yet, though.” “Well, that’s too bad.” I heard the springs in her cracked green vinyl chair wheeze when she sat down, imagined her swinging her feet to rest on top of the flowered hassock. “Then again, you probably don’t mind too much. Kind of like an early summer vacation. Shitty vacation weather, though.” I laughed, a tight little sound that got stuck in the back of my throat and turned into a cough. “It’s not really much of a vacation. I’m trying to catch up on my work for school so I can graduate next month.” “Well good for you, honey. You always had your head on straight.” I was having a hard time thinking of things to say. She wasn’t giving me much help, but it wasn’t like she’d asked me to call and remind her that Rick was dead. “I just thought I should call you,” I said. “I mean— [ 52 ]

since I haven’t talked to you at all. I’m sorry. You probably just want to go to bed.” “It’s all right,” she said. I could hear a game show in the background on her end of the line, bells ringing, the crackle of applause, someone celebrating their good fortune. “I’m just sitting here anyway. I have to wind down for a while before I can sleep.” Rick had two sisters, both of them older, one of them married to an air force guy. The other one lived in Seattle and hardly ever came home to visit. Still, I thought, it must have been nice for his mom to have them to think about when Rick disappeared. At least she still had kids. Not that one could fill in for the other, but at least she didn’t lose out completely. She was still somebody’s mother. “I’m really sorry about what happened,” I said, when I couldn’t think of any other way to get there. “It’s not your fault, honey,” she said, after waiting through a minute when I didn’t say anything else and kept wondering what more I should be saying. But it was my fault, and I knew that—he’d been drinking and I hadn’t had a beer all night. It hadn’t even occurred to me to say I’d drive us home. He always drove. Not that he would have let me touch his car, of course, not in a million years. But I could have offered. Then, at least, I could tell her I’d done my best to keep him safe. Instead I’d been sitting there beside him in the car, thinking about whatever it was that had seemed important at the time, something I couldn’t even remember now. “You still there?” she asked. “Yeah, I’m here.” She sighed. “Honey, look. I’ve known so many kids who died like this, because they did something stupid. This time it’s my kid. And I’m really sad, you know? He was a sweet boy. I miss him a lot.” She stopped then, took a long breath. “And I miss you too. I miss having you around here. But that’s the kind of thing I can’t help. I really am glad you’re okay, but [ 53 ]

talking to you—all it does is remind me that he’s not here. This house feels pretty empty, but that’s how it works.” “I know,” I said. “I just wanted—” I’d halfway expected her to be mad at me, just for being there when it happened, or for being here now. But she wasn’t mad. It was worse than that. I looked out the window behind the kitchen sink and watched the rain chase itself down the glass. “I’m really sorry,” I said again. “I guess I just wanted to say that to you.” “Well, I appreciate that.” She turned off the television and her end of the line went quiet all of a sudden. I could hear her pull a tissue out of the box I knew was sitting on the end table beside her, blow her nose. “When’s graduation?” she asked, her voice pinched off in her hand. “I don’t know exactly. The end of May sometime.” “Well, you let me know,” she said. “I’ll be there.” She didn’t mean it. I knew that even then. Still, it was a nice thing to say. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll let you know.” “Hang in there, honey.” It seemed like I should have been the one telling her to hold on, trying to convince her that things would get easier the farther we moved away from this. Someday we’d be able to talk about Rick the way you talk about anyone else who isn’t here—in the past tense, which is how you keep reminding yourself that you have to leave them behind. She blew her nose again. “I’m going to get some sleep now. You take care.” “Okay. You too.” I hung up the phone and sat down at the table again, listening to the refrigerator hum, a noise you never hear unless you’re completely alone. a week later my dad was back at work and I was at school again, handing in the homework I’d done every day to keep myself from thinking. But then there was more to do, all the work they’d done while I was catching up to where they’d been before I left. By the time I got through that [ 54 ]

first day back, I had more work still to think about than what I’d already finished. I was looking at a good month of nothing but American Government and Personal Math, which made me happier than you might expect. I liked already knowing where my head would be this time tomorrow, full of Watergate and tax forms, things people could explain to me if I couldn’t work them out myself. Coming back was the same as before, except that this time I was used to being looked at. I started out doing the same things I’d always done: I smoked a cigarette with Mitzi in the parking lot before the first bell, stared out the window and watched the rain slowing down during math until the teacher called my name. The difference was, I had the answers he wanted from me now. Also, Rick wasn’t there to walk with me to class or sit on the retaining wall in front of me during the lunch hour. I stood in my usual spot, to the side of everyone else, but I didn’t feel like I was coming back to something: I felt like I was the only naked person in the bunch. The sun had come out, finally, and I felt the heat on my whole chest. I folded my arms and tucked my hands underneath because I didn’t know what else to do with them. Then a car squealed down the street in front of us, and I looked up at the sound. Across the street, I saw the girl from that night sitting on one of the concrete banisters beside the main stairs. She was wearing that same stretchy white headband, her face as clean and round as the moon. I’d forgotten all about her until then. And maybe that’s why I hadn’t realized how coming back here would be different. But now I understood. “Where are you going?” Mitzi asked when I stepped into the street, and I didn’t even bother to answer her. I walked toward the girl without thinking about what I’d say when I got there, then stood in front of her until she lowered her book to see who was shading her face from the sun. “Hi,” I said. “Remember me?” “Sure,” she said, and closed the book in her lap, one finger still marking her place. “How are you?” Her friend on the other banister was looking at me from behind her own book. I could tell, even with my back to her. [ 55 ]

“On the mend,” I said. “I got my big cast off yesterday, so now it’s just this little one. The walking miracle, that’s me.” “Good,” she said. “I’m glad you’re doing okay.” “How’s your boyfriend?” I asked. The friend closed her book now, too, and set it down on the concrete beside her leg. It scraped along the grit the rain had left behind, a surprising sound. “He’s fine,” she said, and then she looked up the street, like maybe she expected to see him coming toward us. “Well, good,” I said. “When you see him again, tell him I said thanks for stopping to help. A lot of people wouldn’t want to get involved with someone else’s mess.” “I’ll do that.” Then I felt like I should apologize for something—for not calling to tell her that I was alive, maybe, or even to thank her for going to the hospital with me. It seemed like a long time since we’d talked to each other, like she was someone I’d known really well a long time ago, when we were little kids. The truth is, I didn’t even remember her name. That whole night had boiled itself down to a black dot I could put on the calendar, a thing to mark the day Rick died. “I heard they couldn’t find your boyfriend,” she said, to fill the space I’d left in the conversation. “I’m really sorry.” All I had to say was thanks, but I couldn’t even trust myself that far. I nodded instead. I looked hard at the toes sticking out the open end of my clean new cast. I hadn’t let anybody write on this one. I liked the way it looked. “Actually,” I said. “I came over here to ask you something. Are you any good at math?” “Pretty good,” she said. “It’s not like you owe me a favor or anything—actually, I guess I owe you a big one. But I’m really behind because I missed so much school, and I totally suck at math.” [ 56 ]

She was nodding before I’d even finished talking. “Sure,” she said. “I can help. Or, you know—I can try.” I nodded again. Then I glanced over my shoulder, across the street, where Mitzi was still standing with everyone else I’d left behind. All their faces had turned to watch what I was doing, what I’d do next. It occurred to me that I could just turn around and cross the street again, go back to my friends and make a joke about this girl with the book—a girl who didn’t seem to know how strange she was. They’d let it go. I was famous, after all, for doing things that made no sense. Or I could just stay here. There was no reason, really, to walk away from her, the only person in the world who seemed to understand that when you say I’m sorry, you’re also saying I know you’re sorry, too.

[ 57 ]

Moraine [ frances ]

you’ve heard this story too: the shy girl sitting by herself with a book gets noticed by someone important. Suddenly she becomes a model or an actress or a singer, something other people want to be. The day Cindy found me was like that. Something changed forever, and I hadn’t done a thing to deserve it, or nothing other than what I’d been doing every other day. I could see it, though—in the way she looked at my feet, not my face, when she asked if I’d help her get caught up with her math homework, the way she didn’t look for her friends when the bell rang to bring us all in from lunch. The girl she had always been with before this came across the street by herself and waited in front of the glass doors, expecting Cindy to catch up with her, I suppose, go inside as usual, and explain what had just happened. Annabeth didn’t wait for me—she walked past Cindy’s friend and pushed through the doors by herself, and that’s when the other girl fell in behind her, before the doors could close again. I had only imagined what it felt like to be her, to be seen. Now I knew: walking beside her in the hallway felt like living out that dream of being naked in public. Everybody looked at us, as though there were actually something to see. I was used to being invisible as air, always moving, finding the open spaces in a crowded hallway and slipping by unnoticed. Now, though, people saw us coming and made room for us to pass. They were afraid of her, all of them. She knew things they didn’t want [ 58 ]

to know about themselves. I’d been afraid of her too, though not for the same reasons: they were afraid that what they saw in her was also somewhere inside them, just waiting for a chance to make itself known. My brand of strangeness wasn’t as visible—I had gone completely unnoticed for years, its own kind of oddity. People looked at me now, for the first time, and didn’t even recognize my face. I might as well have been the ghost of a long-dead girl, come back to keep her company. Before that night at the reservoir, I had only been afraid that she would catch me looking at her from across the street during the lunch hour, laugh or point or do something to mark the fact that I envied her openly, every day. I wanted her life—the quiet ease with a raucous crowd of friends, the gentle boyfriend who stood to the side of everything with her rather than demanding attention from anyone else. But after that night, after she’d talked to me and let me keep her company against the cold and dark, I’d been afraid that she would forget about me again—that the only night of my life that stood out from all the others would mean nothing to her, in the end. I knew she had been in the hospital for weeks. I hadn’t expected her to call me at home. But when I saw her go across the street with her friends that day, I kept my eyes focused on the book in front of me. We were exactly where we’d been before the accident, though she was by herself now, and I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever thought it would be otherwise. And then, suddenly, she was crossing the street again, coming right toward me. I watched her out of the tops of my eyes, my head still tipped down to read. It seemed crucial, for some reason, that I not be eager, or even prepared to speak. I waited until she was standing right in front of me and then I looked up, surprised. “Hi,” she said. “Remember me?” “Sure,” I said, ever casual. Later, I said Sure again when she asked me to help her catch up in her math class. It seemed like the right response, nonchalant but sincere. Then she walked with me to my locker and waited while I collected my [ 59 ]

things for fifth period. Annabeth had already come and gone, the book she’d been reading at lunch tucked into its usual corner of her shelf. I felt sad for a moment, seeing it there; Annabeth was still the same person she had been an hour ago, through no fault of her own. Then I followed Cindy to her locker, waited for her to retrieve the book she used for Advanced Typing. “My dad always thought I should be taking harder classes,” she said, holding up her book by way of illustration. “But right now, I think we’re both pretty glad I never listen to him.” I nodded. “My mom thinks I should be taking harder classes too.” I held up my calculus book and shrugged. Cindy raised her eyebrows. “Are there harder classes than that?” she asked, and I shrugged again and rolled my eyes. She laughed, just briefly, at this failure to understand the complexity of being me. she met me at my locker every morning after that. Sometimes we walked downtown for lunch—she never had money, but I didn’t mind paying for both of us when she’d let me. Sometimes we just shared the lunch my mom had packed that morning. We sat by ourselves on the back steps of the school building, facing a row of old houses, as far from our former lives as we could get without leaving campus. One afternoon we walked to the Fanci Freeze after school and sat at a picnic table, drinking milkshakes and eating fries like we’d been doing this together for years, not weeks. We’d never discussed the accident or Rick or her mom; most of the time we worked through math problems she couldn’t solve by herself, or we talked about starting college in the fall. I had a scholarship to Boise State; Cindy was planning to find a job after graduation and put herself through school. It was as if we had no history that stretched beyond the day she found me. She wanted to know about Tom, though, where we’d met and why she never saw us together. “He goes to Borah,” I said, poking my straw up and down, trying to get [ 60 ]

my shake to melt enough to drink. “We both work at the Egyptian, downtown. That’s where I met him.” She nodded and poked a fry into a puddle of ketchup. “He’s a senior too?” I nodded back. “He’s going to college out of state, though. He won’t be around much longer.” “That’s too bad,” she said. “Not really.” Cindy looked at me and I shrugged, looked away. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. He’s nice enough.” “But not the love of your life, is what you’re saying. You won’t be crying when he’s gone.” She nodded and turned her attention back to the notebook on the table in front of her, scowling at the numbers on the page as if they offended her in some way. “Oh well. Nothing wrong with having some fun while it lasts.” Another sort of girl would have laughed at me for thinking that I had a choice and wondered why I didn’t fall to my knees in gratitude when a boy this smart and kind and not actually painful to look at showed some interest. Wanda certainly couldn’t imagine what I was holding out for. It’s not like there’s a cattle path to your front door, she’d said one night, as if this proved something. And she was right about that, of course, so I couldn’t argue. I went to the bathroom then, and when I came back the dark-haired girl who used to stand across the street with Cindy was sitting on my side of the picnic table—not in my place, but next to it. I thought about going back inside again, washing my hands, killing time. If Cindy was going to leave with her, all right. I wouldn’t have been surprised. But I didn’t want to watch it happen. Then Mitzi saw me standing there, and Cindy saw the look on her face and turned around to look for me. She raised her eyebrows. The question on her face was clear: A little help here, please? So I walked toward the table, sat down beside the girl and smiled. “Hi,” I said. [ 61 ]

“This is Mitzi,” Cindy said. Mitzi didn’t say anything, but she nodded at the table. I raised my Styrofoam cup, a sort of silent toast—to what, who knows. We weren’t celebrating, that much was obvious. Cindy was out of fries, so she reached across the table into my basket and claimed a few for herself. I slapped her hand, but jokingly, and she smiled before she stuffed them all into her mouth. “Anyway,” she said, after she’d chewed for a while, a vague transition from whatever she and Mitzi had been talking about before I arrived. She flicked a finger against the notebook in front of her. “Personal Math. I’m really far behind. And if I don’t pass, I won’t graduate.” “Yeah,” Mitzi said. “Well, whatever. If you want to come, we could give you a ride.” She looked at her watch then. “I’ve got to get home anyway. See you at the locker, I guess.” She stood up and stepped over the picnic bench, turned the corner and headed up State Street. I watched her disappear around the side of the building before I said, “I’m sorry. I guess I interrupted something.” “No,” Cindy said. “We don’t have a lot to talk about anymore. I don’t have a boyfriend.” She shrugged. Apparently the fact of Tom didn’t count for much. He was never around to get in the way, and I talked about him only when she asked. and in fact, it was nothing at first: I made room for his tongue in my mouth, then his hands in my hair. Later, Tom’s hands moved under my shirt and followed the path of my skin until they found whatever part of me they were looking for. We lay in the backseat of his car or outside in the grass, on the nights it stayed warm after dark, and the shape of his body pressed down and into mine until, finally, he couldn’t take all of it back again at the end of the night. Whenever he dropped me off at home, I left him parked at the corner. He watched my reverse image leaving in the rearview mirror; he made sure I got to the door before he pulled his car away from the curb, waving [ 62 ]

at my small reflection as it shrank and finally disappeared. And once he was gone, I could look at myself in the bathroom mirror, after I’d taken a shower, and recognize the girl I was. I could go to my room and shut the door and pick up a book, and no one ever questioned whether it was possible that I was different, somehow, from the girl who had done these same things so many times before. I was different, though, in so many ways I found it difficult to believe there was room enough for two girls in one body. Before, I had only been the one who lay in bed at night and thought about the things Tom and I did now. That girl didn’t know how it felt to tell a boy what he could touch, or how difficult it was, sometimes, to know when to stop. She didn’t know how it felt to lie beside someone who wanted her. She didn’t even know she had something a boy could want so much. I knew these things now. What I didn’t know was how the body tells its own version of every story, a version over which the mind has no control. a fter the first time , after he’d pressed himself inside as far as the body allows, I went home and showered and went to bed, like always. Then I spent the whole night watching the light grow stronger through the blinds at my window. Something like this must be visible, I thought; surely my mother would see I was different, would know that we had something in common now. But I listened to my heart, my breath, these sounds I’d heard a million times, and nothing seemed different at all. I was exactly the same girl I’d been yesterday, stretched out on the same bed under the same pink candy-striped blanket I’d had since I was ten years old, in the same room where I’d imagined a boy would love me someday. And now he had. So I was the same, and I was not. Whenever Tom called, I told my mother it was Wanda and pretended to make plans to cover her shift at work. I left the house in my uniform and changed into regular clothes at the theater, Wanda waving good-bye with one hand and counting back change with the other. [ 63 ]

“What did I tell you?” she asked me once, while I waited for him beside the ticket booth. It was a slow night, a Tuesday comedy. Only a few people needed cheering up so early in the week. “Was I right or was I right?” “He’s leaving for school at the end of the summer,” I reminded her. “So he says. Just you wait and see.” The thought that he might decide not to leave hadn’t yet presented itself as a possibility, and just for that moment I considered this: I thought about the summer still in front of us, the warm nights, the stars overhead and the grass under my back. In itself, a pleasant thought. But I didn’t love him, and I didn’t want to have to tell him this. I’d learned to be in the moment and to look past it at the same time, to focus on another moment, far removed, when I might need to know what I was doing. I might be called upon to show someone else how this was done. That sort of boy would appreciate my patience, be indebted to me for loving him in spite of his inexperience. I had been chosen; now I could choose. And that sort of boy would love me, not because of what I didn’t know, but because I didn’t care that he knew less. Through the glass front doors of the theater I watched Tom pull up to the curb, his left arm a backwards L in the open window frame. He wasn’t looking at the doors, waiting for me; he was looking the other way, across the street, at a girl in purple running shorts and a tight white tank top knotted beneath her small, high breasts. The muscles in her stomach looked like fingers under her skin. He wasn’t waiting for anyone, just sitting there briefly, the way he would sit at a stoplight, because he had to. And then I relaxed. I knew: he was already gone. But when he left for good, when I’d disappeared into his rearview mirror for the very last time, I would be someone different from the girl I had been that first night he drove me out to the reservoir. I had him to thank for this. So I pushed through the glass door, its metal frame flashing in the late day sun. He turned to watch me walking toward him and gave me the same smile he’d given the girl across the street, and I gave it back to him.

[ 64 ]

. . . s i nce that first night at the reservoir, I was officially never seeing Tom again. As far as I could tell, this only served to make me more attractive. I know it did the same for him. My mother said she didn’t trust a boy who didn’t care what a mother might be thinking when her daughter didn’t come right home after work at night, and I didn’t tell her that he’d asked, I’d lied. I saw the irony of our circumstance: Tom was precisely the kind of boy my mother would have wanted me to date. I didn’t want her to trust him. So when he called and my mother answered, he just hung up. “Anyone there?” she said, or “Wrong number, I guess,” the whole thing forgotten before the receiver went back to its cradle. Sometimes I called him back a few minutes later. More often now, I waited until he called again. “Hi,” he said. “Hi Wanda,” I said, smiling at the receiver, because my mother had no idea. She’d be sitting at the kitchen table, shaving carrot curls or carving radish roses, watching them bloom in a bowl of cold water. My mother believed in the importance of presentation. “Jamie sick again?” “I was thinking we could go get something to eat, if you haven’t had dinner already. Maybe go to the park.” Go to the park was what he always said. “Okay.” My mother looked up. I covered the receiver with my hand. “Her little girl gets these terrible ear infections all the time.” “Tell her to elevate the baby’s mattress on one end,” she said. “It helps the ear to drain. That always worked for Robin.” “What time are you on?” I asked into the phone. “Six okay?” “That’s fine,” I said, and got up off the couch. “I’ll be there.” “That poor girl,” my mother sighed, after I’d hung up the telephone. “She’s just seventeen?” “Eighteen. Her birthday’s a week before mine.”

[ 65 ]

“Even so.” My mother shook her head. “Eighteen is awfully young to be dealing with a sick child. She should be out having fun.” I shrugged and wandered over to the table, stuck my finger through a carrot curl and wore it like a ring before I slipped it into my mouth. I wondered what my mother meant when she said having fun, and I wondered if she thought of me as the sort of girl who had it. I couldn’t imagine my mother at eighteen, though of course I’d seen pictures—a younger version of her in white capri pants and canvas sneakers, a dark striped top, posed beside her own mother on the front porch of her old house. A girl named Helen Harrison, living with her family. All those pictures were in black and white, though, so whenever I thought of her life before me, I thought of it as an old movie I might have seen once, a long time ago. “Wanda doesn’t mind staying home,” I said, before I headed down the hall to take a shower. “She loves those kids.” “Well of course she does,” my mother said, as if there were no other possibility. i felt dizzy and started crying while I took a shower, and then I threw up in the sink. I rinsed the white porcelain clean, and I cried again. I wasn’t stupid, but knowing the truth and giving in to it are different things. I had known for some time that this wasn’t food poisoning, motion sickness, nerves, the flu. And now there was nothing I could do, no bargain to make with myself or God that would change anything. I held my wrists under a hard stream of cold, cold water until I was sure I’d be able to keep it together. Then I put drops in my eyes and covered the red rims with black pencil. “What are you doing?” Robin asked. She pushed open the bathroom door, leaning against the doorframe, holding a Barbie in one hand and rolling a bobby pin between the thumb and forefinger of the other. Locking doors was a waste of time when she was home, but I locked them anyway, on principle. “I’m getting ready for work,” I said. “Get out.” I tried to close the door [ 66 ]

again, but she wouldn’t step out of the way. “Get out,” I said, “or I’ll smash your face in this door.” “I’ll scream,” she said, not the least bit afraid, not even looking at me, lifting her hand and letting the Barbie dangle by its flossy hair. “If you do anything to me, I’ll tell Mom. You’ll get grounded.” “She can’t ground me. I’m eighteen. I don’t even have to live here anymore, not unless I want to. If Mom tried to ground me, I’d just move out.” I said things like that to Robin all the time now, even though, strictly speaking, they weren’t true: there was nowhere else for me to go if I did move out, and if my mother had said I was grounded, I would have stayed home without a fight. But Robin didn’t know this. She knew I could drive a car, and I was graduating high school in another week, which meant I didn’t have to go to school anymore unless I wanted to. From her perspective, I must have seemed about as grown up as anybody gets. I pushed past her and went down the hall to my room, shut the door behind me quietly. My mother would have come down the hall to investigate a slam. I didn’t have time to bother with jamming my chair below the knob, but I wasn’t going to be there long enough for it to matter. I pulled my snack bar uniform out of the closet and heard the hall door creak open. “Are you sick?” Robin asked. I stepped into the closet, behind the door, and pulled my snack bar shirt over my head before I stuffed a clean pair of jeans into the backpack I took with me everywhere now. I didn’t know how I’d get another shirt from my dresser drawer without her seeing me and asking why I needed two, so I pulled a white blouse from a hanger instead. “I said, are you sick?” she asked again, before I came out of the closet. “What are you jabbering about?” I stuck my head around the door. “I heard you barfing in the bathroom,” Robin said. “I was not barfing.” “Yes, you were. I can hear.” She looked right at me then. “You barf all the time.” [ 67 ]

“If I barfed all the time,” I said, “Mom would have to take me to the hospital. You can die from barfing too much.” “Well,” Robin said slowly—I could almost see her taking a mental count of how many times she’d thrown up lately. “Not all the time.” I zipped my backpack. Lying to Robin was harder than lying to Tom: she listened to me, remembered everything. And she could tell when I was making something up as I went along—Robin asked questions that turned you back into your story, made you consider what was plausible, made you take too long for the answer to be as available as the truth always is. Now I had to think of something that let her be right and still come to a different conclusion, something to explain how a person could throw up fairly often and not need to tell her mother about it. “Sometimes I just eat too fast,” I said. “Like now—I’m in a hurry to get to work, and Mom made me eat dinner before I leave. It makes me sick, so I throw up.” “What are we having for dinner?” Robin asked. I dove into the closet, stalling. “What did you eat?” she asked, louder. I came out zipping my snack bar pants. “I don’t know what you and Dad are having for dinner, but she made me eat a tuna salad sandwich.” She stuck out her tongue. “I hate stinky tuna. Especially that kind with the pickles and eggs mixed into it.” Robin ate her meals clockwise, working her way through a circle of small, neat piles that never touched each other. She went through phases where she ate only white foods: milk, bread with the crusts cut off, mashed potatoes with salt (no butter), certain kinds of cheese. “I knew you were barfing,” she said. “Well, can you blame me?” I smiled what I hoped was the sisterconspirator smile, something I’d never tried on her before. “Please don’t tell Mom. She’ll think I’m really sick and make me go to the doctor.” I didn’t often ask favors of Robin, but I thought I could afford to take a chance this time. She was allergic to everything—corn, chocolate, pol[ 68 ]

len, dust—she was the only person I knew who was actually allergic to air. A big filter humming in the corner of her bedroom kept things clean enough to let her sleep through the night without a coughing fit. All her stuffed animals had been moved out of her room and given away. She’d spent more time in doctors’ offices than in school that year, being poked and waiting for the skin on her back to rise in angry red welts that itched for days. Still, she had to consider what I’d asked of her. “Okay,” she said, finally. “If you bring me home a box of Hot Tamales, I won’t tell.” “Thanks.” “A big box,” she said. “From the theater. Not the little ones, like at Circle K.” “Deal.” She stuck out her hand as I passed her in the hallway, and we shook on it. I wanted to laugh. Sometimes I forgot she was ten years old. The fact that she was almost as tall as me made her seem older inside, too. “ y ou’re wearing too much makeup,” my mother said, when I came into the kitchen. “I think it looks good.” “It looks cheap.” She turned away from her salad long enough to rinse her hands and look at me again. “Maybe Cindy’s father doesn’t mind having a daughter who looks like a prostitute, but I certainly do. Go wash your face.” “I’ll wash it off when I get to the theater. I’m going to be late as it is.” The back door slammed before she had the chance to tell me what people would think when they saw me walking down the street with all that makeup on. She didn’t need to tell me: when I’d brought Cindy home after school a week ago, what my mother thought was just as clear as anything she might have said about the dark roots in Cindy’s blond hair, the black eyeliner, the long, flowered skirt covering her cast, and the scuffed black boot on her other foot. If we’d seen her on the street while we were [ 69 ]

driving together somewhere, my mother would have pointed her out to me and said, “That girl could be very pretty if she’d just stop trying to look so tough.” What she said to Cindy was “It’s very nice to meet you. Why don’t you girls settle down in the dining room, and I’ll bring you a snack.” We spread out a month’s worth of her math homework in front of us: tax forms and family budget sheets, a little stack of paper stapled and folded to look like a checkbook. My mother brought out glasses of iced tea and a plate of tiny cookies shaped like lemon wedges, sparkling with sugar. “What’s all this?” she asked. “Personal Math,” Cindy said. “I’ve missed a lot of school.” She knocked on her cast, by way of explanation. “Are you taking this class, Franny?” My mother liked to ask a question even when she knew the answer, just to be reassured. Cindy laughed. “This is a bonehead class,” she said. “Right now I’m just trying to graduate. Fran’s being nice and helping me get caught up on everything.” “Well,” she said. “That’s very nice of you, Franny. I’m sure Cindy’s grateful to have such a good friend.” Cindy nodded on cue. Then my mother took Robin and went to the grocery store—afraid of what she’d see or hear, I thought, afraid of what might happen if Robin saw Cindy sitting next to me at our dining room table and started to think she was just like us, just another kind of girl you could be. “Your mom’s okay,” Cindy said, after they’d left. She didn’t look up from the problem she was working on. “You said she was weird.” “She is weird.” I knew my mother didn’t compare to hers on that score, but it didn’t change the fact that most of what my mother did or said made no sense to me. Cindy nodded, then turned the page in her notebook and looked out the window. She stared at the swing set in our backyard. ““My dad doesn’t [ 70 ]

want me to move out after graduation, but I can’t live with him anymore. He makes me crazy. It’s like he wants me at home all the time and I’m not supposed to go anywhere or do anything, even though all we ever do is watch tv. He doesn’t have any friends. I guess he’s just lonely when I’m not around.” She shrugged and looked back to her notebook then. “Anyway, I can’t stay there anymore. I’m getting an apartment.” She was talking to the page in front of her, running a pencil around the prepunched holes, making them look bigger than they were. “I don’t know if you’re planning on living at home, but if you’re not, maybe we could get a place together. Two people paying rent, we could get something pretty nice.” “That could be cool,” I said, trying to sound cavalier, as if this were one of many possibilities I might be considering. I bounced the eraser end of my pencil on the table, caught it between my fingers, over and over. She nodded, still not looking at me, before she went back to the problems in front of her. I thought about telling her, right then. I hadn’t even told my mother yet. But I didn’t know what Cindy would say: she’d been smart enough, at least, to stay out of this brand of trouble. Or lucky enough. Or maybe not lucky at all: maybe now, with Rick suddenly gone, this didn’t seem like the worst thing imaginable. If I told Cindy I was pregnant, maybe she’d say what I couldn’t make myself believe, no matter how many times I said it to myself, out loud or in my head—that this would not be the end of everything. And maybe I’d actually believe it, coming from her. “Aren’t you going to get that?” she asked me, and I realized the telephone was ringing. I picked up the receiver before I’d had the chance to tell her anything. “h ow far along?” Wanda asked, in the bathroom at the theater. She ashed her cigarette on the side of the sink. “I don’t know. I haven’t been to a doctor or anything.” “When did you have your last period?” “All I know is that I didn’t have it yet this month,” I said. I cupped my [ 71 ]

hand under the water and brought it up to rinse my mouth, wet my hands in the sink and ran them across my hair, trying to undo what the wind had done between home and here. “I don’t really keep track. It’s not like I’ve been trying to get pregnant.” Wanda registered her disbelief, one big huh. “I don’t know what you thought you were doing, if you weren’t keeping track and you didn’t use anything.” “Of course he used something,” I told her. “Are you sure?” I realized, in that moment, that I wasn’t. But I couldn’t see any point in telling her this. “Exactly how stupid do you think I am?” I said. “Well.” Wanda shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway.” I stared at my reflection in the mirror. Wanda tore off a paper towel and handed it across the sink to me, then blew a hard blue stream of smoke at the bar of fluorescent light stretched across the ceiling. “Have you told your mom yet?” she asked. “What do you think?” “She is going to hit the fucking roof.” Wanda shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to be around for that conversation.” “If I had told her, I wouldn’t even be here now. I’d already be at some kind of home for wayward girls, I’m sure.” “Do they even still have those?” Wanda stubbed out her cigarette on the damp side of the sink. “I bet there’s a waiting list as long as my arm, if they do. Everybody’s wayward these days.” She threw the wet brown filter in the trash can. “When are you going to tell Tom?” I shrugged. “You can’t wait too long. He still thinks he’s going away to college.” It was something I couldn’t say out loud, especially not to her: what I hoped for, every day, was blood. I didn’t care if it hurt, not even if it meant I couldn’t have another baby, ever. My mother had watched them disappear, one and the next; it was possible the same thing could happen to me, [ 72 ]

I thought, that my life could go back to what it had been, quietly, and no one had to know a thing. I dug through my backpack, wishing I’d brought my toothbrush, settled for gum instead. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to him,” I told her. “You just say ‘It looks like we’re pregnant.’ That way, he knows you’re not going to let him off the hook.” But there was no hook: there was nothing to keep him here. I didn’t want that to change. If I told him, I knew he would do what he thought he should: he’d stopped that night we saw Rick’s car go off the road, not knowing what he might be getting himself into, and he’d spent half the night looking through the brush and rock for what could have been the mangled body of a boy he’d never met. “He’s a good guy,” Wanda said, reaching out to squeeze my hand. She’d mistaken my reluctance for worry. “He’ll do the right thing, France.” She was the only person who called me that. I didn’t mind—usually it made me feel sophisticated, slightly European. At the moment, though, it made me feel like everything I’d ever known about myself had fallen away, leveled in seconds, leaving only the desecrated country of my future. “I’m not going to tell him anything,” I said. “Not until I’ve decided what I’m going to do, at least.” “But it’s not just your decision,” Wanda said. “It’s his baby, too.” Her voice followed me out the open door of the women’s bathroom. Somebody waiting for the movie to start looked away from the coming attractions poster long enough to see who Wanda was talking to, then down at his popcorn again, shuffling the kernels with his fingers. I crossed my arms and leaned against the ticket booth to wait. Wanda crossed the lobby and stood close behind me, by way of apology. She rested a hand on my shoulder, ran it down my arm and circled her fingers to squeeze the flat bone of my wrist. After a minute, though, she saw that I was finished talking and stationed herself behind the snack bar register again. I didn’t know why I’d told her anything, except that I felt like I was running out of room for keeping secrets. But I should have realized: Wanda [ 73 ]

was raising two kids who belonged to her husband, their father, who had taken care of them alone after their mother left. Though she shared them now, the girls were his. And of course I should have known that what posed itself as a problem to me was only a question of logical order for Wanda: first a wedding, then a baby, then a family photo on next year’s Christmas card. Wanda and my mother were exactly alike in that way, though neither of them would have seen or admitted to their similarity. sometimes i thought I could feel it: a pebble washed by waves, a marble rolling in the bottom of a bowl. I knew it had to be something else, maybe something I’d imagined altogether, but I felt it anyway. I took a bus to the public library and hid out in a corner carrel, looked at the glossy pictures I found in books: your baby at six weeks, eight weeks, ten. What I had done with Tom seemed completely separate from all this biology, something altogether different from what my mother and father had done to bring me and Robin here. Its translucent skin was shot through with dark, thready veins, fingers webbed, shadows where its eyes would be. Imagine a marble with tiny arms and legs. Imagine everything about you suddenly small enough to hide in the cupped palm of your hand. i told my mother the day after graduation, afraid she would do something to keep me from going—what, I didn’t know. Or why. My mother would have wanted things to look completely normal for as long as possible. Missing my own graduation would have been the red flag that drew everyone’s attention. I told her in the morning, after my father had gone to work and Robin left for school. I was sitting at the kitchen table, trying hard to eat my toast and ignore the leftover half of a shell-shaped cake that had read The World is Your Oyster, a perfect blue globe in place of the pearl at its center. After last night’s party, half the globe was gone. [ 74 ]

I gave up. I put my hands on my face. My shoulders shook, and I couldn’t breathe. “Franny?” My mother took my whole jaw in her hand, tried to make me look at her. “Franny, are you choking?” She lifted her other hand, ready to hit me on the back, ready to hurt me if she had to. I shook my head, then ran for the bathroom. I stayed in there a long time, the door locked between us, enjoying the fact that it would stay that way until I decided to open it. “I’m all right,” I said, when she threatened to call for an ambulance. When I came out again, she was waiting in the hallway. “Franny,” she said, “for heaven’s sake, what’s wrong?” I shook my head again before I started walking; I made it to the kitchen before I got dizzy and had to catch myself against the doorjamb. Everything seemed so orderly: the appliances blinding, the counters smooth and white, without a scratch. How much time did it take to keep your life this clean? “Franny,” she said, coming into the room behind me, reaching out to pat my back. “You have to tell me what’s wrong or I can’t do anything to help you, sweetie.” “There’s nothing you can do to help me,” I said. “Franny.” She did this often, saying my name over and over to remind me that she knew me. “Honey, please. Of course I can help. Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.” She believed what she said, I know. She thought she knew me. But when I told her, I felt her hand tighten around my arm, slow, like a blood pressure cuff. She yanked me around to look at my eyes, to see if it was possible that I was just making a joke she could say she didn’t appreciate, the kind of joke I’d no doubt learned from Cindy. I caught myself midstep, then turned around. When she saw I was serious, her hand pulled away all at once, the way your fingers refuse to touch what threatens to burn them. “How can that be?” she asked, in a voice I remembered from a long time ago, small and hurt and disbelieving. She hugged herself. [ 75 ]

I tried to keep myself from crying again, sat down at the kitchen table. The yard was full of frantic wrens, all grabbing up the pieces of old bread she’d thrown out that morning; they were working hard to beat the flashy magpies that always muscled them out of an easy meal. She sat down beside me, and I looked at the table in front of her chair. I watched her fingers work her wedding ring in circles. “It’s that boy,” she said. “The one who took you out to the reservoir that night. It’s him, isn’t it? You’ve been seeing him.” I didn’t answer. That told her what she knew already: there had been no one else, not ever. And she had been right not to trust him. “Have you told him?” she asked. I shook my head. “I don’t want to tell him,” I said. “I don’t want to get married.” And it sounded like I was trying to avoid going to the doctor, like I was six years old and afraid of getting a shot. But my mother surprised me: she nodded. “All right,” she said, in the breathy voice that meant she was suddenly thinking out loud, not talking to me anymore. “You made a mistake. We don’t have to compound that by making another.” She stood up again and crossed the kitchen. “I’ll need to make an appointment for you with Dr. Conover, right away. Obviously, you’ll have to take some time off from school.” “I’m already enrolled for the fall semester,” I said. My mother turned her head; I’d interrupted her train of thought. “What?” she said. “I’m not dropping out of college before I even get a chance to start.” “You’re not dropping out, Franny. You’ll just postpone,” she said, dismissing me with a little wave of her hand, and she went right back to thinking out loud. I pushed my chair away from the table and walked into the living room. The morning paper folded on the floor beside my father’s recliner, pastel pillow mints in a green glass bowl on top of the television, Robin’s abandoned Barbie Dreamhouse in the corner: everything looked just the same as it had every other morning of my life. I tried to find something I hadn’t [ 76 ]

seen before, the light falling in a new pattern on the carpet or an unfamiliar car parked on the street—anything to prove that things were different now, to mark the shift from yesterday, when I still hadn’t graduated and my mother believed she knew my heart as if it were her own. She followed me into the living room. “Maybe you could take one or two classes,” she said, trying to make her plan sound more appealing. “Then you wouldn’t really have to get behind. When the spring semester rolls around, you can go back full-time.” “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said. I stood in front of the picture window, my back to her, looking outside. “I haven’t decided anything.” “Well, there’s really not much to decide at this point,” she said, her voice meant for me again. “What’s done is done. You’re having a baby.” “I haven’t decided anything,” I said again. My mother took my arm, gently this time. I didn’t have to look at her to know that her chin had tilted toward the floor; she was looking at me through the tops of her eyes, the face she had used since I was three years old to let me know that we were discussing something non-negotiable. “Franny,” she said. “You wouldn’t do that. You can’t.” But I could. That possibility was as real as the baby inside of me, and both of us knew it. “Franny,” she said. “Sweetheart. Promise me you won’t.” I leaned against the window on one shoulder and folded my arms, stared at the floor. We stood there together, and I didn’t promise anything. When she walked away from me, she sat down again at the kitchen table, alone, holding her head in both hands. I took a shower, got dressed. It would have been easy enough to pretend this was any other morning, except that my mother was still by herself at the table, doing nothing, when I left. A furious cloud of small black birds lifted out of the grass when I opened the back screen door. i walked downtown without really knowing where I planned to go. I tried to call Cindy from a pay phone, but no one answered at her house. [ 77 ]

Then I wandered through the Bon Marche, looking at things I’d never even paid attention to before: sheets, blankets, towels, all the things that seem as if they come with your life, wherever you live, until you think about moving it somewhere new. If there was a way to get my life in order again, I thought, this might be it: bright white towels for drying plates that hadn’t yet been scratched in the dishwasher, new sheets still stiff with sizing. It might be just as easy as starting over, but this time starting with things that matched. Then I was hungry, for what seemed like the first time in weeks, so I took myself out to lunch at the tea room in The Mode department store, sitting at a table by the second-story windows and looking down at all the people passing below me on the sidewalk. My mom and I had come here for lunch a dozen times after a morning of shopping, but she didn’t like to sit by the windows. It made her dizzy, she said; it made her nervous to think how easy it would be to fall to your death. Never mind that people had been sitting at those very same tables for years, and so far no one had made a spontaneous plunge through the glass after lunch. I ordered what I always did there: the cheese soup they served in a bread bowl. When I was younger I’d thought that bowl was just ingenious, the ideal way to avoid doing dishes, and I’d wondered out loud at all the things my mother might serve up this way. Before I was old enough for places like this, my mom would take me to the lunch counter at Newberry’s department store whenever we were downtown. She always ordered a cherry soda for the two of us to share. I liked the look of our two straws in the soda glass; I’d lean toward my mom to take a drink, smelling her powdery perfume when I got close enough. I loved sitting on the high stools, feeling tall. I wasn’t scared: I knew she was there to catch me if I leaned out too far. I remembered all of that, sitting alone at my table, though Newberry’s had closed down when I was still in grade school and I was pretty sure I hadn’t thought about it since. Something had changed between my mom and me now, and it had nothing to do with Cindy, or with Tom—it was about the two of us and no [ 78 ]

one else. Possibly, though, it had something do with her thinking she had known me all my life, when it turned out I hadn’t even known myself. c i ndy still wasn’t answering when I tried her house again at three. I’d been through every store downtown and still didn’t feel like going home, so I took a bus to the library and read my way through the new titles shelf until I realized it was five o’clock. I knew my father would be sitting with my mother at the dining room table soon, Robin sent next door or to her room. They’d be deciding things for me, whether or not I was there to agree to them. I went outside and called Tom from the pay phone. I heard the surprise in his voice, even over the noise of the street around me: he hadn’t called while I was gone, and I’d never been the one to call him first. “I’m at the library,” I said. “Are you maybe in the mood to pick me up? We could get some dinner.” “Sure,” he said. And then, “Everything okay?” “Fine,” I said. “I just don’t feel like taking the bus home.” I tried to sound as if it didn’t really matter, though the very thought of getting on the bus again made my head swim. “If you’re busy, it’s no big deal.” “No,” he said. “It’s fine. I’ll come get you.” But he didn’t say good-bye, so I didn’t hang up. “Good news from the U of O today,” he said. “I’m off the waiting list. I’m in.” “That’s great.” I wondered if he’d be hurt that I sounded happy. I looked through the glass doors beside me, at the mountains in the distance. Oregon was on the other side of them, too far away to see from here. Eugene was nearly on the coast. But Seattle was farther still. “I thought you’d pretty much decided on Washington,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’m going to do.” I was focused on the mountains. When I brought my eyes back to the phone in front of me, everything went dark for a minute. I could hear him jingling something, change or keys, a sound that kept going in my head even after he’d stopped. [ 79 ]

“You’re not going to be upset if I decide to go to Oregon, are you?” he asked. I turned my head toward the receiver, my face a question he couldn’t see. “Why would I be upset?” “Well.” I knew him: I could hear him shrug. “You’re going to be in Washington. I know we’d be closer if I was in Seattle.” I’d forgotten that part of my story. There were too many strings to keep track of now, too many paths I’d marked out to get me around the simple truth: I was staying here, keeping my job at the theater while I went to Boise State. A year from now I’d be less than a mile away from where I was standing at that moment, a distance I wouldn’t measure in anything larger than minutes. “Actually,” I said, “I’ve heard Eugene is a great place. I bet you’d really like it.” I focused on something far away again: a rubble of stones on the side of a hill. I looked for a pattern, a reason for why they were left behind when the fingers of ice that had carried them this far pulled back and away, melting toward Canada. “It’s not like we were planning on trying to stay together, you know. That kind of thing never works.” He sighed—resignation or relief, I couldn’t tell. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I guess we’re both smarter than that.” We hung up then, and I sat down on the library steps to wait for him. I didn’t mind knowing that he would be sad to leave me. Just as long as I knew he would. the wind blew across the bare skin of my arms while I waited, warm against an afternoon of air-conditioning. It lifted the hem of my shirt, touched my stomach, let the fabric fall again. When I looked around, everything was moving: trees shaking green arms behind the cars skimming past me in the parking lot, more cars slicing up and down Capitol Boulevard, people heading home after a long day of work. The whole world in motion and me, in the middle of it all, going nowhere.

[ 80 ]

I sat on those steps and closed my eyes against everything, hot and cold, fixed and moving. I held my breath and tried to make myself the stony center of a little universe, to stop the world with the dead weight of my certain immobility. But I was still alive, after all, and before too long I had to let my ribs lift again, filling myself with the comfort of empty air.

[ 81 ]

The Judas Horse [ cindy ]

she told me about the baby while everyone else was waiting in line to rehearse the walk. All these girls crowded into the hallway between the gym and the locker room, talking about how it’s so unfair that we have to wear nylons tonight, it’s going to be a hundred degrees in here by then, it’s so hot already and it’s only ten o’clock in the morning and we’re all wearing shorts— Suddenly, her face went gray as the cement floor. “Are you okay?” I said. But I don’t think she even heard me before she bolted for the locker room, her head bent down and a hand clamped tight across her mouth. I stayed where I was for a minute, wondering what I was supposed to do. Run after her, probably. Hand her a damp paper towel over the top of the stall door, maybe. Offer to get her a can of 7-up from the vending machine down the hall. “Is she okay?” somebody asked. “Oh, definitely,” I said. And then I started walking too. She was already done throwing up when I got there, leaning across the sink and splashing cold water on her face. I yanked out a handful of stiff brown paper towels. She took them without saying anything, then straightened up enough to find her dripping reflection in the mirror.

