A Bright Soothing Noise

A Bright Soothing Noise

Previous Winners of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction Laura Kopchick, series editor Barbara Rodman, founding editor The Stuntman’s Daughter by Alice Blanchard Rick DeMarinis, Judge Here Comes the Roar by Dave Shaw Marly Swick, Judge Let’s Do by Rebecca Meacham Jonis Agee, Judge What Are You Afraid Of ? by Michael Hyde Sharon Oard Warner, Judge Body Language by Kelly Magee Dan Chaon, Judge Wonderful Girl by Aimee LaBrie Bill Roorbach, Judge Last Known Position by James Mathews Tom Franklin, Judge Irish Girl by Tim Johnston Janet Peery, Judge

A Bright Soothing Noise

STORIES

PETER

BROWN

2010 WINNER, KATHERINE ANNE PORTER PRIZE IN SHORT FICTION

University of North Texas Press Denton, Texas

©2010 Peter Daniel Brown All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Permissions: University of North Texas Press 1155 Union Circle #311336 Denton, Texas 76203-5017 ⬁The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, z39.48.1984. Binding materials have been chosen for durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Peter, 1956– A bright soothing noise : stories / by Peter Brown. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Number 9 in the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction series) “2010 Winner, Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.” ISBN 978-1-57441-291-8 (pbk.) I. Title. II. Series: Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction series ; no. 9. PS3602.R72248B75 2010 813'.6—dc22 2010024012 A Bright Soothing Noise is Number 9 in the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction Series This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or establishments or to persons living or dead is unintentional. Text design by Carol Sawyer/Rose Design

for Dorothy Lahey Brown

Oía el resuello de mi mujer ahí a mi lado: “—¿Qué es?—me dijo. “—¿Qué es qué?—le pregunté. “—Eso, el ruido ese. “—Es el silencio. Duérmete. Descansa, aunque sea un poquito, que ya va a amenecer. —JUAN RULFO, FROM EL LLANO EN LLAMA

Contents

Acknowledgments A Deeper Color

ix 1

The Slaughterhouse Since It’s You The Lie

21

40

56

The Blue Carriage The Dancer

69

91

Yolanda’s Pool

112

The Darkest Hole in the Globe My New Life The Box

143

163

A Bright Soothing Noise

185

128

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the editors of the journals where versions of the following stories first appeared: Post Road: “Since It’s You” The Harvard Review: “The Slaughterhouse” The Mississippi Review: “The Darkest Hole in the Globe” I am thankful to all my friends and family. Their love, encouragement and honesty are the bones of this book. Special thanks to Josip Novakovich, Laura Kopchick and the readers for the Katherine Anne Porter Award and to Karen DeVinney and Paula Oates of the University of North Texas Press. And to Jenny, Jeff, Zoë and Marbury Hill. I am grateful for a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2006.

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found one of the old benches and set the bag down. I took everything out: a plastic lime, an empty Sprite bottle, the Beefeater and two cans of Schweppes. I poured it all into the empty bottle and squeezed in the last of the lime before I sent the lime tumbling down the steps into the sand. I shook the drink with both hands and sat for a minute more, looking out at the big black Atlantic. I raised the bottle and toasted the boardwalk, the crime lights and the balmy air. Everything seemed familiar, as if I had stepped sideways from one life into another. I wished only for someone to talk to, anyone really, someone who might hear me if I made a little oration when I raised my reinvigorated Sprite in the burnt-yellow luminescence. I had a couple more swallows before I cursed the city. Go to goddamn hell! I shouted. I put the bottle down between my feet and threw my arms wide. If only for one lonely moment, it was great to be back. Back in the car, I felt even better. I hit the gas and the Corolla fishtailed for fifty yards. What I needed now was speed. The ocean air had opened my lungs and the Sprite opened my soul. I could breathe! One-hundred-eighty thousand miles had turned over somewhere in Maryland and I checked the odometer—now it was 180,311. I dialed all the old stations, tempted by nostalgia, but “indie” was all I came up with. Ha! More pissed off than ever, 1