[ 82 ]

“I cannot do this,” she said, moving the wad of towels around her face. She yanked her ponytail tighter against her head. I nodded at my backward face, its scar beside the wrong eye now, my reflection floating there beside hers in the old, wavy glass. “It’s really hot out there,” I said. “And it’s going to be a mess tonight. You can’t just pack people into a hot gym after they’ve been drinking for a few hours. It’s not going to be a pretty scene.” “No,” she said. Just no. She held onto the sides of the sink and looked into the drain, took a long, slow breath. I wondered if she was going to throw up again. “You want me to get somebody?” I asked her, stepping toward the door. “Ms. Magnus is out there—I saw her a minute ago.” Ms. Magnus in her gym teacher’s uniform: shiny red shorts and a new white polo shirt you know she must have ironed, bright white tennis shoes and pom-pom socks, her legs shiny and hairless and brown in that way only gym teachers’ legs ever are. She’d been patrolling the lines all morning, touching loud girls on the shoulder and saying “Ladies, let’s keep it down.” She never said a thing to the boys. They weren’t her job. I couldn’t hit or catch or throw a ball to save my sorry life, so Ms. Magnus was no friend of mine. But the way she prowled around the gym, you could tell she spent her whole day on the ready for disaster: she was just waiting for someone to drop, in need of cpr or maybe a lecture on personal fitness. You couldn’t imagine Ms. Magnus not knowing what to do, or at least not doing something, no matter what the situation. “I’m okay.” Fran turned her back to the mirror, then held one hand palm up, like wait. “I mean,” she said, “I’m not sick.” And she looked at the floor when she said it, not me. “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” I think I must have sounded relieved, because I was. Now I knew what to say. I’d had this same conversation with Mitzi not two months ago. We were standing on the corner across from school, where we always stood

[ 83 ]

before the first bell. She was smoking like a bonfire and staring at the piles of old gray snow around her boots, not saying anything. What’s the matter with you? I said, expecting the story of something Joe said or did to piss her off, enough conversation to fill the gap, anyway. I got an A+ on my home pregnancy test, she said. We went inside then, so Joe wouldn’t see her crying, into the bathroom in the basement. The sophomore girls scattered like bread crumbs as soon as they saw me coming through the door. At moments like this, even I had to admit that there were some advantages to being me. “So what are you going to do?” I asked Fran now. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t even think about it, really. Every time I do, I just start crying.” I nodded. “How far along?” She shrugged. “I haven’t been to a doctor or anything. Probably two months. Something like that.” “You should have told me sooner,” I said. “We could have figured something out a long time ago.” “I haven’t even told my mother yet.” I’d only talked to her mom a few times, but that was enough to guess why you might not want to tell her something like this. For all her normalseeming ways, the fancy cookies and the iced tea with a lemon wedge garnish, the Nice to meet you, Cindy, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear she’d told Fran to hit the road. It’s always the nice ones who flip out when things start getting messy. My mom was no great hostess, of course, but at least I could count on her to do exactly what she felt like doing. There was nothing like manners or even basic responsibility with her. Whatever I said or did, it was all the same to her: just one more thing. “You don’t necessarily have to tell your mom,” I said. “You’re eighteen. Just go down to the clinic on Roosevelt. I’ll go with you, if you want. I went with another friend of mine.” She looked at me like my words had switched to Spanish, like what came out of my mouth suddenly made no sense at all. [ 84 ]

“Or,” I said, “if you’re going to have it, I guess you’ll have to tell her pretty soon.” She shrugged again, not wanting to say what both of us already knew: not having a baby was one thing to think about, something else to do. Mitzi and I had gone to Planned Parenthood three different times before she could work up the nerve to tell them what it was she wanted, leaving twice with our coat pockets full of rubbers wrapped in fluorescent pouches. I made her laugh on the bus ride home those times, reading from the pamphlets I’d taken from the lobby. Safe sex can be sexy. The third time, we never talked about. We got on the bus and didn’t say anything, all the way home or afterward. “Have you told your boyfriend?” I asked Fran. “No,” she said. She crossed her arms, leaned back against the sink. “I’m not going to tell him anything. Like I said before, he’s leaving for college at the end of the summer and we’re not going to be together after that, so I’m not going to tell him. I know he’d want to do the right thing, whatever that is, but I really don’t want to get married to him. It would just be one of those things where five years later people are saying ‘If it weren’t for that baby, the two of them would never be together in the first place.’ I figure we’ll just skip that part and save ourselves the misery.” I nodded again. “Well,” I said, “we’ll need a bigger apartment then, definitely. And we’ll have to be kind of picky. There are a lot of places you wouldn’t want a kid to live.” She gave me the Spanish look again. “Unless you’re planning to live at home,” I said, and felt that sink of disappointment in my chest. “I guess that would be a lot easier for you. Your mom could help out—” She shook her head, so fast the loose hairs around her face were just a blur, like a bird’s wings, flying. “No,” she said. “I am definitely not living at home. My mom probably wouldn’t let me stay there anyway, even if I wanted to.” “Well, okay then,” I said. “We’ll start looking for a place.” [ 85 ]

“Tomorrow,” she said. The thing that had fallen in my chest started to lift again, just a little. Then the door creaked open. Ms. Magnus stood there, elbows out, hands on her hips. “Is there a problem in here, ladies?” “No problem,” I said, and I looked at Fran, who shook her head and smiled in the bright-faced way that made it seem completely impossible for her to be the one in trouble here. She had good skin and straight teeth and her hair had never been anything other than its natural color. If you put us side by side and asked a stranger to choose which one of us was destined to become an unwed mother at eighteen, I knew who would be the candidate of choice. We got back to our places just in time to walk into the gym and down a row of metal folding chairs. Then we stood where we’d sit tonight and waited our turn to walk across the stage. The vice principal, Mr. Peck, doled out the imaginary diplomas so we’d get a chance to practice the handshake/handoff. “Miss Morgan? Do my eyes deceive?” he said, when I shook his hand. I just smiled and pretended to take what he pretended to offer me. I couldn’t blame Mr. Peck for being surprised—I’d surprised myself by working so hard for the last few weeks. But it was true: I’d done my time in his office before that. I was a discipline problem of the official variety. there was no way for me to know what I’d just walked into then, not really. I’d never spent any time around babies. You could say I was naïve, though I know at least a dozen people who would laugh out loud to hear that word used in any description of me. When I thought about it later, I wondered why I’d been so quick to go right back to taking care of someone. All I could figure was that when my mom died, Rick moved in right away to take her place at the center of everything. He’d been walking around me in careful circles for a long time, asking me out and waiting for a chance to make his move. I couldn’t ever go anywhere, but he didn’t give up. And then, after my mom was gone, it [ 86 ]

seemed like maybe he deserved some kind of reward for waiting around. I didn’t think about it that way at the time—I felt like I finally had a life of my own making, doing all the things I wanted to. But mostly I just sat beside Rick in his car, going along for the ride, or I hung out with Mitzi, because she was Joe’s girlfriend and always there. I’d hardly started to think about what I wanted. And then Rick was gone too, and doing what I wanted seemed like a selfish thing, this prize I’d won by cheating. So the thing I was missing, it turns out, was someone to wrap the hours around. And there was Fran. It wasn’t her fault, of course—she never tried to talk me into anything. I was the one who’d suggested we move in together, and I didn’t back out when she gave me the chance. And it wasn’t like I’d never thought about this possibility before. That last time I went to Planned Parenthood with Mitzi, I sat in the waiting room and thought about what I would do if I were in her shoes. I knew Mitzi would have done the same for me. Whatever I needed, she would have been there—to throw me a baby shower or sit beside me on the bus ride home. So that’s what I did for her. And still, I was not a good friend. I told Rick about Mitzi the very day she gave me the news, even though I’d promised her a million times I wouldn’t tell anybody. Anybody. I knew she meant Rick, but I just couldn’t see why it mattered. It wasn’t like he was going say anything, like he’d walk up to Joe between classes and slap him on the back. Hey, Pop. That just wouldn’t happen. It wasn’t the kind of thing you’d joke about, even with your best friend. So I told him while we killed that slow Friday night together. His mom lived in the old part of town, in a two-bedroom house where the upstairs window opened onto the roof of a carport someone had added on. He liked to sit up there, above the lights, lean back against the second-floor wall and drink beer until the edges of his life got fizzy and he felt so warm inside that even November didn’t matter. Sometimes Joe and Mitzi sat up there with us and we had a little party of our own, up above the rest of the world. His mom didn’t care, didn’t count the bottles left in her fridge. [ 87 ]

Just as long as we stayed at the house, she said. Just as long as we didn’t take off in the car. “That’s rough,” he said, when I told him what was going on. He took a long drink of his beer, then sloshed the bottle and watched the tiny wave he’d made settle back into place. “So what’s she going to do?” “What do you think? Get rid of it,” I said. And it sounded, even to me, like we had to be talking about something else. He nodded, took another drink. “Would you?” he asked me, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, his voice muffled in denim. He glanced at the house next door, at the bathroom window we could see straight through when it was open. The woman who lived there had orange-striped towels that looked like they should have been spread out on a beach. “Would I what?” “You know.” He shrugged against the siding. His jacket bunched up at the shoulders. “If you were her.” “If I was Mitzi? Yeah. Because Joe’s an asshole, and having his kid would be a crime against nature.” Rick started to laugh. Beer always makes me talkative, not to mention more honest than I’d be under normal circumstances, even with him. “I know he’s been your friend forever, and I’m sorry if it hurts your feelings to hear me say this about him, but believe me—the world will be a much better place when his kind are extinct.” Rick shook his head. “Sometimes I forget that you’re so smart,” he said. “The way you talk. It cracks me up.” “Give me a break.” The hardest thing I took was Personal Math. From there it was on to Concert Choir and Typing 4, followed by Independent Living. That week we’d been doing a unit on kitchen safety: no fingers in the blender, no forks in the toaster, etcetera. I had decent grades, but it didn’t take much to get them. “It’s not like I’m headed for Harvard,” I said. I handed him my empty and he grabbed a new bottle from the six we’d brought along with us, twisted the cap off before he handed it over. He flipped the cap with his thumb. It winked and fell, and I waited to hear it hit the driveway, hoping he wouldn’t say anything to bury the sound. [ 88 ]

Tink. “You are smart,” he said then. “You know you are. You’ll probably wind up going to college next year.” I hadn’t done the paperwork yet, but the application and financial aid forms were all in a rainbow pile on my desk at home. I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but my dad said that just gave me something in common with every other eighteen-year-old in the world. The thing about Rick was, he knew all the things other people believed about me and still acted like the truth was completely obvious—like it was their problem if they couldn’t see that I was smart and going places. But I knew some things about him too, things he didn’t even know about himself: I knew he’d keep working at the record store after we finished high school. College wasn’t even a question. He’d be at the store until something else came along, until he got rescued, if he did. Maybe someone would tell him about a better job, bring him the application, offer to take it back to his boss. Maybe he’d get married and his father-in-law would own a business he could work for. But there were times when I thought I could see him ten years from now and exactly the same, driving his big red Mustang back and forth, from his mom’s house to work and back home again, sitting out on this roof with Joe and Mitzi to unwind. But then, I always reminded myself, people can surprise you. That was one thing I knew better than most. “You’ll meet some smart guy in one of your classes,” Rick said, “and that’ll be it for me. Dirt nap.” He slapped his hand against his thigh, for emphasis. “Ten years from now you’ll be married to a successful businessman and you’ll look at some old picture of us and you’ll think ‘Why the hell did I waste my time on that loser? What did I ever see in him?’” “Shut up,” I said. “You’re not a loser. You’re a drunk.” He laughed again. “I’m just telling you what I know.” “You don’t know anything.” “See? It’s happening already.” He sighed, deflated, then smiled at his own joke. [ 89 ]

But I was telling him the truth, and I didn’t know how to say it any other way. He wanted to know where I’d be ten years from now so he could know where he’d be, too. And even if I could have told him something definite—if I could have shown him the whole long movie of my life—it wouldn’t have answered that question for him. Some people think it’s possible to hook your life to somebody else’s, like with a baby or a ring. What they don’t understand is, even when that happens, you’re always on your own. Even connected to somebody else, you’re still two people who came together for reasons you might never understand, not one person who somehow managed to split apart.

still , like I said, I thought about what I would have done in Mitzi’s place, or Fran’s. After Rick disappeared, I knew there was no chance of anything like that—any chance I might have had couldn’t survive that kind of flying, not even inside the bony cage of my body, where everything important had somehow survived unbroken. What I didn’t tell Rick that night, when he asked, was that I’d never come up with an answer. He didn’t want to have a discussion of all the reasons why and not. He wanted something I didn’t have to think about. Of course I wouldn’t. We’re different. I love you. Sometimes I thought about how I’d tell him, and sometimes I thought I might just do what Fran was doing now: not say a thing. Because I knew what would happen if I told Rick—he’d just smile, reach out and wrap his arms around my waist, pick me up and spin a happy circle, my feet whipping through the air. It would be good news, right from the start. Then he’d be thinking of names—nothing sissy for a boy, nothing butch for a girl. Cody. Crystal. And by the time I could say I didn’t know if having a baby was what I wanted to do, he’d be checking out garage sales and looking for a good used crib. I knew that was one kind of life I could have. Or it was, until he disappeared. [ 90 ]

. . . t he morning after graduation, I woke up early and went outside to get the newspaper. Some days you see things like they’re right up close when they’re still as far away as ever—that morning I saw the dark blue mountains at the east end of the valley, taller than usual, their edges sharp as knives against the hazy sky. I knew, all of a sudden, what my dad meant whenever he looked out the living room window and said It’s a bigmountain morning. If my dad had ever had his way about anything, we’d have lived in the mountains. He grew up in a town small enough that it didn’t even need post office boxes—when I was little I used to write letters to my grandma addressed to Jean Morgan, Lost River, Idaho. I thought the whole world knew my grandma, that her name was all anyone needed to know who I meant, when the opposite was actually true. My dad liked it that way, though. He would have been happy enough to know the same twelve people all his life. He’d come to Boise only because there were no good jobs in a town of that size, or so he said. It was my mom who grew up in Boise and didn’t want to leave. What would I do in a place like that? she asked him, way back when she still left the house to go to movies with her friends occasionally, on Saturday afternoons. Girls’ day out, she’d tell me, while I watched her put on her makeup. One time, I remember, she let me pick out earrings for her to wear. Sometimes I wondered how they ever wound up together, why my dad left home at all. That was something he didn’t want to talk about now, something I hadn’t even thought to ask him before. It didn’t feel safe, then, getting into things that weren’t right in front of us: dinner, yard work, laundry. Making it through another day was enough of a goal. Even on my mom’s good days, I didn’t want to wander into something that might start her crying and smash the calm. But after she was gone, it was like my dad just took the box of everything I didn’t know about the two of them and taped it shut for long-term storage, stuck it in a place he was sure I wouldn’t find. [ 91 ]

I stood outside for a while that morning, looking at the dark ridge of mountains carved into the gray morning sky. I thought about my dad when he was my age, just out of high school, thinking about where his life would go. He couldn’t have pictured himself in this house, alone. That was all I knew for sure. Then I took the newspaper and went inside. I started coffee and took out a box of toaster waffles when I heard the shower running, put a plate and silverware on the table in my dad’s place, poured him a glass of juice. I settled down at the table with the classified ads, and I waited. “You’re up early,” he said, when he saw me sitting there. “Big day,” I said, and tapped the newspaper with my pen. “You looking for a job?” He’d turned his back to me, pouring coffee, dropping the waffles into their toaster slots. “An apartment, actually.” He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t turn around, but I saw his hand pause, just briefly, on its way toward his coffee cup. “I went to the university bookstore yesterday and talked to a woman about a job. She says they’re always short-handed during the summer, with the fall semester books coming in. So now I just need a place to live.” “You have a place to live,” he said. He was looking out the window over the sink, into the backyard, at the maple trees we’d planted in front of the privacy fence along our property line. Trees didn’t grow here without a lot of help, and the fence had never been necessary—my mom hardly ever left the house, much less the yard. But I think they made my dad feel better, like a space of his own was still an option. The maples were taller than the fence now, flaming up red each fall and burning bright in the late day sun. Our house sat right in the middle of a wide half-circle, and every few weeks we had to pull up new seedlings in the lawn. People think trees are built to stay in one place, but the truth is that they’re always moving, he told me once. Unless they’re dying. “I know I can stay at home,” I said. “I just feel like I need to live closer to town. It’s really hard to be so far away from everything out here, especially without a car. If I needed to go to the library or study with someone, I’d have to make a half-hour trip on the bus.” [ 92 ]

“You’re planning to live by yourself? That’s expensive. There’s your rent and utilities, and that comes before your food or clothes or anything else. And if you’re going to get a car, that means gas and insurance and registration.” He turned around to look at me. “And what about your school? That’s tuition and books, just for starters. It takes a lot of money just to live. You have no idea.” “I worked out a budget,” I said, and opened the notebook I’d left sitting on the table the night before. The first page was covered with numbers on clean blue lines, everything labeled. rent. utilities. food. He’d taught me how to do this while I helped him pay the bills every month, the two of us moving through the pile one windowed envelope at a time. I folded the newspaper in half again, then set it on top of my budget when he looked away. “I have a roommate,” I said. “We’re splitting everything. And we’re going to get a place near the university, so we won’t have to worry about a car.” I wasn’t going to tell him about Fran’s baby yet. I wanted this plan to sound like it made good sense for everyone involved. “Even so,” he said, at a loss for arguments, poking around for another soft spot. “Who’s this roommate?” “Her name is Fran Rogers. You don’t know her.” “That’s a surprise.” He took a sip of coffee. His waffles popped up and he pulled them out of the toaster, turned and dropped them on his plate. “Whatever happened to that other friend of yours, the one with all the hair and the—” He made half-circles in front of his rib cage, drawing large breasts in the air. “Mitzi,” I said. I hadn’t really talked to her since that day at Fanci Freeze. She’d seen me sitting there alone when she walked by on her way home and sat down across from me, just like old times. Or, almost— without Rick and Joe there throwing fries at each other, it turned out we had nothing to talk about. She told me about a party at the corral that weekend, offered to have Joe pick me up. But I told her no. I knew I’d just end up alone, the way I had that first day back at school. [ 93 ]

What’s up with you and that girl? she’d asked, and I understood that she felt alone, too, even though she still had Joe. But I didn’t know how I could explain what I was doing in a way that wouldn’t hurt Mitzi’s feelings, so I didn’t even try. We saw each other at our locker in the morning now, said hi, and that was it. “I haven’t been hanging around with her a lot lately,” I told my dad. “I’ve been trying to concentrate on school, so I can graduate on time. Fran’s really smart. She’s in all the advanced classes. She’s been helping me catch up.” “I guess that shows how much I know about what’s going on with you these days. I don’t even know who your friends are anymore.” He shook his head and opened the butter container, the syrup bottle. I got up and poured myself a cup of coffee, topped his off. Then I sat down and turned the hot mug in circles, burning my fingers, trying to think of another way to get us through this. I didn’t need him to tell me I could go. I was leaving anyway. But I wanted to hear him say it was all right, so I’d know he understood: it was nothing personal, just the next logical step. I didn’t think I could stand to leave one more person behind. “So you got a job?” he said, between bites, before I could say anything. “Yeah. In the textbook department.” “Stocking shelves?” I nodded. “That’s hard work. Those big books are heavy. What about your leg?” I’d had the cast off for two weeks and still limped anyway, used to pulling extra weight. “My leg feels fine.” “Did you check with the doctor?” He dragged a chunk of waffle through the syrup on his plate. “You don’t want to hurt yourself again, or you’ll end up right back where you were.” “I’ll call and check, but he said everything looked great last time. I’m sure it’ll be okay.” [ 94 ]

My father kept eating. We were down to saying what we had to say. Then he stood and set his empty plate in the sink. He finished his coffee at the counter, standing with his back to me. “I’m going to take a look at this place on Manitou,” I said, pointing to an ad with my pen. He didn’t turn around to look. “It’s close to the university. And there’s a grocery store right by there, too, I think.” He set his cup beside his plate in the sink. “Sounds like you’ve got it all worked out,” he said. “I guess you’d better get busy and call the landlord.” My dad took his keys from the pegboard. The back door snapped shut behind him, then the screen. I listened to the engine of his truck grind and catch, the gravel roll under the tires as he pulled away from the house. Even now that sound made my stomach lift and my throat go tight and hard, exactly the way you feel when you have the time to realize that you’re about to scream. i took a long shower after he’d gone, then went outside and sat on the front porch, waiting for my hair to dry. The sun was up by then, the mountains small and gray again. You don’t even notice the mountains when they’re underneath your feet—that much I remember from the few times we visited my grandma, before she died. You just see the house where you live, and the road that leads back into town, and the stores where everyone you know buys food and gas. Once in a while the timber opens up and you look out across the tops of other peaks and remember how high you are. The valley is something far away and unimpressive there, even at night, because there are more stars overhead than anyone could ever plant in the ground. But it was Rick, not my dad, who told me about the wild horses that used to run through those mountains, in herds so big you couldn’t count them without losing track and starting all over and getting lost in their numbers again. I thought about that every time we went up to the corral; I tried to imagine what it would have been like to live in that house back [ 95 ]

then, to look out the window and see wild horses flying past, a cloud of dust in their wake. It was something I couldn’t imagine, really, something so far from what seemed real that it always played like a scene from a movie in my head: me in a calico house dress, Rick in a cowboy hat and boots, the horses running past a backdrop of pines more perfectly coneshaped than nature would ever allow. Those herds of horses are small enough now to be fooled into getting caught. You see it on the news sometimes: how they send out a Judas horse, trained to lead the wild ones into a blind gully. How they’re all rounded up, bucking and fighting, seeing their misplaced trust too late. How they’re packed into trailers, bought and sold and trained to be of use.

[ 96 ]

[ part three ]

Long Division [ alice ]

t he man she loved had grown up in a small, wooded town in Louisiana, a town of perhaps two hundred people—very much like the town where her husband was raised, Alice thought, if nearly on the other side of the country. She held on to this fact in the hope of convincing herself that feelings had no real value: there was no reason she should have loved Dalton Thibideaux and not Henry Morgan. The two of them were alike in many ways: both soft-spoken, both in love with the out-of-doors and most at home there. Dalton and Hank are the only two men I know who will go for a walk when it starts to rain. So began her litany of self-denial. No reason at all that she should love one man and not the other. And yet she did. Alice met Dalton the summer she taught high school equivalency courses at the air force base in Mountain Home, a town named with the obvious intent of deception, composed as it was of a tiny cluster of gas stations, drive-through restaurants, and motor inns stuck in the middle of a desert. The mountains, though visible, were little more than the teeth of a saw blade on the horizon, hardly discernible against a low winter sky. Mountain Home was not, she learned from her students, the sort of place you would choose to return to, as many base cities were. Alice had finished college in May, but other than teaching for the summer she had no plans, no position lined up for the fall. It was a bad year for [ 99 ]

teachers, a buyer’s market; of the few girls she knew who were not getting married, those who had managed to find themselves jobs weren’t pleased with the prospect of actually living on an income they had been taught to view as supplemental, a safety measure. This was 1962, some years before women took pride in their self-sufficiency, a time when earning the degree that made you a teacher or a nurse or librarian was still the consolation prize for getting through college, but not engaged. Alice was living at home again, exactly as she had before she went away to college. She seized on any excuse to leave her mother’s house, any opportunity to forget that in four years she had come no distance she could measure with a map. “All that time at school,” her mother sighed, at least once a day, it seemed, shaking her head while Alice scanned the Help Wanted ads. The second half of that sentence remained unspoken: and still no husband. She had warned Alice that a woman who took no interest in making a home for a man might just find herself without a place in the world. And here she was—not alone, not exactly. But still at home, the next closest thing. Since her father’s death, years before all of this, Alice had understood that her mother’s only hope for later-life happiness lay in her hands: a son-in-law and a grandchild were all her mother required, and the fact that Alice hadn’t delivered either of these things suggested a selfishness of character, reflecting badly on the woman who had raised her. Alice’s mother wanted a man to win over with the kind of cooking Alice had never found the patience to master: complicated pastries filled with layers of fruit and custard, dinners with identifiable courses. At college, Alice had been content with a tuna sandwich or a bowl of canned soup for lunch or dinner, eating out of a napkin or a pan to save herself the washing of another dish. Her mother, reluctant to lose that talent for cooking meals designed with a hearty appetite in mind, made enormous casseroles every Sunday and covered the pans with aluminum foil before she stacked them in the freezer chest she kept in her garage. She spent the rest of the week reheating those same meals for herself and Alice, two servings at a time. [ 100 ]

But three nights a week Alice took her father’s car, hardly moved from the garage since his death—her mother didn’t like to drive, so she took the bus or walked or rode with friends when she had somewhere to go—and drove an hour each way to teach high school algebra in Mountain Home, the radio tuned to a classical station and played so quietly she often forgot it was on. The occasional swell of the oboes or strings reminded her to pay attention to the road sliding meekly beneath the wheels of the long silver car. She preferred the music of travel to the radio—the hum of tires against dark pavement, a sigh of air moving into the empty space she left behind. She liked the feel of traveling through space, her body a knife that could sever this life from that one, mine from hers. Several times, when she got to Mountain Home, Alice considered not stopping. She imagined flying past the lights of the little town and following the roadways south to Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, all of them places she’d never been or even thought of visiting. She considered this as though it were an actual possibility. It didn’t matter that she was twenty-two years old and had never crossed the Idaho state line: she could leave this place. Teachers were easily transplanted, Alice thought. Teachers were common as grass. Then one night she passed through the security gates at the edge of the base, flashing her official identification—Alice tried to imagine herself an air force wife, a citizen of the world, whenever she did this. She drove past row after row of serviceable housing units, their absolute squat brown sameness as startling as if they’d been painted rainbow colors. Someone had left a shade drawn up, and through a window Alice saw a family at their kitchen table: a father in uniform, two small boys and a baby in its high chair, a mother spooning up dinner from a serving bowl. Every one of those houses was filled with people like this, she realized, people who had lived all over the world, or who likely would at some point. But that night it occurred to Alice that these were the very same people who came to her classes after dinner. None of them, for all their experience of living—foreign languages learned through awkward but necessary [ 101 ]

conversations, marriages and children, households broken apart and put back together again, somehow, in another country—none of these people seemed any more satisfied with their lives than she was. They were taking classes to finish their high school educations, still trying to improve themselves. They were living each day, eating dinner and going to classes and coming home again, exhausted, to sleep and continue the same routine tomorrow. In that moment, something became quite clear to Alice: This life is nothing more than the set of problems you are asked to solve. It didn’t matter that she was still living at home with her mother; it made no difference whether she ever found a husband. Life, in one of its various shapes, would find her, wherever she was. Her only duty, then, was to remain among the living. for a time, Alice thought her life had arrived in the shape of a tall and slender man whose eyebrows and cropped hair were exactly the color of the cedar chips her father had used to keep weeds from growing between the rose bushes in his flower beds. Dalton sat in the back of her classroom and leaned on his left elbow, toward the pale green cinderblock wall, watching her work at the blackboard from the tops of his eyes and copying figures with his free hand. It was hard to know when he was looking at her, his eyes half-hidden that way. At first she thought he slept through class, and when she sat down to grade the first batch of exams she dug through the stack to find his before she even began, imagining the need for a clear mind in the face of his laziness and inattention. But in fact his exam featured only neat figures, all of them written in bold black ink rather than pencil. There were no scribbled corrections, no graphite shadows under darker, more emphatic versions of the same mistakes he’d made the first time. Alice had learned one thing in her student teaching: there were people who saw the beauty in numbers, the elegance of their logic, the inevitability of one flowing into the next and turning into something else—and there were people who never would. She believed [ 102 ]

anyone could be taught to work an equation, to find the path that moved it forward, but the focus on each small step made it impossible to view the whole journey, beautiful and all of a piece. She wrote the number 100 at the top of the first page with her red pen. She added the words Well Done, then thought of a steak and wished she’d written Very Good instead. But that sounded childish, the kind of encouragement you’d offer a nine-year-old at a spelling bee. Nice Work could have been a comment on his penmanship. Excellent was redundant of his score. There was, in fact, no way for her to tell Dalton that this exam was the loveliest thing she’d ever seen. s he handed back their exams the next evening, watching them sigh and deflate in disappointment when they saw their scores, then lean over their desks with fresh resolve. All except Dalton. Alice looked at his face just briefly when she handed back his paper, folded in half like all the others, to maintain his privacy. Green eyes, fair skin she imagined would burn in the sun, then fade to copper. Younger than she was, maybe twenty, possibly closer to nineteen. He didn’t unfold his exam and look at his score, just slipped the folded sheets into his notebook and took the cap off his pen, ready to work. After class, he came to the front of the room to hand in the problem set he’d withheld instead of passing it forward with the other students’. He stood in front of her desk until she finished erasing the blackboard and turned around, startled by the sudden nearness of him. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” Dalton said, and offered a folded sheet of paper as though he were handing her a bouquet. “For you.” “Thank you,” Alice said, and she felt the color rising in her cheeks, though she couldn’t imagine why. She added his work to the stack on her desk, and he didn’t say anything else that night. He turned and walked away. After he’d left she opened his paper, expecting and finding the obvious [ 103 ]

answers without corrections. Three lines below the last problem, he had written this: Don’t worry. I see you. I understand. Alice didn’t know if this was a comment on her teaching, or perhaps a series of notes he’d written to someone sitting near him. Possibly it was a line from a song or a poem he’d been thinking about during class, bored with her explanation of these concepts he already understood. Quite possibly, she thought, it had nothing whatsoever to do with her. dalton had dropped out of high school after his junior year, after his grandfather died. His father had disappeared just months before his birth, his mother one year later; Dalton’s grandfather raised him alone after that, the two of them living in a trailer just outside of town, removed from everything until Dalton started school. After that, they made the walk into town together each morning, and home again each afternoon, even when Dalton was old enough for this to seem strange. When his grandfather died in August, Dalton said, there was no funeral: he spread the ashes of his grandfather’s body among the cypress trees behind their home, remembering how happy he had been to return to this silence after the commotion of school each day, knowing his grandfather felt that same sense of peace here. There were no family members to take him in, but Dalton was already eighteen and thus officially his own responsibility. After a month of making the walk between home and town alone, Dalton said, such isolation was more than he could abide. So he joined the air force, as his grandfather had in his own youth, encouraged by stories of men who had patched together new families from the scraps of others. He did his basic training in Texas, not far from home, then went to Germany. While he was there, he met a girl. Her name was Katrine. They had been married for almost a year. Alice learned these things sitting on a picnic table next to Dalton, looking out across the C. J. Strike reservoir. Her class had ended a week before [ 104 ]

this, and Alice no longer felt any ethical responsibility to keep her distance from Dalton. On the last night of class, he had been the last to hand in his exam, though Alice was sure he was first to finish. “How long do you think it will take you to grade this?” he asked. “I’ll have a final grade report by the end of the week,” Alice said, topping the stack of exams with his confident figures. “The building secretary is going to post grades on the wall beside her desk.” Dalton paused for moment; then he smiled. Alice realized she had never seen this expression on his face, which had always been somber until now. “I wasn’t actually thinking about my grade,” he said. “I was wondering about when I could maybe take you to dinner.” Now—incredibly, unimaginably—things she had thought about saying to him (and only because she was certain they would never speak, not really) had to be articulated, somehow, in an hour of conversation over dinner, another hour at the reservoir after that. It was still early in the fall, getting cold after dark, but she didn’t even notice she was shivering until she tried to stand. She felt her knees buckle under the familiar weight of her own body. “Careful there,” Dalton said, and he held her elbow to steady her. He ran his fingers up the back of her arm, lightly, then pulled his hand away. “I guess I’d been sitting there so long my legs forgot what they were for,” Alice said. Dalton nodded. “You’re all right now?” She nodded back, drew a line on the ground with the toe of her shoe. She was trying to think of a way to continue their conversation without sounding like one of the girls she had always hated, girls with a single thing in mind each time they met a man. “So you’re not married anymore,” she said, trying to make this sound like a statement of fact, not a question. “No.” Dalton stepped toward the edge of the grass, where it turned into rock and eventually cut away into sand, then took a last drag on his [ 105 ]

cigarette before throwing it into the water. It died with a hiss. “I signed the divorce papers a few months ago. It’s official.” Alice thought it might be possible to downplay Dalton’s first marriage as an accident of language; perhaps he’d agreed to something without quite knowing what he’d done, then felt a duty to follow through on a promise he’d made, albeit unknowingly. That might actually be viewed as evidence of good character. It would help that the ex-wife lived in a foreign country, that no children were involved. The wind coming off the water didn’t move his hair, cropped short against his skull. Alice imagined how that sharp bristle might feel against her cheek and palms. “It’s late,” he said, turning around after a long, quiet moment. “You’d better be getting on home. I’ll follow you out to the highway—your mama worries about you being all the way out here by yourself, I’m sure.” Alice looked at her watch. Her mother thought Alice was teaching another session on base, though in fact there were no math classes being offered this term. “It’s all right. She’s not expecting me for a while yet,” Alice said. “Still.” Dalton lifted his eyebrows. “A nice girl wouldn’t be out here in the wild with a strange man at this time of night, now would she?” He smiled, though, to let her know he meant no harm. But they were not in the wild: they were standing on asphalt, and their cars were parked in spaces marked off with yellow lines. A picnic table was less than twenty yards from where they were standing, a restroom just beyond that. “I’m fine right where I am,” Alice said, though she wasn’t as certain of this as she had been when they arrived. Her legs felt shaky still. “I want you to tell me what happened.” He seemed confused. “When?” “With your wife, I mean.” Dalton met her eyes just long enough to let Alice know he was grateful she’d asked the question—the same one, she realized now, that so many [ 106 ]

people avoided, afraid of the answer they’d get or simply unwilling to acknowledge his particular past. She considered her own inclination to skew the facts of his life to her benefit. Alice felt her heart shift, burrowing safely between her ribs: Dalton thought she was different from the others. But maybe she could be. Because why did it matter, really? He had been married once, and now he was not. It had nothing to do with her, or with anyone else for that matter. This time they were spending together might have nothing at all to do with a future, or a marriage. It could be simply what it was: time, together. The question hung there between them, the way their breath did for a few moments after they spoke, and Dalton considered his answer. He wasn’t accustomed to telling this story. “It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, I’m sure. She got pregnant,” Dalton said. “That’s why we got married in the first place. But then she lost the baby. And when I got my orders, she said she didn’t want to go. She said she couldn’t leave her family. I told her ‘I’m your husband now, I’m your family.’ And she got this scared look on her face, and she said, ‘Just Dalton could not be my family.’” He used a different voice for Katrine’s words, high-pitched and stilted. Then a small, hurt sound came from his chest, something Alice supposed was meant to be a rueful laugh. “I asked her what she was thinking, getting married to a serviceman if she couldn’t even bring herself to leave home. It’s not the kind of thing you do if you’re planning to live your life in one place.” He looked back at Alice then, and shrugged. “But people do a lot of things that don’t make a lot of sense.” Alice nodded. “I’m sure it all made sense to both of you, at the time.” A new expression fell across Dalton’s face then, dropping like a veil— relief, appreciation, Alice couldn’t tell. She would think of this moment often, trying to recall what it was she saw in that twist of Dalton’s mouth, that softening around his eyes. But what she remembered more clearly was the next moment, when Dalton stepped away from the water, [ 107 ]

coming back to her, and she leaned against his car to prepare herself for the weight of his body. She slid her hands beneath his coat, on either side of his rib cage, fingering the slender bones beneath his skin. There had been a few boys in college, but every one of them so tentative and polite—a goodnight kiss, nothing more. Before he kissed her that first time, Dalton gathered up a handful of her hair as though he fully intended to take some of it with him when he left. alice worked as a substitute teacher two or three days a week, trying at first to breathe new life into the lesson plans left for her, then writing hall passes and letting the students read their own books or talk quietly to each other instead of doing the work she assigned half-heartedly. She was only a substitute, after all; no one expected her to do much more than keep order in the classroom. Alice made sure to meet that expectation. For nearly two months she drove out to the base every evening as though she were teaching a class again. Her mother lamented the fact that she had to work so hard. All that time at school. Alice hadn’t intended to hide the fact of Dalton; she had only wanted to hold off the constant questioning she knew would follow any mention of a man. And later, when she saw how completely her mother trusted whatever Alice told her, there seemed no purpose in revealing anything: Dalton could just be hers, Alice thought, in the same way every real hope she had was private. She couldn’t tell her mother that when she looked into the future she saw no children, no family at all: only herself and Dalton, in various bedrooms and cities. So Alice said nothing—not because she wanted to conceal the truth, not because she felt she had something to hide. Only because, she told herself, her mother’s life was built from a different set of pieces, one that didn’t include a man whose entire purpose was to take her only child to the other side of the world. for those two months Alice was both a person she’d never been before and the person she had always been. Substitute math teacher by [ 108 ]

day, Alice wore sensible shirtwaist dresses and kept her glasses on even when she didn’t need them, a female version of Clark Kent. The glasses made her feel older, and the boys were less likely to test her boundaries, she discovered, when she entered the room looking like the sort of person who wouldn’t suffer foolishness. Still, most of the seniors were beside themselves with anticipation. They were only a few years younger than she was, but for a long time Alice had not been able to remember how it felt to be where they were now, just on the cusp of something they couldn’t quite foresee but nevertheless believed would be a great adventure. Not until Dalton handed in his final exam. And now she went home for an hour or so after school, just long enough to eat whatever her mother had heated for dinner. She changed clothes on the way out of town, at a gas station, a skirt and sweater in her satchel instead of homework papers and lesson plans. Dalton liked the pink angora sweater set her mother had given Alice for Christmas a year ago, and the inside of her satchel was lined with small, soft hairs that made it seem to possess a life of its own. Dalton lived in the barracks on base, so they met in Mountain Home— in restaurants, at first, though after a few weeks they began to bypass this step and met, instead, at the Desert Rose Motel, nine pink stucco cottages in a half-circle behind a larger pink stucco office. Dalton brought food from the grocery store, the whole cottage smelling of cigarettes and fruit by the time Alice arrived. As soon as she opened the door he pressed her back against it, closing out that other life, one hand in her hair, as it always was, the other slipping beneath her sweater. She dropped her satchel on the floor and pressed her fingers into the small of his back, let them climb the ladder of his spine. Even what turned out to be their last night together started this way, no different from any other. Later, in the kitchenette, Alice sliced up the apples and cheese Dalton had brought for them and thought that if only her mother could see her like this—naked in a grimy kitchen, slicing fruit [ 109 ]

for her lover—she would understand that Alice bore no resemblance to the girl she thought she had living in her house. That girl was dutiful and kind, always punctual; she was never late for work. She remembered to send birthday cards and had always written thank-you notes without being reminded, whenever she received a gift. Alice, on the other hand, met a man she hardly knew in a shabby motel, for a purpose that had nothing to do with white dresses or engraved invitations. Alice carried the food back to the bed with her, balanced a mint-colored plate on Dalton’s flat stomach. She set a slice of apple between his teeth and he lifted his head, inviting her to share the other half. Alice lay beside him and crossed one leg over his, tasting the apple, feeling the wiry hair of Dalton’s calf against her own bare skin. Everything about Dalton was rough: hands, voice, hair, the way he pressed her back against the door each time she arrived. So the gentleness of his nature was surprising when it revealed itself, in those moments when he’d offer her food, present his cheek for a kiss the way a little boy might, or run one finger along her jawbone, tracing her outlines in the same careful way he’d worked through a set of homework problems in class. “I have to go,” he said, still chewing on a piece of apple peel, setting the plate between them on the bed. He raised himself on one elbow, then got up. “Already?” she asked. “Why so early?” “No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean.” Alice heard the voices of another man and woman outside the cottage door, arguing. Dalton went to the window and pulled back the curtain just enough to look into the parking lot. Then he turned his face halfway, not looking at Alice, looking instead to the kitchen she’d just come from. “I got my orders today,” he said. Alice stared at the plate in front of her, at the wheel of apple slices she’d spun so carefully around its center. She had learned this much from her mother, somehow: presentation matters. Three of the apple slices were missing now, and the wheel had broken into sections, more like the blades of a fan that had come to rest. [ 110 ]

“Alice,” Dalton said. “I heard you.” She sat up and set the plate on the nightstand beside her. She felt cold, and she pulled a blanket around her shoulders. “Where are you going?” “Hawaii. In two weeks.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know. You never know, that’s the thing. They just decide, and you don’t have a choice. You go when they tell you to.” He turned to look at her then, but Alice was staring at the pair of hands folded in her lap. How quickly she had become her mother’s daughter again, well mannered in the face of disappointment. “I swear, Alice,” Dalton said, coming back across the room, “I wouldn’t have started anything with you if I knew I was going to be leaving so soon. You have to know I wouldn’t do a thing like that. Not to someone like you.” He sat on the bed and covered both of her hands with one of his. Alice nodded. She did: she believed that Dalton had intended for things to be different between them. But this was the life that had found them now. There was nothing to do but deal with the problems it presented. “I understand that you have to go,” she said. “That’s your job. And you didn’t do anything wrong—you didn’t trick me into anything. I knew you’d be leaving. I just didn’t think it would be this soon.” Dalton said nothing. He stretched out on his stomach beside her and crossed his arms beneath his cheek. For a long time the room was quiet, except for the hum of the half-size refrigerator in the kitchenette. “It’s always like this,” he said. “You would think by now I’d have learned to see it coming. I should just give up on trying to have anything like a normal life. I guess I’m not meant for it.” She slid down beside him in the bed and placed a hand on the side of his face. Dalton looked like he might start to cry, so she kissed his forehead, the way a mother would kiss her child. Then she covered him with the other half of the blanket. “You could come with me,” Dalton said, after she had closed her eyes. It was, Alice thought, a proposal of sorts. [ 111 ]

If she said yes, he would return her devotion in a way that made it seem inevitable. He would do that for her, for a time. But there was no way to know how far that sense of duty would carry them, whether it would grow into something more like love or turn into another thing entirely: resentment, regret. And she would be alone again, but this time in another state, another country. Then Alice thought of her mother, alone herself right now and oblivious to anything that had happened in this room for the past two months. She saw that to leave with Dalton now would be just as devastating, and as final, as any death: she could not be both her mother’s daughter and this woman lying beside a man she loved for reasons she hadn’t yet tried to understand. A man who, truth be told, knew as little of her as she did of him. Alice opened her eyes. She traced Dalton’s hairline with her fingers. She was certain of only one thing: she did not want to be the second woman Dalton felt he had to marry, another story he would tell another woman someday. So she would stay here, remembering the square line of Dalton’s jaw, the surprise of the soft curve toward his ear. when it st arted to rain , Dalton put on his clothes and went out for cigarettes. He had leaned across the bed and kissed the dense patch of freckles at the base of her throat before he left. Alice found the dress she’d worn all day at school, tucked the sweater and skirt back into her satchel one last time, and put on her glasses for the drive home. It was later than usual, but she could still get there in time to claim a delay at the front gate. Her mother would have no reason to suspect that Alice had been doing anything other than teaching a class, and so she would not. Alice cleaned the kitchenette, threw away the apple cores, and wiped the counters with a paper towel. She thought about leaving a note for Dalton, but she didn’t know what to say. He was leaving; she was not. It seemed as if they had spoken all the words that applied to this situation. Finally, though, Alice found a pad of paper in the desk drawer and a pen near the telephone. Write to me. It was all she could think to offer him. [ 112 ]

She opened the cottage door wondering how it was possible that, only three hours ago, she had spent the whole day waiting for the moment when that very same door would open to her. Leaving her car, heading toward their pink cottage, she always felt as though a light had appeared on the dark horizon, just bright enough to illuminate the days ahead of her, their general shape if not their specific design. But that had been enough. When she entered the darkness again, she closed the cottage door behind her, leaving a light on for Dalton. a lice told her mother the letters were from a former student at Mountain Home, from a boy who was lonely at his new base and needed a friend. Not a lie, not exactly. But not the whole truth: letters from the space in between. At first they came nearly every day, and Alice wrote Dalton back each evening. Not long after he left she’d been offered a full-time teaching position at Boise High—the sophomore math teacher had suddenly resigned his position after the Christmas break, without explanation, effective immediately. Alice had already been his substitute on several occasions and was, the principal said, the obvious choice to replace him. And it was better, she found, having something to focus on, something other than the long winter evenings she now spent with her mother again, at home. In her bedroom, at the same desk where she’d studied for exams when she herself was a student at the high school, Alice graded her students’ homework and wrote letters. She wanted to tell Dalton about the odd mix of bachelor girls and effeminate men who congregated in the teachers’ lounge, their wild speculation regarding the math teacher’s abrupt resignation, the unexpected bruise of a purple crocus that appeared in her mother’s flower bed late in February—but she had no words to describe such things. Instead, she wrote I am meeting some interesting people at the high school. The teacher I have replaced appears to have been very popular among his colleagues and they speak of him often. We had warm weather [ 113 ]

for several days and Mother’s flowers are already starting to bloom. She says it’s much too early and a frost will surely take them all. Alice watched as Dalton’s letters spread themselves out over the calendar, as she’d known they would: twice weekly, once a week, then twice a month. His last letter came in May—already hot in Hawaii, according to Dalton. Still cold in Idaho, cold for another month or more. I hope you know that I will always smile when I think about you, Alice. You came into my life at a time when I needed some human compassion more than I needed food or shelter. You gave me just exactly what I needed and you didn’t ask for one thing in return. I will always keep you in my heart and wish you only the best that life can offer, because that is just what you deserve. Dalton didn’t say this would be his last letter, but Alice understood that she need not respond to this one, and after that no more letters would arrive. She would let Dalton go off into the future that had been waiting for him in Hawaii—perhaps with another woman, perhaps on his own. It really didn’t matter. Wherever he was now, he was gone. She would let him tell the truth: that Alice had stopped writing back, that the end was not his choice, but hers. And perhaps he really would think of her sometimes—perhaps, even, in the same way she thought of him, standing naked in a motel cottage, the single common space in their separate lives. Alice began to think of her life as a Venn diagram; the tiny space that overlapped with Dalton’s life she shaded pink, the color of the Desert Rose. the space she shared with Henry Morgan was much larger, and light blue: the color of the tuxedo he wore at their wedding, the color of his eyes. Hank taught industrial arts at Boise High and seemed to be smiling at all times, for no particular reason. He was tall and fit, sandy haired—no one could imagine why he was still single. “He’s the kind of guy, you look at him and wonder how it’s possible he wasn’t snapped up ten years ago.” Maggie Shea, the tiny sophomore Eng[ 114 ]

lish teacher, was already engaged to be married, though Alice suspected that Hank Morgan sometimes made her regret this fact. Maggie and Alice had the same lunch period and often ate together in the faculty lounge, where Alice accepted compliments on the wonderful smell of her mother’s casseroles. “How old is he?” Alice asked. “Ten years ago, he could have been twelve or thirteen.” “And you don’t know anyone who married her childhood sweetheart?” Maggie shook her head and examined carefully the tuna sandwich in her hands, as though she believed the fish might try to reassemble itself and flap free. “I’m not sure how old he is, actually. He was here when I started last year. But he’s just so sweet—he always says ‘Good morning’ when I see him in the parking lot and ‘Bless you’ when I sneeze. And he’s got that smile, and those crinkly eyes. I bet he dated the popular girls at his school. I bet they were all fighting for him. And now—well, he’s just another guy trying to find a wife.” Maggie shrugged and adjusted her glasses, still looking at her sandwich. She had yet to take a bite. “That’s what happens when you keep waiting for the perfect person to come along. There was probably a time when he wouldn’t have even considered a girl like you or me, but I guess he can’t be so choosy now.” Maggie glanced at her then. “No offense, Alice. You know what I mean.” Alice nodded. She understood exactly. And she could see why other women might find Hank attractive. He was not bad looking, in the conventional way. But there was something about his unwavering smile that unnerved Alice and made her mistrust him: no one could be that content with his life, she thought, not truly. Not all the time. Combined with his light hair and fair skin, the smile made her think of Hank as not fully present, more like the idea of a man than the actual person himself. “Is he from here in town?” she asked, because Maggie was chewing, finally, and Alice realized it was her turn to speak. [ 115 ]