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I saluted myself and reached for another big swallow. I held the Sprite out the window and hailed the filthy bay, the black sky gone blue, the lost stars. They were independents, all right. Until some gigolo in LA finds them and they’re doing spots for Verizon. I hit the gas again and slapped all around the seat for my phone but didn’t find it. One eye on the road, I rummaged in my bag, in the glove, and jammed my elbow onto my horn when, at eighty-five mph, I almost detonated a collie-mix on Cross Bay Boulevard. Enough, I decided. I wouldn’t phone-flame those artsie-fartsie little twerps, not give them the satisfaction. Tuesday, four AM on WNRT in East New York and no freakin’ Ramones? Who the hell do they think they are? Who do they think is listening? How alone was I? I had crossed out of Jersey only an hour earlier and was already within striking distance of New England—of Lizzie, my ex, and my two boys. My restraining order had expired months before and I couldn’t imagine Lizzie and the lawyers would renew it, seeing as they hadn’t heard from me since the fall. I sped up again in celebration and in her honor sang all the verses of “Rockaway Beach” and “The KKK Took My Baby Away.” Orient Point, where I was headed, was the place I gave up rock-and-roll guitar for good, fifteen years before, after I mistook Joey DiGennaro’s fridge in a bourboninspired blindness and pissed into the salad crisper. The Point was also the terminal for the New London ferry. I needed the nine AM, so I pushed the Corolla and even hit ninety-five until the road got bumpy and the old floozy with so many miles on her began to wobble. A half hour later the sun was up and I joined all the New York plates speeding east. I made time on the Sunrise Highway but weather was against me and everything overhead turned black again; the only colors on the horizon were the red and electric green of stop lights in a long perspective. A snarl of traffic stopped

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me a mile after Nageltown and I closed my eyes, suddenly winded by the lack of motion. It was the worst, this paralysis in the humidity, this long moment of traffic death. With my fist on the wheel, I leaned on the armrest and the window. I rubbed my eyes. I wanted, for the first time in days, to sleep. At last I got through Riverton. I rode like lightning up the ramp onto the LIE and over a hump and accelerated almost to a hundred on a sweet little downgrade. I had another swallow and decided it wasn’t so much the road as the Beefeater and Sprite that kept me alive and moving as long as the traffic was alive and moving and if I took just one swallow at a time. I had half the liter left and made several dozen more miles, checking my rearview for cops, pushing the time, watching the sky blossom like a black and yellow flower overhead. I had been thinking about the boys, about Lizzie with her saltand-pepper pigtails, her little smart-ass smile, her face freckled by the hot New England summer. I missed the way she screeched when I licked her or put my tongue in her ear. She howled for joy, too, in those days long ago, and I loved the blue mascara and the way she used to jump when she danced in her stripy tights and that little red-leather miniskirt with the rip in it. So I had another long gulp and the poisonous little sack behind my eyes began to secrete. I punched the wheel softly. I knew the treachery of sentiment too well, but I couldn’t wait to find out what Tommy had made of the network he built in the basement from the electronics he scavenged from Lizzie’s job— and Lucien, oh, Luciano, my sweet little eleven-year-old transvestite with the eyeliner and the ribbons in his long rose-colored hair. Had he grown out of it yet? I hadn’t done too well by them, but what I wanted now with all the mercury in my veins was to get home. Lizzie told me never to come back—true—and after I called Tommy from a truck stop in Virginia to tell him I was all right, the day after I left,

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she had the land line disconnected. But all this wasn’t entirely my fault. Her third abortion and her inability to even discuss it was what destroyed everything. The boys in school one October morning, we sat at Arzivian’s in Watertown, a sick day for her, and smoked at the back table. If there were no Puritans around Arzivian let the Armenians smoke inside and by then I was an honorary Armenian, by marriage, I guessed. Or by divorce. Lizzie put her Winston down on a plate. We watched the smoke uncoil like barbed wire through the window. “Only the first was thanks to me,” I said. “And this one. You were fine with the first.” “That was before Tommy and Lucien. I had no clue what it meant.” “I should never have told you about the second,” she said. “It was none of your business.” “How none of my business? What business is there of yours that’s none of mine? We were married fifteen years.” “Divorced for two,” she said. “Oh, stop that,” I said. “You need to get a decent job,” she said. She hissed it. “Define decent,” I said, hissing back. “Why don’t I take a job, you know, working for GE building nuclear power plants, huh? Or better, nuclear bombs. We could live in Weston. I went to a pretty good school, you know, for a while. Maybe I could become a lawyer, a corporate baby killer, hey!” “Don’t be an ass,” she said. “You need to pay bills. You couldn’t get in law school if your mother was the Virgin Mary.” “I pay bills.” “Not nearly enough. And you drink too much. You scare me.” “Did I ever hurt you?” “You hurt Tommy.” “Not much.” “More than you know,” she said, but I let it pass.

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“I’m against abortion,” I said. “Do I have any say? If I do, I think it’s murder. I’ve always always always been against it. My sister had an abortion and now she’s a drug addict.” “She was a drug addict before she had the abortion. That’s why she had the abortion.” “No.” “Yes.” “No.” “You have no say,” she said, then began to think it over. She lifted the cigarette. She said, “I was drunk.” She shook her head. She continued. “Bourbon is always a mistake. You put on Tom Waits and I fell for you all over again one stupid goddamn last time and you took advantage.” “I’m Italian!” I said, but she didn’t see the humor. The emptiness that followed was filled with gravity. “I’m Catholic, too, you may recall.” “More than you ever understood,” she said. “So are you,” I said. “Not now, not anymore.” She put the cigarette down. “What the hell does that mean?” I said, but we’d been over it enough times. “I don’t want you to do it,” I said. “First I want the ultrasound.” “Too bad.” “What if it’s a girl ?” I said. “Little toes. Little pink sneakers, ha? Sad, pretty little eyes, like yours. Freckles.” “Shit.” There was a long silence, than I said, “I’ll have to leave.” Lizzie surprised me then. She looked at me, not so much with sympathy as an effort to comprehend. The derision was momentarily gone. She tapped her ash onto the plate and I pushed an ashtray towards her but she ignored it. She had long ago given up on me and because nothing was left for me to do, the old frustrations ballooned up in me like the flames of the old furnace we

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could hear roaring, in January, in the tenement in Queens where we first lived together. And it was the same heat, the same oxygen sucked from Arzivian’s backroom, the same helplessness. I wanted to go, to get out, to leave by any means, to flip the table and slam the back door, to curse old Arzivian and his meatball sons on the way but I stayed too long, just as I had in Queens. I sat until I felt my throat inflate around my ears and I watched her eyes, behind them, really, the black curtain descending as she stared at me, the shadow only I recognized and which gave the mystery and sorrow to every gesture she made. I put my cigarette down. I put my hands on the table. I was helpless. The one girl I had loved in all my life, since I first saw her in the first grade at San Anselmo’s, wanted to butcher my baby daughter. “I’ll have to leave,” I said again. “I have to go.” Then she made the mistake. “If you go,” she said, “now, of all times, don’t come back. Ever. Don’t you ever come back.” She didn’t have to say that. I didn’t have to shove my chair aside and stand up either or pick up the fork. She didn’t have to scream. I only meant to point at her, to accuse her. Her hands were flat on the table, as if to hold it down. She stared up at me, at the monstrosity in its cage, with big eyes. By the time I put the fork back down, Arzivian had dialed 911. • • • It seemed I’d already been away forever. In March, I turned thirty-three, la edad de Jesús, as one of the Mexicans in Louisiana pointed out. Angel pronounced his name On-Hell and said “thus,” though it sounded more like “deuce”—and thus, he said, I was now at the age of complete responsibility. You would have thought Angel was an illiterate campesino to look at him, with his mud-colored eyes and his crumpled fedora sprouting blades of filthy straw, his stooped loopy-legged ambling back and forth

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between the Bobcat, the smoldering heap, and the trucks. He was no taller and no heftier than my tender little Lucien when I left Watertown. But one day, during a break in the shade of a dumpster, I caught Angel smoking a big lumpy reefer and reading the Bible in French: he had also learned Latin from the Jesuits. “The age of Jesus,” he reminded me every day for the first week after my birthday bender. He put his eyes down and his index finger up. “When you owe a perfect debt to your perfect truth,” he said slowly, seriously, pronouncing one word at a time, as if he’d been rehearsing all week. “And die for eet—hang on the cross if you need so but kneel to no one, only God. You are no more junior.” My thanks to him was to drive off at the end of August with his forty-weight crowbar in my trunk. To say good-bye, we partied one night under a big live oak next to a trash-filled bayou. Angel had a few shots with me and we both forgot he put the bar in back. It was hard to imagine the wiry old honchito without it, the way he worked that crowbar like a spear. Within twenty minutes by himself and with nothing more than that forty pounds of iron and a clawhammer, I saw him more than once slice and crumple a twenty-foot wall of siding, waterlogged plasterboard and metal studs into a carpet roll we then balanced on the Bobcat and lifted onto one of Mr. Segal’s trucks. He was like a man at war when he went to work and the steel in his little arms and the iron in that tool had the same dark patina I had learned to see in everything, the Louisiana sunset, the traffic going east and west on a rainy day, the deep shadows behind Lizzie’s eyes and my own inner hell hole when I lifted that fork at Arzivian’s. “Angel,” I said and passed him the tequila. “Why you work so hard?” He took a gulp and looked over at the opposite bank, his eyes following the question like some animal he saw slinking from tree to tree.