“No, some tiny little place up by Hailey or Ketchum. I think that’s what I heard.” Maggie sighed. “I remember when I was in college, all those guys from the small towns were either just like him or completely crazy. No in-between. Either they had the best manners you’d ever seen, real oldfashioned gentlemen, or they were like these wild animals raised in captivity and then set loose to follow their instincts. A guy like that almost killed me, you know. That’s how I met Bill—he basically saved my life.” Alice heard her cue to ask for the whole story, How Maggie Met Her Future Husband, but in fact she didn’t care—and she had learned that Maggie often found her own life more interesting than the facts allowed. Alice had just finished her lunch, which seemed to offer a canny escape. “Oh my,” she said, standing up and collecting her lunch things. “That sounds like a story I’ll definitely want to hear sometime.” Maggie smiled and nodded, enthusiastic at this prospect. Alice had seen pictures of Bill on the desk in Maggie’s classroom: a doughy man with smooth yellow hair and a face so unremarkable that she didn’t remember seeing his photograph the first time and embarrassed herself later, by asking Maggie if she could see a picture of her fiancé. Even Alice could see that Bill was nowhere as handsome as Hank. But neither of them, she thought, would survive a comparison to Dalton: standing next to him, his cropped hair flashing the color of embers, their paperwhite skin would take only moments to disintegrate into flame and ash. before she went back to her room for afternoon classes, Alice liked to stand on the third-floor landing of the fire escape and watch the students mill around in the courtyard below. They never looked up at her, standing there. She didn’t know if this was because no one had ever occupied that perch, or because they plainly didn’t care about anything other than the people who operated at their level. Anyone else was as extraneous and inconsequential as a math test or a science project. Alice remembered high school only vaguely, in spite of the fact that she’d spent whole days in this very building not that long ago. She remem[ 116 ]

bered some of the classes she’d taken, and some of the teachers, many of whom were still here now. But she had no memory of a life like this, the orchestrated movement among different groups of girls, playfully fending off boys who pretended to mean harm. It was possible this had been going on outside while she spent her lunch hours in the library, or in the cafeteria, lingering over lunch with a small group of girls. None of those girls kept in touch long after graduation; they were all headed off to different colleges, with different plans in mind. To stay in touch had seemed to serve no useful purpose to anyone. But Alice saw now that she had spent those years in a different world entirely. Of course she had known she wasn’t popular; perhaps for the first time, though, she understood what that meant. Casual conversation had always been an effort for her, even with other women. First dates were nightmares of silent humiliation, which made for few second dates. She remembered one instance better than others: a boy from her German class had asked if she’d like to see a foreign film showing on campus, and after the movie suggested coffee at a diner near the student union building—perhaps, Alice thought, because no one expected lively conversation during a movie, and her weakness in this area wasn’t yet apparent. Alice had enjoyed the film, about an actress who suddenly stops speaking to anyone, choosing to live her life in total silence. She thought she understood something about that character, and she was ready to talk about it. But the boy had not enjoyed the film. “I’m not much for the artsy stuff,” he said. He wanted to talk about other things: his many accomplishments in high school, his plans for the future. “I was on the football team, even though I don’t really like football that much,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing men like to talk about, their high school football days. I just did it so I’d have something in common with people when I go in for job interviews. That kind of thing is important, you know?” Alice nodded, sipping her coffee. [ 117 ]

“A lot of these guys, they’re taking classes and learning things, but they’re not really thinking about the future. They’re not really planning their lives. I just don’t see the point of that. Like these guys who major in English or drama. I mean, sure, it’s a fun major, but what about later? What about after you’ve graduated—what are you going to do for a living? How are you going to support a family?” Alice shrugged and shook her head, then added a sympathetic smile. She offered a similar sort of response whenever the boy asked a question that didn’t appear to require an actual response from her. This went on, it seemed to Alice, for quite some time. Finally she got up to use the women’s room, and when she came back to their table, the boy was gone. Alice sat down and waited for a moment, wondering if perhaps the boy was using the restroom himself, but a sympathetic waitress let her know the boy had left. Alice felt not so much abandoned as purely relieved that she wouldn’t have to negotiate an awkward parting scene, though she was embarrassed by the woman’s supportive pat on her shoulder. She had always assumed this failure of language, this lack of intuitive ability to know what to say, had something to do with her organically: she was missing some component that other people clearly possessed. She had listened to girls chatting with boys before classes began and wondered how it was possible to carry on a conversation like this, of no real substance, with no object in mind. Then Dalton had convinced her that nothing, in fact, was missing: she was whole and perfect. I see you. I understand. And what he understood had nothing to do with the few words she had spoken to him or those he might use to describe her to someone else; what he saw was that they could give each other something, without speaking, without questions or answers. He understood, as Alice did, that words are ultimately useless: your life speaks for itself. There were, in fact, no words for the time she had spent with Dalton. It was not a romance, because he hadn’t been in love with her; if he had, Alice thought, his proposal would have taken another, more formal shape. [ 118 ]

It was not an affair, because neither of them had been married to someone else at the time. Rendezvous, tryst, assignation—none of the words she knew applied. And because it was impossible to talk about something that defied description, Alice had come to believe that nothing of any consequence had happened between her and Dalton. Now she watched the girls milling around below her and understood that they were only doing exactly what she had done, every day since Dalton left: living their lives, moving on in the ways they knew how. At that age, Alice and her friends had believed that their lives, their real lives, would begin at some later point, and the men who would find them—and there had never been any doubt, for some reason, that the right man would find each of them—those men would understand that beauty and glib charms are traitorous, inconstant as weather, no match for intellect and common sense. She had believed that once. It amused Alice to think of this now, similar as it was to a child’s belief in Santa Claus. “o h, i’m so sorry .” Alice started at the voice. Hank was standing in the doorway from the third-floor hallway. “I didn’t know anyone was out here,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to be, actually,” Alice said. “I just like to get a little air before my afternoon classes. It helps revive me.” Hank laughed, which startled Alice again. She didn’t know she’d made a joke. “I know what you mean,” he said. “The day gets long around two o’clock, and after the kids take off it’s just time to start planning for tomorrow. Seems like it never ends.” Alice nodded, then looked down at the crowd of students below them. “Do you mind if I join you out here?” Hank asked. “Of course not.” He let the door close and wrapped his hands around the black iron [ 119 ]

railing of the fire escape. Alice looked at his hands, the long fingers nicked and scarred from working with power tools and rough wood. The pinky finger on his right hand, she noticed, ended just above the first knuckle. His hands were not what you’d expect, given his otherwise precise and predictable features. She liked this about him. Alice wondered if Maggie Shea had ever taken a good look at Hank’s hands. “So how are you liking our school?” Hank asked. “Are you learning to find your way around?” “I already knew my way around, actually—I went to school here myself.” “No kidding.” Hank sounded genuinely amazed at this possibility. “Does it feel strange, coming back as a teacher?” “It did, at first. A lot of the same teachers are here, so I have to keep reminding myself to call them by their first names. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to calling Mrs. Frazier ‘Evelyn.’” Alice shrugged. She’d been glad to have a permanent job, a new routine to fall into after Dalton left; it hadn’t occurred to her, really, to think about whether or not she liked it. “I can’t imagine going back to my old high school to teach,” Hank said. “That’s what I’d planned to do, originally, but now I think it would feel like going back in time or something. And then, people might look up pictures of me in the yearbooks and see how old I look these days.” He laughed again, but this time Alice was prepared. She understood that Hank did not think he looked old at all. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Lost River. It’s a tiny place up near Hailey. You’ve probably never heard of it.” Alice shook her head. “It’s beautiful. Not like this.” He gestured vaguely to the north, toward the dry brown foothills covered with sage and rocks and rattlesnakes. Just behind them were the mountains where people skied in the winter and camped in the summer. But Alice had gone to school upstate, had seen [ 120 ]

heavy timber and snowfalls measured in feet, not inches—she understood now that Boise often presented itself as dull and hard and lifeless. “Do you miss it?” Hank shrugged, then nodded. “Sometimes. Like I said, it’s really small. A lot of people don’t like small towns.” Alice nodded, yes. “I think it’s nice to know everyone you see in a day. But I came down here to go to college, and it’s like you actually grow while you’re gone or something—like you get bigger when you have a little room to spread out. I get claustrophobic whenever I’m there now. And it feels like all the same people keep telling the same old stories. Like they’ve been having the exact same conversation over and over again since I left.” Hank ran his hands back and forth along the railing. Alice wondered if he was nervous. It didn’t seem possible, but she recognized this tendency toward anxious movement. She stopped toying with the birthstone ring she wore on her right hand. “I’ve never lived anywhere other than here,” she said. “I mean, I went to college up in Moscow, but that was just school. I don’t think living on campus really counts as living somewhere. I wouldn’t have minded staying in Moscow and teaching there, though. It’s a beautiful little town. But my father died a few years ago, right after I graduated from high school, so I’m back at home with my mother now. I think she’d be terribly lonely if she were there all by herself. I know she’d manage to get along, of course, but I’d worry about her all the time if I lived somewhere else. And I know she’d never move—she’s lived her whole life here. And I’m an only child, so I’m pretty much all she has left in the world. But there are days when I feel like I can’t go back inside that house even one more time. There are days when I leave early for school just because I’m so glad I have somewhere else to go.” Alice stopped and took a deep breath. She felt shaky and marveled at her untruthful hands, sitting calmly on the rail in front of her. She had never spoken so many words at once, hadn’t planned to say any of these [ 121 ]

things. She hadn’t even known these were her thoughts. But somehow they’d found their way through the maze of her brain and into her throat, over her tongue and lips, and hearing her own words, she recognized them as the truth. “You’re a good daughter,” Hank said, after a moment. Alice nodded at her feet. “Yes I am,” she said. He gripped the railing and leaned back, holding himself with his arms. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. Then he said: “Do you think your mother would mind being alone for a few hours if I took you out for dinner sometime? Maybe Friday night?” Hank’s eyes were still closed when he asked this question, so Alice looked him over carefully: tanned face, muscular torso, mangled hands. She could only imagine her mother’s pleasure at seeing a man like this at their door, calling on her daughter. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind at all,” Alice said. her mother loved Hank, of course. “He’s so tall,” she said, as though this were some measure of his character. But there were other things she liked just as well: he had nice teeth and good manners. He was handy with tools. And he loved her mother’s cooking, so before long he had started eating dinner with them two or three times a week. Sometimes he and Alice sat out on the front porch after dinner. Sometimes, once the days grew longer, they took walks through the neighborhood. Alice and her mother lived in the old part of town, so these walks often featured the gentle smiles of elderly women sitting alone on their own front porches—widows, Alice supposed, reminiscing about the distant days of courtship, that time when they believed in the future as a place where anything was possible. The difference between them was that Alice already knew this wasn’t true. She felt something for Hank, something she might have called love if she hadn’t met Dalton first, but now she recognized what she felt for him was something else entirely: perhaps it was fondness, or affection. [ 122 ]

Perhaps it was simply friendship. She was happy to run into him at school each day; she liked to watch him blush when her mother embarrassed him with backhanded compliments. You don’t worry about spilling that gravy on my nice white tablecloth, Hank—I like to see a man enjoy his dinner. But she didn’t anticipate his arrival on those evenings when he came for dinner; she didn’t watch at the window for his car nosing up the street toward her mother’s house. She remembered all the nights she’d flown toward Mountain Home, leaning over the steering wheel as if that would make the car move faster, imagining Dalton’s greeting when she arrived, and she knew that what she felt for Hank was not the same and never would be. Alice considered explaining this, or trying to. Hank would be surprised, she thought—he was likely used to women who considered his attention a kind of gift. But it seemed only fair to be honest with him. Still, she thought, it was possible that she was taking his attention to mean something more than he intended. They were walking near her mother’s house one evening when she realized that this was not the case. “This is my favorite time of day,” Hank said. He waved to Mrs. Sutherland, one of her mother’s friends. Then he laced his fingers into hers. The blunt end of his shortened little finger curled against the pad of her hand, and she felt suddenly protective of its soft tip, utterly defenseless without a nail. “Evenings are nice this time of year,” Alice agreed. Hank laughed. Over the weeks they’d spent together, Alice had learned not to jump at this sound—but she could never tell when Hank would find her amusing, or why. “I wasn’t talking about the weather,” he said. “I meant that I like spending this time with you, Alice.” “Oh.” She watched her feet matching Hank’s stride, which took a conscious effort because of his long legs. “Well, I’ll admit that it’s nice to have someone to spend the evenings with.” “Really?” Hank waited until she looked up at him, then smiled. “That’s [ 123 ]

nice to hear. You’re kind of hard to read, you know. I can’t really tell when you’re having a good time and when I’m boring you to tears.” “I wouldn’t waste my time with someone who bored me,” Alice said, surprising herself with the truth again. “Well then, I’ll take that as a compliment.” Hank waved to another woman on her porch, and this time Alice copied the gesture. “You get to be my age,” he said, “a lot of people start wondering why you aren’t married. They assume there must be a problem with you and they just don’t know about it yet. Like maybe I’m the most boring man on earth.” “For heaven’s sake, you make it sound as if you’re middle-aged.” “I’m thirty-five,” he said. “That’s old for never being married.” Alice focused on the sidewalk in front of them to conceal her surprise. She had assumed Hank was near her age, maybe slightly older; he didn’t look more than twenty-five. “To be honest,” Hank said, “I was a little surprised that you even agreed to have dinner with me.” “Well, we’re even, then. I was surprised that you asked me out.” “Why?” “Do you really need to ask?” she said, turning her free hand upward to show its obvious emptiness. “I think it’s fairly evident that I’m not your type.” Hank seemed amused by this. “Is that so? And what is my type?” Alice thought for a moment before she answered. She didn’t want to be unkind, only truthful. “Let’s just say that, given the choice, I could see you dating Marianne Parker rather than me.” Marianne was the typing teacher, a petite and effervescent blond with a smile as ubiquitous as Hank’s. Recently she’d become engaged to the junior college football coach—a likely pairing if ever there was one, Alice thought. But she could also see Marianne with Hank. He cocked his head to the side. “I’m not sure I can take that as a compliment,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t mean to suggest that you’re [ 124 ]

superficial—but you must know that women find you handsome. As a general rule, handsome men tend to date attractive women. That’s all I was trying to say.” Hank nodded thoughtfully, as if considering the validity of her observation. “As a general rule, I would say that’s true. But I still don’t understand—” Here he paused to feign confusion. “Why were you surprised when I asked you out?” Alice knew she should smile at this compliment, and so she did. But it seemed unfair for Hank to suggest that she was as pretty as Marianne, as though they were equal simply by virtue of being female. For her to argue their obvious differences would serve only to solicit reassurances that she didn’t want or need. “You are a very kind man,” she said, and Hank laughed again, and she changed the subject. “So how is it that you’ve managed to avoid getting married, exactly? I’m sure it’s not from lack of opportunity, to hear people talking about you in the teachers’ lounge.” “People?” “Well—women. Maggie Shea, specifically.” “Oh, lord.” Hank shook his head. “You’ll notice that I don’t eat my lunch in the teachers’ lounge anymore. Every time it was the same thing— ‘I have this wonderful friend,’ or ‘My neighbor’s daughter is in town this week.’ And on, and on, and on. I got tired of people assuming I needed help filling my social calendar.” Alice nodded. They’d come to a corner, and she let Hank choose the direction they’d take next. He turned north, away from her mother’s house. “I think it’s even worse for a woman,” she said. “If you’re not engaged by the time you finish high school, you’re already behind schedule and your mother starts trying to match you up with someone. My Aunt Rose came over for dinner once, and for some reason I didn’t feel like having dessert, and she said ‘That’s right—you’ve got to watch your figure until you get your man.’ At least men get to go to college before the pressure starts.” [ 125 ]

“Some men do. A lot of my friends just got married after high school, though. They have teenage kids now. And here I am—nothing to show for myself but myself.” “And your degree. And your career. Both things it’s all right for you to have. They don’t make you suspicious.” Hank shrugged, scuffed his shoe on the gritty sidewalk. “I was engaged once, truth be told. A long, long time ago. Right after I graduated from high school.” Alice looked up at him, not surprised, not exactly. “But you’ve never been married.” Hank shook his head. “She died. Her whole family, actually. They were in an accident on their way home from a trip to California.” Alice tried to read his expression, but Hank had turned to wave to yet another woman on yet another porch. They were several blocks from Alice’s house at that point, and she’d never seen the woman before, but Hank’s smile was as genuine as though he’d known her for years. How could he do it, Alice wondered—call up a seemingly honest response from a place that didn’t even exist? “That’s terrible,” she said, and could think of nothing more to add. “It was. Especially in a small town—it feels like a whole branch of the family tree just gets knocked off without any warning. Everyone I knew was feeling the loss, in one way or another, so there was no way to escape from it. Not for one minute. And of course everyone felt sorry for me. I appreciated that, you know, but it’s one of the reasons I don’t go home much anymore. Even now, every time I see them, I know people are thinking ‘poor old Hank.’ Like that’s my full name: Poor Old Hank. Because to them it seems like I never moved on, even though I moved away.” He moved his head from side to side, as though he were considering something before he spoke again. “I’d grown up with Patty—that was her name, Patty Donovan. We’d never even talked about getting married, never had an actual conversation about it, will-you-marry-me-yes-I-will. It was just understood. We’d always been together. We played together when [ 126 ]

we were little, and then in junior high our parents would drive us to the movies together on the weekends, and it just went on from there. It was just my life. I never imagined being with any other girl. I never even tried. And of course I wasn’t ready to date anyone else for a long time after that. But when I was ready, finally—well, that’s when I figured out that I had no idea how to do it. Spending your whole life with one person doesn’t prepare you for much of anything, except being with that person.” So they had this much in common, Alice thought: she would not be the love of his life. She was not the one he had been waiting for. And she understood now that the smile that made her wary was not concealing anything; it was merely Hank’s way of acknowledging your good fortune, happy to see that you had survived, once again, to say hello. His way of reminding you that this, in itself, was reason enough to smile. Alice realigned her fingers between Hank’s, careful to tuck his pinky against her palm. When they came to the next corner, she tugged gently on his hand and they crossed the street to turn toward home. t hey married a year later, in June, just after Alice had completed her first full year of teaching. She understood that she would not continue to work after the wedding and didn’t question why: that, too, was understood. Their daughter was born in April, a girl who looked so much like Hank from the very beginning that Alice could not imagine where the child might be making room for her. Cindy had light hair and long fingers, all intact and unmarred. Holding her daughter in the hospital, just hours after Cindy’s arrival, Alice realized that she was seeing Hank’s hands as they had been before life put its mark on him: there had been a time when Hank didn’t have a story to tell about each of his scars, both the visible and the unseen, a time when Hank was not the person she had married but someone completely different. Someone who loved Patty Donovan and believed the future existed only for planning, for good. Their child recalled this person Hank had been, and Alice wanted to weep for everything he’d lost—the person [ 127 ]

with whom he’d planned to spend his life, the person he loved so much, so inevitably, that the words of love became unnecessary. And what had she lost, really? Alice thought. Nothing, by comparison. “ you’re a lucky girl to have found a man like that to marry you,” her mother said, nearly every time she saw Alice now. “Don’t you forget it.” Because it turned out that her mother knew her daughter after all: she knew that Alice was fragile in many ways, easily overwhelmed and, when feeling weighted down by details other people simply hefted around like bags full of groceries until they found their balance, would give up everything she didn’t absolutely need before she asked for help. Above all else, Alice thought of herself as capable. It was the one immutable fact of her existence: she got things done. When her father died, Alice had made the funeral arrangements while her mother sat on the side of the bed she’d shared with him, staring blankly out the bedroom window at the rose hedge her husband had planted the year they bought the house. Alice went shopping for the suit her father would wear into eternity and a proper black dress for herself because, her mother said, dark blue was not the same, would not suffice, certainly not for the daughter of the deceased. So when the baby cried and nothing would calm her, Alice walked from one end of her house to the other, holding Cindy against her chest, hoping the frantic but regular beating of her heart would calm whatever had unsettled this child. She put the baby in her crib and let her cry, as her mother suggested: “Babies are smart. She’ll figure out that if she cries, you’ll carry her around with you all day.” But more often than not, Cindy just kept crying—whether held or left alone, late or early in the day. She was what the other mothers called a difficult baby, a problem with no obvious solution. “Maybe you should take her to the doctor, have him check her out,” Hank said, but that was the first thing Alice had tried, of course, and she rolled her eyes. [ 128 ]

“Babies cry, Mother,” the doctor had said to her. “That’s what they do. If there’s really something wrong with her, you’ll know.” How? Alice wanted to ask, but it seemed she should already know the answer to that question. She was a mother; some switch inside her brain had been tripped with the birth of this child, or should have been, nurture now as reflexive as breathing. But she didn’t know what to do, and the baby continued to cry. “Is it normal?” Hank asked one evening, the two of them lying awake past midnight, listening to Cindy wail in her room, and Alice turned to glare at him. “For her to cry like that, I mean. It just doesn’t seem normal. It seems like there must be something wrong.” “She’s not wet, she won’t eat, she doesn’t stop when I rock her or walk around with her—I don’t know what else to try. She’ll stop when she’s ready, I guess.” “Maybe—” Alice threw back the covers and got out of bed. “When you have spent one entire day with her, when you have listened to her cry like that all day long, then you can start making suggestions about how I should take care of her.” She shook her head and covered her face with her hands. “Do you think I enjoy knowing that I can’t make my own child happy? Do you realize that I can’t even go to the store until she settles down, and who knows when that might be, and who cares if I’m right in the middle of doing something else—when she stops crying, we have to go, right that minute, because there’s no way of knowing when she’ll start up again, and we’ll have to leave the store if she does, because I can’t make her stop. I can’t.” Hank was quiet for a long moment—afraid to speak, Alice thought, and rightly so. She took her hands from her face and looked at him. “She’s a baby, Alice,” he said, finally. “It’s not like she’s trying to make you feel bad.” As if that makes any difference, Alice thought. She found a tissue, blew her nose. [ 129 ]

“Anyway,” Hank said, “people know babies cry. There’s no law against crying babies at the grocery store.” “Well,” she said, “you feel free to take her to the store, then. See how people look at you. Then again, you’re her father—they wouldn’t expect you to know what to do with her. They’d say, Poor thing, she wants her mama. But she doesn’t want me. I don’t know what she wants, but it clearly isn’t me, because I’m with her all the time and it doesn’t seem to matter.” Alice sat down in the big blue chair she’d settled in the corner of their bedroom, a chair that had long been in her parents’ living room—her father’s chair. Every time she saw it, Alice thought of her mother sitting in the quiet living room, looking at the empty seat beside hers, a matched set broken. She had kept her own but offered the other to Alice when she moved out, finally, into her own home. And Alice had taken it, of course, knowing she couldn’t refuse a gesture made in love, though she did refuse to put the chair in her living room. Hank got out of bed, walked to the other end of the short hallway. Alice could hear him crooning to Cindy, talking to her in a voice he’d created just for this child. She listened to the floorboards and the sound of Cindy’s crying and tracked their progress from Cindy’s room into the living room, into the kitchen, out the back door and into the warm June night. She pulled back the curtain at their bedroom window and watched Hank point out the constellations, something he’d done with her on more than one of their evening walks, a long time ago, before they were married. She tried to recall those long walks through the old neighborhood, learning to be with Hank, his gentle finger tucked against the palm of her hand. Before he kissed her, he liked to put his palms on the sides of her face and tip it upward, positioning her just so before he bent down and met her lips. His pinky found a soft space behind her ear, a place she was sure Dalton had never touched, it felt so new. Sometimes now, when Hank was at school and Cindy was crying, she folded her own pinky in half and pressed her knucklebone into that spot, trying to remind herself how it felt to know that someone loved her. [ 130 ]

Alice climbed back into bed, exhausted, hoping the new distance between her and the baby would offer something close enough to quiet. But she couldn’t sleep: she looked at the ceiling and imagined herself on a chaise lounge, washed by a warm breeze, drinking from a tall glass, watching a palm tree wave its fronds overhead. Hawaii would be green and fragrant, even this time of year. She felt herself floating somewhere in a deep expanse of blue. Alice reached a hand out to her side in the darkness and tried to feel Dalton’s fingers laced between her own. This is my real life, she thought, as though it were possible to erase the intervening years through sheer force of will. But it felt like a lie even as the words formed themselves in her mind. Years had passed, and Dalton had probably moved on. This life with her husband and their child was the only one she would ever have. s he must have dozed off, because when Cindy stopped crying Alice didn’t notice right away; she woke, then realized she’d been sleeping, and then she noticed the house gone still and got to her feet so quickly she had to catch herself against the wall to keep from falling. Hank and Cindy were not in the house. She opened the back door and found them still in the yard, Hank stretched out on a blanket, Cindy asleep against his chest. Her body was curled into a tight ball against the curve of his arm. She touched Hank’s shoulder and he opened his eyes, pursed his lips in a silent shhhh. He tipped his head toward Cindy, eyebrows raised—How about that?—then smiled and pointed to the house with his free hand, telling Alice to go back to inside. “Are you sure?” she whispered. Hank nodded again, so Alice helped him pull the free edge of the blanket over half of his body and went back to sleep. She woke, early in the morning, to the sound of Cindy crying again, surprised to feel relief at her daughter’s distress. “Who knew?” Hank asked, while Alice fed her a bottle. “She just wanted to go camping.” “I don’t think that damp night air can be good for her.” [ 131 ]

“Hey, if it gets her to settle down,” Hank said, “I’m all for it. I like sleeping outside anyway. I guess she takes after me that way. We’ve never gone camping, have we?” Alice shook her head, no. But this wasn’t about spending time outdoors: Cindy had settled into her father’s arm because she’d found whatever she needed there. Perhaps it was something her mother didn’t possess; perhaps it was something her father wasn’t even conscious of. Or perhaps it had nothing to do with either of them: she had simply been charmed by the lights of the neighborhood, guardians against the dark distance, and found herself, momentarily, happy. years later, Alice would think of that night as the beginning. It was not so simple as the beginning of the end, which came long after this; it would have been difficult, and maybe impossible, to trace a line between those events. But it was the beginning of Alice’s sense that something was plainly wrong with her, and something much worse than her inability to find the words to represent her inner life. Hank had gone to their troubled baby and found a way to help her sleep; Alice had dreamed of leaving them, then drifted off even as Cindy cried. So Alice was not to be trusted, not by herself or others. It was no wonder Cindy cried all the time. Babies are smart, her mother said. cindy took after Hank in so many ways that Alice lost count. She was blond and strong and beautiful. She loved to be outside. She smiled whenever she wasn’t crying, and after those first few months she rarely cried at all. That first summer after Cindy was born, Hank took the civil service exam and quit his teaching job to become a mail carrier. The pay was better, and he liked walking his route, spending the day outdoors and chatting with the people he came to know in his neighborhoods; it was almost like living in a small town again. One Monday morning he noticed that an elderly man on his route, Mr. [ 132 ]

Hennessey, had not come to the door to greet him as he usually did when Hank delivered the mail. This change in his routine so alarmed Hank that he went next door, to a neighbor’s house, and asked the woman there if she knew whether Mr. Hennessey had gone out of town. Now that she thought about it, the neighbor said, she hadn’t seen Mr. Hennessey for a while. Hank asked her to call the police and went back to old man’s house to wait. He stood on the front porch while the officers went inside and found Mr. Hennessey naked on his bathroom floor, where he’d lain since falling and breaking his hip Saturday evening, after he took a shower in preparation for Sunday morning services. The local newspaper reported these events, and Hank became a minor sort of celebrity, for a time. He was quoted in the newspaper as saying “People just need to watch out for each other. Pay attention to what’s going on—keep an eye on the people you know and love, and we’ll all be a little bit safer.” A smiling photograph of Hank’s face sat above this line in the morning paper. Alice smiled back at him when she read this. He was her husband, this good man, and she was lucky to have found him, lucky he had chosen her. But there was so much that Hank himself didn’t know. For instance: that after Cindy went to school each day, after Alice made her sack lunch and sent her on her way, she sat in the blue chair in their bedroom and stared at the blank wall for hours. She did not think about anything in particular as she did this, though she often told herself to get up, clean the house, eat some lunch. Quite often now, she did none of these things. Her clothes had begun to hang on her body differently, and she was aware that she’d lost some weight. Other women in the neighborhood had commented on this, though Hank had not. Alice was aware of many things she needed to do, and yet she could bring herself to do none of them. The house gathered a layer of dust, and Hank drew a finger across the top of the television set in the living room once, leaving a shiny clean stripe beneath a wake of sparkling dust motes, [ 1 33 ]

but said nothing. He wore a uniform to work—he had four sets of matching shirts and pants—and Alice did manage to go to the dry cleaner often enough that he always had clean clothes to wear. She managed to go to the grocery store, get herself out of bed in the morning to make Hank and Cindy breakfast, set out Cindy’s clothes and send her off to school. She knew these were the acts of love. But when the door closed behind her husband and daughter, Alice sank into the soft blue chair, exhausted in a way she understood was completely out of proportion to what little work she’d done. Tired as she was, though, she couldn’t sleep—not at night, beside Hank, or during the days she spent alone. Eventually Alice couldn’t bring herself to think about anything she needed to do, either. She couldn’t bring herself to think at all. Too much effort. Sleeping, waking, getting up, getting dressed: it was just a ridiculous routine that amounted to nothing but one more day. Then came the morning when Hank got up to take his shower and Alice did not get out of bed to make him breakfast. He returned to the bedroom from the bathroom and saw her lying there still. “Are you sick?” he asked. He put a hand on her cheek. “You don’t feel hot.” Alice closed her eyes. “I’m very tired,” she said. Alice’s mother had died that spring, so Hank might have attributed her behavior to grief, initially. Perhaps Alice just needed time to herself. In any case, he nodded. “You rest, then. I’ll get Cindy up and ready.” He finished dressing and closed the bedroom door behind him. It was early, still dark. Alice heard the two of them having breakfast together, in the kitchen, and she noticed that when the house went quiet, it was as if she too had gone. after her mother died , Alice had spent several weeks clearing out her house; she decided what could be given to Goodwill, what to toss, and what to keep. Most of her mother’s clothes looked nearly brand new. [ 1 34 ]

She had a few favorite dresses that she wore around the house, but the rest she wore only to church. She had shoes in her closet that were still in their boxes, as though she’d once planned to wear them but never had the chance. Alice hardly remembered her mother going anywhere other than church, even before her father died. Her mother had been there in the morning, before she went to school, and in the afternoon when she came home. Naturally she must have left the house during the day—to do the shopping, the thousand mundane errands that being in charge of a household demands—but Alice couldn’t remember a time when she’d come home to an empty house. And now that her mother wasn’t here, now that this house too was her responsibility, Alice was able to imagine the life she might have lived here on her own. She could have come home after a long day at school and graded her students’ homework at the kitchen table instead of her bedroom desk; she could have taken down the heavy curtains in the living room and let the morning light stream in, not worried about how it might fade the woodwork. After a while, as her mother’s generation passed away and new families took over their homes, no one would know this house had ever belonged to anyone else. They would know her only as Miss Alice, the quiet, kindly high school teacher who lived alone. It didn’t sound so terrible, Alice thought. She remembered her mother saying that Alice needed to find her own place in the world, but she saw now that her mother had said this, at least in part, to obscure the easier option—of asking for nothing more than what she had already, of looking inside herself for happiness. That wasn’t an option any longer: she had others to think about first, and to look inside was plainly selfish when there was so much out here that needed to be done. t he first time she tried to take her life, Alice planned it carefully: Cindy was spending some time in Lost River, visiting Hank’s family. Hank had [ 1 35 ]

explained that Alice needed a little break; she hadn’t been feeling well, she was tired, missing her mother. Hank’s mother loved Cindy and couldn’t carry on a conversation with Alice, so she didn’t need convincing. Hank was working overtime, filling in on a Saturday shift while another carrier took his vacation. He would be out of the house all day. At noon, Alice drew herself a hot bath and lined up twenty-two sleeping pills from bottles she’d purchased at the drugstore over a series of several weeks, so as not to draw attention to herself. No one had paid attention, though; Hank’s act of heroic good citizenship was long in the past. Most people had gone back to thinking about themselves. She took the pills with a large glass of water and lowered herself into the tub. When she woke at the hospital that evening, she was genuinely surprised that her planning hadn’t achieved the intended outcome. Hank was sitting beside the bed, arms folded, watching her sleep. “Hi,” she said. It was pathetic, it was awful, but she could think of nothing else. “Hi.” He took her hand. “How are you feeling?” Her mouth was so dry it hurt. She had a terrible headache. She was still alive. “Okay,” she said. But then she started to cry. “Oh, Alice.” Hank bent over and kissed the back of her hand. “Why would you hurt yourself like that? I came home on my lunch break to check on you because you seemed so—I don’t know. You weren’t yourself this morning. I could tell something was wrong. Is it something I did? Why would you do such a thing?” She could see that Hank really wanted to know, but she had no answer to his question. How could she say it? There’s no point, Hank. She knew what he would say: Of course there was a point. She had a child, a husband, people who needed her. Their whole life lay ahead of her. “I love you, Alice,” Hank said. “Cindy loves you. She’s only six years old. She needs her mom.”

[ 1 36 ]

Alice nodded. She understood. Of course Cindy loved and needed her mother; it would be ridiculous to think otherwise. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” Hank put his hand on her cheek. His pinky slipped into its familiar place behind her ear. “You have to promise me you’re never going to do anything like this again.” Alice nodded, and she meant what she was saying. t he doctor at the hospital gave her pills and told her to take them at the same time every day. “They’ll help you stay even,” he said, and Alice found this strange; staying even had never seemed like the problem. As far as she could tell, her entire life had always been, exactly, even. People talked, of course. Boise was still a small town then, and her neighbors knew what had happened. Perhaps they had seen her carried out of the house on a stretcher, hair wet from where she slipped down into the bath. (Alice remembered none of this; she could only imagine.) Perhaps a crowd of people, standing around to gawk at their neighbor’s misfortune—now, suddenly, paying attention—had overheard the paramedics talking to each other, gleaned the facts of her story. No one said anything about that day. No one referred to it at all, not even Hank, once she’d come home from the hospital. But Alice could see in the way her neighbors looked at her now, or didn’t look at her, or quickly met her eyes and offered a cautious smile—Careful, you don’t want to set her off. They knew, and they would always know this about her. After two months of taking her pills, though, Alice felt better than she had in years—better, perhaps, than she had ever felt before. She was getting out of bed every day, getting dressed, making breakfast, cleaning the house. She was planning dinner and running to the grocery store, all of it so easily manageable. She picked flowers for the dinner table and bought herself a cookbook, learned to make a few new meals.

[ 1 37 ]

She stopped taking the pills one summer morning when the sun shone on the grass in their backyard, fragrant and freshly mown, a brighter shade of green than it had ever been, Alice was certain. She watched two magpies bickering over the last piece of stale bread she’d thrown outside for them. Ridiculous that she should have to convince herself to stay in this world, this beautiful place she shared with her husband and their lovely blond child. Whatever dark cloud had come over her before—well, it was clearly gone. What was that thing her mother always said? This too shall pass. And so it had. the second time she tried to take her life, Alice was already in the hospital. Hank could see it happening this time, their whole life piling up around them, Alice exhausted but never sleeping. Concerned that she would try to harm herself again, he called the doctor—who told him to have Alice committed before, as he put it, she did something stupid. Committed. A word people used to describe a successful marriage, but also the word Hank used to explain that he planned to send her away. It made no sense. Alice saved up the pills they gave her each day at the hospital, then took them all in one gulp, just before she went to bed for the night. She woke up the next day in the same bed; she’d been taken to the emergency room when a nurse heard a strange noise and checked on her, found Alice choking on her own vomit. So her stomach had been emptied, and then she’d been returned to her room, fresh and clean but not forgiven. After that, the nurse held Alice’s chin tipped back and dropped the pills straight down her throat. She watched Alice swallow before handing her a glass of water. Every time—and there were many after this, times she’d hurt herself and times she knew Hank spent whole days afraid she would—Alice went home from the hospital believing that she was a different person, that she had learned something important about herself. She just needed better [ 1 38 ]

coping skills, a new hobby, a part-time job. But there were no jobs for people like her, women who couldn’t type and couldn’t spend a whole day away from home. For a time she saw a psychiatrist twice a week, but talking didn’t solve the problem; talking only made it worse, she told Hank, because she had no way to name the selfish and deceitful thing that descended on her the very moment she let down her guard. The psychiatrist kept telling her she had to choose to live. She wanted to live, she told Hank. She just didn’t know how. Alice started smoking, as many people at the hospital did. It was a way to mark the time she’d spent in one place. She could count the cigarettes in her ashtray and know when she was slipping, when she needed to make herself get up and do something else. Hank started smoking too, or started again, a habit he’d given up after college. Now it seemed like something they could do together, sitting on the back steps in the evening, watching Cindy play on the swing set in the yard. She would never, she was certain, harm herself in front of Cindy, or at a time when Cindy might be the one to find her body. Alice didn’t want to harm her daughter in any way—she only wanted to end the relentless flight from whatever it was that made her desperate enough to do these things. Even on her best days she felt more animal than human now, always watched, forever pursued by something that rustled in the hedges of her mind. j u st after cindy turned ten , Hank moved them into a different house, near the edge of town, where they had no neighbors and Alice felt more comfortable. By then she’d switched roles with Cindy almost entirely: her daughter got herself out of bed in the morning, made breakfast for herself and her father, started the coffee. She brought a cup to Alice, if her mother was still in bed—Alice didn’t eat breakfast, even when she was feeling well—and gathered her things for school. Alice’s mother had taught Cindy to make a few simple dishes, so she often made dinner for everyone too. [ 1 39 ]

Alice stayed in bed or got up, pulled on a robe or put on her clothes—it didn’t matter anymore. At the hospital, the last time, she’d overheard a doctor speaking to Hank: “The thing is, if she wants to kill herself, she’s going to find a way to do it. You can take every pill out of the medicine cabinet and sell every gun you own, and she’ll still find a way. One of my patients drank drain cleaner. Another woman tied a plastic trash bag over her own head.” She would never tie a plastic trash bag over her own head, Alice thought. The very idea was too gruesome to consider. But Hank had listened to this doctor—he was running out of money and patience and energy to deal with her. And now they both understood: he would do his best to head her off, but he could not keep Alice from dying. She would have to do that herself. So she lived in the house with them, but for the most part she lived alone. She wandered from her bedroom (it was her room now, Hank slept in his recliner in the living room) to the small back porch, from the porch to the kitchen. She made a sandwich, drank a cup of coffee. She tried hard to stay alive—for Hank, who was good and deserved good things, and for Cindy, because she didn’t want to harm her daughter. At the end of each day she sat on the back porch thinking, There, I have done this for you. She gave herself credit for this accomplishment, though it seemed no one else could. Then it occurred to her one day that the answer might not be death, but leaving: none of this had started, the black cloud descending low, until after she married Hank. She would miss seeing Cindy every morning, smiling when she brought her a cup of coffee, but Alice didn’t want to infect her with this darkness. Already Cindy did so much; it wasn’t fair to her. Perhaps Alice could go away, and when she was feeling well again she might call her daughter on the telephone and say, See how much better I am now? It wasn’t my fault. I just had to get away from him. Long ago, Alice realized, she had given her child all she had to give. It didn’t seem like much, but she could see that Cindy was a good mother, [ 140 ]

taking care of her now, and she hoped that meant she had been a good mother at some point, that Cindy had learned some of these things from her. Alice made the decision to leave and in minutes was out the front door of the house, closing it with a sound both solid and final, as though the house approved of her choice. Hank had taken his truck to work, so she would have to catch a bus into town or walk. She didn’t know how far that was, how long it would take. But their front yard was wide, the house set back from the road, and by the time she’d crossed the lawn she could feel her feet going numb with last night’s cold rain, still sitting on the blades of grass. There were puddles of old rain in the rutted gravel drive, their surfaces lightly pocked and rippled; it was starting to sprinkle, but Alice stood beside the road. She would wait for a car to come by. She would flag it down and ask the driver to take her into town. But she had no money. Alice pulled a cigarette from the pack in her pocket and lit it, thinking. She didn’t know if there was money hidden in the house somewhere. It seemed like a long time since she’d gone to a store or written a check; she wasn’t entirely certain she remembered how to do this. She thought of the desk in their living room, where Hank always kept envelopes and stamps for the bills. There might be extra pads of checks in that desk drawer. She could ask for a ride to town and go to the bank, write a check. That would require going back inside the house, though, and Alice didn’t want to go back. Her departure was complete; the door had closed behind her in a satisfying way. And there weren’t many cars along these country roads—what if she went inside the house and a car came by? What if that was the only car to come by this afternoon? She would miss her chance. Then she would have to stay here, with Hank. But she couldn’t go anywhere without money, that was the bottom line. So Alice crossed the front yard again, and when she arrived at the house she found the front door locked. The back door was locked too, she discovered. So now she was trapped outside, left in the yard to shiver like a wet dog. It was as if Hank had [ 141 ]

planned it this way—if she chose to leave, he seemed to be saying, that was fine, but she should realize that she couldn’t just change her mind. She was being punished. And for what? For trying to stay alive, the very thing he had been asking her to do since that very first time at the hospital. You have to promise me you’re never going to do anything like this again. She was trying, couldn’t he see that? She was trying. Alice crossed the lawn again, heading back to the road. She would find money, somehow. She would panhandle, if she had to. She would get away. The wind picked up and she drew her robe more tightly around her body. She hadn’t realized, before she left the house, that she’d neglected to get dressed that morning. Her house slippers stuck to her feet now, soaked with rain, pressing the cold into her skin. She reached for another cigarette, but the pack in her pocket was empty. Empty? She distinctly remembered opening a fresh pack that morning, sliding it into the pocket of her robe. That was always a good way to start the day: she liked the firmness of a new pack of cigarettes, before it began to collapse around its missing pieces. She looked down at the flower bed beside her and saw it was covered with cigarette butts, bloated like tiny finger-shaped corpses. How long had she been standing here? The cigarette butts settled among the cedar chips in the flower bed, around the peony bushes she’d watched Hank and Cindy plant from inside the house. The color of the cedar chips reminded her, suddenly, of Dalton. That was why she needed to leave, she understood now: she was going to find him. She was going to be happy again. But first, she was going to clean this peony bed. The cigarettes had started to float in the rivulets of water that ran in from the street, like bodies carried downstream after a flood. She hated smoking, hated the smell that hung on her clothes and the cigarette butts that spilled over the edges of her ashtrays, betraying her. She couldn’t quit now, though. She had tried. They wouldn’t let her go. “Mom?” Alice was on her hands and knees, on the wet ground. She looked up at Cindy. [ 142 ]

“Mom, it’s raining. Come inside the house. Come on.” She held out her hand. “The door’s locked,” Alice said. Cindy glanced at the house, then back at Alice. “We’ll use the extra key, under the mat,” she said. “Come on. You’re soaking wet. You’re going to get sick.” She sounded so rational, Alice thought, so clearly adult. Her daughter was fourteen years old, coming home from school, but this was the sort of voice people adopted with very small children who didn’t understand the consequences of their actions. “I’m trying,” Alice said. And then she started to cry. She sat back on her haunches and covered her face with her hands and smelled the dirt underneath her fingernails. It was awful for Cindy to see her mother like this, like a dog in the yard. “It’s okay. Come on. I’ll help you.” Alice took her hand and Cindy pulled her to her feet. They went inside the house, the front door closing with the same sucking sound she’d heard before, but this time she was being sucked in. “I’m sorry,” she told her daughter. “It’s okay.” Cindy guided her to the bathroom and told her to take off her wet things, brought her fresh pajamas and warm socks for her feet. “Wash your hands and throw your wet clothes in the tub. I’m going to make you some hot chocolate,” she said, and closed the door so Alice could change in privacy. The day she finally succeeded in taking her life, Alice would close that bathroom door and think of Cindy doing the same for her, closing the door behind her that day, giving her mother privacy—but not before she had reached around with one hand, almost as an afterthought, to make sure the door between them was unlocked. s he had wanted to be a different kind of mother. There were times when she believed she could: in the weeks after coming home from the [ 1 43 ]

hospital, when the days were just long enough, she could see the shape of her routine in a list of errands. The trip from home to the grocery store, to the dry cleaner and home again, was a circle that overlapped with the lives of her husband and her child, whose meals she prepared and clothes she washed. She took care of them and they took care of her: reciprocity. They were all inside that circle together, sharing their lives. But there were other times, when she thought she could help her daughter—with her math homework, for instance—and wound up shaking her head in resignation instead. Worse yet were the times she snapped at Cindy when she didn’t catch on as quickly as Alice thought she should. She felt something small and tight in her chest then, something that didn’t open itself the way it should, flowing easily into the patience this child deserved. This child who shared her blood, who once had relied on Alice for her very breath—of course Cindy could understand these problems, given enough time and the right kind of guidance. She was Alice’s daughter too. But Alice could give Cindy neither of those things. She wanted to, but the tight thing in her chest snapped shut and refused to open again. She walked away. Later, though, she would hear Hank sitting at the kitchen table with Cindy, talking her through the very same set of problems. He was the one, in the end, who would help their daughter understand that whatever remains, you must carry.