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“I don’t tell you,” he said. “Es complicated.” “You got family?” I said. He smiled at me then maybe for the first time ever and I noticed how big his ears got, how they opened like papery wings when he looked straight at you. What was left of his teeth appeared pointy and when he smiled an upper one touched the lower and his jaw muscles flexed. Then he put his lips together and I thought he’d whistle, but his eyes went moist. His face was as sharp and hideous as a vampire bat when he smiled with those eyes, those sharp teeth, those big papery wings. No wonder he never smiled. “Maybe someday,” he nodded. “I have a wife.” I drove off ten minutes later and left him snoring against the foot of the tree, his boots straight out in front of him, his mighty demo-weapon in my trunk. I coughed at his memory and peered out over the cold Long Island morning spreading in front of me like a sunlit swamp. I was glad I’d never have to hear it from him again and took a big three-swallow gulp of my Sprite in his honor. But my mood soured. So I took another swallow. I hit the gas. I hit the brakes. I swerved all over hell for the hell of it. I checked around for cops and accelerated again. The sun burned higher above the horizon and the sky behind me was backlit filth. To hell with New York City & State, I told myself, two polluted little rat holes, one tunneled deep inside the other. I was thankful I ditched them long ago. Ten miles on, 6:30 AM already, my one hope came with a sword of sunlight angled down from the east until the cloud moved in and swallowed the sword, its big belly hemorrhaging out over the horizon. Oh, rain! I rolled the window down and shouted at the humid wind whipping my face. I hated rain as much as I hated New Orleans, that brackish stench-and-mess, that grimy Southern smirk. I hated everybody. I hated my ex. I hated that old overeducated

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farmhand for his stooped piety and his ability to work on and on from before daylight way into dark, for that polished teak finger he always raised, pointing at the heavens when he lectured me. I hated the storm-glutted sky titled overhead and breaking apart like a block wall about to collapse. I even hated hating so much and the one thing that helped was to have another big drink. I had made a killing with Angel as my partner though and lived out of my car after that for three months in Jacksonville and Orlando. I drove keys of Panamanian from the Keys to Atlanta. I worked the construction sites, worked my tan, searched the beaches for those notorious little Florida high school girls. I’d saved an increasing bag of money, too, nearly $6,000 and still had almost twenty-five-hundred of it, even after an unlucky stopover in Atlantic City. I meant to get Lizzie the diamond I owed her for seventeen years but couldn’t get the one I wanted anymore. I wanted to bring the best diamond ever and was planning instead on a pair of minibikes for the boys, though I wanted them giftwrapped, tied in a wide gold ribbon, and sent ahead. But that would be a whole day’s work, to find out who sells minibikes near Watertown, Massachusetts, and pay for them and deliver them on time and the whole shit when what I really wanted was to get home to my boys—and my Lizzie. So I focused. I kept my metaphysical Joker in hand as I waved through traffic and toasted every pinhead I passed, but first and again I toasted my pretty little silver-eyed Armenian-American bride with the shadowy gaze, whether she would let me in the door or not, and my swarthy little wire-haired teenage networking wizard and his sweet little sister-brother in pink high tops. • • • I rolled up the window and lit my last joint. I checked all around again. Lightning sizzled somewhere north, over the Sound. I drove in a cloud of smoke for a good ways then rolled the window

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down and released the final shred of Zig Zag and ashes to the wind. Something was about to give. I could smell it, like ozone. A trooper flashed his blue-and-white on the westbound and I braked for a nanosecond. I crossed out of the fast lane but kept apace, accelerating with the erratic, too-fast traffic as my team and I—a racing-red Ranchero, a U-Haul with Iowa plates and another Toyota—made our way over a hilly patch and came onto a rise where I caught my first sighting of the baby-blue Mercedes off in the breakdown lane, no flashers on and a passenger door thrown wide. I hesitated at full velocity, as I had so often in my life and this time what stopped me—what forced me to stop— was an overhead light on inside the Mercedes. I can’t say how I noticed such a thing or how it counted. Maybe the dampness in the air and the darkness of the impending thunderstorm everywhere else gave the tiny glow a new measure. It was no surprise my eastbound cohort objected and the full din of Satan’s horn section filled the air as I swerved and braked, the gravel flying when I hit the shoulder. I looked in my mirrors at her one good headlight gaping at the asphalt. Her rearview was at the wrong angle and the overhead was now off. Above and behind her the first thunder let loose through the low clouds. It was full daylight for less than a second, then all at once the sky was black. I checked my watch. I double checked my mirrors. I put the Corolla in reverse and wheeled backwards twenty yards, my own red lights lighting my mirrors until that maladjusted headlight behind me disappeared under my ass end and I pulled within a yard of her. I fumbled under the seat for my phone but still didn’t find it. I checked the mirror on the street side one last time and figured it wasn’t too late to move back into traffic. Behind me, a curve and a rise in the highway screened the oncoming cars until one after another they exploded upon me, covering my windows with a wet curtain. I waited another second. Another bucket of rain

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swamped my wipers. I climbed across to the passenger side and out the door. I heard it right away, the girl’s lonely soliloquy. In some barbaric language she shouted and whimpered and screamed, and yet it had all the freakish intimacy behind those fogged windows of angry pillow talk. Then she rejected all that and howled even more loudly against all things, from the sound of it, against the wall of traffic, against rain, against me. I stood gaping at the inexplicable for who knows how long. Who was I to interrupt? Already the entire sequence had taken place in the middle distance, like déjà vu, as if I were too far away by now and had only glimpsed into a sideview in time to witness a secret roadside humiliation that had happened elsewhere, long ago: a belt raised against a girl kneeling in the grass, a man who shit himself during a fenderbender, a mother spit on by her son as I flew past at eighty-five. One second followed the next in the wrong order. A gush of rain drenched my shirt and I stood waking up in the cold before I could reach her, slipping on the gravel. But somehow she had locked her doors and put her windows up. This got us off on the wrong foot, I figured, seeing I had risked my own legs as well as a few others, turning out of traffic like that at the wrong moment. I slipped twice more going back and forth between our cars, trying to see what to do. Her windows were fogged on the inside. I wiped them with my sleeve but that had no effect. Along the rubber edges, I peeked in. I turned my head and whistled to her, hoping to put her at ease but then I glimpsed her in the back: her jeans and underwear were off and her knees up, her big blemished thighs swollen hog-wide and in between them she was huge, black and crimson distended into darkening layers, every variation of purple, pink and red forced partway out into a deeper color. I could barely see her face, though I saw she was a teenager. Her head and neck were bent against the door. She had a red hoodie down over her

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eyes and her chin in the zipper. A frazzle of hair dyed bright blue sprayed out on either side and I saw a corner of her mouth, but it was twisted and ugly, her rapid breathing deformed by pain and sudden heaving. Under her legs the blue upholstery was smeared with a thick lumpy muck. I turned away in time and reversed my last helpings of Sprite beside a tire. Holding her door handle, I emptied my stomach and rested, emptied and rested a few more times then turned back to her. I wiped the window again, again to no effect. I rapped the glass. In easy Southern, to sound friendly, I said, “Hey, y’all all right in there?” To get closer to her, I went around to the expressway side and watched the top of her hoodie as she began to toss sideways, wiping a clear wide stripe on the fog then rose away, pulled back into the mist as if by a rope. For a short eternity, she was silent. Before I could look in, the stripe fogged over. “Hey!” I said. “Are you okay?” She started in again. I heard more than I could see. I slapped the window hard with both palms. “I’m trying to help you.” She only screamed. “Stupid bitch,” I said, but I had to calm down. I circled the Mercedes, jerking the handles. Bitch! I said, not at her so much as the locked doors. When I looked in again, I saw she had pushed the hood off her head. At first, the back of her uncovered hair threw me. The bright blue mass looked fake, like a coil of synthetic rope squashed against the glass. A pair of raw knuckles worked the tangle and every half minute or so, like clockwork, another disembodied hand joined the first as each formed a fist and pulled. “Same to you, babe,” I said, and started down the road past the Corolla. Then, hopeless, I turned around and said, “No hard feelings.” I paced in the ditch. The traffic accelerated past. I searched up and down the slope for a rock big enough to put through the