[ 1 44 ]

[ part four ]

Around the Bend [ cindy ]

m y boss at the bookstore was Deb, the biggest woman I’d ever seen—she had to be at least six feet tall, with muscular shoulders and a broad back that shunted right down into thick legs, not even pausing for a waist. Her hair was sandy, like my dad’s, but going gray above her ears, and she kept it cut short and simple, the same style you see on a lot of five-year-old boys. I could see her going into a barbershop instead of a beauty parlor and saying “Same as it is, only shorter,” which is what I’d heard my dad say every month, when I was a kid. I was scared of her, at first, but I liked her too. I appreciated a person who could tell me what she wanted and whether I’d delivered on time. She showed me around the receiving room that first day and introduced me to the guys who worked there already, Simon and Preston. Simon was small and wiry and originally from another country. Between his slight accent and speedy talk, I hardly ever knew what he was saying—the first thing he said to me was “Hello,” I think, but it sounded like “Ow,” it went by so fast. It took me awhile just to learn how to hear him, and it took me even longer to learn when he was actually talking to me, not just chattering to himself. He and Preston had known each other for a while by the time I started in June, so they had a whole routine for me to learn. At first they gave me the lightest boxes to unpack for the shelving carts, trying to be gentlemen. [ 1 47 ]

That didn’t last for long—within a few days, once they saw that I was nearly as strong as Deb, just half her size, they loaded me up with whatever came in. I did all the returns, fat cookbooks and big glossy art books. I helped the ups guy cart boxes out to his truck when he came for a pickup at the end of the day—he’d use a dolly to load up three or four at a time and I’d carry the last one out myself. I liked my job. I liked doing work that made me sweaty and left my arms sore the next morning when I lifted them to wash my hair. It was the kind of job that lets you see exactly what you’re getting done: usually, at the end of my shift, the receiving floor was cleared off and ready for the next day’s shipment. We had some boxes full of books we couldn’t return shoved over to the edges, things we’d sell for fifty cents or a dollar at a big sale closer to Christmas, and other boxes full of supplies—plastic bags, receipt tapes, all the stuff you need to run a store—but none of that was my job, so I didn’t care. If the receiving area was clear at the end of the night, I felt good. I liked my job more than my classes, once they started in the fall. Not that they were hard, necessarily—they were long and dry and made me want to sleep, like the stretch of interstate that runs through the desert between Boise and the Utah border. I fought just to keep myself awake, much less pay attention. In my worst class, Economics, the only way I could keep from sliding straight into a nap was by taking Fran’s suggestion that I write down everything the professor said or did, the whole hour long. That way, I was forced to pay attention. Dr. Martin just took off his tie. Why did he bother putting it on this morning if he’s just going to take it off in class? He does that every day. Now he’s telling us about his trip to Guatemala. What does his summer vacation have to do with anything? I would like to ask him that question but I guess that would be rude. Very, very rude. 50.3 percent of U.S. parents with preschool children participated in the labor market in 1980. And on like that. A few weeks into the semester, I told Preston and Simon about this while we were talking about the tests we had coming up. But Simon didn’t [ 1 48 ]

believe me. “Nobody works that hard to stay awake,” he said, so I went to my locker in the break room and pulled my red spiral notebook from my backpack and showed him. I didn’t mention that the whole thing had been Fran’s idea. “Oh good God,” he said, sitting down on a full box of books. “She’s telling the truth. Listen to this, Pres—Dr. Martin cleared his throat again. That’s the third time today. Is he coming down with a cold? I don’t need to get sick. He should take some vitamin C tablets before it gets a hold of him and he gives it to the rest of us. The median income for a family of four in the United States last year was $26,274, in current dollars.” Simon threw back his head and grabbed at his short, dark hair. He laughed at the ceiling, loud. “How do you find the stuff you need to know in amongst all the garbage?” “I highlight the important stuff after class,” I said, flipping back a few pages to show him. “Those are just today’s notes. I haven’t had a chance to go back through them yet.” Preston said nothing all this time, but he smiled at me then, when I looked up from the notebook. He hardly ever said a word—mostly, I thought, because Simon was always talking, leaving no room for anyone else. Even when there was a lull in the conversation, though, he didn’t take that as an opportunity to jump in. Usually he just asked questions— “Where’s the box knife?” or “Can you get me a soda too?”—but he always said hello to me when I came in to work and good-bye when I left, and he always said my name, so I’d know he was talking to me. Hello, Cindy. See you tomorrow, Cindy. Not like Simon, always talking, not necessarily to anyone in particular. Right from the first time I saw him leaning over a box of books in the receiving room, I thought Preston was beautiful. That’s not a word you hear people use when they talk about men, but it’s the only word that works for him. He had light brown skin, the color of coffee with a little too much milk, and very curly gold brown hair, and the straightest, whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. When he looked up at me the day Deb was doing my [ 1 49 ]

tour of the receiving area, I saw his eyes—the strangest color, light grayish green. It wasn’t a color I’d seen before, but I still had to use the words I knew to describe it to myself. “What do you make of this girl, Pres?” Simon asked him, handing back my notebook. Preston shrugged. “She’s amazing,” he said. It wasn’t necessarily a compliment. He didn’t even think about it first, just answered the question, and in a voice that made it sound like this would be perfectly obvious to anyone who’d spent five minutes with me. But no one had ever said that before—not about me, to me, even around me. Not that I could remember, anyway. I forget that you’re so smart, Rick told me once, but that’s not the same as amazing, more like a magician than a regular person. Preston flipped an empty box, sliced open the bottom strip of packing tape, and flattened it, all in one move, then headed for the back door. “Better watch out.” Simon wagged his eyebrows at me. “I think he’s got the hots for you.” It sounded like I think he’s got the heart for you. “Are you people getting anything done back here?” Deb yelled from behind a wall of boxes we had yet to unpack. Simon jumped to his feet, so fast it looked liked he’d been sitting on something that burned him. I tried not to laugh, but it didn’t work. fran was s till working at the theater, but now she was there almost every weekday evening. It was a good job for her because she was taking hard classes and when it was slow, between shows, she could get her homework done. Her boss had moved her into the ticket window so she didn’t have to stand up behind the snack bar all night, which didn’t go over well with the girl who’d been working the ticket window originally. “She’s had two kids,” Fran said, “and she got to sit in there with both of them. You’d think she could be a little more sympathetic.” [ 150 ]

Her friend Wanda didn’t like working with the ticket girl, either. She never liked to talk, Wanda said; she thought she was too good for the snack bar because she had worked at the theater longer than Fran. “This is what she said to me,” Wanda told us: “I did my time with you in the popcorn pit. Can you believe that?” Wanda came by our apartment with her little girls sometimes, when she had a day off. By then we knew that Fran was having a girl, too, and it seemed like Wanda thought of these visits as parenting practice. If one of her girls asked a question, she turned it right over to Fran: “Well, what do you think? Would you let her have a piece of gum?” And it seemed like Fran always gave the wrong answer, at least from Wanda’s point of view. Sometimes I wondered if things would be different if Fran were having a boy. Maybe then, Wanda would admit that there were a few things she didn’t know, or at least some things Fran would be able to decide for herself. I liked Wanda well enough, though. Her girls knew how to behave, and even though she dressed them to look alike, you could tell she understood that they were two different people who’d have to live their lives that way. She was always getting after Jamie, the six year old, to let Jenny do a few things for herself. Jamie was bossy and always telling Jenny what to do, even the things that seemed completely obvious—drink your milk, put on your coat before you go outside. Since their mom had walked out on them, I figured Jamie was just doing what she thought she needed to, filling the gap. I thought I understood something about her. And Jenny was three, after all, so she was happy enough to have juice poured for her and toys put in her hands. But Wanda kept saying “Those legs will shrivel up if you don’t use them once in a while, missy,” and then she’d lift Jenny off the floor and set her down on her feet and give her a gentle shove in the right direction. Some people might have thought she was being hard on them, especially Jenny—she was the baby of her family, and she liked the attention that comes along with being small. All babies do. But I could see that [ 151 ]

Wanda was teaching her girls, right from the start, what it had taken me almost my whole life to figure out: you’re the only person who can save yourself. Other people can offer you help, but in the end, the hand that saves you is your own. “ so has she heard from you-know-wh o ? ” Wanda asked me, while the girls filed into our narrow kitchen and Fran supervised their snack. Wanda was testing Fran’s idea of an appropriate mid-day treat. “You mean Tom?” Wanda nodded, and I shrugged. “I have no idea. I don’t think so. When he left, they decided that was it.” “So he hasn’t even called her once?” “Like I said.” I held my hands up, empty. “I don’t know. But I don’t think so.” Wanda crossed her arms, shook her head, sat down beside me on the couch. “Bastard. Men can be such assholes, and the only reason is because women let them do it. Well, not me. My husband, Ray, he knows better than to jerk my chain. I come up pregnant, let him just try to walk out on me. I’d sooner shoot him in the knees.” I didn’t doubt this. “Tom didn’t know about the baby or anything,” I said. “She didn’t want him to.” “I know that.” “She didn’t want to get married, and she knew he’d want to because, you know, supposedly that’s the right thing to do. I guess he was that kind of guy.” “He was,” Wanda said. “And she should have let him do it.” “Why?” I stood up and stretched out my back. Since I’d started my job, I was always stiff and sore if I sat in one place too long. My muscles were used to moving. “I mean, if she doesn’t want to get married, she shouldn’t have to.” “Because that baby deserves to have a mom and a dad, that’s why. And the dad has rights, too, you know.” Wanda sat back hard against the [ 152 ]

couch, looking up at me. “When Ray’s wife took off, his mother-in-law tried to get custody of the girls. And she almost did it, too. You know why? Because he’s a man, and she’s a woman.” Wanda shook her head. “Their mom takes off and their dad stays with them, and then the court comes this close to giving those kids to the woman who raised the mom?” Wanda held two fingers so they were nearly touching each other. “What kind of sense does that make?” I didn’t know much about Wanda, but I could see why she felt the way she did. Still, it seemed like her situation was completely different from Fran’s. She loved Ray, for one thing. “Anyway,” I said, turning my hands up again, to show I still had no answers. “It was Fran’s decision, and she’ll have to live with whatever happens.” Wanda allowed that this was true. “I just hope he doesn’t show up for a surprise visit. He’ll be the one who gets a surprise.” She got up off the couch then, headed for the kitchen, talking loud enough for Fran to hear her now. “What is Miss France feeding you two in there?” And then, loud enough for me to hear all the way in the other room, “That’s nice, you cut off the peel for them. Jenny, don’t you dare just spit that out like a dog—you ask Miss France to cut up your apple in smaller pieces before you put them in your mouth.” I heard Wanda sigh. She wasn’t born to be a teacher, and the effort of whipping Fran into shape was getting to be a little more than what she’d bargained for. i liked our ap artment . The kitchen was a long narrow strip along the front of the house, and the ceiling sloped down to a window near the floor at the far end. Our bedrooms were like that too, the ceilings high on one side and low on the other. Because we were in the attic, all the windows were at floor level—when you looked outside you were actually looking down, past your feet, unless you were sitting on the floor. [ 1 53 ]

It was small, no doubt about that. We were always saying excuse me, squeezing past each other to get where we needed to go. But we were both so glad to be in our own place that I don’t think either of us minded very much. Where we lived wasn’t far from Rick’s mom’s house, in the same part of town. She lived a few blocks farther north, closer to Camel’s Back Park, but I could have walked to her house from the apartment in ten minutes. I’d thought about that when we rented the place, and I’d wondered if I might bump into her sometime, maybe at the little Hollywood Market, buying a gallon of milk. Well, what are you doing here? she’d ask—not suspicious, not unfriendly, just surprised. Oh, you know, just picking up a few things—I’m living in a place on Thirteenth now, I’d tell her. And usually I imagined her saying that was great, leaving it there—but sometimes I thought it might be just as easy for her to add, You should stop by and visit sometime. We’re almost neighbors. Or I thought about dropping by her house to say hello, but I didn’t know what else I’d say. It was strange to think about how much time I’d spent there in the last two years—I’d slept on her couch and eaten her food, I’d even taken showers there a few times, and now I just couldn’t go back. It was like the house had burned down or blown apart, only there hadn’t been a fire or a storm: it was my own fault I’d lost her. All I would have had to do was ask Rick for the keys, and then I could tell her I’d done my best. She would have understood; she knew how he was about his car. You could say that anyway, I’d told Mitzi, that day at the hospital: you could say anything, whether it was true or not. But that didn’t change what you knew, when you were by yourself at night and thinking how different things would be now if you’d done this or that and not the other. If I’d just stayed home that night, like my dad wanted me to, Rick might not have gone to the corral at all. He might have stayed at his house, sat on his roof and had a beer and went to bed. Or if I’d been in a better mood, if he’d been having a good time with me, he might not have had a thing [ 1 54 ]

to drink. He didn’t drink that much, not really, not as much as a lot of people we knew. You could think about those things until you drove yourself right around the bend. That’s what my mom used to say: It’s enough to drive you around the bend, meaning drive you crazy. That always made it sound like a place you could get to on the same roads people used for other things—perfectly good things, like going home. f ran’s dad wound up buying her a used car because he said he was not going to have his daughter pregnant and walking down the side of the road, like one or the other was okay but together they were just too much to swallow. We drove to campus together in the morning, most days, or I took the bus and she drove in later. Then she went to work at the theater, I went to work at the bookstore, and we ended up at home around ten o’clock. We’d eat a late dinner, talk about the day. Then I’d read until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. Fran went to bed right after dinner, usually, if she’d been able to use her ticket booth time for studying. Fran’s scholarship paid for almost everything that had to do with school: tuition, books, even some of her living expenses. I wasn’t scholarship material, of course, but I’d taken out loans and made a budget and so far I was making ends meet. I was struggling in my own way, though: I’d never really been a student, not in the sense of learning things. I didn’t know what I was doing. In high school I’d taken the easiest electives, typing and choir and things like that—I’d done just enough of the homework in all my classes, usually at the last minute, and memorized the information long enough to get the grades that kept my dad off my case. I hadn’t even thought about college. Then, toward the middle of my senior year, my dad brought home a stack of forms and a catalog from the admissions office at the university. “You have to start giving some thought to what comes next,” he said, and that’s when I saw that I had some choices: majors, departments, programs. [ 1 55 ]

I hadn’t thought about any of those things before, and we’d never talked about them, never had the time or energy. Rick had a job he planned to keep—he’d just switch to working full-time after graduation. He only went to school half days anyway, leaving right after lunch. But I had never had a job, other than taking care of my mom, and I didn’t know what kind of job I’d want to do for the rest of my life. And I still didn’t know what I wanted. That much hadn’t changed since the last night I was with Rick. I liked my job at the bookstore, but I knew it was only temporary. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life hulking boxes of books on and off the ups trucks. I knew I had to go to school to figure out the permanent things in my life—but the first thing I had to do was get the words Conditional Admission off my record. Math was the biggest thing standing in my way. This would have made my mother sad, but whatever it was in her that saw the sense in numbers hadn’t carried over to me. “College Algebra kicking your ass?” Simon asked me in the break room. He sat down across the table with a bag of food from the little drive-in restaurant across the street. I must have been scowling at my book, scrubbing out a problem that had brought me to another dead end. “I hate this,” I said. “I really think I’m missing the math gene.” “You should ask Pres for help. He’s a natural mathematician.” A natural math magician. And like he’d heard his cue, Preston came through the break room door with a brown paper bag. We were taking our lunch break together now, the three of us, instead of rotating like we always had before; that way, Deb said, we could get all the talking out of our systems and get back to work. She was looking at Simon when she said this, but she had to know that Simon wouldn’t be talked out until he couldn’t breathe anymore. Air was reason enough for him to keep going. “This girl,” he said, pointing to me, as if there were some other girl in the room, “needs your help, my friend.” [ 1 56 ]

I shook my head—I was chewing a bite of my peanut butter sandwich—and looked at Preston. “It’s okay,” I said, once I’d swallowed. “I’m fine.” I didn’t want him to find out how dumb I was, especially after he’d called me amazing. I liked knowing at least one person thought of me this way, and I didn’t want him to see anything that might change his mind. “What are you working on anyway?” Simon pulled my book toward him before I could slap my hand down and pull it back. “Oh my God, it’s not even College Algebra. It’s baby math. How cute.” “Simon—Jesus, you can be such a prick sometimes.” Simon and I both turned to look at Preston. He spoke so seldom, it was easy to forget what his voice sounded like. “Why would you say a thing like that, when you know all it will do is hurt someone’s feelings? If you don’t have something kind to say, for God’s sake, shut up for a change.” We watched Preston taking a series of plastic containers out of his lunch bag, each one slightly larger than the last. Simon swallowed and looked down at his hamburger. “It was not my intention,” he said quietly, “to hurt your feelings.” “Are you talking to me?” I said. I could see Preston smile at the edge of my vision. Simon raised his eyes just long enough to say yes, then looked back at his lunch. “Thank you,” I said. And then I shrugged. “It’s all right, actually. I know this is a bonehead class.” I’d learned a long time ago that the best way to avoid humiliation is to admit the truth before someone tries to use it against you. “It’s not all right,” Preston said. “You’re in school to learn. That’s the whole point of being here.” “She gets the idea. I said I was sorry.” Simon wiped his mouth with a napkin, stabbed a French fry into a blob of ketchup. “So remind me, Pres, what are you majoring in—peace studies?” [ 1 57 ]

Preston smiled again. “Engineering.” “Civil?” Simon asked. “Very funny.” “My roommate’s an engineering major,” I said. “Fran Rogers. You might have her in some of your classes.” Preston thought about this for a moment. “Long straight hair, light brown. Roundish face. Blue eyes.” Pregnant, I thought. That would probably narrow the field considerably. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “There can’t be that many girls in your classes,” Simon said, then held up his hands in front of him, defensive, when I raised my eyebrows. “Well, come on. How many female engineering majors do you know?” And he was right about that: Fran was the only one. The other girls I’d met in my classes were planning to be teachers, psychologists, lawyers, doctors. Everything but, it seemed, engineers. “What about you?” Preston asked, and I realized he was looking at me, not Simon. “Undecided,” I said. “I have no idea, actually.” “That’s okay,” he said. “Most people change their minds anyway—they think they know what they’re doing, but they don’t. You have plenty of time to decide.” I nodded. It was something I’d heard a lot of people say, and even hearing Preston say it now didn’t necessarily make me feel any better. I still felt like there was a missing piece of me I hadn’t found yet, something that would bring the whole picture into view. Suddenly Simon realized that no one was paying attention to him. “Well, you both know I’m pre-med,” he said. “After med school I plan to travel the world, providing health care for the poor.” “You’re kidding,” Preston said, through a mouthful of something green and leafy—He’s eating a salad, I thought, a little stunned by this fact. Simon hung his head, mouth open, then turned deliberately to look at Preston. “How is it you can say a thing like that to me, but yell at me for

[ 1 58 ]

being rude to her?” He stabbed a French fry in my direction, for emphasis, even though I was the only her in the room. “I think that’s cool,” I said. “Like taking care of sick kids? Very cool.” “I think so too.” Simon nodded. “That’s why I plan to do it.” “So you’re serious,” Preston said. “Yes, I’m serious.” Preston cocked his head to one side. “Well, I’m sorry I doubted you. You just don’t seem like the type.” “And what is that supposed to mean? What type am I?” We both looked at Preston, waiting, but he had nothing more to say. a fter simon had cleared out of the break room, Preston was packing up the empty containers that had held his green salad, a piece of cold chicken, cottage cheese, and a sliced pear. It was the most carefully balanced lunch I’d ever seen. “If you’re stuck,” he said, “I can help with the math. I really don’t mind.” “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m getting it.” “You’re sure?” I nodded. “But thanks. It’s nice of you to offer.” He nodded back. “Just yell if you need me,” he said. i told fran about this over dinner at the apartment, wondering if she knew Preston from her classes. “Tall?” she asked. “Not really. Kind of my height, maybe a little taller.” “Oh, he’s short then,” she said. “For a guy, I mean.” She shook her head. “Brown hair?” “Kind of yellowish brown. It’s hard to describe. Really curly. And he has strange eyes.” “Strange how? Like cross-eyed?”

[ 1 59 ]

“No, strange color. Greenish grayish. I don’t know.” She shook her head again. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” she said. Fran was sitting sideways on the couch with her feet propped up. Since her last appointment with the doctor, she’d been doing this whenever she could. The doctor said Fran’s blood pressure was high and told her to lie down as much as possible—which wasn’t much, of course, since she had to go to class every morning and work almost every afternoon. She had six more weeks before the baby was due, so I’d taken over dinner duty, and I cleaned up afterward, so at least she got to come home and relax at the end of the day. “So did he help you with your math?” she asked, eating the last of her spaghetti from a plate balanced on her belly. “No. I told him I was getting it. And anyway.” I took the empty plate from her. “That’s what I keep you around for.” After dinner she’d been helping with my math, just like old times, checking things over and pointing out where I’d made mistakes. Lately, though, she’d been so tired that she fell asleep waiting for me to work through the problems I’d done wrong the first time, and I didn’t want to make her feel bad about that. She was having a baby, after all. And she’d done so much for me already. Before classes had started, we went to campus one day and walked around, so I could figure out where my classes were. Fran had been there before, lots of times—on visits for her scholarship and for things during high school and even junior high. She pointed out all the classroom buildings, the student health center, the daycare center where she had her baby on the waiting list. I walked beside her and smelled the river running along the back edge of the campus, thought about the park stretched out on the other side of it, a place Rick and I had spent our share of time—so close to the campus, but we never once crossed the bridge and came over here. I felt like a tourist in the city where Fran had grown up, and I realized that of all the reasons why I’d crossed the street to talk to her that day, this [ 160 ]

might be the biggest one: she belonged here. Maybe I thought she could show me how to belong here too. I ran hot water over the plates in the sink, added soap and let them soak. Fran was already half-asleep on the couch when I got back to the living room. “You should go to bed,” I said. She opened her eyes and jumped like I’d poked her in the side, then shook her head. “I have to finish two chapters for Sociology.” “You’re already asleep. And anyway.” I clamped a hand around the top part of my hand, like a blood pressure cuff, and pumped a few times. “Doctor’s orders, missy.” Her ankles were swollen. Her face was, too. She’d always had soft cheeks, but now they were fuller and dropping into a second chin. “All right, Wanda,” she said. I held out both hands and she grabbed them. I pulled her to her feet, and then I gave her a little shove in the general direction of her bedroom door. i t was two more weeks, the end of October, before I broke down and asked Preston for help with my homework. We stayed in the break room after our shift and I bought him a soda, to make me feel like I had something to offer him in return. I’d also offered to give him a ride home after that—I had Fran’s car because she’d skipped her morning classes, feeling sick to her stomach. And by that time I didn’t care if Preston thought I was stupid; I just didn’t want to fail another test. I couldn’t stand the thought of moving out and getting a job and then admitting to my dad that he’d been right, this had all been a really bad idea. Preston was different from Fran. She’d always looked at my work, then pointed out my mistakes and told me what I should have done. Preston pointed out my mistakes, but then he’d ask, “So what do you think you should do instead?” [ 161 ]

“If I knew that,” I said, “I wouldn’t be asking you for help.” He smiled. “But if I tell you what to do, you won’t know how to figure it out next time you have a test.” And he was right: I told him what I planned to do, and he’d ask “Why?” And once I figured out how to answer that question, I started seeing how one problem was a lot like the next one, just the numbers and the symbols changing sometimes. It took about half the time to get through a problem set, even though it seemed like he was doing less work with me than Fran had ever done. “You’re good at this,” I said. “You should be a teacher.” He shook his head. “Teachers don’t get paid enough.” “Oh, I see. You want to live the high life. You and Dr. Simon.” Preston scowled, but he was joking. “Don’t compare me to Simon. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying yourself while you’re here, is there?” “I guess not.” The intercom buzzed and Deb’s voice crackled through. “Cindy, you still back there?” “Yeah.” “Line 2. She says it’s important. I told her I wasn’t even sure you were still here.” Something cold trickled from my chest into my stomach before I picked up the phone. She. I knew no one would be calling other than Fran. “Hello?” “Oh thank God, you’re still there,” Fran said. “What’s wrong?” “I’m bleeding,” she said. “Really bad.” “Did you call 911?” “Yes. They’re sending an ambulance, but—” She stopped right there, in the middle of her sentence. “Fran?” “I’m really dizzy,” she said. “Lay down. I’ll be right there.” [ 162 ]

“I can’t have this baby tonight,” she said. “It’s Halloween.” “It’s okay. Just lay down. I’ll be right there.” I hung up the phone and turned around. Preston had already stuffed all my books and papers into my backpack. He slid it across the table to me. “Go,” he said. And I did. I opened the back door and ran.

[ 1 63 ]

The Alluvial Heart [ helen ]

helen went to see her daughter in the hospital just hours after the baby had been born. The girl Franny was now living with called to deliver the news after the fact: “Everything just happened so fast,” she said, by way of explanation. “Fran started bleeding all over the place and the ambulance came and they took her to the hospital, and then they took her into surgery and bam.” The girl hit something for emphasis, the wall or the pay phone, Helen couldn’t tell. “She’s here and she’s fine. So is Fran. Everybody’s fine.” Helen wanted to ask why no one had thought to call her before this— perhaps last night, when they brought her daughter to the hospital bleeding all over the place. But she knew the girl thought she had already answered this question. The important thing, she told herself, was that Franny and the baby were all right. Franny was also eighteen, which meant that no one had to tell Helen anything unless they felt like it, a fact of which her daughter had reminded Helen many times in the past few months. So she took a deep breath, thanked the girl for calling, and said she’d come to the hospital right away. “Actually, Fran’s pretty tired,” the girl said. “She was awake most of the night, but she’s sleeping now. I’m going to take off and go to class. Why don’t you wait and come by a little later, after she gets some rest?”

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Helen thanked the girl again, hung up the phone, and picked up a pencil. Went to the hospital—Franny had her baby, she wrote, a note for her younger daughter, in case she wasn’t back by the time Robin came home for lunch. It’s a girl. She thought for a moment, then added an exclamation point over the period. A girl! It was appropriate, she thought, to suggest some level of excitement. o n her way to the hospital, Helen passed the theater where Franny had worked for nearly two years. That had seemed like a safe job when she first mentioned it to Helen, better than a fast-food restaurant certainly—no one ever robbed a theater, after all. But more than this, Helen had been pleased that Franny came to her first, for a change, rather than going straight to her father to ask his permission. Franny had been afraid that he wouldn’t approve of her working during the school year and asked Helen to intercede on her behalf—and Helen, flattered, patted Franny’s shoulder and said, Don’t worry, sweetie. I’ll take care of it. A job would teach Franny the value of a dollar, Helen argued, and although her husband had pointed out that Franny was already quite responsible, never frivolous, although he worried a job might divert Franny’s attention from her schoolwork, Helen assured him that nothing bad would come of this. You know Franny, Helen said. She has her head on straight. Nothing to worry about with her, and she’ll be able to save some money to help with college. And so it was Helen’s fault that Franny had met the boy who started this terrible chain of events, beginning that long night when her daughter didn’t come home from work and ending, now, finally, at the hospital. That much, Helen understood, was indisputable. Franny had always been shy, never flirtatious, not even interested in boys, as far as Helen knew. She had worried about this privately but convinced herself that Franny was simply a late bloomer; better that she focused on school to the exclusion

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of boys than vice versa, after all, especially given the way the world was changing. And the other mothers she talked to agreed: their daughters were boy crazy, just getting by in school, not thinking of anything beyond the next weekend. Helen was lucky, they said, to have a daughter like Franny. She had raised her well. In high school Helen herself had been the opposite sort of girl, outgoing if not particularly smart. She thought of this, even now, as an act of will rather than a question of ability: she had not applied herself to her studies because it was plainly understood that a girl would graduate high school, get married soon after that, and raise a family. Graduating, it had seemed to her then, was little more than a necessary milestone, and similar in that regard to earning a driver’s license. She had met her husband, David, at a party, when he was a senior and she a sophomore. Helen liked the fact that he was preparing to graduate, to enter the world of private lives that had always, it seemed, been located just beyond her reach. There had been something vaguely illicit about the difference in their ages then, as though she were more sophisticated than the older girls, and in a way that might not be evident to anyone other than David. Some of them made cryptic comments along those lines, but Helen’s mother pointed to this as a sad product of their jealousy. “You know who you are,” her mother said. “You know what’s right and wrong. You don’t need to listen to any of their garbage.” So David graduated and went on to college; Helen wore a promise ring with a diamond chip on her left hand, and she did not go out with other boys. David took girls to the dances his fraternity sometimes hosted (always, he told her, with the clear understanding that the date was a matter of convenience, nothing more), but Helen wasn’t interested in dating. She knew what she wanted, and it had nothing to do with going to the prom. It was hard for Helen to think of her own mother now—not because she felt that absence acutely, but because her mother’s image always arrived with a Screwdriver or vodka tonic in one hand (depending on the time of day), a cigarette in the other. Helen didn’t like to be reminded of [ 1 66 ]

either of these things. The only time her mother abandoned those implements, it seemed, was when she left the house—for church, card parties, or, less often, the grocery store. Helen had learned to cook at an early age, not of necessity but because she took pleasure from the various chores that surrounded meals: planning a menu, checking the cabinets and refrigerator for necessary ingredients, shopping for what her mother didn’t have on hand. Recipes were orderly in a way that the rest of her life often was not. If she followed their steps precisely, the outcome was predictably similar to the pictures in cookbooks and magazines she collected. Helen made it her goal to replicate each photo as accurately as possible, down to the garnish at the side of each plate. Not that anyone noticed her efforts. Helen’s father worked odd shifts and warmed his meals when he wanted them, though he always thanked Helen for cooking and praised her for taking an interest in keeping him well fed. This seemed like not so much a compliment of his daughter as a sideways dig at her mother, though, so Helen was wary of his praise; she felt her mother’s injuries as though they were her own. Surely there had been a time when her mother cooked well, too, because her father hadn’t starved to death, obviously. (He had, in fact, if photographs were an accurate record, thrived throughout their marriage.) Her older brother, married and gone before Helen took over the kitchen completely, had also managed somehow to avoid growing lean. Helen’s mother ate a few bites of anything she was presented, then returned to her usual post in front of the sliding glass door that opened to the backyard. Their house backed up to an open field, once the edge of town, now well within the city limits. A new development slowly filled the empty space, the skeletons of large, fine houses taking on more solid shapes each day. “Sometimes it feels like I’m being walled up in here, like the man in that Edgar Allan Poe story,” her mother said one afternoon, glancing from Helen in the kitchen, making meatballs, to the construction going on [ 1 67 ]

outside her house. “Now I won’t be able to see anything except the backs of those damn houses.” Helen looked up, through the window over the kitchen sink, as she washed pink bits of ground meat from her hands and tried not think of Poe, whom she’d read in her English class and found unnecessarily upsetting. She looked across the field, thick with sage and cheatgrass. It had always frightened her to think of what might be living in that field: mice, snakes, all manner of vermin. “Nothing much to see anyway,” she said. “At least you’ll have pretty houses to look at.” Her mother shook her head and didn’t answer. Helen saw her eyes were bright; she had missed something her mother was trying to say, but there was no way to go back now, ask her to clarify. Her mother took a long drink, then a deep breath. “You’re right. Those will be nice houses. You’ll live in a neighborhood like that someday—you’ll find a good husband and make a nice life yourself.” It didn’t sound like a prediction, Helen thought, so much as a request. “You’re my good girl. I know you’ll be careful, because you’ve seen what happens if you’re not.” Helen wasn’t certain whether the mistake her mother alluded to was getting pregnant with her brother or marrying her father after that, an obvious fact of chronology the two of them never had discussed. Helen’s father had been handsome and determined in the pictures from his youth, a soldier; he had fought in the Korean War. But he came back changed, her mother said, distant when he had once been garrulous, easy to talk to, the sort of man people called on whenever they needed help. She hardly knew him, after he returned, and with two children to care for on her own, she’d grown accustomed to his absence. She had no time for getting to know her husband again. The factory where Helen’s father worked classified his position as a floater. That description suited him, Helen thought, though she wouldn’t have said this out loud. It was hard to know how devoted her mother was [ 1 68 ]

to the marriage, to the man who drifted in and out of the house each day. It occurred to Helen once that she could not remember seeing her father and mother touch each other, but this had seemed like a simple observation, a fact, not evidence of a larger problem—unlike the fact that her older brother, once he left home, never came back to visit. This was just the way her family worked: they moved away from each other until, almost by accident, they found themselves completely separate. So Helen tried to keep herself from thinking about her mother. It was difficult to reconcile the fierce, protective love she felt for her with the fact that could not be denied: even when she was alive, her mother had not been truly present. She had not invited confidences; she had not been worthy of Helen’s trust. She was not the sort of mother Helen had resolved to be with her own daughters. But Helen couldn’t blame her mother for this, not entirely. There had been a time, after Franny started school and before Robin arrived, when she understood how easy it would be to slip off course. She had thought of the carpet in her parents’ dining room, paths worn through it to the mat below, and imagined she might resort to drinking herself, left alone in that shabby house all day when her father left to join the world of men. t here had never been any question about the order of events in Helen and David’s courtship and marriage: an engagement ring replaced the promise ring, which migrated to her right hand, on Valentine’s Day of her senior year. They married in June, right after graduation, and moved into student housing until David had finished his business degree. He got a job, they bought a house, and Franny was born in January of the following year, a joyous start to the next phase of their life. So when Franny told Helen about this baby, the morning after her own graduation party—a morning that seemed now to belong in another person’s life, when Helen thought of how she’d set out a box of thank-you notes and a book of stamps for Franny, believing that was the most important task on their agenda for the day—Helen was all at once aware of a [ 1 69 ]

life she had never once acknowledged: not the baby’s, but her daughter’s. Who was this girl who’d lived in Franny’s room for the last three months and evaded Helen’s careful watch so easily—this girl who could lie with the casual audacity of a lifelong delinquent? And what was wrong with her, Helen wondered, that she hadn’t even seen this change taking place, hadn’t so much as noticed that Franny was sick every morning, much less already beginning to show? That was the moment when Helen first began to understand that, though Franny had lived inside her own body for a time, her knowledge of her daughter was in no way particular. They were separate too, suddenly. Living in the same house with Franny for eighteen years had amounted to nothing: what she knew for certain was less than what a total stranger might have concluded in a fraction of that time. But Helen was certain this transformation had to do, at least in part, with the girl. Obviously the boy had forged the first link in this chain, but Franny now lived in a shabby north-end attic apartment with the girl who’d been involved in the accident near the reservoir that awful night. Cindy. Even the girl’s name was disreputable, like her bottle-blond hair with its dishwater roots, her heavy black eyeliner. Helen remembered reading the story of Cindy’s mother’s suicide in the local newspaper some years ago, surprised that she could know a woman who would do such a selfish and gruesome thing: Cindy’s mother had been a substitute teacher in Helen’s math class her senior year, a dour occasional presence in darkrimmed glasses and sensible shoes. She took over another class full-time later that year, and Helen remembered seeing her in the halls of the high school, talking with Mr. Morgan, the woodshop teacher. Then Helen had seen their wedding announcement in the newspaper after she graduated and wondered what any man could see in dowdy Miss Graham— especially a man like Mr. Morgan. It was almost unthinkable, the handsome man somehow transformed into that girl’s father. Cindy was lucky to have survived the accident at the reservoir, much less to have all her limbs and faculties intact, but she appeared unfazed [ 170 ]

by her blessings: she had moved on with graduation and college as though she had suffered no misfortune at all, or nothing that would require her to slow down and assess the path that had brought her to where she was. And she had suggested the apartment, Helen was sure of it, offered her help in raising Franny’s child. Without Cindy’s prodding, Franny would have stayed at home; Helen, not that girl, would be helping her to raise this baby. It wouldn’t have been an ideal situation, by any means. But at least people would have known that Helen loved her daughter, enough to forgive her anything. That awful night—after the phone rang and a stranger’s voice told her there had been an accident, after she carried Robin, still half asleep, to the neighbor’s house and left her crying and scared in a strange room, after she and David drove through the dark streets to the hospital without speaking a single word, because fear had consumed all the words she had once known—after Franny walked into the emergency room whole and unharmed, Helen had stayed in her chair until Franny crossed the room and stood within arm’s reach. It was, she thought later, a way of testing her senses, making sure that what she saw in front of her was the work of her eyes, not her heart. “Hi,” Franny said. Helen wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear from her daughter at that moment, but she knew this wasn’t it. “Are you all right?” she asked. “I’m fine. It wasn’t me who had the accident—there was another car. We just stopped to help.” “We?” David said. He stood when Franny walked in and now had positioned himself with arms crossed, legs just slightly apart—the stance of judgment, the posture he assumed whenever there was punishment to be meted out. Determining consequences was his responsibility; guiding the girls’ initial actions was Helen’s territory. Franny looked at her feet, or at the tile floor beneath them. “I went for a drive with a guy from work,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be gone so long.” [ 171 ]

“I should slap your face,” Helen said, all the words she’d lost suddenly rushing forward again. It was as if she had no control of her lips and tongue. “Honestly, Franny, I feel like I could shake you until your teeth rattle around in your head.” “Okay,” Franny said. She wasn’t being defiant; she wasn’t daring her mother to assault her in a public place. She was agreeing to a punishment she knew she deserved. “Let’s just go home,” David said, “before this gets out of hand.” But Franny wanted to stay at the hospital, at least until she knew the girl would survive her injuries. She refused to leave, in fact, even when Helen pointed out that Cindy’s own family had to be here somewhere— they’d take care of her. “Please,” Franny said, with a desperation Helen had never heard in her voice before. “Please, can I just stay here until she wakes up?” And when Helen shook her head again, no, Franny sat down in the plastic chair her mother had occupied and wept. She covered her face with her hands, but the noise of Franny’s sobbing filled the emergency room with such grief that Helen’s own eyes welled with tears, and the people around them looked on with sympathy or turned away, offering privacy out of respect for her loss. a month later the girl appeared in her home, at the dining room table, doing homework with Franny. She knew who the girl was immediately—by the cast on her leg, or by the fact that she looked nothing like little Annabeth, the only other girl Franny had ever brought home from school. Or perhaps she knew by the way Franny didn’t look up, didn’t smile, didn’t even acknowledge Helen when she walked into the room. It was Cindy who said hello first, and then Franny looked up from the book in front of her. “This is Cindy,” she said. Nothing more. But Helen knew. “It’s nice to meet you,” Helen said. “Are you girls doing a project together for school?” [ 172 ]

“It’s just my math homework.” Cindy pointed at her leg. “I’ve missed a lot of school. Fran’s really good at math, so she’s helping me get caught up.” Fran. Helen had always called her Franny, so Robin did as well. David sometimes called her Fancy Girl, Princess Francesca. Never just Fran, that single flat, ugly syllable. She had taken Robin with her to the grocery store that day, hoping Cindy would be gone by the time they got back, and she was. But Franny was closed off in her room by then, and she didn’t want to talk about Cindy—“Just someone I know from school,” she said, when Helen asked. She didn’t want to talk to Helen at all, suddenly. And then she was always upset, always crying in the bathroom, because David had forbidden her from seeing the boy from work again, and Helen had not intervened to change his mind. In retrospect, of course, it was easy for Helen to see what had actually been happening: Franny had claimed to be working extra hours, but instead she had been with the boy. Then she found herself pregnant, and rather than coming to her own mother for help, she went to the girl. It wouldn’t have occurred to Franny to hide a thing like that from her mother before that night, Helen thought. But since then, Franny had been adamant about every decision she made: She was not getting married. She was moving out. She was going to raise this child with Cindy’s help. “And where are you going to live?” Helen asked, when Franny announced that she’d be moving at the end of June. “We found a place on Thirteenth Street. It’s the top floor of an old house.” “An attic apartment? Do you have any idea how hot that will be this summer?” “It has windows,” Franny said, pouring a bowl of cereal. “We’ll buy a fan.” “Have you told your boss at the theater?” [ 1 73 ]

“No.” Franny’s tone indicated that this was a ridiculous question. “Why would he care where I live?” “I meant about the baby. You might lose your job, once he finds out. He might not want a pregnant teenager working for him. I don’t know how you’re going to pay the rent, if that happens.” Franny exhaled through her nose while she chewed her cereal, an airy but derisive laugh. “I doubt it seriously, Mother. The girl who works in the ticket booth has two kids, and she’s never been married.” She shrugged and looked at Helen then, almost apologetic. “It’s going to be okay. I know Grandma probably would have locked you away in the basement for a year if this had happened to you, but it’s not such a big deal anymore. Girls have babies.” “It is a big deal,” Helen said. “You have no idea, Franny. Babies are a lot of work. If you’d just stay here, I could help you. A baby needs a family.” “Well—.” Franny cocked her head to the side and shrugged again. “This one will have to get by on one and a half mothers. That’s the best I can do.” One and a half, the half meaning Cindy. Just like that, Helen wasn’t part of the equation at all. David had helped Franny move her things into the apartment on a Saturday morning. It didn’t take long; the apartment was already furnished, and Franny owned little more than her clothes and books. Helen offered two sets of sheets and several bath towels, but she declined an invitation to visit Franny’s new home. “You might as well just accept that this is what’s happening,” David said, when he came back and found Helen sitting on Franny’s bed, taking in her empty room. He sat down beside her, put an arm around her shoulders. “We don’t have to like it, but we have to live with it. This is how things are, Hel. Being disappointed in her isn’t going to do anybody any good.” “Don’t call me Hel,” she said. “You know I hate that.”

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“Why? You look like Hel,” David said, and she smiled at his old joke before she started to cry. a t the hospital Helen felt she needed a moment to compose herself before she went up to Franny’s room, so she stepped into a gift shop crowded with bright, cheerful items: bouquets of daisies and carnations, stuffed bears with pastel fur, helium balloons with pictures on one side and shiny silver backs. It was as if she’d walked into a party, though the store was quiet except for the humming of a refrigeration unit. The woman behind the cash register was wearing the rosy pink jacket all hospital volunteers wore to quietly identify themselves. Her nametag said, I can help! I’m lillian. And as if to prove the assertion true, Lillian asked “Can I help you find something today?” “I’m looking for a gift for my daughter,” Helen said. “She just had a baby.” “So you’re a grandma!” Lillian said. “Congratulations! Is this your first one?” For a moment Helen had trouble following the woman’s line of thought. First child? First grandchild? As it happened, the answer to both questions was yes, so she nodded. “We have some lovely bouquets in the cooler—then again, I’m sure the new mother will be getting lots of flowers. Balloon bouquets are always nice. They last longer than the flowers, too. I can make an arrangement in any colors you like—I have this little helium tank, and the balloons you can choose from are right over there, in those bins. We also have some very cute little outfits for the wee ones. I’ll show you.” Lillian marched toward the farthest corner of the store, and Helen felt compelled to follow. She had no idea what to buy, but decided to err on the side of excess and hope she got something right. She bought an arrangement of white and yellow daisies in a slender glass vase, a bouquet of pink and cream balloons, a box of almond toffee (the same kind she’d bought Franny every

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year for Christmas), a mint green sleeper for the baby, and a pink fleece blanket imprinted with the name of the hospital, “a precious memento of baby’s arrival,” according to the plastic packaging. When she could think of nothing else to buy, Helen brought these things to the cash register. “So what’s her name?” Lillian asked, one hand on the pink blanket. “Frances,” Helen said. “That’s a beautiful name for a baby girl. So many of them these days, they want the names with more—I don’t know, pizzazz.” Lillian sparkled her fingers in the air before she took the check Helen offered. “Is it a family name?” For a moment Helen considered correcting the mistake she had made. Then she nodded her head again, realizing that the answer to this question, too, was yes. the baby’s name was Megan, according to the card on her isolette. A lovely name, Helen thought, but she too was surprised that Franny hadn’t chosen something more unusual. Franny tended toward melodrama, and she’d complained about her own name bitterly for years, distressed that it didn’t make her unique or at least lend itself to more innovative spellings. Away from home, at school and church, she had always been Frances; her only alternatives, she lamented, were Francis, which would make people who didn’t know her think she was a boy, or Francys—and the cys at the end brought to mind a boil. Not the image you want to present people with when they first see your name, Franny said. Helen had laughed and agreed and suggested that maybe Frances wasn’t such an awful name to be stuck with, certainly not as bad as Helen: Old Heller, Hellion, Helena Handbasket. And Franny had laughed at this and allowed that perhaps Helen was right. Megan looked just like Franny had as an infant, with the exception of a halo of peach-colored hair. Helen had never even met the baby’s father, a fact that upset her still, so the hair was a shock. It seemed unaccountable that Franny had met this boy, smiled and laughed and made small talk [ 1 76 ]

with him—even made love with him, somewhere—and Helen had never even seen his face. Now the baby began to fill in the blank space where her father should have been, suggesting red hair and, Helen noticed, long thin fingers. But Helen couldn’t look at the baby’s hands without thinking about the boy touching Franny, so she turned away from the nursery window and made her way to Franny’s room. She was asleep when Helen walked in, or at least her eyes were closed. Helen set the bouquet on the windowsill—Lillian had been wrong, she noted, this bouquet was the only one in the room—and put the rest of the packages on a table near the window. A curtain divided the room, and she could hear a girl’s voice coming from somewhere behind it. “I don’t know how he could be sick. I haven’t been sick, and he came out of me,” the girl said. “But they’re not saying he’s sick enough to die or anything. That’s a good sign, right?” Helen touched Franny’s shoulder. “Hello,” she said. She was still holding the balloons because she didn’t know what to do with them, and Franny looked surprised. “Hi,” she said. “What are you doing here?” Helen looked around the room for something she might be able to tie the balloons to, then decided on the arm of the visitor’s chair. “You’re surprised that your mother would come to see you in the hospital?” “I guess Cindy called you.” Helen nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t call myself. I was going to. Everything was just so crazy, and then I just felt like I had to crash. Did you see the baby?” Helen nodded. “She seems very small, but I guess it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a newborn. How are you feeling?” “I’m fine. I’m just glad Meg’s all right. It was pretty scary there for a while.” “You’re going to call her Meg?” Frances nodded. “Like in Little Women.” That was one of many books Helen remembered reading with Franny, a long time ago. “I think her name was actually Margaret.” [ 1 77 ]

“I know, but that sounds old-fashioned. ‘Megan’ has a little more—” “Pizzazz?” Helen said, sparkling her fingers. Franny smiled. “I guess. Anyway, her name is Meg and she’s fine and that’s all that matters.” Franny shook her head and wiped her eyes. Helen remembered the weepy weeks after giving birth, and she handed Franny a tissue. Then the curtain beside the bed moved and Helen saw the other girl just briefly, her broad forehead and dark eyes, before the drape fell back into place between them. Helen pointed at the catheter taped to Franny’s arm. “And what is that?” “It’s just in case they need to do another iv. I guess once they stick you, they leave it in there so they won’t have to do it again if something goes wrong. But I’m fine, don’t worry.” Helen nodded. She was running out of polite conversation, exhausted from trying to avoid the obvious traps and setting off another argument. How are you going to raise a baby on a part-time paycheck? How are you going to do your homework while you’re walking the floor with a cranky child? If she asked these questions, she knew, Franny would have answers—she always did. But nothing she said would make Helen feel more confident of her ability to make this work, not even with Cindy’s help. Raising a child required a woman’s full attention. She’d had David’s help, of course, in the evenings, but taking care of Franny and Robin had been a full-time job, just as David’s job had been to bring in the money they needed to live. They were partners, in that respect, equals in the enterprise of maintaining a family. Cindy was certainly not Franny’s partner. She had no stake in anything that happened to Franny, or to Meg. She could not be counted upon to help them, not in the way Helen could. “I brought some things for you,” she said, pointing at the pile of gifts on the table. Then she remembered the boxes she’d put in her purse before she left the house. Helen dug around and found them, one wrapped in silver paper, the other a black velvet box that didn’t need to be wrapped. [ 1 78 ]

She’d always liked the look of a black velvet box, officially special, itself a little gift. She handed the velvet box to Franny, who thanked her and opened it. Helen had had the ring made to order at a jewelry store downtown, Franny’s birthstone set beside the baby’s. The colors weren’t particularly attractive together, Helen thought, one yellow, the other red, but that couldn’t be helped; like so many things in life, you didn’t get to choose when you were born. “Does it fit?” she asked. “I didn’t know what size to get, so I had to take a guess. I didn’t want to ask you because I wanted it to be a surprise. I can have it sized up or down.” Franny nodded and blinked back her tears. She was obviously disappointed by Helen’s choice. The ring was too small for her swollen third finger, but she slipped it on her pinky and it sat there, loud as a fresh scar. “It’s perfect,” Franny said. d riving home again, Helen allowed that it was possible Franny didn’t know about all the babies she had wanted, the children she had lost— certainly Helen had never spoken of them to her. In those days, the world of adults was something entirely separate from childhood. Her neighbor, Lila Hunnicutt, hadn’t even told her youngest child that his sister Charity was dead until after the funeral, during which he was left with a babysitter. He had been only six, after all, and Lila was afraid he wouldn’t understand the process, would assume this same fate was waiting for him sometime just after he turned eight. It was possible, then, but unlikely. One thing Helen had learned from her children: they know much more than what they’re told, and they know it long before you want them to, before you’re ready to talk about it. Robin had known that Franny was pregnant even before Franny moved away from home, so that when Helen was ready to sit her down and have a serious conversation about the mistakes her sister had made and how to avoid them, Robin had begun by waving her hand dismissively in the air. [ 1 79 ]

“Oh, I know all about that,” she said. And what could Helen say? Her daughter was ten years old and already she knew it was possible for her unmarried sister to have a baby and move away from home, and she didn’t seem to think this was any particular cause for concern. “I don’t think you do understand, not completely,” Helen said. “Franny made a mistake.” Robin nodded. “She had sex.” It was hard for Helen to acknowledge this still, and she swallowed before she nodded. “But Franny wasn’t married,” Helen explained. “That’s why it was a mistake. God means for babies to be part of a family—that’s why you don’t have that kind of relationship with a man until you’re married.” “Because after you’re married,” Robin said, “it’s okay to have sex.” “Of course.” “Because when you want to have a baby, that’s how you get it.” Helen could see no point in explaining that marital relations weren’t quite so much like going to the grocery store for a loaf of bread, so she nodded again, staring at her folded hands. “I know Franny might have told you that what’s happening with her is no big deal—but it is a big deal, Robin. It’s a very big deal.” “I know. That’s why you made her move away,” Robin said. “Because she made a big mistake. She had sex and you’re mad at her.” Helen turned to look at Robin, surprised. “I didn’t make her move away.” Robin seemed surprised as well. “You didn’t? Then why did she go?” Helen couldn’t answer that question, for Robin or herself, but she took comfort from the fact that her younger daughter, at least, saw no obvious reason for Franny’s leaving. “I don’t know,” she said. “What I do know is this baby will be your little niece, and you can be a good example for her. You can help her make good decisions. I can help you do that, too, but you have to talk to me whenever you have a problem. All right?” [ 180 ]

Robin nodded—perhaps a little too vigorously, Helen thought—then patted Helen on the back, as though she were the parent in this scenario. “Don’t worry about me,” she said, standing up. “I’m never having sex.” “Oh sweetie, I think you’ll change your mind. You’ll want to have babies and be a mother when you grow up.” Robin was already on her way out the door to play, shaking her head. “Too much work,” she said. Helen couldn’t say Robin was wrong, exactly, though she thought perhaps she should. But there was time enough to help Robin arrive at a different vision of her future. She was only ten. Helen had been an eager mother with Franny, the child who came so easily. She was pregnant after the first time they tried to conceive, and her labor was quick, and suddenly she was the mother of a beautiful girl who never cried, just ate and slept and smiled at everyone. Franny had seemed like a special reward for all of Helen’s decisions, the logical outcome of finding a good man with a good job who could provide her with the good home her mother had foreseen. And Franny had learned things so quickly, walking before she was fully a year old, talking in complete sentences by the time she was two. But then, when Helen was ready to have another child, whatever mechanism had been securely in place with Franny kept failing over and over again. She prayed, but she didn’t conceive, and when she finally did the pregnancies lasted only a few short weeks. After the fourth miscarriage, when Franny was six years old, Helen stopped praying for another child. She couldn’t stand the disappointment, the loss. She set aside her dream of a big noisy family, boys and girls clambering through the kitchen on their way to school, picking up the lunches she’d made and kissing her on the cheek as they left. She prayed, instead, that God would help her be a good mother to the child He had given her. And why wasn’t Franny enough? Beautiful, smart, smiling—Helen warned her against climbing too high on the jungle gym at the playground, told her always to walk, never run, taught her to fear strangers [ 181 ]

because they might decide that a beautiful little girl was just what they needed, might decide to snatch her away, and Franny would never see her home or her mother again. Helen could see her believing this, becoming afraid, and it made her glad. Shameful, really, how happy it made her to know that Franny wanted above all else to be alone with her mother, safe at home. The house was empty and quiet all day after Franny started school, so Helen started to ask, “Are you feeling all right, sweetheart? You look a little peaked this morning.” And before long Franny believed this too: she came home often, with a headache or an upset stomach. Helen took her to the doctor, just to be certain she hadn’t made her own child physically ill, but Franny was fine; he encouraged Helen to be less indulgent, a sentiment often echoed by Bev Hadley, another of her neighbors. “That child’s got to toughen up and learn to do for herself,” Bev said. “Otherwise, how will she ever get along?” And then—and only because, Helen was certain, she had devoted her full attention to being Franny’s mother—she was pregnant again. She waited for blood, expected failure. But nothing happened, so she sent Franny off to school each morning, insisted that she stay all day, and spent her days turning the guest room into a sunny nursery. Helen napped each afternoon on the living room couch, waiting to feel the baby kick and turn before she drifted off, reassuring her of its healthy presence. Then Robin arrived, without incident—and Helen, fairly consumed with joy, gave all her attention to the child who had proven that God was with her all along, watching Helen care for Franny, rewarding her efforts. Franny was smart. Franny was good. Clearly, Helen had done her job. But Franny got lost. She could see that now—she’d let go of her daughter’s hand too soon, and Franny had wandered for a long time, searching for the mother who’d convinced her she could not survive alone. But she’d tired of looking, finally, and she’d settled for another resting place, finding comfort somewhere other than home.