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window. Where was my phone? I checked my pockets and went back to the Corolla and ransacked the glove and my jacket again. I knelt on my seat and tried to reason out a plan but my frontal lobes had gone cold, so I bumped my head on the roof as I took another big drink. I ran back through rain to her. I rested my forehead on her window, her hair and mine separated by an eighth inch of shatterproof. Please? I said and put my nose nearer to her. Far off inside the gray, the silhouette of a foot in a small, red sock appeared and vanished, pushing on nothing. What could I do for her? Why not just drive off? To me she had no name, no face. She was only a pair of hands squeezed tight, a red sock, wild swatch of blue hair, the ruined upholstery in back of some clown’s Mercedes. But I had to help her. I had no choice in this but to give her all I had. My money, my car, my wallet, my keys, anything. If only she’d open a door. As if I had endured an entire life for this moment and the moment was sealed off. Why was everything impenetrable to me? Was this the one thing I had left to ask? For her to reach behind her head and pull that little blue button? “Open the door!” I said. I might have flagged someone down but the cars rose out of the hill and were gone before I saw them, each a pair of headlights and an icy spray. I went to my trunk and popped it, as I had ten million times in the last eight months, looking for anything, some hint or gift or miracle and there was Angel’s big crowbar lying under a pile of dirty clothes. What happened next came in fast-forward. I moved like the Hulk and saw him reflected in glass. I short-armed the blow and her death-seat window whooshed and warped like a blanket pulled from its tuck, striating into a sticky fabric. I knew what to do, sort of, and moved fast; I struck again and again and lifted the bar and ran it in half circles, leaving a jagged crust around the seal. Now she saw me. Now I saw her, her eyes in pain as she stared into nothing, her face childish and flat, almost concave,

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like a pink saucer, and her eyes blue porcelain, a color somewhere between the car and her hair. Something about her mouth was defensive and precise in its intention, her lips tight over her teeth, as if she were determined above all to hide them. Her hands overhead formed two fists, but the melodramatic huffing that followed cancelled whatever notion she had for saving herself from me. I turned and with both hands dropped Angel’s forty-weight into the grass. I opened the door, put in a knee and stopped to look at her red socks, her splotchy shins, her big bare thighs. Her jaw, in stiff motion, rubbed a loose pair of drawstrings as she over and over muttered something I couldn’t hear. A long earring, tangled in her hair, moved sideways along her shoulder as she began again to shudder and push. She was quiet, then noisy. Once she threw her shirttail between her legs, out of propriety maybe—or defiance—but pulled it right up again, showing me the infant’s narrow throat and the small alien head squeezed out like convoluted toothpaste, the round top of him almost at the point of touching the seat; his face was elongated enough to be meaningless and his upper lip, designed to suck, was tapered to a swollen inverted V. His skin was marbled red and purple and blue in splotches as he turned an ear the size of a nickel toward the roof. An eye was a slit facing the windshield. His small shoulders squeezed almost together as he skidded out of her. “Otyebis! ” she said, surprising me with the one Russian word I knew, though I forgot what it meant. She opened her eyes and I could see the whites in a circle around her pupils. “Vali otsyuda. Pliiiz, pliiiiz, pliiiiiiz! ” “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here.” But she began to thrash. “Pliz! ” she said again and I realized she meant please. “Oh, hold on,” I said. “You got a cell phone? I can’t find mine. I think I lost it, I don’t know, on the boardwalk.”