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. . . r obin was at the house when Helen arrived. “Did you get my note?” she asked. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here, sweetheart. I tried to hurry. Were you scared?” “No,” Robin said. “I just used the key from the back porch. I made a sandwich.” She held up the evidence, dripping red jelly on the paper towel she’d used in lieu of a plate. “Well, I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I know you don’t like to come home to an empty house.” Helen set a plate in front of her. “Lean over the table.” “I really don’t mind.” Robin shrugged. “It’s kind of neat. It’s like being a grown-up and this is where I live.” She licked the jelly from the side of her hand. “Did you get to see the baby?” “Don’t lick yourself like a dog, use your napkin. Yes, I saw the baby. Her name is Megan.” “Is she cute?” “All babies are cute.” “Can I go see her at the hospital?” Helen thought of the girl who was sharing Franny’s room. She’d only caught a glimpse of her behind the curtain, but she’d heard the girl’s voice. So young. Even younger than Franny, she thought, though that hardly seemed possible. “No,” Helen said. “We’ll wait until Franny can bring her here for a visit.” She left the kitchen then and went to her bedroom, opened the top drawer of her dresser and pulled out another small black velvet box. She brought it back to the kitchen with her and sat down across the table from Robin. “I want to show you something.” Helen opened it slowly, trying to create anticipation. Inside was the locket, a gift she’d bought herself just after Franny was born. When Robin arrived, Helen had taken out Franny’s picture and replaced it with the new baby’s; now, though, the locket held both of them, a tiny face

[ 1 83 ]

pressed into each half of her heart. She opened the clasp and let Robin see them. “Cool,” Robin said. “I didn’t know you had a locket.” “Those are pictures of you and Franny when you were just born. I used to wear this so I had a picture to show people when they wanted to see my new babies. I had a special ring made for Franny, but maybe you can have this, instead, when you grow up and get married and have a family of your own.” “I’m not even having babies,” Robin said. “I told you that.” “Well, I think you’ll change your mind. After you meet the right man and get married.” Robin shrugged. Helen snapped the locket shut. “But if I do have a baby,” Robin said, “you’ll give me the locket?” Helen stood up from her place at the table. “We’ll see,” she said.

[ 1 84 ]

Abscission [ frances ]

m y mother came to the hospital that morning, after Cindy finally agreed to go to her classes—after I pointed out the immediate crisis was over and Meg was fine and, in case any of this changed, the nurse’s station was right down the hall and teeming with people who were trained to deal with the situation. As soon as she left, I pushed the call button and asked one of the nurses to take Meg back to the nursery for a while, so I could try to get some sleep. It was maybe ten o’clock by then, though what I remembered of the night before was fragmented, more like a dream I was trying to remember than a scene I had actually lived through. Later, Cindy would ask me questions: Do you remember the ambulance guy who kept asking me about the theater? He couldn’t keep it straight that you worked there, not me. And a vague memory would swim up from the darkest part of my brain—not of a person, specifically, but of voices and flashing lights and movements being made for me, a cold hand around my wrist, taking my pulse, folding my arms across my chest before I floated from the house to the ambulance and on to the hospital, where I woke up sometime later, as somebody’s mother. It seemed fitting, in one way, and sad in another, that I couldn’t remember most of my own daughter’s birth, that I had to rely on Cindy for this part of my story. Already there was so much of it that only she could tell, [ 1 85 ]

and now that part overlapped into Meg’s life too. And that seemed fitting as well, both of us connected to the one person who had made it possible for Meg to make this shift from my body to her own. Without Cindy, I knew, I would have kept Meg and lived at home, the way my mother wanted. But I wouldn’t have survived living under a shadow that big. Then Cindy found me. She was the girl who taught me to answer every question with a shrug and turned-up hands, to think every problem was more or less equal, just one more thing to deal with in whatever way you chose. I tried to doze off, but I couldn’t get my brain to let go of the night’s events. Then I tried to do something normal instead, like watch tv, but I couldn’t focus on anything long enough to figure out what was going on, not even an old episode of The Brady Bunch I’d seen a million times. The girl behind the curtain that was supposed to divide our room was on the telephone again, and her story kept getting in the way. Her name was Ruby. She was only sixteen, even younger than me. I wondered if they’d put us in a room together on purpose, if they thought of us as already having something in common: two girls too young to be having babies and doing it anyway. “He’s really sick,” Ruby said, to whomever was on the other end of the line this time. “He’s got pneumonia or something. I haven’t been sick, though, so I don’t know how he could have gotten it from me. I think maybe he got it from someone here.” A long pause, then she took a ragged breath. “Yeah, well, they’re not saying they think he’s going to die or anything. That’s a good sign. They’d tell me if they thought it was anything serious, right?” In the last conversation, she’d been telling someone how badly her baby’s feet were bruised, solid purple, because he’d been poked with so many needles for so many tests. I’d meant to tell her when she got off the phone that I thought the purple was ink from the footprints on his birth certificate, not evidence of medically sanctioned torture, but I’d forgotten to say anything. [ 1 86 ]

I closed my eyes again and raised my arms overhead, to block my ears with my shoulders. Then I felt somebody touch my arm. “Hello,” my mother said, in a singsong voice that might have been friendly, under other circumstances. I opened my eyes and saw she was holding a bouquet of shiny pink balloons, which surprised me as much as if she’d been standing there holding a kite. My mother was nothing if not practical; those balloons made no sense at all. “Hi,” I said. I tried to sit up, but my stomach muscles didn’t work the way I was used to; I couldn’t sit up without using my hands and arms to pull my body upright. The stitches across my belly pulled and burned. My mother shook her head and reached over the rail, found the button that controlled the top half of my bed. “That’s good,” I said, when I was sitting in what could have been a natural position. I watched her tie the balloons to the arm of the visitor’s chair at the other end of the room. “How are you feeling?” she asked, sitting down on the end of my bed as if we were in my bedroom at home. As if I just had a cold, not a child. “All right, I guess, considering.” She nodded and looked at the catheter taped against my arm. “What’s that?” “It’s called a heplock. It’s in case they need to start an iv again.” “Why would they need to do that?” “I don’t think they will,” I said. “It’s just in case. They had an iv in my arm before, during the surgery, so I guess they figured they might as well leave it there. One hole’s better than two.” I wondered if she’d seen the baby yet, if she’d noticed the fuzz of reddish hair on her head. She’d never met Tom, and it would make her angry to think of him now, but I thought it was lucky Meg had his hair: now his contribution to this mess was undeniable. My mother could blame it all on him and be done with it. If I had been a different sort of girl, she would have had more explaining to do, both to herself and other people. [ 1 87 ]

“The baby’s fine,” I said. “Did you see her in the nursery?” My mother nodded again. “She looks awfully small.” “Seven pounds.” “That’s what Cindy said, when she called.” She wanted to remind me that the news had come from Cindy, that she’d had to hear about the birth of her first grandchild from a relative stranger, and after the fact. She hadn’t been here for the big moment, the way she should have been. And it really wasn’t fair, that she’d become a grandmother this way. I knew this whole scene should have been different: Cindy should have been the one coming to the hospital with ridiculous balloons, polite and brief. My mother should have been the one I called when things went wrong. And Tom should have been here too, but five years older—a man with a good job, sitting in the corner chair and practicing different ways of holding his baby until he finally got it right. Like this, my mother would have said, guiding his hands into place, the only person in the room who had any idea of what she was doing, and both of us would have been grateful for her direction. “I’m really sorry I didn’t call you myself. There just wasn’t time. Everything happened so fast—I started bleeding and Cindy dialed 911, and then the ambulance was there, and they brought me here and did the C-section. I was really scared. I didn’t know what was going to happen. All I could think was that the baby was going to die and it would be my fault.” This wasn’t exactly the true course of events, but it seemed like a version that might put Cindy in a heroic light and make my mother happy she had been there for me. The curtain beside me moved a little and I saw Ruby leaning back in her bed, trying to eavesdrop while she pretended to take a nap. All this talk of dead babies was apparently too much for her to resist. “Why would it be your fault?” my mother asked. “You have no control over something like that.” I shook my head, wiped my eyes, nothing more to say on the subject.

[ 1 88 ]

“The important thing is, she’s fine,” my mother said, smoothing wrinkles from the blanket in front of her. “You should just be thankful to have a healthy baby.” “I am. Dr. Bishop wants me to stay in the hospital over the weekend, because I lost a lot of blood, but she says we can both go home on Monday.” My mother looked up at me. “Home?” She sounded hopeful, but dubious. “I meant the apartment,” I said. “My home.” And she nodded then, of course. “I brought you a few things there.” She gestured toward the little table in the corner. I hadn’t even noticed the pile of presents from the gift shop, the bouquet of daisies on the windowsill. “Some of that toffee you like, and a blanket for the baby. And these.” She pulled her giant purse into her lap, digging through it to hide her face from me. She pulled out a square box wrapped in silver paper with a white bow, and a smaller black velvet box that wasn’t wrapped. I knew what was in the black box: she’d bought the heart-shaped locket just before I was born, then carried my picture around her neck every day, so whenever someone asked about her new baby, she had a picture at the ready. She told me this story when I was little, keeping the locket in her dresser drawer as a kind of promise. I’ll give it to you someday, when you have a baby of your own, she’d said. But this was not what she had meant. “Here,” she said, and set the velvet box on the sheet over my stomach. “Thank you,” I said, ready to cry. It felt like being forgiven, the way I’d feel sometimes after taking communion at church, clean and blameless, until the next time I scowled at my sister. I opened the box and found a gold ring set with two stones: one was amber, the other red. “That yellow one is topaz,” my mother said. “That’s Meg’s birthstone. I took a chance that she’d be born on time, but she almost beat the clock—I

[ 1 89 ]

would have had to get it changed to an opal. The garnet is yours, of course. I had it made for you. Do you like it?” It wasn’t a pretty ring, the colors clashing and the band too wide for my short fingers. My hands were still swollen and it wouldn’t fit on my ring finger, so I put it on my pinky. “It’s perfect,” I said. the silver-wrapped box held a silver cup, one of half a dozen Meg received from the women who had lived on my parents’ street all my life. I didn’t understand why a silver cup would seem like the appropriate gift for a baby; I assumed it had something to do with wanting her to feel like she’d had the right start in life, born with a silver cup in her mouth, so to speak. But the truth of the matter was that she wouldn’t be able to drink from a cup for some time, and silver cups weren’t meant for using anyway. And when you get right down to it, everybody knows that babies can’t feel much more than hungry or tired or afraid or secure, regardless of their family circumstances. So those silver cups are more for the people who give them than for the child they’re given to. They’re a lot like wedding china, in that regard—easily identified as a good wish for the future, though not exactly helpful in getting you there. As for Meg, all she wanted was me. In the hospital, the nurses brought her back to my room from the nursery because she cried whenever she wasn’t being held and they couldn’t have someone holding her all the time. “When you get home, Mom,” one of the nurses said, “you’ll want to let her cry it out once in a while. Babies are smart—she’ll learn that crying gets her what she wants. You have to teach her that Mom’s the boss.” I didn’t know if they called the other mothers by name, but every one of the nurses referred to me as Mom or Mommy or, in one case, Little Mother. It might be part of the job nurses do, I thought; it might be their way of helping someone come to terms with the fact that she’s just had a child and has to begin to think of herself in a different way. Or it might [ 190 ]

be part of a special plan for girls like me and Ruby. Maybe they worried that we hadn’t started to think of ourselves as mothers yet, that we still thought of ourselves as girls with mothers of our own. At the time I didn’t know you could say this same thing about a woman twenty years older than me; I didn’t know that I would never stop thinking of myself, at least occasionally, as somebody else’s child, not entirely capable of playing the adult role in the story of my life. I’d taken the baby classes, though. I’d read some books. I thought I knew a few things. Cindy had read the books too, so we felt like we’d prepared ourselves as well as we could. Then she picked me up at the hospital Monday morning, and we buckled Meg into her car seat just the way we’d practiced with a teddy bear, and then we didn’t say one thing to each other while we listened to Meg cry the whole way home. I carried her up the stairs to our apartment, the sound of her voice echoing against the yellow walls and filling the whole space on our narrow landing. Cindy fumbled with the keys in the half-dark of the hallway. I clenched my jaw, breathing through my nose, trying to keep from crying. When we finally got inside I sat down in the rocking chair and tried to feed her, but Meg didn’t want to eat. I checked her diaper: clean and dry. I put her clothes back on and held her against my shoulder for a minute, patting her back. The only thing left to do was take the nurse’s advice and let Meg work out the problem, whatever it was, on her own. I settled her on her stomach in her crib and walked out of the room. Cindy stood there for a minute, looking down at Meg, but then she followed me. “You think she’s going to be okay?” Cindy said. She stood there, looking at me. I was supposed to have the answers. I was the mother here. “I have no idea,” I said. w e’d installed the car seat a month before this, excited to find it at a yard sale, relatively cheap and in good shape. It still surprised me, though, when I got done with work and opened the car door to throw my stuff in [ 191 ]

back—at first I’d think I had opened the wrong car door. Then, after Meg was born, I’d have this moment of panic anytime I saw the car seat empty, until I remembered that Cindy or Wanda had her and she was okay. Because I knew it was only a matter of time before I made a big enough mistake. I didn’t know what it would be, but a baby is so defenseless that it doesn’t have to be much—I didn’t have to forget that she was sleeping in her car seat and leave her to freeze to death in the dark while I did the grocery shopping, nothing that dramatic. I could simply fail to hear her choking in her crib one night while I did the dinner dishes and discover her later, blue and lifeless, suffocated by spit-up formula. That had happened to another woman in town, a woman who was married and had two other kids. They thought it was sids at first, and she probably would have preferred to keep on thinking that, since sids was tragic and scary, the real monster in your baby’s closet, but nobody’s fault. There were always stories of child abuse in the news, of course, and at first you can’t understand how a normal person could hurt their own child. But anyone who has dealt with a baby who wants to be held all the time, like Meg did—what they now call a high-needs baby in the parenting books, as if giving them a label makes them easier to deal with, somehow, and need is a medical condition you can treat—any one of them will tell you, there comes a point where you’re ready to say, All right, kid, it’s going to be you or me. I didn’t go back to work for two weeks, because of the c-section. My scar itched and pulled even after it started to heal, and I got tired quickly doing just the most basic things: feeding Meg, changing diapers, going down into the basement of our house to do load after load of laundry. Before I left the hospital, Dr. Bishop had given me the lecture on how it takes time to heal after a major surgery: don’t lift anything heavier than the baby, get plenty of rest. I’d listened to this, of course, but all I could think was that it had nothing to do with me. I had to go back to work, as soon as possible, or I wouldn’t be able to pay my part of the rent. I had to carry my backpack of books to class, and soon. I had some choices, that [ 192 ]

was true, but they were more along the lines of whether I’d study or sleep while Meg took a nap, when she finally did stop crying. Still, I felt like I’d never been as happy as I was that first night back at work at the theater, sitting in the total silence of my ticket booth, trying to get caught up on reading for school and interrupted only occasionally. I felt like my old self. I knew I should be missing Meg, and I did—I hoped she wasn’t crying the whole time I was gone, and I hoped Cindy wouldn’t say she’d had enough, I’d have to find someone else, someone who could do something to make her stop—but I was happy, too, for that rare time alone. It lasted exactly two hours. Then Tammy, the girl who’d worked in the ticket window before I got pregnant, came in through the back door of the booth and hiked a thumb over her shoulder. “You’re on snack bar the rest of the night,” she said. “I am?” “Look at the schedule, if you think I’m lying.” She folded her arms and waited for me to stand up, then plopped down hard in the single chair. “And just in case you’re thinking about taking over in here permanently, you should know that I’m pregnant, so you’re back on snack bar for good.” She raised her eyebrows, daring me to contest or comment on this. “Congratulations,” I said, and closed the door. Wanda was already standing there with her arms held open, waiting for me. “You’ve returned from Sibreria!” “Siberia,” I said, and I tucked my books under the counter, in the empty section only I ever used. Wanda and Tammy weren’t in school, and they kept their purses in their lockers in the break room. Since Tom had left for college in August and all the high school kids went back to working weekends when the school year started, I was the only person here on weekday nights, it seemed, who thought of this as a temporary job. Which had been fine when I was just a girl going to school, but that was different now: I felt a little pathetic, scooping up popcorn, doing all the same things I’d done before. It felt like I should be doing something more important. Wanda had no plans for doing anything else, ever, as far as I could tell. [ 1 93 ]

“Well. Excuse me, college queen.” She wrinkled her nose, sniffed, pretended to take offense at the correction. It would have been hard to insult Wanda, though; she’d heard it all, and most of it more than once. She’d made peace with herself. I knew enough to admire that about her, but I wasn’t sure how it was possible to reconcile yourself to the idea that you had reached the end of the line, or at least the last station on that particular line, at the age of eighteen. In any case, I wasn’t sure I could do it. “So how’s the bundle of joy?” she asked. “All right.” “Still fussy?” I nodded. I was hoping my silence would be contagious, but no such luck. “I read something in one of those magazines at the doctor’s office, the ones about raising kids—Jenny has a cough, it’s been keeping us up all night—something about some kind of drops? You put them in their bottle.” Wanda shrugged. “I can try to find them for you, if you want. They probably have them at the drugstore. I didn’t get the girls until they were past this stage, so I can’t vouch for drops, but it seems like it might be worth a try.” I nodded again. “At this point,” I said, “I’m willing to try anything.” It had been awhile since I’d worked a whole shift with her, and I’d forgotten how much she liked to talk—especially about Ray and the girls. She was telling me things that had happened months ago, like she’d saved it all up for when I came back to work. I didn’t know why she’d waited until now, though. She’d been at our apartment at least once a week ever since we moved in. It seemed like she was glad to have somewhere to go, somewhere other than her house and the theater. Not even a customer could break Wanda’s stride. “So Ray calls from work last night,” she said, filling a bucket of popcorn, “and he tells me he’s going out with the guys for a beer before he comes home. $12.95,” she said to the couple in front of her, snapping a lid on their Coke. “And I said, [ 1 94 ]

‘Well, sweetie, who’s going to take care of your kids?’ $7.05 is your change. Thanks.” She sent the couple on their way. “And he says to me ‘Aren’t they with you?’ And I says, ‘Yes, they are. But you are not going to have a wife if you start this kind of—”she looked around and ducked her head—“‘shit with me.’ So he says, ‘Okay then, I’ll see you soon, babe.’ I don’t know what he told the guys, but he was home at his usual time.” She shook her head. “You can’t give them an inch, because they’ll hang you before you know it. Fortunately, Ray knows he’s got a good thing. He’s seen how bad it can be. So he doesn’t try to mess with me very often.” I nodded again, so she’d know I was listening, or hearing her anyway. I was trying to figure out whether I’d have enough time to finish the chapter I’d started in the ticket booth, though that was only about a tenth of what I needed to get done. How are you going to do homework with a crying baby in the house? my mother had asked me, a dozen times, and all I’d ever said back was, We’ll manage. But there was no we where Meg was concerned, just me. And I hadn’t known it would be like this, that the crying would go on and on and on, because I couldn’t hold her all the time. I couldn’t. And letting her cry it out, as the nurse at the hospital told me to, didn’t work: already our downstairs neighbor, a girl I’d seen on campus occasionally, had complained to our landlord about the noise. It’s like you’re killing that kid, she cries so much—that’s what she told me. I explained that we’d been to the doctor, Meg was healthy, just a baby who liked to cry. I’d thought raising a baby would be like anything else, like cooking: if you read the books and learned the tricks, you could manage. But already it was clear that I’d been wrong. “Turns out that was not such a good thing to say, though.” Wanda went on, undeterred by my silence. “Because when I got off the phone with him I turn around, and there’s little Jamie standing behind me in the kitchen, and she’s heard everything. And she goes ‘Are you going away, Mama?’ And I just wanted to rip out my tongue right then and there, you know, I felt so bad. I can be such an idiot. My dad used to say that my mouth gets going before my brain’s in gear. So I told her ‘No, sweetheart, [ 1 95 ]

I would never leave you. Never, never, never.’ And then I gave her a big old hug, and it seemed like she believed me. So I think it’s going to be okay.” Wanda glanced around, stuck her hand in the popcorn bin and grabbed up a handful of kernels. “I still can’t believe I’d be stupid enough to say something like that in front of my kid.” I walked to the back of the snack bar, the side that faced the windows along the front of the building. It used to be that whenever I was inside the theater like this, I forgot that everything outside kept moving—I’d come out at night after going in sometime that afternoon and be surprised by the darkness, surprised that it wasn’t daylight anymore, even though I’d been watching the clock the whole time I was working. I couldn’t let go of anything now, though: I thought about Meg. I thought about school. I thought about how in the world I was going to get up tomorrow and do this all again, and every day after that. “So really,” Wanda said, trying another tack, now that the show had started and the snack bar was going to be dead for a while. “How’s it going? Are you okay?” I started to cry before I even knew what was happening, before I had a chance to try and stop myself. I nodded, and Wanda handed me a napkin from the dispenser on the counter. “I know how it is. Jenny was only about a year old when I met Ray. Between Jamie chattering and Jenny needing everything done for her—we’re still working on that, I’m sure you’ve noticed—I really thought I was going to lose my little mind. I kind of understood why their mom couldn’t take it.” She folded her arms. “I don’t really mean that, you know. I don’t. That was another stupid thing to say. It’s hard, though. I understand. But it gets better—you have to remember that. They grow up a little. And you get used to it.” She reached out and patted my shoulder, and I tried to smile to thank her, but she didn’t even know what she was talking about. She’d never had her own baby, then tried to go back to a normal life. One was bad enough, but living in this body that leaked milk and still bled and hurt every day, [ 1 96 ]

and trying to take care of Meg all at the same time—it was too much for one person, just like my mother had said. I could feel the buttons on my snack bar shirt pulling across my chest. I was going to have to go into the bathroom and pump on my break. Otherwise, I’d have sour-smelling wet spots on my shirt, and I’d have to go home. I smelled sour milk all the time, though Cindy said she couldn’t smell it—I was always leaking into the pads I’d shoved into my bra. It was almost a relief, though: I filled up and emptied out and filled up again, and in that process I saw my body making it clear that after a certain point, something had to give. i ’ d been okay for the fall semester—not a standout student, like usual, but I held my own. Even after Meg was born, I’d been doing well enough that the good grades from early on carried me through. I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t disappointed in myself. Not yet. I’d understood that a change was on the way, and that’s why I’d worked so hard in the early part of the semester, to offset whatever damage might be done. When I went to my parents’ house for Christmas dinner and my mom asked about my grades, I said they were fine. “What’s fine?” she asked. “B’s? C’s?” “They were pretty good,” I said. “All things considered.” She was still getting used to the fact that, as a person who no longer lived under her roof, the facts of my life belonged to me. “I don’t think we need to have this conversation right now,” my father said. “It’s Christmas. Let’s just enjoy each others’ company.” “I got three A’s and three B’s,” Robin said. “But I got an N in handwriting, for Needs Improvement. Mrs. Harvey is very strict on handwriting.” I was holding Meg against my left shoulder and trying to eat with my right hand, which worked about half the time. I did my best to lean over my plate, to keep from spilling on my mother’s good tablecloth, but finally she set her fork down with a clatter. I felt Meg startle at the sound. [ 1 97 ]

“Why don’t you put the baby in your room,” she said. “Just put some pillows around her. She can’t roll off the bed yet.” “She’ll cry,” I said. “She’ll settle down.” “No, she won’t. She’ll just keep crying until I go in there and pick her up again. She’s quiet right now, so I’d rather just not mess with her.” “For heaven’s sake, Franny, you can’t hold a baby all the time. You’ll spoil her.” My mother pushed her chair back from the table and stood up. “Let me take her in the other room.” “I’m telling you, she’s going to scream.” My mother hadn’t spent much time with Meg—I hadn’t asked her to baby-sit, though she’d offered to help out whenever I needed her. So she seemed genuinely surprised when Meg wound up for one of her tantrums. I know that’s not the right thing to call them, when you’re talking about a newborn, but I still don’t know what else would do them justice. Cindy sometimes called them fits, but that made me think of epilepsy, something I wasn’t going to wish on my supposedly normal, admittedly difficult child. Still, my mother wasn’t going to give up easily. She’d always been good with babies, and she really believed that Meg could be convinced she was safe in someone else’s arms. “Sh-sh-shhh,” she hushed, in a rhythm almost like “Jingle Bells.” She moved her body from side to side, walking through the living room and down the hall toward my old room. Meg didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down. She got louder, though I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. “She’s a feisty little thing,” my father said. “That’s one way to put it.” But I smiled at him, and he smiled back. “That crying would drive me nuts,” Robin said. “Do you think she wants to play with one of my Barbies?” “She’s still too little for Barbies,” I said. “When she gets a little older, though, I bet she’ll love to play with all your stuff. She’ll think you’re the coolest aunt in town.” [ 1 98 ]

Robin smiled at this prospect. It was hard to believe that I missed her, but I did. When I’d lived at home, I spent all my time trying to stay away from Robin, or keep her away from me. Now, though, she didn’t seem so bad, and I didn’t know if that was because she’d grown up or because I had. She was funny, actually, and most of the time she was sweet, trying hard to say the right thing. I’d actually thought about asking her to spend the night with us at our apartment—I thought she might like pretending she was a grown-up bachelor girl—but I knew my mother probably wouldn’t let her come, and I didn’t want to start a fight between them. I didn’t want to hear my mother say that I was a bad example. “My goodness,” my mother said, coming back into the room. Meg’s face was as red as the poinsettias embroidered into the tablecloth. My mother’s face was flushed, too, and the two of them looked like they’d been out for a little jog around the block. The very thought of that amused me, and I smiled. But my mother took this as a sign of triumph: I’d been right, she’d been wrong. She handed Meg back to me. “That red hair certainly suits your little girl.” Maybe it was the mention of Meg’s red hair, that reminder of my fall from grace. Maybe it was the way she said your little girl, drawing a black line between the two of us. In either case, I pushed my chair back from the table. It felt like something I had to do. “Where are you going?” my mother asked, but she didn’t follow me to find out. “Well that’s it. I give up.” I heard her pull out her chair and sit down at the table. “Apparently I can’t say anything to her anymore without making trouble.” I went to my old room, put Meg on the bed while I pulled on my coat, then zipped her into her bunting. I had to fight to get her arms into the sleeves, and to keep myself from crying. My dad came to the door of my room and leaned against the jamb, hands in his pockets, falsely casual. “Franny, come back and sit down.” [ 1 99 ]

“No,” I said. “I’m just going to go.” “I think you’re overreacting. Mom didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” I said I knew that, and I did. But it didn’t change the way I felt. I zipped up the front of Meg’s bunting, from her ankle to her neck. “This was a bad idea in the first place. I shouldn’t have come.” My father sighed, surrendering, as he often did when it came to my mother. “Do you want me to wrap up your plate?” he said. “You can heat it up later, when you get home.” I shook my head. “It’s all right,” I said. He moved to the side when I walked past him. Robin was standing in the hallway, by the bathroom door. “I’ll see you later.” “What about your presents?” she said, and I could tell she was about to cry too. My mother had given me a sweater, pink angora, from her and my dad, which I was planning to exchange for something I could actually wear. Robin had given me a red coffee mug that said world’s greatest mom in white letters, and my mother had looked so shocked by this that I could only assume Robin had bought it with her allowance and hidden it, somehow, until that moment. They’d all given Meg a lot of little things—rattles and stuffed animals with bells inside them, a set of plastic nesting blocks with letters on the sides. “You want to carry them out to the car for me?” I asked her. “You’re not going out in the snow, Robin Diane. You’re still getting over a cold,” my mother said from the dining room, where she now sat by herself. My dad followed me out to the car with the little pile of boxes. He was still wearing his dress shoes from church that morning, and now he walked carefully, so he wouldn’t slip on the ice beneath the snow that had fallen just while I’d been inside. I buckled Meg into her seat and let him put the presents beside her on the seat. “Your mom,” he said, still bent over—he leaned farther across the seat to kiss the top of Meg’s sweaty, furious head—“doesn’t mean to upset [ 200 ]

you. It just comes out wrong. She wants to help.” He straightened up and looked at me. “She really wanted this to be a nice day. She was in there cooking all day yesterday, like we had a whole battalion of people coming over, not just you two.” “That’s what she does,” I said. “She cooks whenever she’s upset about something.” I shrugged, as I had learned to do. “She doesn’t want to help me. She wants to take over, like she always does.” “I think you’re being pretty hard on her. She’s doing the best she can, you know.” The tears I’d been holding back pushed forward. Still this was happening: the sadness would fill me up, like a reservoir built just for that purpose, but built too small. He put an arm around my shoulders, gave me a squeeze. “It’s all right. I know it’s hard. I’m not so old—I remember what it was like when you girls were this age. Of course, I was out working all day long, and you were both easy babies. You never cried, either one of you. Well, hardly ever.” I looked through the car window, at Meg’s clenched face. We could both hear her, even through glass and steel. “I’d better take her home,” I said. He nodded and kissed my cheek. “All right. Merry Christmas, Fancy Pants.” That was something he hadn’t called me since I was small, still wearing ruffled diaper covers underneath a frilly smock. My mother hated that name. She asked him why he didn’t just call me Nice Underwear and get it over with. So he did, once in a while, just to watch her jaw clench up, because she couldn’t complain about something that had been her idea. b y january Meg was crying less, but coughing all the time. The tiny bedroom we shared had a wall of low, drafty windows, and my mother suggested moving Meg’s crib into the living room, which had just one [ 201 ]

window on the end that faced the street. But I knew that wouldn’t be fair to Cindy—she studied all the time, when she wasn’t working, and most of that time she spent on the living room couch, flat on her back, a book wedged open above her eyes. She said that made it easier to stay awake while she read, because she wasn’t in her bed, and she couldn’t fall asleep with her arms up in the air. At that point, though, I was sure I could. I’d missed the first day of spring classes to take Meg to the doctor, and then I missed the second day because the antibiotics he prescribed made Meg throw up. Back to the doctor, back to the pharmacy. And I couldn’t go to work either one of those nights because Cindy and Wanda were working too, and the woman who watched Meg when I needed extra help—a friend of Wanda’s who did what she called “second shift daycare,” which amounted to letting kids sleep at her house—wouldn’t take Meg until she hadn’t thrown up for a full day, just in case the problem was a virus and not the medicine. I thought about calling my mother, but just briefly, because I knew she’d take it as a sign that I was coming to my senses. So by the middle of that week I had missed all my classes once, work twice. I was nearly broke, even with my financial aid, because I had to pay for books and tuition and now two visits to the doctor and Meg’s medicine. The medical stuff would have been paid for if I’d applied for assistance—they’d given me an application at the hospital, without even asking if I wanted one—but I hadn’t. I hadn’t even thought about it. Assistance seemed like the kind of thing a girl like Ruby needed, not a girl like me. I was smart, I had a job; at that point, I still believed those things meant something. Now my paycheck would be smaller than usual because of the time I’d missed from work, and it didn’t take a daunting intellect to figure out that I was in serious trouble. But I did what I could think to do: I stayed after class to talk to my professors, apologized for my absence. I asked for syllabi and planned to get to work. The last one, Dr. Lawson, seemed amused that I would even dare to show up after missing the first day of class. [ 202 ]

“I wouldn’t say that makes a very good first impression, would you?” he said, handing me the syllabus after class. I hadn’t done that day’s homework, of course, so I had nothing to hand back to him. “No, it doesn’t,” I admitted. “And I’m sorry. I’ll try not to let it happen again.” “That’s a good idea.” He was the rumpled sort of professor who always made me wonder: If he could do calculus, couldn’t he figure out how to operate an iron? “At this level of mathematics, we work very quickly. There’s no room for laziness. You can’t afford to fall behind, not even one day.” “I understand.” “I hope you do.” He looked at his roll sheet through the bottoms of his glasses. “Rogers, did you say?” “Yes. Frances.” “You’re a Hotchkiss Scholar?” I didn’t know why that information would be on the roll sheet, but I said yes. “Only as long as you keep your grades up, though.” He pointed a finger at me, to emphasize this last bit of information. “I’m on the screening committee for the Hotchkiss awards. I remember your application from last spring. Very impressive.” “Really? Thank you.” I was amazed that anything about me might be distinctive enough that he’d remembered it this long. It had been over a year since I was applying for scholarships, a long time that seemed even longer. “I remember you,” he said, pulling on his beard, gray and red and brown all at the same time, “because I assumed you were male. We don’t get many female applicants for engineering scholarships, as you might imagine. And Frances—that’s a name one used to see on our applications once in a while, but not so much anymore.” He nodded as he packed up his briefcase. “And then, when I found out you were female—well, then you were quite impressive. One might say you were without peer.” He laughed at his own joke. [ 203 ]

I heard a squeaking sound at the back of the room and turned toward it. Cindy was standing in the hallway with Meg, who’d fallen asleep in her stroller. She was supposed to be at the campus daycare center, so I knew right away that something was wrong. Dr. Lawson had already started for the back of the room. I followed him out the door and into the hallway. “Are you waiting to see me?” he asked Cindy. She shook her head. “Her,” she said, tipping her head toward me. He glanced down at Meg. “Look at that head of hair. Yours?” I looked down at Meg too. She seemed fine. A little flushed, maybe, but not on the brink of death. “Yes,” Cindy said, and I looked up at her. Dr. Lawson wagged his fingers in Meg’s direction. “My sons had hair that color when they were small. See you Friday, Miss Rogers?” “See you then,” I said, no question mark. I bent down to put my hand on Meg’s cheek. She didn’t open her eyes, and her face felt warm. “They called from the daycare right as I was about to leave the apartment. She was throwing up again.” “Oh, God.” I put one hand across my eyes, rubbed my temples. “I can’t believe this. I’m going to have to take her back to the doctor.” I shook my head, sighed, took the stroller from Cindy. “Thanks for going to pick her up.” “No problem. I don’t have class for another hour.” We headed for the elevator at the end of the hallway. “What class was that?” “Math. Calculus. The professor’s a jerk.” She nodded. “I thought so. Sometimes you can just tell by the way they look.” Cindy pushed the down button and we waited. “Why did you tell him Meg was yours?” I asked. “I thought you wanted me to.” She was surprised by the question, her eyes open wide, afraid she’d done something wrong now. “You were stand-

[ 204 ]

ing right there, and you didn’t say anything when he asked. So I just thought—well, you know.” “You thought what?” Cindy shrugged. “To some people, it makes a difference. It’s stupid, but that’s just how some people are. It doesn’t matter what he thinks of me.” The elevator doors opened in front of us. “I’m not ashamed of her,” I said, tipping the stroller so the front wheels didn’t get caught in the little gap in the floor. “I know that,” Cindy said. I listened to the doors close in front of us again with a sucking sound. It was too awful to admit, but I felt such gratitude for what she’d done. Even in that moment of surprise, when I saw how she’d erased me from the picture, I’d been grateful. I had known it was the right thing to do, that Dr. Lawson would never take me seriously again—You were very impressive, he’d said, already using past tense. The elevator started down, and I felt my stomach give in that way it does when you think you’re about to fall. Maybe I had been impressive once. But maybe now I was just a girl with a baby to raise, a girl who once thought she could plan whole cities and, as it turns out, couldn’t even manage her own life. i called my boss at work when I got home and told him that I couldn’t come in again. I knew exactly what he was going to say: Ben was the kind of guy who was so predictable that you could almost have a conversation with him by yourself. “That’s the third time this week,” he said. “I know. I’m sorry. My daughter’s still sick, and I have to take her back to the doctor again this afternoon.” “Is it serious?” “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” “You can’t get someone to take her for you? Maybe your mom?”

[ 205 ]

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I need to be with her. She’s sick. I know I’ve been leaving you short-handed.” “It’s not me I’m worried about, Frances.” Ben was shuffling the big sheets of paper he used for the schedule. I could hear them snapping in his hands as he straightened them out. “I can always get one of the weekend people to cover once in a while. But if this keeps up, you know—” “I know,” I said. “You’ve always been a good worker. I’d hate to lose you.” “I understand,” I said. And I did. Up until then, I’d always been one of those employees who came to work early, not just on time, who mopped the floor before someone pointed out it was dirty. For a long time I thought a manager’s job was to look for any excuse to fire you. I wouldn’t realize, for years, how rare it was to find people who showed up for work, much less did their best while they were there. But I had always been afraid of getting in trouble, afraid of the consequences of being anything other than careful. For a little while I’d let that go, and look where it had gotten me. When I called, a week later, to quit before Ben had to fire me, he sounded sad but not surprised. He said he’d send my final paycheck in the mail, and that’s when I realized I’d never changed my official records at work: they still had me on file as living at my parents’ house. On paper, anyway, it looked like I’d been the same person all this time. that last night I spent in the hospital, after Meg was born, a nurse brought her to me just after midnight, so I could feed her. I could hear Ruby’s ragged breathing from behind the curtain between us. Her baby wasn’t getting better—respiratory distress was what I’d heard the doctor tell her earlier. They were moving him to the nicu, putting him on a respirator. They’d given Ruby a sedative, and she’d been sleeping ever since. But she woke up anyway, either because Meg was crying until she latched on to my breast or because the sound of a crying baby seemed so

[ 206 ]

strange now, so out of line with what she knew, that even drugs couldn’t keep her brain from feeling the scrape of incongruity. She pulled back the curtain and watched me nurse Meg, and I didn’t ask her to stop. Ruby had been on the phone almost constantly, but no one had come to see her—not the baby’s father, not even her own mother. My mother had come, of course, and Cindy, and Wanda. “You’re really lucky,” Ruby said. And I nodded. Compared to Ruby, at least, I knew I was.

[ 207 ]

Little Lost River [ cindy ]

they found him. Some people just disappear—like the man who takes off to go hunting by himself and doesn’t come back when he’s supposed to. No one remembers seeing him after he left home, so nobody knows whether he got where he was going. He’s just gone. Sometimes they find his truck and guess at what might have happened; sometimes a body turns up in the spring, when the snow melts away and shows where his body landed after he slipped down the mountain and broke his neck. But sometimes they don’t find so much as a mark to show where that guy had been the second before he fell right off the face of the earth. That’s the kind of mystery people don’t want to read, the kind that can’t be solved. What surprised me wasn’t the news that Rick was dead, because I’m pretty sure I was the first one to know this, but the fact that somebody actually called to tell me what was going on before I read about it in the morning paper. That’s where I’d always expected to find him, if he turned up again: body of local teen discovered, private services pending. Meg was crying when the phone started ringing—why, I didn’t know. I’d fed her and she’d fallen right to sleep, and I started feeling hopeful that maybe I could get some reading done before Fran came home and I had to go to work. I put her in bed and closed the door. But ten minutes later I could hear her snuffing around, beating her head against the mattress, [ 208 ]

making that sound that meant she wasn’t happy: Uh-uh-uh. Each one a cross between a bark and a cough. Then the telephone rang. I took a chance that Meg would settle down on her own, which she sometimes did now, if she thought you couldn’t hear her. I answered on the second ring. “Cindy,” she said, not a question. “It’s Gretchen.” I didn’t recognize her name right away. I’d never called her anything but your mom, Rick’s mom. I’d never said anything but Hi when she walked into the room. Not Hi, Gretchen. But I knew her voice, of course, and after a few seconds the rest of the picture came into view. “Oh, hey,” I said. “How are you?” “I’m all right,” she said, then nothing else. “That’s great.” It occurred to me that my name wasn’t in the phone book yet, that she would have had to call my dad to get this number. Hard to imagine the two of them talking to each other—they’d never done that before, or not as far as I knew. But maybe she’d just said she was a friend of mine, which wasn’t completely a lie, and avoided the whole scene of him trying to help me get on with my life. Why can’t you just leave her alone? She’s working hard and going to school and trying to put all that business behind her. Why do you have to dredge it all up again? “I’m doing okay, too,” I said, just to fill the silence. “I’m going to school and working at the bookstore on campus. Keeping busy.” “You sound busy,” Gretchen said. Meg was going full throttle. Even through the closed bedroom door and across a few miles of telephone wire, you couldn’t ignore her. It occurred to me, suddenly, that Gretchen might think Meg was mine, and therefore hers. The timing made this possible. After all, the last time I’d spoken to her was a few weeks before I found out Fran was pregnant. So maybe all this silence on her part was just surprise—maybe she was trying to piece the facts together and figure out what to ask me, how to say it. The possibility of a baby might have made her feel better, but only for a minute. [ 209 ]

“You can probably hear the baby,” I said. “My roommate just had a little girl. Meg. That’s the baby’s name, not my roommate’s.” I just kept babbling. I didn’t know if she believed me, if she thought I was trying to cover something up, why she’d think I would. “Well,” she said. “I just wanted you to know—” And she stopped there, and I heard her throat go tight, closing off, thick with the words she was planning to say and the wish that she didn’t have to say them. Then there were other voices at her end of the line, the sound of the receiver changing hands. “Hello?” someone said, a voice I didn’t recognize. “Hi.” I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know who I was talking to, but something inside me had gone loose and shaky and I realized now that I already knew why Gretchen had tracked me down. There was only one reason for her to do that. “This is Cindy Morgan. Gretchen called me—she said she wanted me to know something.” “Yes. This is her daughter, Jennifer Happs. I’m Rick’s sister.” I tried to remember if Jennifer Happs was the Seattle sister or the air force sister, but really I had no idea. I hadn’t paid much attention to those details. Jennifer Happs. Jennifer Happs. I didn’t even know if I’d heard her name before. Rick’s mom didn’t seem like the type to name her daughter Jennifer. Rick’s name, his real name, was Fredrick. Fredrick James McKinney. But no one ever had called him Fred, much less Fredrick. Not even his mom, and she was the one who’d come up with that name. “Hello?” Jennifer Happs said. “Yeah. I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m here.” And then she said, “We’re calling people today to let them know that Rick’s body has been recovered.” The word buzzed around in my head like a fly caught under a jelly jar. Recovered. Recovered. I’d been waiting for discovered, or found. I didn’t know whether she meant they’d already brought his body home and had the burial. I knew it couldn’t mean what it sounded like, Rick getting bet[ 210 ]

ter and everything suddenly fine, one more miracle in the long chain that left me standing here, still alive. But really I didn’t want to know what she meant, because as soon as she told me, the whole thing would be over: mystery solved, case closed. You can’t have a death until you have a body. That’s what they say on tv, anyway. “We’re having a graveside service Tuesday morning,” she said. “Ten o’clock, at the Dry Creek Cemetery. Just family and a few close friends. It’s going to be very brief, but we thought everyone would want the chance to say a proper good-bye.” She waited a minute, but I didn’t jump in. “My mother thought you might like to be there,” she said, finally. I nodded, then realized she’d need to hear me say something. “I would,” I said. “I’d like to be there. Thanks for letting me know.” And then I couldn’t think of anything else. I heard Rick’s mom in the background, still choking on the words she’d tried to say to me. “Is Gretchen okay?” Jennifer Happs sighed. “It’s been a very hard day. We knew they’d found a body a few days ago, but we didn’t know anything definite until this morning. She wanted to call everyone herself, but you know—it’s tough for her to go through this all over again. She’s doing about as well as you’d expect, under the circumstances.” I nodded again, a reflex. “Well, tell her I’m sorry and I’ll see her Tuesday morning.” I could hear how stupid that sounded as soon as the words were out of my mouth, but Jennifer Happs just said she’d let Gretchen know I was coming. I walked into Meg’s room after I hung up the phone. I took her out of the crib, sweaty and red and mad in that way only babies can be, her whole body absolutely furious. She was stiff when I picked her up, knocking her head against my collarbone again and again, a baby brand of punishment that must have hurt her more than me. I held her against my chest and we walked around the living room together for a while, until she went soft and reassured, until she calmed down enough that she could hear my heart [ 211 ]

pounding through my shirt. And then she just collapsed, the back of her clammy head against my neck. She slipped one hand under the collar of my shirt, curled her fingers against my shoulder. She needed skin to feel connected to someone, even when she was pressed right up against that person’s body. Meg sighed. She was still awake, I could tell, just not ready to be alone. I could understand that, so I didn’t put her down. we sat in the rocking chair together until Meg finally fell asleep. We sat there past the time when Fran was supposed to be home, until she was full-blown late. Finally I got up and put Meg in her crib. Then I called the bookstore and told them I didn’t feel like I could come to work. It wasn’t a lie, but I would have gone in anyway if Fran had come home on time. “You just don’t want to go out in the rain.” Simon had answered the phone and now he wouldn’t hand it over to Deb. “At least be honest: You want to stay all curled up in your cozy little apartment. You’re probably drinking a cup of tea, reading a book.” “I don’t feel good,” I told him. “I can hardly stand up.” This was definitely not a lie. My legs felt weak, like I’d run for miles. At first I thought it was because I’d been sitting in the same position for so long. But even after I’d been up and walking around for a while, my legs didn’t go back to normal. I stood there, afraid I was going to fall, until it occurred to me that I could sit instead. I leaned against the wall and slid to the floor. “Well, if you really are ill, I’m sorry to hear it.” I heard his box knife zipping through a slice of packing tape. “We’re doing a big load of Christmas returns—art books, cookbooks. All the stuff no one buys. Lots of big, heavy things. It’s a very good day to be sick. But Preston’s here, of course—so perhaps you’d like to come in after all?” “I’ll be in Tuesday afternoon,” I said. Then I thought about asking Deb for that afternoon off, but going to work might be the best thing to do after a memorial service, something [ 212 ]

normal to pull me back into what would still be my life every day after that. I remembered from when my mom died, that was the hardest part—not the funeral, but afterward, when everything else went on like nothing had happened. I watched people decorating Christmas trees and shoveling sidewalks, and every day I looked at strings of blinking lights wrapped around the eaves of the houses and I thought, My mom is dead, and nothing else. “Hello?” Simon tapped on the receiver with a fingernail, like knocking on a little door. “What?” “I said . . . pale as Cathy . . . this line about being sick.” Sometimes I couldn’t understand even half of what he was saying. Especially when he realized you weren’t listening and started talking faster than ever, like if he could just be quick enough about it, you’d tune back in. “Cathy who?” Simon sighed. “I can’t believe you work at a bookstore and you’re asking me that question.” “I unpack the books,” I said. “I don’t read them.” “. . . stomp out every little spark of faith . . .” I could hear books thumping against the back of the shelving cart as he sorted them out. “Go to bed. Read Wuthering Heights. It’s a good book for a sick girl to read on a rainy night. See you Tuesday, sunshine.” By then it was almost six o’clock. Fran should have been home by five. It occurred to me that I should be mad when she got home, but I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t feel sad, either, which was a surprise. I felt like when you see someone and you know their face but you can’t figure out where from. Or when you start watching a movie and you start to think you’ve seen it before, but you can’t remember exactly what happens next. For a long time I’d been thinking I knew about this, and I did know certain things: I knew I wouldn’t hear Rick’s voice again, or watch for his car coming down the street to pick me up. But I didn’t know how it would feel to bump up against the hard facts of these things, to be absolutely sure. [ 213 ]

I got up off the floor and turned out the lights. Then I sat in the rocking chair, put my feet up on the windowsill, and looked down at the street. Rick and I sat on the roof of his house and did this same thing all the time, watching people who didn’t know you were watching them. People never think to look up; you don’t expect to find someone sitting on the roof, which is exactly why Rick liked to be there. We could see people for who they really were. One night we watched a guy slash all four tires on his girlfriend’s car. At least, we figured she must have been his girlfriend. He parked right in front of Rick’s house, crouched down low, and ran across the street, commando-style. “That’s what you get, you bitch,” he said, in a completely calm and normal voice, and because it was late and quiet I could hear him like I was standing right there with the knife in my own hand. The tires sighed for a long time after he’d pulled away from the curb. We didn’t say anything about it to anyone, not even when the cops came by that night and asked if we’d seen anything, because we knew it wasn’t meant for us to see. I felt bad for both of them—the woman and her ruined car, the guy so mad he had to do something, knowing he couldn’t do anything, really, to hurt her. He had a knife, but he hadn’t gone to her door or even called her out into the street. By that time I wasn’t watching for Fran to come home anymore, but I saw her anyway. She pulled her car to the curb across the street, got out, and gathered up the grocery bags she’d put in the back. She didn’t look like she was in a hurry, like she was late or anxious or even trying to get out of the rain. She looked like any other girl coming home after a normal day, the way I would have looked this time yesterday. she turned on the lights when she came inside. “Why are you sitting here in the dark?” she asked. “You’re late,” I said. “No I’m not.” She looked at the clock. “Okay, three minutes.” She’d started working at a video store two weeks before this, after she [ 214 ]

quit her job at the theater. I told her she should have kept the other job, her boss wasn’t going to fire her, but she’d convinced herself that it was going to happen and decided to beat him to the punch. Fran put two bags on the table and started unpacking. “You were supposed to be home at five,” I said. “How could I be home at five? I worked until five. I told you I was going to the grocery store after that and I’d be here by six.” “I was supposed to be at work at five thirty.” She had two cans of formula, one in each hand, when she headed for the cupboard. “Well, you didn’t tell me that,” she said. “I always work five thirty to nine on Sunday nights,” I said. “I’ve been doing that the whole time we’ve lived here. Why would that suddenly change?” Fran turned away from the cupboard. “You can’t expect me to read your mind,” she said. “I checked my schedule with you when I got this job, and I told you this morning that I’d be home by six o’clock tonight. If you needed me to be here earlier, I could have come home first and taken Meg to the store with me.” “Oh, right,” I said. “You are so anxious to spend every possible moment with your child. That’s why you moved in here with me, instead of staying at your mom’s.” She was working all the time, now that she’d found another job, whenever she wasn’t in class. She was trying to get caught up on bills, doing the best she could. And I’d never said anything like that before, not once in my entire life—I’d never said anything just for the sake of hurting someone’s feelings. Fran stood there a minute, trying to decide how to answer me. But she didn’t say anything: she started to cry while she stared at the floor, trying not to, holding her eyes wide and taking deep breaths to blow back the tears. Instead of going to her room, closing the door, and letting me wonder whether she was mad or something else, she gave me exactly what I’d earned. [ 215 ]

The obvious thing to do was apologize. But I grabbed my coat from the hook beside the door instead, and I left. i got in the car and started driving—I shouldn’t have taken her car without asking, but I did it anyway. The problem was, I had nowhere to go. I’d already called work and told them I was sick, so I couldn’t just show up at the store. I wanted to see Preston, but he was working. And that felt like the wrong thing to do anyway, turning to a guy when I was missing a different one. It was Sunday night, so every store I could think of was closed. I drove through downtown, everything dark and quiet. Everyone was home, getting ready for the week: catching up on the laundry, finally doing Monday’s homework. I ended up on Warm Springs Avenue, driving past those old houses that are so big you can’t believe a regular family lives inside. A few people still had their Christmas decorations up, white lights on the eaves and wreaths or big red bows on their doors. I’d always liked that look, your home a gift you acknowledged at least once a year. I kept driving until I saw the sign for Highway 21 and then, suddenly, I knew where I was going. Past the public swimming pool, closed for the winter, it was darker still. I almost missed the sign for Whorley Drive. Once I made the turn, though, it was easy to find our old house, white and squatty, like a barn, two stories hunkered over a too-small lawn. I’d never seen another house like it, and I could understand why my dad had picked the exact opposite thing, a small one-story house on a giant lot, when we moved outside of town. I circled around in the cul-de-sac and parked across the street, left the engine running. The downstairs lights were on, but I couldn’t see anyone inside the house. I remembered this place in stray pieces that didn’t mean anything by themselves: how you had to step down from the kitchen into the living room. The downstairs floors were wood, but the upstairs had a different color of carpet in every room. From a certain spot in the hall you could see every color at once and the floor looked like a giant quilt, connected [ 216 ]

in spite of the walls. The carpet in my room had been light yellow, the color of Easter ducks. I’ve never liked yellow, but my dad had built me a white bedroom set with yellow drawer pulls and finials to match the carpeting, and then it didn’t seem so bad. I remember I liked that everything matched. My room felt like a finished puzzle, not a bunch of scattered pieces, like the rest of our house. It was nice to have one place where everything made sense. I couldn’t remember when it started—it felt like my mom had always been sad, always sitting on the back steps or in the blue chair in her bedroom, staring at the wall. But I knew it must have started here, and maybe even before I was born. This is where we lived until my dad ran out of stories he knew the neighbors didn’t believe anyway. I remember being small and at home with her during the day and the house would be completely quiet—all those voices made her nervous, so we left the tv and the radio turned off. I’d have to walk through every room in the house to find her, like we were playing a game of hide-and-seek, because she never answered when I called. And when I sat down beside her, on her bed or on the back porch stairs, even when I tried to be really quiet, she’d tell me to go somewhere else and play. Please, find something to occupy yourself, she said. Never mean, always please. And sad, like she was sorry to have to ask me to leave. I just wanted to be in the same room with her, to know I wasn’t home alone. When I started school, she helped with my math homework sometimes. She’d been a teacher for a while, before she met my dad. She said she liked math because you knew there was only one place you could end up if you made the right moves along the way, and usually it was easy to see what those moves should be. Math didn’t come easy to me, but I tried hard to understand it because she’d get a little excited whenever I started catching on. There you go! That’s my girl! But then I’d start making mistakes and scrubbing out the wrong answers so hard the paper would tear, and she’d end up walking away from me. And then I’d be crying for reasons that had nothing to do with numbers. [ 217 ]

But I might not have even gone out with Rick in the first place, if it wasn’t for my mom. I was so used to taking care of someone that after she died, I wanted the opposite thing, someone who was fine by himself. At first, Rick didn’t care if he saw me once a week or every single night: he’d call, and if I said okay he’d come and pick me up, and if I said I didn’t feel like going out, no problem. He’d call the next night, either way. For a while, I wanted to be anywhere but inside that house with my dad, where it seemed like I’d spent my whole life. The night I flew down that mountain with Rick, I didn’t want to be with him and I didn’t want to be at home: I wanted something else, something I couldn’t point to. I didn’t know how to explain it in a way Rick would understand. But then he was gone, and suddenly I didn’t have to explain anything. I could just start over. Though there were times I thought it might have been easier for everyone if the car had just flown a little farther, if we’d gone in the water together, the car turning end over end all the way downhill. The water would have closed in around us right away, a cloud of bubbles working its way toward the surface until the air inside the car and in the human space inside us turned to foam at the shoreline, fidgeting with the sand. And then we’d both be in the water and the water in us, and the reservoir would still empty itself into the river, and the river would still make its way to the ocean, not the least bit daunted by the stupid things people do. Rick and I would have been no different than the rocks or tree limbs under its surface, just something else to work around, nothing important enough to change its course. They would have found us there that night, probably. A car is an easy thing to find, not as mobile as a body. And that would have been easier too—easier, anyway, than wondering how long a person can stumble around in the mountains in wet clothes, without food or water, wondering if it’s possible he walked to the highway and caught a ride to somewhere he might be living now, not remembering who he used to be. You hear that story sometimes, too: the guy who walks away from his life and starts [ 218 ]

up a new one in another town because he doesn’t remember to want to go home. It’s strange how sometimes you don’t even know what you know, when the information is right there inside your brain. My mom was with us, in this house and the other one, but she wasn’t really there: she was somewhere else, long since gone, and it had nothing to do with me. But I don’t think I figured that out until after she died, and then I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever thought anything else was true. And now, with Rick, it was just the opposite: he was gone, and I thought I’d known that for a long time, but now it turned out I’d been dragging him along with me, even when I kept telling people otherwise. He’s dead, I told Mitzi that day in the hospital, thinking I was the only one brave enough to face the facts, to separate myself from him. I could do that then because there were no actual facts to be faced: no body, no funeral, no grave. Anything could have happened. I knew that, too, and saying it wasn’t true only left me free to be amazed by the miracle of him showing up at my door someday, saying, Hey, remember me? i sat there in front of our old house until a guy came out the front door with a big black dog on a leash. He looked across the street at me and didn’t start off on his walk, so I pulled away from the curb. I didn’t want to scare anybody; I was just trying to figure out where it had started, when I stopped knowing how to feel about things and started coaching myself on how to be. Your mother is dead; act like you’re sad. But I wasn’t sad when she died, not at first. I was scared. And then I was mad, for a long, long time. Then a little relieved. Then guilty, of course. And then—just now, finally—I was missing her. I was sad. It occurred to me that my dad must have felt the same way: angry that she’d let him go to work that day, knowing what she planned to do. And scared too, probably, afraid that people thought it was his fault this had happened. Because how did she manage to get a gun, anyway? Why would he even have a gun in the house, knowing how she was? [ 219 ]

A gun he’d kept for protection, because we lived so far outside of town. Because I was there, alone with my mom, so much of the time. He taught me how to use it when I was ten, then put it away and told me not to touch it, ever, unless I thought my life was in danger. He kept the bullets hidden from her, kept changing the places where he hid them, just in case she was looking. But she’d found them anyway. As if the gun mattered. As if she wouldn’t have found another way. More than one doctor had told us that if she were really determined to kill herself, she’d do it somehow. All we could do was put her in the hospital, or try our best to head her off and hope she changed her mind eventually. I got back on Warm Springs, pointed the car toward downtown again. I passed Thirteenth and kept on driving. I headed for my dad’s house without actually deciding to. Even if Rick’s mom hadn’t told him, he’d probably figured out why she was looking for me. I knew I couldn’t count on him to actually care, not even to say he was sorry, but at least he’d know why I was there. He’d let me sit with him for a while, watch some tv. I could always count on him to give me that much. the lights were on at his house too, and his truck was parked out back. I’d only been home a few times since I moved out, mostly when I thought of something I hadn’t taken with me when I left. Usually I sat with him in the living room for a while and we let the television do the talking for us. On Christmas I came over and made a tiny turkey for the two of us, the most pathetic thing I’d ever seen. We ate it with canned peas and stuffing from a box, and then he took me back to my apartment, left me there feeling sick. I went in through the back door and called his name, but no one answered. “Dad?” I heard a voice in the living room, but that turned out to be the television talking to itself. He wasn’t sitting in his recliner. Then I walked down the hall, and I saw the light was on in the bathroom, the door closed. [ 220 ]

“Dad?” I knocked. Still no answer. I started to try the knob, but something happened when I reached out for it—like that moment in a movie when you know something bad is going to happen because everything slows down. I saw my hand and had the feeling I was watching someone else do this, or like I’d picked up a fake rubber arm somewhere and held it out there now, in front of me. I closed my hand around the knob, turned it hard. The door swung open: empty. That’s when the back door opened and closed again. I jumped at the sound, my heart beating like I’d run all the way out here from the middle of town. I could hear my dad walking through the house, and I went to meet him in the living room. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “I didn’t know whose car that was.” “It’s Fran’s,” I said. “My roommate. Where were you?” “Out for a walk.” “It’s raining.” He shrugged. “Just sprinkling. I hardly got wet.” He took off his jacket, hung it over the back of his chair. “It’s probably going to start snowing before too long. Supposed to get down below freezing tonight. I’m ready for some snow, though. It’s January.” I nodded. This time of year I started to watch for signs that the world was still moving me forward, too. For the second time I’d spent the whole month of November counting the days in my head, leading up to November 25, the day my mom died. November was like a mountain I had to climb all by myself, but I didn’t feel any sense of accomplishment once I got to the top: I just looked across the valley below me to the next year, where I’d have to start climbing all over again. Christmas was on the downhill side, at least. But now Rick’s funeral would be too. “Did someone call here for me today?” I asked. It surprised me to hear that question come out of my mouth. I hadn’t planned to talk about it, really. Now I sat down on the couch, like I was ready to have a real conversation. [ 221 ]

He thought about this for a minute, or pretended to, while he settled into his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “Around four o’clock, I guess. A woman.” “Rick’s mom,” I said. “Oh.” He shrugged again. “She didn’t say who she was. She asked if you were here, and I told her you’d moved into your own place and gave her your new number.” It was hard to believe my dad wouldn’t ask any questions. Whenever anyone had called me at home, I always heard him say, Can I tell her who’s calling? before he handed me the phone. He never told me who it was, though; the question was really for him, and for the other person, so they’d know my dad was keeping track of me. “Well, it was her,” I said. “They found Rick. His body, I mean.” My dad’s eyebrows went halfway up his forehead. He was actually surprised. “I didn’t think they’d find him now, with things all frozen up,” he said. “When they didn’t find him last summer, I figured they wouldn’t until the spring. Or later.” I didn’t want to think about those things: how Rick had spent the whole summer under the water, trapped or floating below the people who were taking rafting trips with their families. How his body must smell now, parts of it torn or eaten away. I’d been trying not to think of all these things since Jennifer Happs said that strange word, recovered. “Yeah, well,” I said. “They found him.” “Where?” What does that matter? I wanted to ask, but he was trying to be nice. And nobody knows what to say—Tell Gretchen I’ll see her Tuesday, I’d said, like we had a date for lunch. “I’m not sure. I didn’t ask. They’ll probably say in the newspaper.” The tv had been on this whole time. He stared hard at the weather map in front of us now, as if it could tell him something he needed to know about how to get through this situation.

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“Is she going to have a service? I know she already had a memorial, last spring.” “A graveside service, Tuesday morning. That’s why she called, to let me know about it.” My dad nodded. The coldest spot in the nation that day was International Falls, Minnesota. It was almost always the coldest place. I remembered that now. “I could take that morning off and go with you. If you want,” he said. I don’t have a word for how I felt right then. Shocked isn’t even in the neighborhood. Neither is grateful. But I suppose those things are at the root of what I felt, the thing that started somewhere in my chest and found a way out through my eyes. “Thanks,” I said. “That would help. It’s just going to be his family and a few other people—probably his friend Joe. I don’t think it’ll take very long.” My dad nodded. The weather map changed to the next day’s forecast: snow. I wondered how the people who worked at cemeteries dug graves this time of year, when the ground fought back so hard. “It’s rough, I know,” he said, “losing someone you love. Especially when it happens all of a sudden like that. Not like it’s much easier when you have some idea that it’s coming.” We both knew what he was talking about. “I don’t know how to feel,” I said. The tears were just sitting on my face, but I didn’t wipe them off. We were both looking at the television instead of each other, as if Wade Wagner, the Weather Guy, were somehow involved in this. “You just feel whatever you feel,” my dad said. “You take it one day at a time, and you work through it. Pretty soon it’s been a year. And then it’s been another year. And here we are.” He turned away from the tv then, to look at me, so I turned to look back. I nodded my head at my father, to let him know that this was true.

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... i drove home that night thinking about all the trips my dad and I had taken to my grandmother’s house when I was little, when my mom was in the hospital or my dad just wanted to give me a break. We drove through the mountains, past the signs that said Watch For Falling Rock, and he’d told me a story—and I’d believed it way too long, even after I was old enough to know better—about an Indian chief, Falling Rock, whose daughter had been kidnapped by a white man. Now, my dad said, the angry ghost of the great chief ran through the mountains, searching for the daughter who’d been taken from him. Whenever you saw one of those signs, it meant his ghost had been sighted in the area. I always watched for Falling Rock, hoping and scared I’d see him coming through the trees, a pale figure with his tomahawk raised overhead. I watched until I saw the sign that marked the Little Lost River, the smaller arm of the river my dad’s hometown was named for, the one that disappears underground. It flows into the aquifer, and then it shows up again a hundred miles away, broken into a bunch of springs that pour out the side of another mountain. My dad told me about this too. But it made me sad, that sign. Little Lost River always sounded to me like an Indian kid who was lost in the woods—like Falling Rock’s daughter, maybe, scared and alone out there by herself, searching for her dad while he looked for her somewhere else, the two of them never quite meeting up. At the time, I could think of nothing worse than that: losing my dad, being alone. So it surprised me to feel lost at my mom’s funeral, because of course my dad was right there with me. I didn’t know any of the people who showed up—a dark-haired woman and her pale blond husband, people my mom and dad had known from back when they were all teachers, plus a few women my mom had known before I was born. I should feel sad, I thought, but I didn’t. I just felt scared, and I couldn’t imagine why. But

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maybe I knew even then, without exactly knowing it, that learning to live without my mom in the world was something my dad couldn’t help me with, something I’d have to figure out on my own. f ran was studying on the couch when I got back to the apartment. Meg was still asleep, or asleep again. Fran looked up when I walked into the living room, then went back to her book without saying anything. I knew I should apologize, but I didn’t even know how to start explaining myself. I threw my coat in the rocking chair and went to the kitchen first. I was digging in the ice bin with my fingers, stacking cubes in a glass, so I barely heard Fran’s voice over the noise I was making. “I’m sorry,” she said. I looked around the freezer door, but she was still in the other room. I filled my glass at the tap and went back to the living room, sat down at the other end of the little couch. “I screwed up,” she said. “I know you work every Sunday night. I just wasn’t thinking, I guess. I hope you didn’t lose your job because of me.” She was still staring at her book. She couldn’t even look at me. “I didn’t lose my job,” I said. “I didn’t even go to work. I called in sick. Rick’s mom called right before you came home.” She looked up at me then. “They found his body,” I said. “Oh my God.” Fran covered her mouth with her hand. “Where?” And then she shook her head. “Never mind. That was stupid.” “I don’t know where. I didn’t ask. Anyway, when you came home—I was just mad, I guess. Not at you, but, you know. You were here.” “It’s okay.” “No, it’s not okay,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said that to you. You work really hard, and you’re a good mom.” I’d started crying again by then. “And I shouldn’t have taken your car without asking, either.” She started laughing, one loud ha before she thought to cover her mouth again, to keep from waking Meg.

[ 225 ]

“Yeah, I was really worried that you might steal my car,” she said, and then I started laughing too, laughing and crying at the same time, which felt completely natural. by tuesday morning the weather had cleared: a thin skiff of snow on the ground, but that was all. It was one of those bright, cold mornings when you feel like you can see everything up close, and the last thing you’d be thinking about was a funeral. But my dad picked me up just after nine and we drove out to Dry Creek. Rick’s mom was there already, sitting down, one woman on either side of her in folding chairs. I guessed those were Rick’s sisters. She looked up at me when we arrived. I didn’t know what to do. Not smile, of course. Not wave. She looked down again, at her hands in her lap, before I could decide. Mitzi was there, of course, with Joe. I hadn’t seen either of them in almost a year, and they looked the same but also different. Joe had gained a little weight. Mitzi’s hair was longer, darker brown. She’d cut heavy bangs into the front part and they called attention to her dark eyes. She was holding Joe’s hand, and when I came to stand beside her she said hi, I said the same, and then we didn’t say anything else. My dad was standing on the other side of me, hands in the pockets of a long winter coat that made him seem even taller than he is. Having him there was nice, like I’d tucked myself into a tight space between a person and a building that had warmed up in the sun. And I didn’t feel like anyone was looking at me, so I could focus on something other than myself, the way I was supposed to. The ceremony didn’t take long. The pastor—or whoever he was, someone from the funeral parlor—said a few words about how life is a circle, which means it has no end and no beginning. It’s the same thing they say at every funeral, I guess, but somehow it helps to hear those things repeated. It helped me, anyway, to think that a baby like Meg was being

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born at the hospital right now, not far from here. For someone else, this was a day to celebrate. And that wasn’t going to change. Every day would be like this: people weren’t going to stop being born, graduating, getting married, having babies. Or dying. You had to mark all of these occasions, because they were all part of the same thing. Rick’s mom stood up and set a bouquet of white flowers on the casket, and apparently we were done. Mitzi turned to me once the pastor had taken Rick’s mom’s hand and started talking to her and the daughters in a low voice, personal. “So how have you been?” she asked. “Good,” I said. “I’m going to college.” “Still living with that girl?” “Fran,” I said. “Yeah. She’s going to school too, and she has a baby now. I’m helping her out when I can.” Mitzi raised her eyebrows and did this thing with her mouth that I remembered, kind of like biting her bottom lip without ever opening her mouth. It was her way of not saying Seriously? “I’m going to hair school,” she said, and combed her fingers through her bangs. “Your hair looks good. I noticed that.” “Someone else did it,” she said. “You don’t do your own hair.” “Oh. Well, it still looks good. Whoever did it.” “Thanks.” Joe had let go of her hand and Mitzi looked around for him then. He had his arm around Rick’s mom, talking to her and the sisters, the four of them in a tight little huddle with their heads bent together. “We’re getting married, did you know?” Mitzi asked. “You and Joe?” She turned to look at me again, like Who else? “That’s great,” I said. “When?” “We haven’t decided. But he gave me a ring.” She wiggled her left hand in front of me, and a tiny diamond winked in the winter sun. “It’s pretty,” I said. “Congratulations.”

[ 227 ]

“I’ll send you an invitation,” Mitzi said, “if you give me your new address.” “Just send it to my dad’s house. That way it’s sure to get to me.” I didn’t even realize Rick’s mom was standing beside me, not until I turned around to look for my dad. He’d wandered off toward the car right after the service, not rushing me, just giving me space. Gretchen looked older than I remembered. Something in her eyes seemed blank, like maybe she didn’t remember exactly who I was. But then she said, “It’s good to see you again, Cindy. I’m glad you came.” “Thank you for calling me,” I said. “Thank you for letting me be here.” The look on her face changed then. It told me there had never been any question about that: where else would I be? “It’s hard for me to say good-bye,” she said. I nodded and then she walked away, toward the car that would take her home, and I realized she’d been talking about both Rick and me. i went to work that afternoon, like usual. The receiving floor was piled higher than normal—partly because we were still doing all the Christmas returns, partly because it was the start of a new semester. We had textbooks everywhere, plus boxes of new sweatshirts and T-shirts in spring colors. “You give the people what they want,” Deb said, “and they’ll spend time shopping while they’re here instead of going home to study right away. Especially this early in the semester.” That didn’t seem like such a good attitude for running a bookstore at a university. But I wasn’t the manager, so I didn’t say anything. And for the first time I could remember, Simon wasn’t talking either. He was loading up a shelving cart with thick chemistry books. Preston looked up at me, smiled, then folded his forehead into something that looked like concern. “Are you okay?” he said. When he heard this, Simon looked up. “You really have been sick, haven’t you. Well, go on back home. Don’t give it to me.” [ 228 ]

I didn’t know what they were seeing, but I told them I was fine. And I really did feel okay, which surprised me. I’d expected to be feeling worse than I did, to be fighting for some kind of level footing that would get me through the evening. “Are you sure?” Preston said. “I think Simon’s right. Maybe you need to go home and rest.” “I just got here.” “Still.” He put down his box knife, shook his head. “You don’t look well, Cindy. You look really, really pale.” I waited for Simon to add, Like you’ve just seen a ghost, but he didn’t. “You’re giving me a complex,” I said. “Do I really look that bad?” I went to the restroom at the back of the storage area and turned on the light, looked in the mirror, wondering if I’d forgotten to put on makeup that morning. But all I saw was the same face that had always been in front of me. I didn’t see what had changed, if anything had. I came back to the receiving floor, where the boys were waiting for me to agree with them and say I was going home. “Enough,” I said. “Knock it off. You’re making me feel like the Wicked Witch of the West.” I smiled, though, so they knew I appreciated their concern. “She was green,” Preston said. Simon scowled and shook his head, annoyed by my lack of concern for his well-being. “At least she had some color in her cheeks,” he said. i got home from work later and the apartment was quiet too: Fran was asleep on the couch, her psychology book hugged against her chest. She’d been trying to study like me, with a book held right above her face, but it didn’t work. It was so strange to find the place quiet that I almost wanted to wake someone up. I wanted to feel like I’d come home to something familiar. I didn’t wake anyone, though; I just checked on Meg. She’d somehow worked one arm through the slats of her crib, and the light cutting in [ 229 ]

from the open doorway made her skin look thin as paper. I could see the blue veins in her wrist, little rivers of blood running right beneath the surface. The bones in her wrist were hardly as wide as the slats of her crib. I could see why a mother might be afraid to love her child. It would be so easy to hurt them, even without meaning to.

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Bachelorette City [ frances ]

t he only good thing about the new year, as far as I could see, was that the old one finally had ended. Cindy and Meg and I celebrated the passing of 1982 with a sparkling cider toast. “The new year has to be better,” I said, draining my glass. “I really don’t see how things could get much worse.” “Don’t say that. Never say that,” Cindy said. She leaned over and knocked her knuckles on the coffee table. It surprised me to find out she was a person who believed in superstitious rituals. She laughed at Wanda for reading her horoscope in the newspaper every day, but she’d walk around a ladder, rather than passing under it, and she threw a pinch of salt over her shoulder whenever our shaker spilled. But she was right: I shouldn’t have given misfortune an open invitation to my life. Two weeks later I was a girl with a baby and no job, not to mention mediocre grades that weren’t going to help me keep my scholarship or get me much of anywhere after college—assuming I could stay in college—if I didn’t start pulling things together. But how? That was the one question I didn’t know how to answer. And that made no sense to me at all, because I’d always been able to figure out how to get things done. Life had seemed easy enough to manage, always logical: you did x, you got y in return. I had never understood how it was possible for a life to get out of control as long as you thought far enough ahead. [ 231 ]

That changes, of course, when you have a child. There are books to tell you what to expect from your body while you’re pregnant, what might happen during labor, other books that explain how to care for your baby after she’s been born. But there are no books to tell you how to dig out from under the avalanche of outcomes you failed to anticipate. it started when they found Rick’s body, a week after I got my new job at the video store. Cindy disappeared the night after Rick’s mom called, then came back and sat up most of the night, even after I’d gone to bed. She went to classes Monday morning, like usual, but she came home afterward and sat in the rocking chair and stared out the window. She didn’t study, she hardly moved; it was like she’d decided to focus on something in the distance, and whatever it was, she couldn’t let it out of her sight. But then she went to his funeral Tuesday morning, and after that something in her had changed. At first I thought it was because she’d spent the whole morning with her dad. She seemed pale and shaky, like she’d just gotten over being sick. But in the next few days I saw that she had opened up, somehow: she smiled all the time, all of a sudden. That was more than a little unnerving. It was the last reaction I would have expected from her, and it made Cindy seem like another person entirely, someone I had never known at all. Then there was Wanda. She was mad at me for quitting my job at the theater, and for no good reason, she said; she didn’t believe that Ben would ever have fired me, no matter how often I called in sick. But it turned out I made more money and got more hours at the video store anyway. Free rentals were part of the deal, too, but the sad thing was that I couldn’t bring myself to watch a movie anymore, even if I’d had the time. They were all so ridiculous, everything working out for the best in just two hours, give or take a few minutes—all those people finding their one true love after months of manufactured turmoil. Worse yet were the movies that wanted [ 232 ]

to tell you the truth about life, the dark and depressing ones—unflinching was the word you’d see on those little cardboard boxes that describe them. Those were the movies that didn’t bother to show you how nice it was to go home from work at night and find your baby already fed and sleeping, a message on the answering machine from your little sister and a Hostess cupcake with a candle pushed into it sitting on the kitchen table, because your best friend had remembered your birthday too. With movies, it was always one way or the other: happy or sad, dark or light. But real life is a tangled mess of all those things. Like the day I was downtown shopping with Wanda, a beautiful Saturday afternoon in February when, like a little miracle, neither one of us had to work and the fog that had kept the whole city socked in tight for three days suddenly lifted. The air felt sharp and clean, the way it feels right after a heavy snowfall, not soft and collapsing; the wind wasn’t blowing at all, and none of us—Wanda, her girls, even Meg—were complaining about the cold. It was one of those winter days when you can get outside and February doesn’t seem like such an awful time of year, the shortest month with the longest days. And then I started to cross a street, and I saw Tom on the opposite corner. I saw his red hair first, and I recognized the bony slope of his shoulders, even under his winter coat, and though I’d started at the sight of half a dozen red-haired boys in the past few months, I knew right away that it was him. And he was waiting there for me. Wanda must have seen him at the very same time, because she grabbed my arm the way she grabbed her girls whenever one of them started to cross the street before it was safe. But I couldn’t turn around: he’d seen me, and he knew I’d seen him too. He smiled and waved. I kept on walking, and Wanda let go of my arm. “Well, hello there, stranger,” he said, after I’d tipped the stroller back and stepped up on the curb behind it. “How are you?” The only thing on my mind was Meg, so for just a moment I stood there thinking this had to be the strangest thing a man could say to the child [ 2 33 ]

he’d never met, the child he didn’t know about—so casual, so friendly. And then I realized Tom was talking to me, of course, not Meg. “I’m great,” I said. “How are you?” “Excellent. Hey Wanda,” he said. “I didn’t even recognize you at first. You changed your hair.” She’d had it cut right after the new year. Wanda’s hair had always been long, past her shoulders—now it was level with her chin and too short to pull back into a ponytail, like she always had before. She’d added some blond streaks, too. The new haircut made her look older, which she didn’t like, but I told her I thought it suited her. She looked grown up, finally. She matched her life. “Hi,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears. It was the first time I’d ever seen Wanda at a loss for words. “Oh, this is Macy,” Tom said, as if he’d just remembered the dark-haired girl who was, I saw now, standing next to him, one arm linked through his. “This is Frances and Wanda—we used to work together at the theater I showed you. And this is—” He looked at Wanda’s girls. “I’m Jamie,” Jamie said. “This is Jenny.” She pointed at her sister. “And who is this?” Tom asked, pointing to the stroller, looking at Wanda. “Meg,” she said, before I could think to open my mouth. His reaction made sense now: he had seen me pushing a stroller, and then he’d seen Wanda standing next to me. A baby wasn’t hard to explain. But then Tom looked into the stroller, and he saw the wispy edge of Meg’s flaming hair peeking out from under the hood of her jacket, and something happened. I saw it: he was smiling, perfectly happy to see us, and then his smile turned into something else—not a frown, not the opposite of what it had been. He just stopped smiling, like a gear in his face had slipped. He raised his eyebrows. “So how’s school going?” Wanda asked. I gave her credit for trying to redirect his attention, though with Macy [ 2 34 ]

standing there at his side, an innocent sentinel, I knew we were all on safe ground. “It’s good,” he said, looking up at me, as if I’d asked the question. “We’re on a quarter system, so I don’t go back for another week. How about you?” “Good,” I said. “I ended up going to Boise State—I got a full-ride scholarship. We started about two weeks ago. One semester down, seven to go.” “Still engineering?” “Yeah. Civil. You’re—” “Still undecided,” he said, and he shrugged. “Some kind of business, probably, but I don’t know.” All this time people had been streaming around us on the sidewalk, giving us dirty looks for blocking the way. It was Saturday, after all. They had important things to do. “We’d better get going,” Wanda said. “Meg needs a nap.” “Okay.” Tom took a hand from his pocket and gave a little wave. “Good to see you guys.” “You too. Nice to meet you,” I said, waving at Macy, and she lifted her free hand without saying anything. We were less than a block away from them when Wanda grabbed my arm again, hard this time. “Oh my god oh my god oh my god,” she said, in exactly the same voice her movie character would have used at this moment. “Can you believe it? Do you think he knows?” I was short of breath and walking fast, though I didn’t know why. I was sure no one was trying to catch us. “Maybe. I was pushing the stroller. She has red hair. It doesn’t take much to put those pieces together.” “But he’s never met Ray. He doesn’t know what Ray looks like—she could be mine. You could just be helping me out.” “He knows what they look like.” I pointed to the two little blond girls walking in front of us. “Whatever. You’re the one who always said I should tell him what was going on. If he does know, I’m sure you’ll be overjoyed.” [ 2 35 ]

“Oh, no way,” Wanda said. “Did you see that girl he was with? Little Miss I’m-Too-Good-To-Talk-To-You-People? Like you’d want her raising your little girl.” I’d thought Macy was pretty, actually. She had short dark hair that swept across her forehead softly, wire-frame glasses. She looked like an English teacher, shy but smart. “She’s not his wife,” I said. “She might be someday. Oh my god, France. What are you going to do?” “Nothing.” I’d slowed down again, apparently feeling like I’d escaped whatever I was running from. I took a deep breath, but the air was cold and it hurt to fill my lungs. I felt the way I had sometimes in pe, when I had to keep running for some physical fitness test but knew my body was on the verge of giving out, no matter what I told it to do. I looked down at the sidewalk, careful to avoid the occasional patch of ice, knowing I couldn’t count on my legs to catch me if I slipped. “Are you kidding?” Wanda said. “You have to get a lawyer, France. Like, right now. Before he does. He might try to take her away from you.” “I’m not even sure he knows,” I said. “And anyway, no guy is going to volunteer to pay for a baby that may or may not be his, even a nice guy like him. That’s not how it works. You think he’d want to tell his family about this?” I shook my head. “Unless I ask him for something, he’s not going to do anything. So I’m not going to do anything, either.” “You’re insane,” Wanda said. “No, I’m not. If he does know, he probably thinks I’m going to get all bent out of shape because I saw him with another girl. I’m sure he’s worried that I’ll come after him now. That’s how guys think. Trust me, he’ll just be relieved when I don’t.” Wanda shook her head. “I can’t believe you’d take a chance like that with your own little girl.” She waited for an answer, but I was finished talking for the time being. [ 2 36 ]

Wanda shook her head, then stepped ahead of me and moved between Jamie and Jenny, the three of them holding hands to form a little human chain across the sidewalk. c i ndy agreed with me . “Even if he does know, he’s not going to do anything,” she said. “He’s not out there looking to pick up some extra responsibilities. No guy is.” “That’s what I told her.” I took our empty dinner plates to the kitchen sink and ran them under the hot water. I honestly didn’t think Tom would track me down and insist on being a father after the fact—as surely as I’d known he would want to do the right thing, if he’d known about Meg beforehand, I believed he would want to continue with the life he had now. He and Macy had looked happy, out for an afternoon together, no specific plan in mind. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had an aimless day like that. Still, I couldn’t shake the thought that he might be at home now, lying on his bed and seeing Meg’s face and wondering if her red hair had come from his side of the family—a family that now, suddenly, might include another child. Knowing that he was a father could change everything. I knew that too. I’d kept this from him because I knew that. Still. I added dish soap to the water in the sink and watched the bubbles rise. If I were a man, I thought—if I were Tom—I’d be mostly relieved. I would feel like I’d just stepped off a curb without looking for traffic first, that whoosh of wind as a car flies by, honking its horn: almost, but not quite, a catastrophe. I would feel like I’d nearly been caught making a serious mistake. I might even be a little bit grateful to the driver—not watching out for me, necessarily, just taking care of herself, but leaving me intact anyway. I hadn’t asked a thing of Tom. He must know by now that I wasn’t planning to. But at the same time, I wondered: if you thought you had a child out there in the world, could you really go on with your life without [ 2 37 ]

knowing whether or not that was true? Could you go to classes every day and parties on the weekend, hang out with your friends watching television through the lazy afternoon—wouldn’t you always, always be thinking Where is my child? Is she all right? Is someone taking care of her? I washed the dinner plates clean with soapy water and reminded myself that Tom didn’t know a thing, not for sure. He might suspect. He might go so far as to stop by the theater, thinking he’d talk to me again. But Wanda had said that if he came looking for me, she would tell him I’d quit. Nothing more. “I’m not going to tell him one damn thing,” Wanda said, when I dropped her off at home that afternoon. Her voice suggested she was not doing me a favor so much as trying to protect me from my own stupidity. i said a silent prayer every time the phone rang, even when I was at work. I kept imagining the conversation we’d have, if he tracked me down. It always came down to one question: Is she mine? And the only answer I could imagine giving him was, No, she’s mine. Because she always had been: the thorn in my side, the love of my life. “You know what we need to do,” Cindy said, after a few days of watching me sit on the couch and stare at the silent telephone on the table beside it. I kept telling myself, The phone won’t ring while you’re looking at it, using one of her superstitions to my advantage. “What?” “We need to have some people over. It’s early enough in the semester, it’ll take our minds off everything. Give us a little break from the daily grind.” She was stretched out on the floor, propped up on her elbows. She bounced the eraser on her pencil against her jawbone. “We’re two cool girls with our own apartment, and you’re nineteen now, you can buy us some beer. I think we should throw a little party.” “What about Meg?” I said. “What about her? You’re up for a get-together, aren’t you Meggy?”

[ 2 38 ]

Sitting in her baby seat near Cindy, Meg smiled and kicked when she heard her name. “I thought so. You’re on the guest list, party girl.” “I don’t know if it’s such a great idea to have a party with a baby in the house.” Cindy sighed and closed her eyes, the look that said I was trying her patience yet again. “I said a little party, not a giant orgy. We’ll keep it all very pg. I promise.” She raised her right hand, sealing the pledge. “I don’t even know anybody. Just you and Wanda.” And I didn’t know if Wanda was speaking to me, at that point. I hadn’t heard from her since Saturday. “That’s a good idea—we’ll invite Wanda. She’ll keep the conversation going, at least. And I’ll invite the guys from the bookstore. Simon will be a good match for Wanda. We’ll pit the two of them against each other and see which one of them burns out first. It’ll be the battle of the motormouths.” Cindy rolled over on her back and locked her hands together behind her head. “Maybe I’ll invite Deb too. I don’t think she’d actually come, but I should ask. I know a few other people from my classes. It won’t be a big deal—we’ll just get some beer and sit around.” She was the one who’d gone to parties in high school, all those Saturday nights when I’d been working at the theater with Tom and Wanda. I’d heard people talking about those parties at the corral, parties with dozens of people, it sounded like, standing around and drinking beer beside a bonfire. Boys got into fights over girls sometimes—less often, girls started fighting over something someone had reportedly said to someone else—and that’s when I’d hear people saying, on a Monday morning, That party was out of control. But they never made it sound like a bad thing. I had always imagined Cindy at those parties with Rick, standing off to one side of the noisy crowd, the way they usually were at school. But Rick was dead. I hadn’t known him at all, and still his absence hit me then—an obvious blank space next to Cindy, where I’d seen him standing so many times.

[ 2 39 ]

. . . cindy took over the party planning, in the sense that she told people when to show up and what to bring. Our only real job, she said, was providing a place for people to hang out and driving people home if they’d had too much to drink. I volunteered for that job—because I had a car, a baby, and because it seemed like a good explanation for why I wouldn’t be drinking anything. A thimbleful of communion wine constituted my entire exposure to alcohol, at that point, and I was nervous enough about having all these people in our apartment, people I’d never met but would still be expected to talk to. I worried, out loud, over breakfast that morning, that our downstairs neighbor might call our landlord or the police. “You know, you worry way too much,” Cindy said, chewing her cereal. “I think you must lay awake at night thinking up new things to worry about, just in case you run out.” I took a sip of my coffee, still too hot to drink. “She called the landlord because of Meg’s crying—it seems pretty likely she’d call because of a party.” I tried not to feel like my mother at times like these, but it was hard. “Yeah, but Fran—most people only care what you’re doing when you’re doing something to them. I’ll just go downstairs and invite Barbie Girl to come up and join us for a beer, and then everyone will be happy.” And Cindy was right, as she was about so many things that had to do with predicting how people behave. Our apartment filled up with strangers, most of them just sitting on the floor and drinking beer, including the girls from downstairs—Shari and Sarah, identical twins. For months Cindy and I had thought we’d seen just one tall blond girl going in and out of their apartment, but it turned out there were two of them. Shari was the one I’d seen on campus occasionally. Her sister worked at a clothing store downtown. “So you’re an engineering major?” Shari asked, sitting beside me on the floor by the window. “Yeah. Civil.” She shook her head, swallowing. “That’s such a hard major. You must be really, really smart.” [ 240 ]

I shrugged. There had been a time when this was the one thing I knew about myself, but I wasn’t so sure anymore. “It’s hard,” I admitted. “But I’ve always thought it would be cool to design cities—decide where people are going to live, where the roads go, how to keep things moving along so everybody’s happy. Cities keep growing and growing and you always have to think of new ways to deal with them. It’s always interesting.” Shari shook her long bangs out of her eyes. “I guess that could be cool,” she said. “I never really thought about it.” “What about you?” “Pre-med.” I must have looked surprised at this because Shari added, “Yes, it’s true: I’ll be the first blond woman ever to become a doctor. But someone has to blaze that trail, I guess. It’ll be my contribution to blond womankind.” I laughed. “No, I was just thinking—that’s a really hard major too.” Shari shrugged. “Pretty hard. But, like you were saying, it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. When we were little, Sarah played house with her dolls and she’d bring them to my bedroom for their checkups.” I laughed again and looked around for Meg. I thought she must be enjoying all the attention people give a baby they don’t live with, being passed from one set of arms to another. Her cheeks were pink and she looked a little droopy-eyed, like she might be about to fall asleep from all the excitement. “That’s your baby?” Shari said. Her sister was holding Meg at that moment, under Wanda’s close supervision. “Yeah. Meg.” Shari nodded, surveyed the crowd, and didn’t say anything else. It seemed pretty clear that she didn’t plan to specialize in pediatrics. Cindy’s friends from the bookstore came in then. The one I recognized from some of my classes—Preston, I thought, the guy Cindy had mentioned, who’d helped her with her math last semester. The other one, Simon, I’d never seen before. He was short and taut, wound up like a [ 241 ]

spring. He bounced on the balls of his feet, even when he was supposedly standing still. “Whoa,” he said, when he stepped into our apartment and looked around. “Look at this, Pres. Bachelorette city.” I hadn’t even noticed that all the people in our apartment, up to that point, were girls, but now I realized that Simon and Preston were the only guys in the room. Cindy saw them arrive and met them at the door. Preston leaned over and said something right into her ear, something she smiled at. Simon went to the kitchen for a beer, then settled himself on the floor beside Shari. “Hello,” he said, his face still bright with the promise of the room. “Hello. And good-bye.” Shari took a long last drink from her can and turned to me. “Back to the salt mines. I’ve got a monster O. Chem test on Monday.” “Good luck,” I said. I watched her make her way across the room toward Sarah. “Tough room,” Simon said, watching her walk away. “And you are?” “Frances,” I said, looking for Meg again. Wanda had taken her back and someone was tickling the bottom of her foot, bending forward to make faces, trying to earn a smile. Meg stared noncommittally. “Whose baby?” Simon asked. Mixed into the rumble of the other conversations in the room, it sounded like he’d said Ooh, baby. I thought he was making a comment on Shari or Sarah, maybe the two of them standing there together—even I had to admit they were an impressive pair, mirror images of an uncommonly beautiful face. Then I realized that Cindy must not have said a word about Meg, not in all the time she’d been working at the bookstore. That seemed a little strange, but at the same time I didn’t know why she would say anything; Meg wasn’t her baby, after all. “She’s mine,” I said. “Really?” Simon stretched the word into three syllables, as if this were the strangest thing he’d ever heard. [ 242 ]

“Yes, really,” I said, copying his inflection. “I’m Cindy’s roommate.” “You’re the engineer?” “I’m an engineering major.” “Simon.” He gave me a prim little handshake with a hand still cold from his can of beer. “Preston and I work with Cindy at the bookstore.” “I know. She talks about you two.” He took a drink of his beer and waggled his eyebrows up and down. “I bet she talks about Pres,” he said, after he’d swallowed. “Not so much about me, though, probably.” I looked at Cindy and Preston again, standing across the room from us, leaning against the wall beside the door. Exactly where they’d been the last time I’d looked, and with Preston’s mouth still moving against Cindy’s ear, even though the room wasn’t that loud. She could have heard him easily if he’d been talking in a normal tone of voice. When she answered, though, she put a hand on the front of his shirt and leaned in, toward his ear. “She likes him,” I said, just as the thought occurred to me. “Oh, they’re way beyond that now.” Simon wagged his eyebrows at me again. It seemed to be his favorite gesture. “Very close to falling in love, if they haven’t done that already. From there, I’d say it’s a straight shot on to marriage. Soon enough, the baby carriage.” “It’s not always that tidy,” I said, and he tipped his head to the side, granting me the point. “And they haven’t known each other very long. I think getting married is probably pretty far down the road.” “But he’s that kind of guy—he wouldn’t be here at all if he weren’t dead serious about this. Dating’s just like school or work for him: if he’s going to do it, he’s going to give it everything he’s got.” “Sounds like you know him pretty well.” “We’ve been working together for almost a year now.” Simon took another swallow of his beer. “He lives in this tiny little apartment off campus, by himself, because the dorms were too much of a distraction. I tell him, the distractions are where you meet people, Pres. But he’s not interested in meeting people. The man’s a machine: study, work, study, work. Occasionally, eat. [ 2 43 ]

Always healthy stuff, brain food. No time for girls whatsoever. But now, with her, it’s suddenly like—” Simon sprung open the fingers on his free hand, opened his eyes wide. “I’m pretty sure this is the first party he’s been to since he started college, and he’s only here because she invited him. Otherwise, he’d be at home tonight, by himself, studying. On a Saturday night.” Simon shook his head as though such sadness were unbearable. Cindy hadn’t said a thing about any of this to me—as far as I knew, Preston was just the boy who had helped her get through Fundamentals of Math last semester. Probably, though, he was helping her with College Algebra now. She hadn’t asked me for any help in quite awhile, and I hadn’t even noticed. I had my own life, my own set of problems, and she’d been leaving me alone to work them out. “So what about you,” Simon asked. “What about me?” “Is there a man in your life?” “No room for anyone else in my life,” I said. He glanced at Meg again and nodded, as if he actually understood what I was saying. the next time I looked around for Cindy, she and Preston had disappeared. But not long after that, I heard someone say, “Oh Jesus God,” and I turned around and saw Sarah pulling the front of her pink shirt away from her skin. It was covered with something—not beer, something white and thick and gummy. Then I saw Wanda standing in front of her, holding Meg in her arms. Wanda turned around to look for me almost at the same time I got to her. “Oh no, I’m so sorry,” I told Sarah, taking Meg. “She seemed fine,” Wanda said. “And then she just—” Wanda gestured toward Sarah’s shirt. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I didn’t know she was sick.” She hadn’t been coughing. She didn’t even have a runny nose. Her forehead against my cheek was hot, though, and I shouldn’t have been surprised. Meg was always picking up something at the daycare center: a strange rash, [ 2 44 ]

a stomach bug. She’d been well for the last few weeks, which only meant she was due to come down with something. Part of building up her immunity to the world, the day care people said; kids went through it in their first few months at the center, and afterward they were almost bulletproof. Sarah didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to touch her shirt, but she didn’t want the shirt touching her. She stood with her arms out, letting her shirt dangle, looking down at herself. “I can get you a clean shirt,” I offered. “No, I’ll just go home,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced that this would solve the problem. “I’m really sorry,” I said again, and I carried Meg into our bedroom. “Poor sweetie,” Wanda said, closing the bedroom door behind us. She set her hand on the side of Meg’s face while I changed her clothes. “Oh, France. She’s burning up.” Meg’s whole face, even her ears, were bright red. “Can you get me the Tylenol and the thermometer out of the bathroom?” I said, and Wanda went to get it. “I’m sorry, sweet girl,” I told Meg. “Mommy wasn’t paying attention.” I would have felt better if she’d cried, but Meg’s eyes were blank and glassy and she just looked exhausted. I took her temperature: 103. She slumped against me while I squirted the Tylenol into her mouth and walked her around the tiny bedroom. “Maybe we should take her to the hospital,” Wanda said. “Not yet. I’ll wait and see if the Tylenol brings her fever down. It might just be a virus.” Cindy came into the bedroom then. Her cheeks were flushed, too, but she smelled like the outside air. “What’s wrong?” “Meg’s running a fever. She threw up on Sarah,” I said. Cindy looked confused. “One of the Barbie twins.” “Oh, no-o-o-o.” She covered her mouth, but I could see she was already giggling. She’d had a few beers, obviously, and anything like a polite response was going to be way too slow in coming. [ 2 45 ]

“You’ve been having a good time, haven’t you?” Wanda asked, smiling. Cindy pinched two fingers close together. “A little,” she said. “I think Meg’s okay,” I told the two of them. “I’m just going to stay in here with her. You guys go back to the party.” “Actually,” Wanda said, “I was getting ready to take off. The girls are over at my mom’s house. They’re probably driving her right up the wall by now.” She dug her coat out of the pile on my bed, put it on. “See you later, Meggy. Feel better.” She ran a hand down the back of Meg’s head, then made a kiss-kiss sound in my direction. “See you later, too. Call me if you need anything.” I nodded and sat down on the side of the bed. Cindy looked around the room for a minute, hands on her hips, reorienting herself. “Well, okay,” she said, trying to think like a sober person, speaking very slowly. “I am going to go out there now and tell some people to hit the road.” “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “We’re fine. I’ll just stay in here.” “No, no.” She shook her head. “That is a sick baby. She needs to rest.” “She’s all right. It’s just a fever.” I didn’t believe what I was saying, but I hoped that saying this would make it true. “Anyway, I was supposed to be driving people home.” “Preston can do that. He hasn’t been drinking. Can he use your car?” I nodded. “All right then. Preston and I will take people home. That’s what we will do. We will take some people home.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s only ten thirty.” “That’s all right,” she said, like it was one word. Cindy opened the bedroom door then. I could see that most of the people had already left: only Preston and Simon were sitting on the couch, and two or three people I hadn’t met were standing up, talking with them. “People,” Cindy said, holding her arms in the air. “We have a situation in here.” Then she closed the door again. after everyone had left , I sat in the rocking chair in the living room with Meg. I tried to give her a bottle of juice, but she wouldn’t open [ 2 46 ]

her mouth to take it. People had been here only a few hours, but there were empty beer cans on the kitchen counter, on the kitchen table, the coffee table in the living room. The whole apartment smelled like beer. But when I started to cry, it wasn’t because I’d gone to my first real party after I had my first child: I cried because I was scared of what I already knew. It was Saturday night, and the doctor’s office wouldn’t open again until Monday, so I’d have to take Meg to the emergency room if her fever didn’t go down. All my books said any fever in a baby younger than three months old was serious; Meg was nearly four months old by then, but I didn’t know how much an extra few weeks could matter. I didn’t have the money for a trip to the emergency room. I thought about calling my mother. She’d know what to do with a fever like this, so sudden and high. You’re not ready for this, my mother had said, at least a dozen times. You have no idea what it takes to raise a child. She’d been right about that, and I’d known it for a while. I felt sick myself. I wasn’t, not physically, but still it seemed I could hardly bear the weight of the baby in my arms. m eg’s fever went down a little, but even before the Tylenol was supposed to wear off it had gone back up to 103. I called my mother, finally, just after two o’clock. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” she said, automatically angry, though not necessarily because I’d woken her up in the middle of the night. She used that same tone of voice anytime I talked to her now. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but Meg’s really sick. She’s running a fever.” “How high?” “103.” “You need to take her to the hospital right away,” my mother said. “When a baby’s this small, a fever that high is nothing to fool with.” Hearing her say this was different than reading it in a book: my mother had done this herself. I swallowed hard. [ 2 47 ]

“The problem is, I don’t have my car. I loaned it to Cindy.” She and Preston had been gone for hours, but I had no energy to waste on being angry with her. “All right, I’ll come pick you up. Meet me out in front of your house in fifteen minutes.” We hardly said a word on the way to the hospital, driving through empty streets lined with quiet houses, all those families at peace. My mother didn’t have a car seat, so I held Meg and watched her face twitch in her sleep. It was unfair, I thought, how you could tell that a baby was sick after the fact, but not necessarily before. Meg’s face was slack in a way it wasn’t ordinarily, her mouth pulled back at the corners. Her eyes looked puffy, too, and her cheeks were still flaming red. When we got to the hospital my mother took her from me after I climbed out of the car. “Oh for heaven’s sake, Franny,” she said, holding Meg against her shoulder. “This baby is on fire.” “I know,” I said, and I let my mother walk ahead of me, carrying Meg into the waiting room. She walked her back and forth, making the same little sound she’d made at Christmas, sh-sh-shhh, while I filled out the paperwork. Apparently it didn’t matter that Meg wasn’t making a sound this time. I’d thought to bring Meg’s shot record with me, and the nurse at the front desk seemed impressed by that. “No one ever remembers these things,” she said, standing next to her copy machine. “I never take it out of my purse,” I said. “That’s a good idea, when they’re this age. Never know when you’re going to need it.” She smiled and handed the little booklet back to me. “We’ll get to her as soon as we can, hon.” I nodded and looked for my mother, walking toward the opposite end of the room. I wanted to hold Meg myself, but she was sleeping anyway, and letting my mother hold her seemed like the least I could do—a kind of thank you that didn’t require the actual words. My mother turned around and started back toward my end of the room, but she didn’t look [ 2 48 ]

for me. She didn’t look at anyone, for that matter: she focused on the wall straight ahead of her, intent on avoiding the abundant evidence of people’s mistakes. i found an empty chair just as an ambulance wailed into the parking lot, and I thought about the last time my mother had been here, waiting in this room—the night I met Cindy. My mother had been sitting at the end of the room where she was headed now, waiting for me, afraid I might be missing an arm or a leg or half my face when she saw me next. Or I might be dead; she didn’t know. That night had been my fault, too, but I didn’t feel sorry for what I’d done, or for anything that had happened since. I realized this with a little tremor of discovery: if I hadn’t gone for a ride with Tom after work that night, if I’d just said No, thanks, I’d still be sleeping in the same bed I’d had since I was ten. I’d be going to classes in the morning and work at night, just like I did every day now, but I’d be going home to study for the next day’s classes at the white desk that matched my chest of drawers, eating a sandwich my mother had made for me. Two words would have saved us all of this. But it seemed like a thin life now, my life before, quiet and productive yet somehow empty, in a way I couldn’t explain to my mother or even myself. It would have made no sense to say I preferred this life to that one, difficult as this one was. But the truth, I saw, was that I did: given the chance, I wouldn’t hesitate to make a choice between the two. w e waited almost an hour before they called Meg’s name. By then my mother had settled into an empty chair across the aisle from me, but she still hadn’t offered to let me hold Meg and I hadn’t asked. She carried Meg down the hall and let the nurse weigh her and take her temperature again: still 103, but I felt reassured that I’d done one thing right, at least, got an accurate reading on the thermometer at home. The nurse handed Meg back to my mom and put the three of us in an exam room. We waited for a doctor and listened to a woman on the other side of a thin wall moaning, [ 2 49 ]

O Lord, O Lord, over and over again, like a hymn with a very specific rhythm but no particular tune. And then she just stopped, halfway through an O. The silence that followed was even more disturbing, I thought, than the sound of her distress. The doctor who met us in the exam room after that was young and blond and surprisingly cheerful, given that it was nearly four o’clock in the morning. No doubt she’d been awake all night. I thought of Shari right away, though Dr. Price wasn’t nearly as pretty and had shorter hair, twisted into a fat braid threatening to come undone. “So what’s going on here, Mom,” she asked, and my mother let her take Meg from her arms. “She just started running a fever last night,” I said, and Dr. Price turned to look at me. Her eyebrows flew up under her bangs, but she didn’t say anything. “She didn’t seem sick at all before that.” “Eating normally?” “Yes. But she threw up about ten,” I said. “Threw up or spit up,” Dr. Price asked. “What’s the difference?” My mother had taken a deep breath; now she let it all out in a sigh and turned away. “Threw up is an hour or more after she’s had a bottle. Spit up is while you’re feeding her, or right after she eats,” Dr. Price said. “Threw up, then. She had a bottle at seven.” Dr. Price nodded and put Meg on the exam table. She started to squirm and fuss while Dr. Price pressed on her belly, more activity than I’d seen from her in hours, and I didn’t know whether to hope she’d stop or continue. My mother was standing at the end of the exam table, near Meg’s feet. She played with Meg’s toes and tried her noise again, sh-sh-shhh, but it didn’t work. I could see that Meg was gearing up for a full-throttle scream. “Let’s have a look at those ears before she gets too worked up,” Dr. Price said, and I held Meg still on the table while she cried. I talked to her, [ 250 ]

the silly things you say to a baby—That’s a good girl, We’re almost done, You’re okay, Mommy’s here—but I wasn’t doing anything to help her, as far as she could tell, so Meg closed her eyes. Tears squeezed out from under her lashes, rolled across her furious cheeks. I blinked hard. “Okay,” Dr. Price said, putting her scope away, and I picked Meg up. She stopped crying right away, grateful that I’d finally gotten the message and done my job. She settled her sweaty head against my shoulder. “She’s got a double ear infection. A whopper. You say she hasn’t been fussing at all?” “That’s impossible,” my mother said. “With both ears infected, she’d be crying all the time.” “Well, not necessarily.” Dr. Price was writing a prescription, shaking her head. “I have a nephew who went three days with a broken arm—he took a bad fall while our family was on a ski vacation and just didn’t say a word about it to anyone. Some kids have a higher threshold for pain than others. I guess this little girl is just a trooper. Other than that, she seems completely healthy.” She handed me a prescription for antibiotics and rubbed Meg’s cheek with her finger. “Look at that red hair. All the boys are going to be chasing after you, beautiful girl. They’re going to drive your mommy crazy.” “Why would she be vomiting if it’s only an ear infection?” my mother wanted to know. Dr. Price shrugged and turned to her. “The pain, maybe. That happens a lot with the little ones—they don’t cry, but they sleep more than usual, or less than usual, or they throw up, or they just stop eating. Or it could be just too much activity—the throwing up might not even be related to the infection at all.” “So how would I know,” I said. “Before it gets this bad next time, I mean. I don’t know what I was supposed to be watching for.” She shrugged again, this time at me. “You probably wouldn’t know anything. When they’re this little, if they’re not crying or acting in some way that seems unusual, you just assume they’re okay.” She patted my [ 251 ]

shoulder. “You know your baby. You brought her in here as soon as the fever kicked up because you knew something was wrong. You did the right thing. Swing by the pharmacy and get that filled before you leave. Start her on the meds tonight, as soon as you get home. And be sure to follow up with your regular doc this week.” I thanked Dr. Price, and she smiled at my mother before she left the exam room, but my mother was standing with her arms crossed, her coat folded neatly over them, clearly dissatisfied with that assessment of our situation. “That’s a relief,” I said. “It’s ridiculous. That baby is sick, Franny. It’s nothing as simple as an ear infection. That woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You need to take her to your regular doctor first thing Monday morning.” My mother transferred her coat and held out her arms to take Meg. “I’ve got her,” I said. “Thanks.” She paused just a moment with her arms in the air, then let them fall before she opened the door and headed down the hallway toward the waiting room again. I followed and watched her pulling on her coat as she walked, switching her purse from hand to hand. Then she pushed through the glass doors and into the dark morning, alone. meg was wide awake on the ride home, quiet and warm against my chest, watching the lights that cut through the darkness around us and chewing her fingers. That early on a Sunday morning, the streets were still empty around us and would be for hours. Still, my mother drove with her mouth in a hard line and both hands firmly on the steering wheel, as though she were negotiating rush hour traffic. “I really appreciate you doing this for me,” I said. “I feel so much better knowing it’s nothing serious. Even if it cost me an arm and a leg to find that out.” “Do you need money?” my mother said.

[ 252 ]

“That’s not what I meant.” I sighed and shook my head. “I’m not asking you for money. I was just trying to thank you.” My mother stopped short at an empty intersection. I leaned forward and tightened my grip on Meg, then bounced back against the seat. “How long are you going to keep doing this, Franny,” my mother said. “Doing what?” “Whatever this is. Making a point, living out some kind of drama—I don’t know what you think you’re doing, and frankly, I don’t know why you ever felt the need to do this in the first place. But it has to stop. It’s just—well, it’s beyond ridiculous now. It’s affecting that baby’s health.” My mother put the car in park and turned to me. “You are not equipped to raise this baby by yourself. You must realize that by now.” “I’m not doing it by myself,” I said. “I have a lot of help. Cindy helps me. My friend Wanda does too. Meg loves them. They’re like our family.” “Then why didn’t you call Wanda tonight? You said Cindy was gone, but you wouldn’t have called me if you had any other alternative. I suppose you think I don’t know that.” I ran a hand absently over Meg’s hair, kissed the top of her head, and didn’t say anything. I’d called my mother because I was scared. Call me if you need anything, Wanda had said before she left. But calling her hadn’t even occurred to me. “You need my help. I came to get you tonight because I’m worried about that child, Franny—I lie awake at night worrying about the two of you in that drafty old place.” My mother had been inside the house where I lived now only twice. Our apartment was by far the nicest of the ones Cindy and I had looked at, but that wasn’t saying much, given what the two of us could afford. “Neither one of you girls has the slightest idea of how to care for a baby. The way she cries, it’s obvious she’s not content. She’s been sick almost since the day she was born. It’s a miracle that she’s still alive, as far as I’m concerned.”

[ 2 53 ]

“It’s because she’s in day care,” I said, and then I stopped. I didn’t want my mother to know that she could still make me cry. As long as I just kept quiet, focused on breathing, I thought, I’d be all right. “She shouldn’t be in day care. She should be at home with me!” My mother beat the heels of her hands against the steering wheel, a dull, insistent pulse to underscore each word. Meg was startled by the momentary uproar and looked at my mother, then started to cry again and turned to me. I lifted her to my shoulder and rubbed her back, blinking hard. My mother looked at her hands as if they’d done something of their own volition. Then she covered her face, smoothing the skin across her forehead and down her cheeks, letting her fingertips rest at her jawbone for a moment, putting herself in place. She folded her hands together just beneath her chin. When she spoke again, her voice was as somber as if she were saying a prayer. “Your little girl deserves better than what you’re giving her, Franny. If you really love her, you will stop being so selfish and admit that to yourself. You cannot take care of her. I’m not judging you, I’m just stating a fact. I know you’re doing the best you can. But you’re going to school, and you’re working—you don’t have time to raise a child.” She turned to look at me. “Leaving her with whoever happens to be available—what kind of life is that? How do you think it makes her feel? She’s going to grow up thinking her own mother doesn’t even care about what happens to her.” I’d been looking out the passenger side window since my mother turned to me. I could see her face at the edge of my vision, but I didn’t turn to her when she stopped. I stared hard at the yellow windows of the house beside me, the only lighted house for blocks. I wondered if the people inside had a baby who woke up early for a bottle, like Meg still did sometimes. Maybe one of them worked a night shift to make ends meet. Or maybe someone had just fallen asleep watching tv on the couch, too exhausted to drag himself to bed for a good night’s sleep. I knew how that felt.

[ 2 54 ]

“What did I do, Franny? I really don’t know what you think I did. I don’t know why you feel like you have to keep that baby away from me, like I’m some sort of monster.” And how could I say it? You can’t tell your mother that just being near her makes you feel small, pathetic, inadequate to the task at hand, no matter what that task might be. Not when you’re her whole life’s work. “Franny,” my mother said, begging me. I didn’t turn to look at her, and eventually she had no choice but to put the car in gear again and start for home. m y car was parked on the street when my mother dropped me off, the lights on in our apartment upstairs. I thanked her again, but my mother was crying, tears without sound. She didn’t say a word—she pulled away from the curb before the door fell closed behind me, headed toward her own house, her own life, as fast as she could travel and still feel safe. Leaving me must have felt like leaving a foreign country and going back to where the customs made some sense, where people knew enough to drive on the right side of the road and put their children to bed at a decent hour. Cindy had left the light on in the living room, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t thought to leave her a note before we went to the hospital; she didn’t know where we’d gone, or why. I could see her through the open doorway to her room, asleep on top of her covers with her clothes and shoes still on; she looked prepared to make a quick exit, if I called. She rolled over when she heard me come in, but she didn’t wake up, so I closed her bedroom door and put Meg on the floor before I started a pot of coffee. Until she was ready for a nap, I didn’t see any point in trying to sleep. “What’s going on?” Cindy squinted in the light from the kitchen. “Sorry. I closed your door so we wouldn’t wake you up,” I said. She rubbed her eyes, trying to shake off sleep. “Is Meg okay?”

[ 2 55 ]

I told her the story of my mother’s rescue, Meg’s diagnosis. I skipped over the whole scene in the car. “I’m sorry we didn’t come right back,” Cindy said. “I wasn’t—you know—thinking very clearly.” “It’s okay.” “It’s not okay,” she said, shaking her head. “God, Fran. You have to start getting pissed off at people when they screw up. At least once in a while.” I laughed. “All right. I promise I’ll get pissed off at you at least once this week.” She sat down at the kitchen table, holding her head in her hands. “So. Your mom.” “Yeah.” I leaned against the counter, folded my arms. “You can imagine.” Cindy nodded and kept nodding until the response had nothing to do with what I’d said, until it had turned into a way to rub her forehead on the heels of her hands. “It’s nice that she’s willing to help you out, though.” “A little too willing,” I said. “That’s the problem. It’s like Wanda always says about Ray—give her an inch and she’ll hang you.” Cindy frowned, trying to follow Wanda’s logic, then gave up and shook her head. “If you feel like that, I can’t believe you even called her.” “It’s not like I had much of a choice, did I?” Cindy looked at me sideways, through her long hair. “Careful—you sound a little pissed off there.” “I am,” I said. “A little.” She smiled and wrapped her hands around the cup of coffee I’d poured for her. i slept later, while Meg napped, and I didn’t wake up until I heard the telephone. Cindy caught it on the first ring. “She’s fine,” I heard her say. “She’s sleeping right now, actually.” Preston, I thought, and went right back to sleep. Later, I found a note from her saying she had gone to cam[ 2 56 ]

pus early, to study with Preston before she went to work that night, and my mom had called—to see if the doctor had been right, I thought, whether Meg’s fever had come down or if the situation was more serious, as she suspected. She would have been happy to know Meg wasn’t getting better. That would prove her right. But truth was, I didn’t know; I hadn’t taken Meg’s temperature, and I couldn’t tell my mother I’d been asleep all afternoon. I went to Meg’s crib and put a hand on her cheek: cool, but clammy. The antibiotics were doing their job. Then I sank back into the couch and curled my legs to the side, under the blanket we kept there for that purpose. My mother had been right about the apartment, at least: a constant breeze came off the windows, cold air rushing toward the heat inside. It was no wonder Meg was sick all the time, even without the soup of germs she swam through at the daycare center. I remembered being small and with my mother, before I started going to school, long days when we’d bake or walk to the park. Most people don’t remember that far back, but I can remember walking across a grocery store parking lot once, holding her hand, feeling the sun on my shoulders and feeling tired. It must have been almost time for a nap. I asked her to pick me up, and she said, You’re too big for that now. Matter-of-fact, like this was something I should have known, like my name. It was the first time I remember thinking of myself as growing, not just bigger but away from my mother and into a person who would have to take care of herself someday. I remembered being scared by that thought. Now, though, she wanted me small again. She wanted to move me out of the way, keep me occupied with something else, so she could do her job. She must have known that wasn’t really possible, but I knew my mother: she didn’t give up until the job was done the way she thought it should be. She just redirected her energies and waited for a chance to get back on track. She was waiting right now. I felt sick, all of a sudden, from lack of sleep and too much coffee without any food in my stomach. I went to the bathroom, thinking I might [ 2 57 ]

throw up, but nothing happened. I stood up and looked in the mirror, ran cold water on my wrists. Only a year ago, impossible as that seemed, I had no idea of everything I carried inside of me, what I could do once I’d figured out what had to be done. The course of my life had been mapped out some time ago—not by me, not entirely. But the shape of it made sense to me now, and I understood the function of its design. I heard Meg waking in our room. I thought about all those nights she’d cried for hours, when nothing could calm her, all those times when I thought only one of us was going to survive the night. It surprised me to realize I’d ever had this thought—as if it were possible for one of us to carry on without the other. i packed all Meg’s clothes into the backseat of my car before I put on her coat and pulled the hood up over her head. She was happy: her coat meant going outside, and she liked to be moving, in the car or in her stroller. A baby’s body is so small that Meg’s whole wardrobe took up less space than her car seat. I wrote a note and left it on the kitchen table, then held Meg tight against my hip while I locked the door with my free hand. I slid my key back under the door, through the yellow slice of light coming toward me in the dark. I’d left a light on for Cindy, just as she had for me.

[ 2 58 ]

[ part five ]

Tributary [ cindy ]

f or a long time I had these visions—that’s a stupid thing to call them, I know, but I don’t have any other word. I wasn’t asleep, so it wasn’t a dream, and I didn’t get lost the way you do when you just space out and lose track of time. I always knew right where I was. Every time it was the same: like I’d turned my head and suddenly here was a scene I hadn’t set eyes on before, but something in it I recognized right away, like that weird round lime green clock radio from Rick’s mother’s house. Or the souvenir coffee cup from Redfish Lodge that’s been sitting on the shelf above the kitchen sink at my dad’s house for as long as I can remember, always holding some assortment of paperclips and rubber bands and loose change. I’m pretty sure the thing has never seen a liquid, not even water. Something like that cup—that’s how I’d know it was happening again. And it never lasted more than just a few seconds, and I could never tell when it was going to happen. Once I was folding laundry at Super Suds and when I looked up to grab another pair of socks I was actually in a tiny bedroom with pale blue walls, but sorting the same pile of socks from the same red plastic laundry basket. I heard a screen door squealing open somewhere, and I wasn’t afraid; it was like I’d been expecting someone. And then I heard the door snap shut, and I was back at Super Suds again. Another time I was shopping for kitchen towels, just trying to decide between the blue-and-red checked and the solid blue, not thinking about [ 261 ]

anything other than which would do a better job of hiding stains. But the minute I picked up a solid red towel instead, there I was in front of a chipped enamel stove, stirring a pot of tomato soup. I don’t even like tomato soup. Rick did, though. I made it for him all the time. Which leads me to think he had something to do with whatever was going on, in spite of the fact that I don’t believe in psychic premonitions and ufo sightings, that kind of thing. I’m a superstitious person, that much is true, but only because I can see no reason for inviting bad luck into your life. There’s plenty of it to go around, as far as I’m concerned. But I have a feeling that if those visions had lasted long enough for me to do something else, maybe just long enough to put down the socks and see who had opened the door, Rick would have been there. So maybe he was asking me to look into the future I’d decided I didn’t want, the one I would have shared with him, and see that it wouldn’t have been so bad. After a vision, for a while anyway, I couldn’t remember why I’d been so sure that things with Rick weren’t going to last. I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever thought I might want something else, something other than what I had with him, the future those visions were showing me. But then they’d go away, and in between I’d start thinking about other things: how Rick never actually tried to persuade me to go out with him when I wanted to stay at his house and get things done for school, but he always seemed hurt that I’d rather do homework than spend my time with him. I’d wind up asking for half an hour alone at his mom’s kitchen table when I knew half an hour was nothing, not even close to what I needed. I told myself it was too late anyway, almost time for graduation. That half an hour was just a way to make me feel like I’d taken a shot at whatever I had wanted to do. Or I’d think about how many hours we spent in his car, driving circles through the downtown loop, just to see who was there. He talked about people in terms of their cars. Look at that Camaro—he’s all show and no guts. I’d look at my watch and count the number of circles we’d make in fifteen minutes, just to give myself something to think about other than [ 262 ]

all those cars and the all girls inside them. I wondered how many of them were just like me, feeling sick and dizzy but riding in circles because they didn’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings—somebody who’d been kind to them when that was what they needed most. Or I’d think about something from a long time before the visions, before the accident, even before my mom died—something totally unrelated, like the first time I realized that the view from the top of a mountain sometimes isn’t much different from what you can see in the valley below. I must have been six, maybe seven; my mom was in the hospital, and I suppose my dad didn’t know what else to do with me, so he packed our things and drove us up out of the valley, headed toward Lost River and my grandmother’s house. On our way up the first incline, I told my dad to let me know when we hit the summit. I must have been thinking that whatever was on the other side would be more colorful, Oz compared to the drab landscape of our daily life. He slowed down and pointed out the summit sign when we got to the top, but everything around us there and on the back slope was exactly the same as what I’d seen before: more trees and rocks, then another green valley and the same river snaking through it in the ravine below. No special effects, just the world as I’d always known it. The visions were like that too: new places that featured the same old things. So maybe they were Rick’s way of telling me that his not being there was just another detail, like the coffee cup you choose to hold the potentially useful pieces of your life. Maybe he wanted me to know that the life I was headed toward was going to be full of new things, different in a way I couldn’t imagine, a way it couldn’t have been if he were still here and part of the picture. Or maybe the visions were Rick’s way of letting me know he was still with me in all these new places, and he always would be, and it couldn’t have been like that otherwise. Now he was just a boy who’d died a long time ago, a former lover made less threatening by the fact that whenever I bumped into him, nobody else had to know. [ 2 63 ]

. . . at some point I stopped making these visits to a parallel future. I don’t remember the last time it happened, but I do remember thinking it hadn’t happened in a long time. And then it was like I just understood that it wouldn’t be happening again. None of this makes much sense, I realize, but that doesn’t matter. What I think it means is this: the past is like that river my dad’s hometown is named for, going underground and showing up again a hundred miles away, in tiny springs that barely resemble the river it used to be. Or like water itself: bottle it up, watch it evaporate, and still it comes back again. Just like the past, water keeps moving. And then it finds you. “ you don’t remember me,” she said, the only words out of her mouth when I opened the door that morning. She was right—I had no idea. But the first thing you do when someone says this is try to prove them wrong. I stared at her light brown hair and pale blue eyes in a face as round as a pie. She was a little on the soft side, not so far as chubby. She looked familiar. That was as far as I could go. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right. I don’t remember you.” “My name is Robin Rogers. I think you knew my sister, Franny, a long time ago.” Even before she said that last part, things had started falling into place. The hair, the little round face—they were all the same as Fran’s, though the sister was taller. She was sturdier, too, almost athletic, with a slightly sharper nose. The dad’s, I guessed. Fran had looked exactly like her mom. “I remember you now.” I was nodding, trying to smile, trying to think of the right way to greet a total stranger who shows up at your house for who knows what reason on a Monday morning. “Wow. You were about ten years old the last time I saw you.” “Yeah, well—” She laughed and held her arms out at her sides, like voila! “It’s been awhile, I guess.” [ 2 64 ]

And then we were stuck. Because what do you say to a girl you talked to for maybe ten minutes, ten years ago? “Is something going on with Fran? I haven’t talked to her in—well, I don’t even know,” I said. “It’s been awhile.” Robin stared at the welcome mat in front of her feet. She had the toes of her shoes lined up with its edge, not stepping on it, like maybe she was worried the message didn’t apply to her. “I’m sorry to just show up at your house like this,” she said. “I thought about calling you instead, but that seemed even more bizarre—this total stranger just calls you up, out of the blue. I thought I should at least come over here in person and try to explain myself.” Then she looked up again, shaking her head, and that’s when I saw she was crying. Somehow, the tears made her look even more like Fran. “I know I must look like a total basket case. I’m sorry. I just thought— well, here’s the thing. My mom is really sick. She has cancer. She’s been sick a long time.” “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, and I was. I’d never much liked Fran’s mom—still, you don’t wish a thing like that on anybody. Robin didn’t say anything else right away, just stood there crying on my front step. I have never been good at things like this, not even with people I know. I did the only thing I could think to do: I asked if she wanted to come inside, get out of the cold. “No,” she said, wiping her face with her hands and letting her black gloves soak up the tears. She gave herself a little shake and stood up straighter. “Thanks. I really don’t want to bother you. I just wanted—I’m wondering if you keep in touch with my sister. If you know how I could get in touch with her.” She turned her face up to look at the blue winter sky. “I haven’t talked to her a lot since she left home. And I started thinking I might call her and try to convince her to come back for a while, even just for a visit. But I hardly even know her. That’s a terrible thing to say about your own sister, but it’s true.” “You want her to come back before your mom dies, you mean.” [ 2 65 ]

Robin nodded again and looked at my feet. I was barefoot, as I always am whenever I’m home for the day, even in the middle of the winter. I tried to imagine how I must look to her, a woman in ratty jeans and a flannel shirt that belongs to my husband, dark blond hair slung back in a sloppy ponytail, no shoes. I could not possibly have looked like somebody’s mother and somebody’s wife, though I am both of these things. But for some reason, when I looked at her I thought about that night I went back to the house on Whorley Drive. I don’t know how long I sat there in my car, staring at a house that didn’t belong to me anymore. It was a place where I’d lived with my mom and dad for a short time, when I was a little girl—who knows what I was looking for, what I thought I’d find there. I suppose I was hoping for something to fill in the hole where my mom had been, the space I’d let Rick occupy for a while. Or maybe I wanted to see if I could remember how it felt to have one of the ordinary connections to this world: a place you can shrink into, where you’re not in charge, at least not all the time. And here was Robin, standing on the steps of a stranger’s house, her mother leaving and her sister already gone. She was looking for something, too, I understood. I didn’t know what I could offer. Still, I felt like I had to offer her something. “Look, I’m freezing out here,” I said. “Come inside for a while.” “I really don’t want to bother you,” she said again. “You won’t be bothering me. You’ll be saving me from doing the dishes.” She smiled at that, though I could see she didn’t want to. Then she stepped past me when I opened the door and waved her inside. Her eyes caught on a picture of my daughter, framed and propped up on a table in the entryway. She looks just like her father, and I could see Robin wondering if it were possible that this child belonged to me. It’s a look I recognize. my daughter was sitting at the kitchen table, working over the same piece of toast she’d been eating for the last half hour. If there were a [ 2 66 ]

prize for World’s Most Careful Eater, this child would be in the running. She takes after her father in that respect as well. Tell her to hurry and Naomi says, It’s important not to choke. Which is true, of course, so I can’t object. Naomi has the same gray green eyes, the coffee-milk skin with just a splash more cream than Preston’s, the curly gold brown hair—all those things I thought were beautiful the first time I saw him. Nothing about her is definite, which means she will be whoever she wants as she gets older. When she’s a teenager and a boy is trying to describe her to his friends, he’ll have to say, “She has greenish eyes and brownish hair.” I was looking at paint chips once and I saw something close to the color of her eyes on a card: Summer Sage. So now I have a name for it, a name I like. Sage grows tough and wild in the foothills here, even when it doesn’t rain for months at a time, and you use that word to describe a person when you mean she knows a few things. If I’d seen that paint chip before she was born, Sage might be Naomi’s name. My contributions to her gene pool are less obvious: the long fingers she gets from my dad, and a constellation of freckles on the back of her neck, identical to the one my mom had right at the base of her throat. This was something I didn’t even know I remembered about her until my dad pointed it out, a few days after Naomi was born—but as soon as I saw it, I knew where it had come from. “This is my daughter, Naomi,” I said, by way of introduction. “She has the day off from kindergarten. This is my friend Robin. She came over for a visit.” I waved Robin toward the table and took an extra coffee cup from the cabinet. “Hi Naomi,” Robin said, but Naomi wasn’t taking the bait. “How old are you?” Naomi thought about revealing this information, then held up a handful of fingers. “Are you almost finished with that toast?” I asked. She shook her head, pinching off another tiny piece of bread. Morsel is the word that comes to [ 2 67 ]

mind whenever I watch her eat. “Why don’t you take that into the other room then. You can watch some tv while you finish.” Naomi raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t pause long enough to ask an actual question before she climbed down from her chair. Preston’s the one with the rules about taking food out of the kitchen, though usually I do a better job of backing him up. He grew up in a house where dinners had courses and tables had cloths that matched the seasons and the holidays, and you can’t blame a person for wanting things nice. So I go along with him on this point, for the most part, because I don’t see how it hurts. “So do you work?” Robin asked, making small talk, like we were new neighbors just getting to know each other. “I’m a landscape architect. It’s our slow time of year, so I took a day off. You’re probably in college now, right? You’re eighteen?” “Almost nineteen,” she said. “I’m a cashier at Albertson’s. I’ve been working there since I started high school. My dad wants me to go to college, but I took a year off to think about it. I don’t even know what I want to do.” I poured two cups of coffee and sat down across from Robin at the table. She’d been surveying the room, eyeing Preston’s things. He’s a man who collects: stamps, rocks, various types of trading cards. Our house is full of his display cases, gathered over a lifetime of making sets. I’m making him sound more obsessive than he is, but the fact remains that I’m a person who makes messes and Preston is a person who likes to clean them up. He puts things in order because it makes him happy. You can’t ask for a better situation, as far as I’m concerned. “That’s my husband’s souvenir spoon collection,” I said, following her eyes to the big rack on the wall. “Well, actually—he’s not that weird. It was his mom’s spoon collection. She was cleaning out a bunch of junk a few years ago and she was going to get rid of it, but Preston just had a fit. So he brought it home and put it in here. Kitchen, spoons—it kind of makes sense, I guess.” I reached over and took a spoon out of its slot. “They all [ 2 68 ]

have a different design. This one’s from New York, so of course it has an apple on the handle.” “They’re all from different places?” “Yeah.” I handed the spoon to her. “His dad traveled a lot on business. Preston says he remembers sitting in the kitchen and looking at these spoons and thinking about all the places he’d go when he grew up. He thought that’s the way it worked—the guys traveled and the girls stayed home and collected spoons. His parents got divorced when Preston was eight, though, so obviously that arrangement didn’t work so well.” Robin laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone collecting spoons.” “I sort of remember it from when I was little—seeing these spoons, like in gift shops. I don’t think people do it so much anymore.” She handed it back to me and sipped her coffee while I put New York back in its place on the rack. I played with the handle until the spoon was hanging precisely upright, trying to think of how to get us back to where we’d been out front—the time in between had taken us in a completely new direction. “Is that your sister?” Robin asked, nodding at a picture stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet. “No,” I said. “That’s my friend Wanda. She was Fran’s friend, actually, from when she worked at the theater.” “Oh yeah. I think I remember hearing that name.” “And those are her kids. Well, the two girls aren’t hers, technically. She adopted them when she married her first husband. Then they got divorced, and she married another guy, and they had the boys together. That’s Jake.” I pointed to the older one, who looked exactly like Wanda, only smaller. “And that’s John.” “Her first husband just left her with his kids?” “Oh, are you kidding? He tried to take the kids, but she was having none of it. She didn’t really have a prayer of getting custody, of course, because technically they were his kids even though she’d adopted them. [ 2 69 ]

But the girls were ten and thirteen then, so Wanda told Ray—that’s her first husband—she said, they’re old enough to have a choice, you ask those girls who they want to live with. So he did, and both girls said they wanted to be with Wanda.” I shrugged. “So they live with her now, believe it or not. I was amazed, personally, because I didn’t really think Ray would care what the girls wanted. I guess it’s easier for him, though. He sees them every few weeks, and that’s about it.” “That’s amazing,” Robin said. “It is.” I nodded. “People surprise you.” Wanda’s story must have seemed like as good a path as any for getting us back to the main road, because Robin said, “It’s really nice of you to talk to me. I appreciate it. I know I must seem like a total lunatic. I was scared to even come over here, but I didn’t know what else to do. I’m kind of at the end of my rope.” I nodded. “It’s hard when someone’s sick, I know. You do whatever you have to so you can feel normal.” Her eyes were filling up again, but she took a deep breath to stop the tears. “I just feel so bad, about everything. Like I said before, my mom’s been sick for a really long time. My dad wanted to tell Franny when we found out my mom had cancer, but my mom told him she didn’t want her coming home just because she felt sorry for her—I think all this time she’s been hoping that Franny will just show up someday, without being asked to come. Anyway, my mom was sick for a while, and then she got better, so my dad just kind of let the whole thing go. But then the cancer came back, and my mom got really sick this time, really fast—and there just hasn’t been any time, you know, to think about anything other than taking care of her.” I understood this, so I nodded. Robin took a napkin from the holder on the table and dabbed one corner of her eye. “It kind of seemed like she was holding her own for a while. My dad said she was so stubborn that she’d probably beat the thing through sheer force of will. But it’s getting really bad now. She’s on hospice care.” [ 270 ]

“So you want to ask Fran to come back before it’s too late. So she can say good-bye.” Robin took another deep breath, let it out. “I don’t know what I’m trying to do, actually. I don’t know if it will make my mom feel better to see Franny one more time—maybe she’d just let go, if that finally happened. But I’m not sure that’s what I want, either. Maybe I’m trying to help Franny. Or maybe I’m being totally selfish, thinking she’ll never come home again if our mom dies before she gets a chance to come back and make things right.” She shook her head. “I really don’t know what I’m doing.” I turned my coffee cup in circles. It was hot, still burning my fingers when I touched the sides, so I used the handle. “She moved about a year ago—she’d been living somewhere south of Seattle, and then she wound up living on campus while she finished school. You don’t have that number?” Robin shook her head. “I don’t think so. I tried calling the number my mom had in her address book and got a recording. Disconnected.” “I’ll give you the one I have for her,” I said. “I haven’t talked to her for a while—she’s always busy with school and Meg and everything. But you should call her and tell her what’s up. She needs to know.” Robin raised her hands, like she was surrendering to something. “I know,” she said. “It’s just—well, like I said before, I don’t even know her anymore. I was just a little kid when she left, and my mom hardly talked about her at all. I’m afraid that when I do call, she’s going to wonder who I think I am, trying to tell her what to do.” “Maybe,” I said. “But at least you’ll be giving her the chance to make things right. You’ll be giving her the choice, instead of making all the big choices for her.” t he night fran left , I walked home from the bus stop and saw a strange car parked in her usual place on the street. She’d left a light on for me inside, the apartment gone quiet. Even if I hadn’t noticed her car was missing first, I’d have known they weren’t coming back: it was the noisy [ 271 ]

kind of silence that fills up a newly empty space, a sound I recognized right away. I looked for a note on the kitchen table, and this time she’d remembered to leave one. I’m sorry to stick you with the rent for the next four months. This is what I have to do. It’s going to be better for all of us this way. There was more, but that’s the general idea. I couldn’t even tell whether she’d gone somewhere and hurt herself or just taken off. Meg’s playpen wasn’t in the corner, though, and her dresser was empty. I took that as a good sign, until I realized that Fran could have left Meg at her mother’s house. So I checked Fran’s closet too, and saw that most of her clothes were gone as well. In my room, she’d left three nice sweaters folded on my bed, things I’d never seen her wear. I sat there in the rocking chair all night, not knowing what to do. I thought about calling her mom or calling the police, but what would I say? I didn’t know what had happened, not exactly. I wouldn’t look at the phone, just in case Fran decided to call. And the next day she did. She called from a pay phone, but she wouldn’t tell me where she was. I could hear people talking in the background, the beeping of a cash register nearby. She was at a rest stop or a diner, I thought, getting some breakfast. “You have to come back,” I said, and I meant it: I couldn’t imagine my life alone in that place, without the two of them. Everything I’d done since I left home had focused on them, in one way or another. “No,” she said, and her voice didn’t offer any openings. “I’m not coming back.” “Why not? I don’t understand why you’re doing this. What happened?” “Nothing happened,” she said. “This is just what I have to do.” “Why? Everything’s fine, Fran. We’re working it out.” “Nothing is fine,” she said. “Meg’s sick all the time. I’m killing myself trying to juggle everything—and you’ve helped me so much, but you can’t keep doing that forever. You have your own life to think about. I just [ 272 ]

needed your help so much, I didn’t even think about how unfair this has been to you.” “I don’t mind helping,” I said. “I never minded. I love Meg.” I couldn’t believe she actually thought she’d done something to me, not for me. “I know that.” She sighed. The phone line snapped in the space between us. “I just have to figure out how this is going to work for us. For Meg and me.” “You could do that here.” It surprised me how much I missed them already. I missed knowing Meg was on a blanket in the next room, kicking her feet in the air, happy just to be alive. Babies are the only people who seem to understand that waking up every day is a kind of gift in itself. It’s nice to have someone around who reminds you of that. Hearing Fran’s voice when I’d picked up the phone made my shoulders go slack with relief, but now I felt myself go stiff again, bracing for something. “No, I can’t do it there,” she said. “My mom isn’t going to stop telling me how I’m screwing up, and I’m going to start believing her, eventually, if I don’t get away from her. I know I will. I’ll just give up, because it’s too hard to keep fighting her. And she’ll be right there, ready to take over. I can’t let that happen to Meg.” Neither one of us said anything for a while. I didn’t know what more there was to say—she’d made her choices, and they left me with none of my own to make. Still, I didn’t want to hang up the phone. I looked at the open door to their empty room, more sad than angry, and felt my eyes filling up. It was worse, I realized, when the person you love doesn’t die, just refuses to be with you. I didn’t know how that could be true, but it was. “Where’s Meg?” I asked. “She’s right here.” Fran cleared her throat, or coughed. “I just wanted to tell you what’s going on. That’s why I called. I couldn’t do it in person.” “So where are you going?” “I really don’t know.” “What about school? What about your scholarship?” [ 2 73 ]

“I’ll go back to school later,” she said. “There’s time. But it can’t be a priority right now.” “Fran,” I said. I was running out of questions. “This makes no sense at all.” “I know.” She sighed. “But I have to do it anyway. And you need to get to campus.” I looked at my watch and laughed, because she was right. So we said our good-byes and I put the receiver in its cradle, picked up my backpack, and caught my bus. I went to my classes and on to work, as usual. I rode the bus home again, and until I got back to the apartment that night and looked up to see that I’d left the light on for only myself that morning, it was just like any other day. i told robin all of these things, and then I turned up my hands: end of story. “She called me again after she’d found a place to live, and then for a while she’d call every few days. Then it was every week or so. You know how it is—when you aren’t seeing people all the time, you kind of have to find room for them in your life, and it fills up with other stuff in the meantime. But I’ll give you the number I have for her. We still call each other now and then, and we send each other Christmas cards.” I got up from the table and went to the little desk in the corner of our kitchen, where I paid the bills each month. Robin turned toward me and shuttled her empty coffee cup between her hands. “Right after she left, she’d call home pretty often—I’d hear my mom on the phone, and I knew she was talking to Franny. I could tell just by the way her voice sounded. She never would let me talk to her, though.” “Your mom called me right after they left and asked if I knew where she and the baby were.” I shrugged. “Your mom never liked me much, so I’m sure she didn’t believe a thing I said, but that was before I had an address or a phone number for them. And she never called again after that.” “Would you have told her, if you knew where they were?” Robin asked. [ 2 74 ]

I thought about that for a moment. I wasn’t sure, but I nodded. “Probably. I don’t think she was ever trying to hide from anyone. People do things, you know, and then they sit around and wonder, What was I thinking? I’m sure there were plenty of days when your sister was wondering why she thought she had to pack up and leave. Her life wasn’t perfect, but she had people here who were happy to help. Your mom was trying to help, too. That’s what most people are looking for, not running from. But Fran always felt like she had to take care of things completely by herself. She was embarrassed when she had to ask for help, or when people tried to pitch in. It’s like she thought she was cheating or taking a shortcut or something. That’s just how she was wired.” I found a clean piece of paper, wrote down the phone number I had in my book. Then I handed Robin her sister’s number. She looked at the paper for a long time before she sighed. I went back to the counter and held the coffee pot in her direction, but Robin shook her head. I filled my own cup before I went back to the table. “So how’s your dad doing with all of this?” Robin closed her eyes and pinched her fingers together at the top of her nose. All this holding back of tears must have given her a headache. “Not good. He doesn’t want to fight with my mom about whether or not to ask Franny to come home. But he feels guilty, you know? He doesn’t want to cross her, and at the same time he feels like he should tell Franny what’s going on, so at least they can try to make things right.” She shook her head. “Then again, who knows what would happen with the two of them in the same room. Maybe he’d rather not find out.” “It’s pretty easy to pick up the telephone.” I shrugged. “If Fran wanted to know what was going on, she could call you guys and check in. But there isn’t much you can do for a person who doesn’t want to be around.” Robin sighed again, nodded. I glanced at her hands then, still toying with her empty coffee cup. A diamond winked on the third finger of her left hand. “Is that an engagement ring?” I asked. [ 2 75 ]

She looked at her own hand, as if she weren’t sure what was there. “Not exactly,” she said. “My boyfriend gave it to me for Christmas. We’re not engaged or anything.” “Good,” I said. “You’re young to be getting married.” “I feel old.” I knew what she meant by that, so I nodded. Then she shrugged and smiled at me. “I never thought I was even the type to get married, actually,” she said. “But now I think I could.” And I nodded again, because I understood that too. this is the moment when I knew I could make a life with Preston: We were out on the fire escape, at the party I’d planned to cheer up Fran, just before she left. It was hot inside, all those people packed into our little place, but it was February and freezing cold on the fire escape. I didn’t mind—the sky was clear and full of stars. It felt good to be out there, actually. I hadn’t thought to put a coat on before we climbed out the bedroom window. I was wearing just a sweater and jeans and shivering hard. Preston climbed out behind me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders. Then he circled his hands around the tops of my arms and squeezed. “Feel those muscles,” he said. “I like that you’re so strong.” “Really?” I said. “You realize I could probably beat you up.” He laughed. “I don’t doubt that for a minute.” “And that doesn’t make you feel small?” I looked over my shoulder at him. “Most guys have a thing about smallness.” Preston turned me around so I was facing him, laced his fingers together at the small of my back. I put my arms around his neck. I thought he was going to kiss me. “I can be just as small as you want,” he said. “Put me in your pocket and carry me around like a voodoo doll, for all I care. Stick pins in my ass when you’re mad at me. I can take it. Just give me a kiss once in a while, when you’re not. That’s all I ask.” [ 2 76 ]

I laughed. “You are really drunk.” He shook his head. “Nothing to drink all night, officer.” Then he kissed me, and his mouth tasted clean, and I knew he was telling the truth. I didn’t want him to be small, though—not like my mom, not knowing how to take the lead. But I didn’t want him to be like my dad, either, always trying to be the one in charge, because somebody had to. I just wanted to be with someone who could take care of himself, most of the time, and who’d take care of me once in a while—someone who’d be able to see when I needed help and offer it before I had to ask. And I knew right then that I could count on Preston for both of those things. We got in Fran’s car that night and took the last few people home, then drove for hours on little two-lane roads, headed toward Greenleaf and Wilder. Preston asked if we needed to go back right away and I told him no, keep driving, Meg’s fine. That’s what Fran had said, and I wasn’t sober enough to question her reasoning. We didn’t pass another car all night. We were alone in the dark, and I leaned my head against the seat and almost fell asleep from the warmth of the heater and the humming of the tires on the road. I felt safe inside that shell of steel, for the first time in a long while, because Preston was with me. He didn’t turn the car around until he saw a sign for the Oregon border, and then we headed home again. t here’s a ten dollar bill that I’ll never spend tucked into a carved wooden box Preston gave me years ago. It’s the bill I found the night Rick died, a bill that came home from the hospital with me in a plastic bag of ruined clothes. I remember seeing that money in my hand that night and taking it with me when I left the car, thinking it was something I might need, who knows what for. I remember seeing it again, at the bottom of a drawer, the day I packed to leave my dad’s house. I think of it now as a parting gift from Rick, a little something to get me started off on the right foot. I keep it as a charm against bad luck. I believe [ 2 77 ]

it’s the reason I met Fran that night, so she could help me get where I needed to go. And I know she is the reason I am here now, in this house, with my husband and my daughter. My family. i gave robin a hug at the front door—I’m not a hugger, but what else was I going to do? Just saying good-bye seemed ridiculous. “Call your sister,” I said. “And tell her to give me a call, too.” Robin nodded and headed down the stairs while I watched her leave. Naomi got up off the floor, where she’d been watching television all this time, and came to stand beside me in the cold doorway. She hugged my leg, and I put my hand on the back of her neck. “Is that your friend?” Naomi asked, seeing Robin turn to head up the street. Not really, I thought—not a person I knew very well. But someone I’d be thinking about from time to time now. Someone I wished good things for. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s my friend.” A familiar theme song called Naomi back into the house. She let go of my leg, and I closed the door to follow her.

[ 2 78 ]

Delta [ frances ]

i have this dream where I’m standing on the bank of a river full of winter trash—tree limbs, bloated animal carcasses, the occasional boot. I’m standing there trying to figure out how to get across the water, thinking that if I can just move quickly and lightly enough from one solid thing to the next, I might be able to get to the other side. I’ve never figured out exactly why I need to get across. But as far as this dream is concerned, that doesn’t matter. The important thing is that while I’m standing there, trying to plan my path across a terrain that keeps changing, my mother comes down the bank behind me. I can hear rocks sliding downhill under her feet, and she always stands where I can’t see her, just behind me. I can hear her voice clearly, though, even over the roar of the water. What are you doing? my mother asks. Trying to figure out how we can get across, I tell her. And then I always say one more thing—one of three things, actually. In the original version, which started right after I left home, I tell my mother I’m going to walk downstream and look for a bridge. There’s no way we can cross this by ourselves, I tell her. It’s way too dangerous. That’ll take too long, she says. Come on. Let’s just go. And before I can think about trying to stop her, she walks ahead of me and into the water, until it closes over her head. She doesn’t hesitate—not [ 2 79 ]

when her feet first sink into the shock of melted snow and ice, not even in the moment before the water covers her mouth and nose. I’m always surprised by what she’s done, every time, so I wake up before I have the chance to find out if she gets to the other side. I’m guessing not. In the second version, the one I have most often now, I tell her I’m going to swim across and go for help. I tell her to wait for me, that I’ll come back for her. Well you can just forget about that, she says. Look at that water. You get knocked out by one of those big branches, then where would you be? Dead, that’s where. We’ll just wait here for a while, my mother says. We’re in no hurry. Plenty of time. Time for what, I don’t know. But that’s what we do: we sit on a big rock and watch the melting winter run. To keep myself from feeling nervous about the fact that we’re not getting wherever we need to go, I think about where all this water is going instead: out of Boise and into the Snake River, through Hell’s Canyon, west until the Snake empties into the Columbia, then all the way across the top of Oregon, through the gorge and out to sea. In this version of my dream, it’s seeing the bright horizon of moving water that finally wakes me up. like i said, this dream started a long time ago. Otherwise, I might be more willing to see it as part of a grieving process, which is what my nextdoor neighbor, Carrie, would have me believe. “This dream is giving you the chance to let your mother go,” she explained this morning, drinking coffee at my kitchen table. What possessed me to tell her about the dream, I still don’t know—I could have predicted her response myself. “The fact that you’re still shocked awake when she leaves you just goes to show that you aren’t ready for her to do that yet. Not completely. So if you want it to stop, your job is to figure out why you’re holding on to her.” “She only dies in one version,” I reminded her, breaking off a corner of [ 280 ]

my toast and dunking it into my coffee cup. “In the other two, she’s still there at the end. And I don’t even know for sure if she dies in the one—she just goes underwater.” Carrie rolled her eyes, then smiled down at her son, James, playing on the floor beside us. James stayed with me this morning, since I didn’t have class until later in the day. He’s been teething and crabby and flat out annoyed by all the commotion at the childcare center for the last few days, so Carrie’s been giving him a break whenever she can. “Dead or alive makes no difference,” Carrie said. “Your mother is with you by that river in all three versions of your dream, and you’re negotiating the terms of your eventual separation—that’s why you’re standing by the river. That’s the point.” Carrie is a grad student in counseling psychology. Her goal is to become a grief counselor—so as far as she’s concerned, everything comes down to letting go of something. Her story, like mine, begins when she was eighteen and pregnant, though Carrie was newly married to her high school boyfriend, the baby’s father. She went to the doctor every month and things were fine, a textbook pregnancy; then, just a week before the baby was due, Carrie’s dog barked at something he was seeing through the living room window. She remembers stopping right in the middle of making herself a tuna sandwich, holding a heavy new jar of pickle chips in her hand, because the baby didn’t kick like it always did whenever the dog started barking. Carrie called the dog into the kitchen and offered him a jerky treat. The dog went crazy doing all his tricks, yapping for his reward. Still, nothing. Her first marriage ended not long after that, and Carrie moved home again. For almost a year, she says, it felt like time was slipping backward instead of pushing forward, like she was revisiting days from her old life, sleeping in her childhood bed and watching television with her dad at night. The problem, of course, was that the most important pieces of that life—her baby, and the boy she had loved—were so obviously missing. [ 281 ]

And then it occurred to her that maybe this was the point: maybe losing something clears a space, once you’ve acknowledged the loss, and makes room for something new. So Carrie went back to college. She met her second husband in Abnormal Psychology her junior year. And now, five years after Carrie thought her life had stopped moving forward, she and her husband live next door to me, in Graduate and Family Housing, with their beautiful little boy. “Most people think moving on after a loss is the hardest part,” Carrie is fond of telling anyone who will listen. “But I’m here to tell you: moving on is a piece of cake once you’ve figured out exactly what’s standing in your way. Owning your unwillingness to grieve—that is the hardest part.” She actually says these things. My downstairs neighbor, Sam, does an impersonation of Carrie that somehow captures both her zealous confidence and her genuine sincerity. The latter is what makes people love her, and makes the former bearable. “You thought making this lasagna was hard?” Sam said last week, when I brought a slightly blackened dish to the table, after inviting him to join Meg and me for dinner. “Well. I am here to tell you something, Frances Rogers: owning your unwillingness to set a kitchen timer—that is the hardest part.” I laughed, of course. It wasn’t a kind thing to do, I’ll admit, and I know I was setting a bad example for Meg. But it’s hard not to laugh at a person who truly believes she’s uncovered the solution to every problem you might encounter. this afternoon, when I relayed Carrie’s thoughts about my dream, Sam rolled his eyes at me as well. “Sounds like the usual dose of psychobabble,” he said. I nodded, but then I shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know, though—I’ve been having some version of this dream for years. Don’t you think that’s kind of weird?” [ 282 ]

Sam shook his head, no. “I think some parts of the brain remember when we were more like animals. So when you let your imagination loose at night, it roams around. Your brain just found a spot it likes, so it keeps going back there.” Sam is a grad student in forestry. He has a daughter, Langley, who’s about a year older than Meg, though the specific gap in their ages puts Langley in fourth grade. To Meg’s mind, this makes Langley infinitely more sophisticated than a pathetic second grader could ever hope to be. The girls play together whenever Sam has Langley at his place, after school and some weekends, and Meg comes home from their apartment wanting whatever chic new item Langley has: pierced ears, a see-through purse, a particular brand of lip gloss. Today, when the girls walked into Sam’s living room, I saw the evidence of Langley’s newest acquisition: a complete makeup case. “A practice case,” Langley said, as if this wouldn’t have been immediately apparent from the swatches of neon color above Meg’s eyes, the deep rose bruises of blush on her own cheeks. “Oh my God,” Sam said, and his right hand flew up to pull on his beard. It’s something he does unconsciously, only when he’s really worried. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what they were up to in there. I guess I should have checked on them.” He took Langley’s chin in his hand and turned her face toward him. “Jesus, Lang. Does this stuff come off?” Then he turned to me again. “I hope you don’t hate me for polluting your beautiful child.” I pointed to an orange stripe above Meg’s eye, a color that almost exactly matched her hair. Sam shook his head, but then he laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “Where’d you get the makeup case, Lang?” I asked. “My mom bought it for me.” “She got it at Target,” Meg added. “Can I get one too?” Langley’s mother majored in horticulture at the university—when he was twenty, Sam says, this seemed like something they had in common, though the difference between a forest and a garden is substantial. But [ 2 83 ]

the two of them hadn’t fully explored their differences until a few years later, after they’d married and Langley was born. “It’s one thing to share your life with someone else, make compromises for them,” Sam explained, the day he told me his story. “That I can do, no problem. I always wanted to have a wife and a family. But when it comes down to making a whole life plan, which is what Claire wanted us to do—I don’t know. I guess that’s just not how I do things. Maybe I’m dumb, maybe you have to do that when you have a kid, but it seems like you could also just live your life and make the choices as you go along. Claire said ‘That’s how homeless people live, because they don’t have any options. When you have options, you need a plan.’ And like I said, maybe I’m stupid, but it seems like most things work out the way they’re supposed to anyway, and we’re all just going along for the ride. So we might as well enjoy it—that’s all I’m saying.” In the end, Sam and his wife split up but decided to share their days with Langley. Sam went to grad school, earned his master’s degree, then decided he wanted to go on for a Ph.D. Langley’s mother became a real estate agent. I met her once, when she came to pick up their daughter at Sam’s place, a slender woman with sleek blond hair and a French manicure. She looked like the women who work at cosmetics counters in department stores, just vaguely real. I couldn’t imagine Sam had ever thought of her as his type. But I didn’t know Sam when he was twenty—for all I know, Langley’s mother may have been the very woman he’d conjured up in his teenage dreams. “So are we still on for dinner?” he asked this afternoon, as I guided Meg out of his apartment. “Assuming I can get this stuff off her face. She needs to be at her friend’s house for a sleepover at six, but it looks like we might be running a little late.” “I don’t want to wash it off,” Meg said. “I think it looks cool.” Sam closed the door behind us, wisely, before Langley could register her vote. [ 2 84 ]

. . . l angley has both a mother and father, if not in the same residence— and, she’s told Meg, a potential stepfather in the wings, though Sam hasn’t mentioned this to me and of course I haven’t asked. Langley also has a small army of grandparents, uncles, and aunts with whom she spends the occasional weekend and most holidays. In the face of all this, it only makes sense that Meg would want to know about her own family. I decided, years ago, that whenever Meg asked I’d tell her the simplest versions of the truth and answer additional questions as she presented them. Today’s version of the truth, while I helped Meg wash her face, was this: “We were really young, and I didn’t love him enough to get married to him. So I just decided to raise you by myself.” “Then why did you guys have sex, if you didn’t love him?” Meg asked. She’s eight years old, and the fact that she could formulate this question was as surprising to me as the question itself. “You told me sex was for showing someone how much you love them.” I sighed. “Well, sometimes people just have sex because they feel like it,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s a good idea unless you really love the person.” “Because you can get pregnant from sex.” “Yeah, but getting pregnant isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. I’m mean, I’m very glad I had you. Most of the time.” She smirked at my reflection in the mirror and closed one eye to let me scrub her brow. “But it’s hard to take care of a baby by yourself, if you’re not going to marry the dad. I had a really good friend who helped me take care of you before we moved here—you don’t remember her, but I’m lucky I met her when I did. The thing about sex is, if you do it with lots of people, then it isn’t special anymore. It’s just another thing you do, like going to the movies. And that’s not how it should be. At least, I don’t think so. You’ll have to decide how you feel about it when you’re older.” Meg nodded, as if she actually understood what I was saying, and I realized she might. [ 2 85 ]

“Do you think my dad misses me?” she asked. “Sam says he misses Langley all day long, and he can’t wait to see her after school.” This is the thing that breaks my heart: knowing the choices I have made along the way shape the life Meg now thinks of as her own, a life that strikes her, by turns, as both wanting and full. There are days when she tells me she’s glad there is no one else living in our house, that the two of us by ourselves make a perfect family. But today was not one of those days. “I didn’t tell him I was going to have a baby,” I said. Meg stared at the sink in front of us, her face rubbed red from the washcloth in my hand. I set it down and pulled her hair back gently, so I could watch her expression while I spoke. “He moved away before you were even born, and I didn’t keep in touch with him. But when you get a little older, if you want to find him, I’ll help you. I promise. And I’m sure he’ll be very glad to know he has a beautiful daughter like you.” She nodded her head, and I hung the washcloth on the towel bar to dry. “I wish you’d let me wear makeup,” she said, catching my reflection in the mirror. It’s amazing, really, the way the mind recovers from its various injuries. “Okay, here’s the deal: you’re not supposed to see makeup. It’s supposed to look natural. There is nothing natural about orange stripes around your eyes.” “If you can’t even see it, then why do you wear it?” Meg wanted to know, and I confessed that this is the very question I ask myself, each morning, in the mirror. “ you talk about stuff like that already?” Sam asked. Dinner was a big green salad, fettuccine with a garlic-butter sauce and shrimp. Ask him where he learned to cook and Sam will tell the story of his mother, beleaguered caretaker of six children, legally married but for all practical purposes a single parent. The Merriman children learned to do everything, he says, and fast. All his brothers and sisters still live in the [ 2 86 ]

area, testament to the power of their mother’s mantra: You share the load and it feels a little lighter to everyone. Sam’s specialty is spaghetti, but apparently he knows how to power up the style when the occasion demands. What made tonight special, though, I had no idea. “I’ve always figured that if she’s old enough to formulate the question, she’s old enough to hear the answer.” I shrugged. “Anyway. Two minutes later, she was back to talking about eye shadow.” “Still.” Sam combed his fork through the pasta on his plate. “I guess I just didn’t think about Claire having those conversations with Lang yet. I wonder what she says about what happened with us.” “She probably says ‘Your dad wanted to live in a yurt on Orcas Island, but I was thinking more along the lines of a condo on Queen Anne.’” Sam laughed quietly around the fork in his mouth. “Langley will ask you about it if she hears something that bothers her. You guys are great together. This,” I jab my fork in the general direction of my plate, “is amazing. I had no idea you could actually cook.” “You’ve eaten my food before.” “This goes way beyond food.” “You’re just saying that because it isn’t burnt.” I smirked while Sam tipped the wine bottle toward my glass, waiting for me to give the okay. “I wanted to make something kind of special. I have some good news for you.” “News for me?” Sam nodded. “I have a friend.” I waved one hand, because my mouth was full of wine, and I shook my head. “Thanks, but no thanks,” I said, after I’d swallowed. Sam frowned, confused, then rolled his eyes. “Not that kind of friend.” “Oh. Sorry. I guess I’ve heard the ‘I have a friend’ speech too many times, and I’m done with blind dates. I still don’t understand why people think a single woman is a situation that needs correcting.” [ 2 87 ]

Sam looked down at his plate again, moving noodles to look for shrimp. “You really think I’d try to set you up with someone?” he asked, clearly hurt. I shook my head again, staring at my own plate. “No,” I said. “I don’t. That was a reflex. I’m sorry.” Sam nodded, all right, and let it go. “Anyway, I have a friend. Zach. He runs this place in Gig Harbor, and he saw you do your thing at the 3C’s meeting last week.” I held my fork in place, just above my fettuccine. “What kind of place in Gig Harbor?” “He runs a nonprofit—they do consulting work with businesses and land developers. Their whole thing is community development, so it’s right up your alley. I told him you were graduating from the urban planning program this spring.” I set my fork down. “And?” “And, they’ve been thinking about hiring another person—community development stuff is really hot right now, you know. Everyone wants to look like they’re listening to the little people, making sure their concerns are addressed. I told him about that access-to-child-care study you did for your senior seminar last fall, and he went right through the roof.” “Seriously?” Sam nodded and looked around the table. He got up to get the pepper grinder from his kitchen. “That’s the kind of thing Zach does—he helps developers find areas where they can build without contributing to sprawl, or rehab existing buildings, or he gets a grant to do a study and then recruits businesses into the areas that need them. His big thing is developing walkable communities. He hasn’t owned a car in, like, five years. He’s convinced that people are never going to warm up to public transportation, so the only way to get people out of their cars is to put everything they need within walking distance and make them see the car as an unnecessary expense—and once they get out of their cars, of course, they get to know their neighbors, they see how easy it is to help each other out, the world’s [ 2 88 ]

a better place, yadda yadda yadda. So I told him he should go to the 3C’s thing and hear what you had to say, because I know that’s your thing too.” Sam came back to the table with the grinder, held it over my plate in a silent question. I shook my head. “Needless to say, he was really impressed. You blew him away.” Campus Community Connections held an open forum last week, not well attended, so students could voice their opinions on whether an old shopping center that’s being demolished a few blocks from the university should be replaced with a superstore or a multi-use building. No surprise that most traditional undergrads favor the superstore—they live in dorms or giant apartment complexes close to campus. A superstore would offer one-stop access to beer and condoms, as well as printer cartridges, the staple items of their lives. But most of those students had other plans for their Thursday night, and the few people who actually spoke at the forum were, like me, in favor of the complex—apartments and small businesses sharing the space, helping each other exist. Not that any of this will make a difference, necessarily. But I went to the forum, and I took Meg with me, because I wanted her to see that when you have an opinion about the way the world should work, you do what you can to make it happen. “So why didn’t he introduce himself or something, if he was so impressed?” I asked. Sam smiled. “He had to leave before the meeting was over. To catch the last bus home.” I laughed. “Now there’s an argument for public transportation.” But then I leaned forward and rested my head on one hand. “I can’t believe this. I was just in the career placement office today, about to cry.” “Why?” “Because I’m graduating, I’m in student loan debt up to my eyeballs, and I’m completely unemployable. Or I thought I was, anyway. Now you’re telling me this.”

[ 2 89 ]

Sam held up his hands, a caution. “They haven’t decided for sure if they’re even hiring another person. He just asked me to find out if you’d be interested.” “I understand that.” I sighed and sat up again. “The thing is, after I went to the placement office, I went in and talked to Bob Crandall.” Sam frowned, thinking. “Is that the sweater vest guy?” “No, that’s Meyer. Crandall’s the old guy.” Sam raised his eyebrows. “The one who hated the idea for your childcare project?” I nodded. “I guess I won him over, though, because he put this nasty note on a paper he handed back to me last week and said he hadn’t seen my application to the master’s program—he’s the director of grad studies now—and I wasn’t going to get a fellowship if I didn’t get my stuff turned in before the deadline. Apparently, this is his way of telling me he hopes I’ll be applying to the program, and he thinks I’m a sure thing for a fellowship if I do. That’s what Meyer said, anyway.” “Wow.” Sam set his fork down, picked up his wine glass. “I didn’t even know you were thinking about grad school.” “I wasn’t. It’s been such a struggle just to get this far, you know? All those years I was working and going to school part-time, and then commuting from Issaquah while I was on the waiting list for this place, and then working, and raising Meg on top of that—grad school was absolutely the last thing I was thinking about. I’ve just been concentrating on getting done. But then I went to the placement office this morning, and I kept thinking that at least a fellowship would pay the bills for another couple of years. That’s one less thing to worry about. And I’d have an easier time finding a job with a master’s degree. And I could keep living here, which I like. And Meg will be a little older when I’m going off to work full-time. It all just made sense, all of a sudden. So I went in and got the application stuff from him.” Sam drained his glass. “So you’re definitely going to do it?” “Well, I thought I was. But now, maybe not. I have no idea.” [ 290 ]

He picked up his fork again and watched a pale noodle whirl through the tines. “I have to tell you—it’s totally selfish, I know, but I’ll be happy if you decide to stick around. I like having you guys upstairs.” Sam leaned forward on his free arm, then looked up at me and smiled. “We’d miss you, too,” I said. There is a safety in being the two of us, Meg and I, much easier to speak in the plural than it ever was to speak for myself. “So should I tell Zach to give you a call or not?” “Sure.” I speared a cherry tomato with my fork. “Can’t hurt to talk to him, if he really thinks I have something to offer.” Sam nodded. “No doubt about that. He said you had quite a story.” i left my home in Idaho when I was nineteen years old, with less than three hundred dollars in my checking account and a four-month-old baby in the backseat of my car. I crossed the Snake River into Oregon, and at some point it occurred to me that I could just follow the river all the way to the coast or cross over and go north. I made a choice: I crossed the Columbia River at Hermiston and made my way through Washington. I had no real destination in mind: away was the only place I’d planned to go. This was before I understood that moving forward doesn’t necessarily mean moving at all; sometimes it means going deeper, making your peace with the things you know you’ll never really understand, the choices you made for reasons your brain can no longer fathom. I stopped when I came to Issaquah, just before I drove into Seattle. I’d never been outside of Boise alone, and facing a city exhausted and broke was more than I thought I could handle at that moment. I found a motel room and did some calculating. The only thing I owned then was my car, which I knew I’d have to sell—that much was certain. I needed money for an apartment. But I knew no one was going to rent to me unless I had a job, and I couldn’t interview for a job until I’d found someone to watch Meg, and I couldn’t look for a baby-sitter until I knew where the two of us would be living, since we’d have to live close to wherever I found work, or [ 291 ]

to a bus line, because I wouldn’t have a car. I followed that circle of logic until I was good and dizzy, and then I took Meg out in her stroller, thinking the fresh air might do us both some good. I picked up a can of formula, a pack of diapers, and a copy of the local paper at a grocery store. That afternoon, while Meg napped, I scanned the classifieds and saw this ad: Christian Couple Needs Your Help! 1 br 1 ba basement apt, all util pd in exchange for asst to elderly landlords. Some driving required, car provided. I called and made arrangements to meet with Delsey Gruene—who, truth be told, was not excited about the prospect of a single mother sharing her house. But Delsey agreed to a meeting because her ad had been running for nearly three weeks, and her only takers so far had been, as she put it, “a bunch of shady characters.” The Gruenes were on a fixed income; they couldn’t afford to let their basement apartment sit empty. “My husband Arthur,” she explained, in the shadowy living room of their house, “has regular appointments at the va, for his eyes and such. He’s going blind now, because of the diabetes. I drive him out there, but I hate to fight the traffic. People are always honking at me, always in such a hurry. I worry I’m going to get us both killed one of these days. And then, you know—” She tipped her head to one side, a concession. “It’s not so easy for me to get around myself. I don’t like to leave Arthur alone, and it’s hard to take him with me—juggling the groceries and watching out for him at the same time, it gets tricky. So when our last tenant moved out, I thought maybe if I could find someone to help me a bit, in exchange for the utilities, maybe that would work. But I wasn’t thinking of a girl like you, with a baby to care for. You have enough on your plate already.” She reached out and took Meg’s hand, shook it primly, and Meg smiled. “That’s right, I’m speaking of you, little miss. Such a pretty girl.” I nodded that I understood her concerns. “But this baby is exactly why [ 292 ]

I need your help, Mrs. Gruene. As soon as I sell my car, I can pay you the first and last month’s rent—so if I can use your car to do both your grocery shopping and my own each week, that solves a problem for each of us. Trying to take a bus with a baby and a week’s worth of groceries—I can do it, of course, but it’s going to be a challenge. You’d actually be doing me a big favor by letting me help you out.” “You don’t have a job?” Delsey said, the first part of my speech still ringing in her ears. “Not yet,” I admitted. “We haven’t been in town very long.” “When did you get here?” “A few days ago.” I watched the expression on Delsey’s face revise itself into something like mistrust and imagined her response if I’d told the truth: that we had been in Issaquah less five hours. “I’m not picky, though—I’ll have a job by the end of the month, I promise you that. I’ll schedule my work around all Mr. Gruene’s appointments. That will be my first priority.” Delsey looked skeptical. “Are you running from something then? The law, maybe?” Running from the law. Delsey could have known nothing about me, of course, but I wanted to laugh and knew I couldn’t. I was trying to make a good impression: capable mother, responsible tenant. “No,” I said. “I’m not running from anything. I’m just trying to make a good home for my daughter. I can give you phone numbers to call, job references, family, friends, lots of people who know me. I got really good grades in school. I’m from Boise, Idaho—I’m not a criminal.” Delsey shook her head, looking from Meg to me. “Even Arthur could see that, for heaven’s sake.” She spoke quietly, glancing down the hall, toward the room where her husband was sleeping, as if she were worried that he’d heard her. “So how does it happen that you’re all the way up here then, all alone?” I sighed. “That’s a very long story.” “Well, I’m a very old woman. Time is just about all I have left.” Delsey settled back into the couch and folded her arms, waiting. [ 2 93 ]

We agreed on a trial period: two months, subject to immediate cancellation if Meg kept the Gruenes awake at night or if I proved incapable of holding a job. I sold my car and paid the two months’ rent in advance, used their silver Buick to take Arthur back and forth to the va; true to my word, I found a job and scheduled shifts around his appointments. I picked up Arthur’s prescriptions, did the shopping for both our households. Delsey watched Meg when I had to work evenings. People at the discount store where I worked as a cashier assumed the Gruenes were my family, and I didn’t tell them otherwise. As far as I was concerned, that was true. A year later, when Arthur’s heart shut down, I was the first person Delsey thought to call. After his funeral, I moved among her friends to fill their coffee cups, collect their dirty dishes—I knew how to be a good daughter, even if I hadn’t always acted on that knowledge. But Delsey and Arthur had no children of their own, so I slipped unnoticed among the quiet conversations of Delsey’s friends and heard them worry how much longer she’d last. They’d had no children, and now she had no husband—she would be lost without Arthur. Living alone, they said, that was no way to live. But at some point in the quiet afternoon Delsey covered her face with her hands, to hide her tears of apprehension or frustration, and Meg, sitting on a nearby lap, began to laugh, as she always did whenever Delsey played this game with her. She was still a baby, after all, still unaware that the people she loved might disappear for any reason other than the sheer delight of coming back to her. I turned to look for Meg when I heard a squeal in the murmuring room and saw, instead, Delsey smiling and crying at once, standing to lift my daughter to her shoulder, found. this is my story . But, like all stories, mine finds its shape in the presence of others—like Delsey, who took a chance on a girl she didn’t know because she needed to, or wanted to, or had no other choice. It makes no difference now. Meg and I lived in the basement of her house in Issaquah long after Arthur [ 2 94 ]

died, though before long the three of us occupied the whole house without any real regard or need for boundaries. I took down heavy curtains and painted her living room, put up new blinds in her kitchen: Meg and I brought the light back in for her, just as she had done for us. I hardly remembered that our bloodlines had never really crossed. One evening, though, while we were sitting at home and watching television together, as we nearly always did, Delsey asked why a girl like me didn’t try to make something more of herself. “A girl like me?” I said. I was interested to know what sort of girl I had become. “You’re sharp,” she said. “Levelheaded. I know you had the trouble with your mother, but somebody raised you right. There aren’t many girls your age who could do what you’ve done already, raising a child on your own and holding down a job and taking care of two other people besides— people who aren’t even blood relations, I might add.” It occurred to me that my mother might be proud to hear Delsey say, Somebody raised you right. But it was also clear, when I talked to my mother, that she didn’t see the life I’d made for Meg and me as evidence of her success. “I went to college for a while, in Boise,” I said. “It was just too hard, with a baby and job on top of that.” “Meg’s older now. It might not be so hard this time.” “I guess.” I shrugged. “I don’t even know what I’d study, though. I used to think I wanted to be an engineer, but that doesn’t even interest me anymore.” “So you go back and take some classes, find out what interests you now. There’s no law against changing your mind, for heaven’s sake.” “I know that. But I like my job.” I had a more regular work schedule by then: I’d been promoted to receiving manager, so I worked only during delivery hours. My days were predictable, finally, almost routine. “Meg likes her day care, too.” Meg looked up from her toys at the sound of her name and smiled at me. “You like Miss Julie, don’t you?” [ 2 95 ]

“Miss Julie sings,” Meg said, and started in on one of her favorites: Miss Polly had a dolly who was sick, sick, sick . . . I nodded, then turned back to Delsey. “Maybe I’ll go back to school eventually, but I think we’re both happy enough where we are right now.” “Happy enough?” Delsey reached down to run her hand through Meg’s curls. “Is that all you want for this beautiful girl?” And I saw in that moment how easily I made all my decisions now: there were things Meg needed and things beyond my reach. I thought about Wanda, working all the time to keep her girls not only fed and clean but also mannerly and self-sufficient—why shouldn’t that be enough? But Delsey reminded me that I’d once known it wasn’t, or not for me. There had been a time when I wondered how it was possible to survive one day without the promise of something more: not a fuller life—as if that were actually possible—but something larger than the range of my daughter’s immediate concerns. cindy is part of my story too, of course, because without her there would be no Meg. The child I love—the girl who slams her bedroom door when she’s had her fill of me and crawls into bed beside me later on, no apologies required—would be another girl entirely had she grown up in my mother’s house. She’d be careful to the point of silence, almost invisible. I was that girl: I know. I called Cindy from a rest stop in Oregon the morning after I left because it seemed unfair, somehow, to leave her behind with just her life to think about. Still, that was the one thing I could give her and the thing she most deserved: days that were not shaped around the needs of a child who would never be hers, a family fragmented at its base, a whole world of absence in the making. My life would be with Meg, and hers would not. “You’ve helped me so much,” I said. “But you can’t keep doing that forever. It isn’t fair. Meg isn’t your responsibility.” “I don’t mind helping you,” she said. “I love Meg.” “I know you do. But I have to figure out how to make this work for Meg and me, by ourselves. We’re the ones who’re going to be stuck with each [ 2 96 ]

other for the long haul.” I tried to laugh, but the sound came out raspy and dry. “I want you to come back,” she said. “We’ll figure it out, whatever you want to do—just come back, Fran. Please.” But I told her no. I wanted to call her every day, to tell her the new things Meg had learned to do and give her the details that made up my new life. I called whenever I couldn’t stand the sadness building up inside of me, but the gift I’d given Cindy was in leaving, so I tried to stay away. That makes me sound more noble than selfish, when the truth is that I left because I wanted Meg to grow up knowing I was her mother. Cindy was already moving on without us, whether she knew that or not, and she deserved to think of herself for once. She’d done enough already, more than I had any right to expect. But when Cindy left, I’d have no other choice than to move back home—and I couldn’t be Meg’s mother in my own mother’s house. There wasn’t room enough for both of us there. And now my daughter is the girl I would have liked to be at her age: self-confident, secure, outspoken. Meg is fully convinced that she’s worthy of any attention she draws when she enters a room. From the time she was small, total strangers have stopped to admire and remark on Meg’s hair. I had to teach her how to answer these questions: It’s natural. It runs in the family. At some point Meg came to view this attention as nothing more or less than her lot in life, no reason for flattery or aggravation. Her hair, of all things—Tom’s gift to both of us—was our entry point into the world of friendly strangers. It makes Meg seem unique at a glance, but her poise in the face of unexpected attention is what makes her truly rare and special, what separates her from my mother and me. m y mother. I sent her a postcard of the Seattle skyline a few days after I left, so she’d have some idea where we had gone. Don’t worry, I wrote. We’re all right. We’re finding our way together. I’ll be in touch. Still, I expected to find her sitting on the Gruene’s front steps when I came home from work [ 2 97 ]

some afternoon, maybe in the living room, drinking tea with Delsey and waiting for me. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that Delsey had called her, feeling a need to do what she thought was right for me. That was before I knew Delsey well enough to understand that she would always let me figure out what was right for myself. Still, there were days when I hoped I’d find my mother there, days I knew I would go home if she told me I had to. But my mother didn’t come, and at some point I stopped expecting that she would. I wasn’t hiding from my family, not exactly. I called home once in a while, remembered birthdays and sent cards. The last time I called, my mother sounded preoccupied. “Just tired,” she said, when I asked if she was sick. “Listen, I was thinking maybe you’d like to come home for the holidays this year. It would be nice to have the whole family together again.” The suggestion took me by surprise: I hadn’t been home in nearly six years by then, and I’d concluded that we both preferred to keep it that way. I was safely distant from my sister, unable to set a bad example; there was no grandchild to explain. Six years seemed like a long time, in some respects, and in others not long at all. “I don’t know,” I said. “I hate to leave Delsey alone at Christmas. She’s been so good to us, and she doesn’t have any other family to spend the day with.” My mother sighed, but she didn’t sound hurt when she spoke again; she sounded resigned. “Think about it, anyway. Give me a call when you decide what you want to do.” After I hung up the phone, I found Delsey standing behind me in the kitchen doorway. Her arms were crossed, mouth twisted. “You don’t ever need to stay here and baby-sit me,” she said. “Not for Christmas, not ever. I can take care of myself. You know that full well.” I nodded and looked at the floor. “I do know that.”

[ 2 98 ]

“Then why are you telling your mother you have to stay here on my account?” “Because I can’t tell her the truth,” I said. “I don’t want to see her. I’m not ready to go back there yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to go back.” “Well then, you need to figure out how you’re going to tell her that, because I won’t have your mother thinking I’m some selfish old woman who’s stealing her daughter away.” But I didn’t know how I could tell my mother that I felt more at home where I was than I ever had in her presence. So I didn’t call. Christmas came and went. The new year arrived. And then I got a letter from the university saying Meg and I could move into a two-bedroom family housing apartment in June. That spring I helped Delsey find a new tenant to live in her basement, packed a rental van with what little we owned. I didn’t call home to tell my mother I was moving, but I told myself I wasn’t trying to hide: I was waiting for the right moment to present itself, the right words. And they didn’t come. w hen I got back from Sam’s, the message light on my answering machine was blinking like a traffic signal. “Hello, little miss.” Delsey’s name for Meg and me, interchangeably. “Just calling to check in with you two. Didn’t really want a thing. I thought maybe you’d like to come down for a visit this weekend. Let me know. Love you girls.” I glanced at the clock: eleven thirty. Too late to call her back. A second message: “Hey stranger. It’s been awhile, so I thought I’d just call and see what you guys are up to. Had a visit from your sister today—she was looking for your new phone number. I gave it to her. I hope that was okay. She’ll probably be calling you in the next few days. Anyway, call me back. Bye.”

[ 2 99 ]

It was an hour earlier in Boise, but still ten thirty; I knew her daughter would be asleep. I hadn’t talked to Robin much since I’d left home, other than to say hello on the rare occasion when she picked up the phone. She’d still been a little girl, at first, and I understood my mother felt the need to be careful with her. But in the meantime she grew up, and now she was someone I didn’t know at all. It surprised me to feel happy at the thought that she might want this to change. The last message, from Meg: “Hi Mom. I thought you’d be back from Sam’s by now. I’m just calling because, um, I thought you might be a little scared there by yourself.” Her voice went buzzy when she pressed her mouth against the receiver to speak more quietly. “Ashley’s mom made us popcorn but she put some weird spray butter stuff on it and I didn’t like it. I was polite, though. I just said I was already full. Okay, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.” I punched a button on the answering machine and listened to the scrambled sound of their voices rewinding together. My life was small once, the size of a little town or a young girl’s imagination—but I’d told myself I had no limits, that anything was possible. Then my life spilled over, became a stream of people moving in and out, and the farther it carried me away from where I’d started, the more clearly I saw how little I had known, how much I still had to learn. I collapsed on the couch, finding the silence in our apartment—or perhaps the wine I’d shared with Sam—triggering a sudden, oppressive exhaustion. I opened my eyes, just briefly, when I heard James crying through the wall between our apartment and Carrie’s. He’s always been a good baby, crying only for food or comfort, unless he’s sick. She got lucky with him, but that’s something Carrie didn’t need me to tell her. James stopped fussing almost as quickly as he’d started, and I imagined Carrie walking him across the bedroom floor, rubbing his back, easily soothing him to sleep with just the promise of her presence. I still remembered the first time it occurred to me that the sound of my daughter’s voice was to be the soundtrack for the next phase of my life. Meg [ 300 ]

couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old, and I wanted to weep then, starved for the quiet I’d always taken for granted. But I missed her now. I leaned my head against the back of the couch and closed my eyes again. I wanted to tell her about the job in Gig Harbor, though it was just a possibility and might amount to nothing. Another sort of mother would have waited until she had more definite news to share, but I couldn’t even consider an option without talking to Meg about it first. I really didn’t know which option might appeal to her more: some continuity after a year of big adjustments, or the chance for another new start. She was happy here, that much I knew; I’d understand if she wanted to stay. But she was also a little girl looking forward to all the changes ahead of her, excited about the possibilities. She reminded me, just by being around, that transformation is what takes you forward. It’s the only constant thing. What are you doing? my mother asks. Trying to figure out how we can get across, I tell her. She takes my hand, but gently, and starts for the river without saying anything. She stops just before she takes the first step into the water, though, sticks her toes in first. Cold, she says. I tell her I’m not going in, but she keeps moving forward anyway. Her fingers are wrapped around my wrist now, and I realize she will not let go. She takes one step, and then another, and when her arm is stretched back as far as it can reach, she turns around. Well, what else are we going to do? she says. Come on, Franny. It’s all right. She is my mother, after all, so I do what she says: I take a step. The water opens to let me in, then seals itself around my ankles, as though it has never been disturbed. See? she says. We’ll be fine. And my mother is right: this water is cold, not far removed from the snow and ice it used to be. But the longer I stand there beside her, the warmer it seems. [ 301 ]

Acknowledgments

So many people had a hand in the creation of this book that to recognize them all by name would be nearly impossible. Nevertheless, a few merit special mention: The amazing Ragdale Foundation and its staff gave me the space I needed to see what I was doing and the time I needed to get it done. There are no words to express their fabulosity. (See? I had to make up a word.) The entire staff at the University of Nevada Press has offered enthusiastic support for this book from the outset, and their enthusiasm has been a great reward for traveling the long road to this moment. Mike Land, in customary fashion, provided encouragement and unrelenting positive energy. His love affair with the writing process remains an inspiration to me. Stephanie Cox, friend of my heart, read every word of this novel more times than I would care to reveal—and always with a generous spirit. A special place in heaven is reserved for people like her.

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My parents, Howard and Maxine Johnston, gave me my first electric typewriter when I was twelve and taught me the most important lesson: that when the going gets tough, you get tougher. Their example has served me well on many occasions. Jordan and Andrew Lueker taught me everything I know about being a mother—I stand in awe of their patience, integrity, and compassion. They help me remember that being a parent is the most important job I’ll ever have. And finally: Michael Lueker has been a source of encouragement, love, and support through nearly twenty years of writing—not to mention a meticulous reader of all my work. This book would not exist without his enduring faith in my ability to write it.

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