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She turned her flat dumb teenage face to me and I made a fist, stuck out my pinky, and put my thumb to my ear. “Telephone?” I said. I pointed at her. “You gots?” “Nyet! ” she said and began to bang her head on the door and chuckle in frustration. “Otyebis! Eh? Vali otsyuda! ” I had no more ideas, but as soon as I saw the keys in the ignition, I climbed over the handbrake. Instead of making decisions, I was following orders from somewhere else long ago, as if I had once been in training for this. I put the mirror right. I checked the sideview. I put my foot on the brake and turned the key. The engine popped and a blue feather of smoke appeared in three mirrors. I said nothing and thought nothing but heard myself like someone better, someone honorable and sober making promises. I nudged the gas again and the car hacked and died. More rain came through the hole. I switched the wipers on. I waited a second, and then another; I unlocked the driver’s door and stepped out and ran crouching to the Corolla and reached in for my liter. Standing half in rain, the driver’s door open, cars going past, you understand how alone you are. I had a long galloping swallow and raised my drink to the rain. I said a brief, wordless prayer, only a nod really, with eyes closed, a recognition that Something deserved thanks and my whole spirit surfaced somewhere warm and dry. I felt Someone’s cupped hands holding my heart, Her eyelashes closed around my face; in Her I could see the stratus and the pink cumulus above the drapery of rain and the blue behind the stars. I could see the whole intent, the whole trajectory and how it made a kind of purposeful nonsense. Monsignor Gallagher at San Anselmo’s had said it long ago. We were all seated and had received the ashes. Like Angel, he raised a finger. He said, “Your one hope is that you are all completely void of hope.” Lizzie was there, too, or should have been. “Your one hope,” I repeated, and raised the liter and took another long drink until at last it was

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weightless. I toasted no one then and repeated aloud something I’d heard somewhere: only thieves are fit to judge, only the dying to live. I stepped back then and sent the plastic bottle in a perfect spiral toward the treetops and down into the weeds. Back in her driver’s seat, I crossed myself, certain this was the best thing I’d ever done. I double checked the mirrors, this time drowning the motor in gas. The motor raged and a sequence of cars answered going past. I put the radio on. Someone said vladimiri glaznosti stolichnaya vladimirovich or something like it, and I punched the radio back to silence. I eased the transmission up. I closed my eyes. I stomped the gas. Blood or oxygen or gin or rain lit the inside of my head and I turned in time, remembering my Corolla a few feet in front. I opened my eyes and we swung into the middle of the LIE where the motor cut out. The girl was out of her mind. She had no confidence in me at all. Several times we rolled to a stop and each time I turned the key again and again we lurched ahead. A semi blared and I waved back. We dodged a bouncing boat trailer but I kept our motor alive and we made progress, the three of us. At intervals on the highway, syncopated by rain, the Horns of Hell came alive again and again in surround-sound. The rain in layers across the windshield, the shower through the gap, the traffic like ghosts in flight wailing past, I only wished Lizzie could see me. That was all I’d ever wished for. I only asked her to see. Soon I was next to bored. The motor killed and I brought it back to life over and over as suburban New York scraped past the mirrors. I failed to get our speedometer over twenty and almost parked right there and got out and flipped them all a pair of birds. Instead I spun the dial until I had Marvin Gaye doing “Let’s Get It On” and put the volume to the sky as we belched our way down between the lines. We drove like that for an eternity, leaping to twenty-five at last, when I realized I should be on the shoulder.

A Deeper Color

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At exit 62, I put us in neutral and when the motor cut out, I laid off the brakes. We rolled downhill with no power steering and I thanked almighty FEMA for those months driving Mr. Segal’s musclebound dump trucks. Underneath Marvin the sound of rolling rubber gained speed on the asphalt. Just past the stop sign, I pulled a quick U-turn that bumped us over a sidewalk, over two curbs and halfway into the lot of an Exxon station. I put it in park, turned the key again, again stomped the gas and pushed it into drive. We bucked and heaved and stopped. With the rain pouring down like water from a hose, the radio loud, and the perfect hush behind me now of mother and child, an attendant by the pumps in his yellow slickers ducked out and stepped towards me. “Hey!” I shouted. “I need an ambulance!” • • • The trooper came steadily toward us, through steady rain. I turned the radio off and rolled the window down. The butt of his right hand on his holster, he waved at me with the other and looked in. In my rearview the infant, laid out naked in the soup, clawed the air with his little arms and jerked the cord with a foot. I wanted to say, “You’re safe now, honey,” but the chill went through me like a knife. I looked at the cop. He looked at me. I wanted to vomit, but was too exhausted to open the door. “What’s the matter, sir?” he said. Under the brim two dark eyes went left and right. He seemed stupid at first, with his big Smoky Bear hat under a shower cap, his monumentally pockmarked face, the rain streaking his short sleeves. Over a pocket was a nametag: Sgt. Rocco Catania. “Paisano,” I wanted to say. “You have eyes?” But he had already come alive, noting the bashed window and the seats in a thick lather of blood, mucus, and glass. “I stopped to help her,” I said. “My car is up on the expressway.”

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“Please step out and away from the door,” he said. “And put your hands on your head.” I remembered why I hated cops, especially the troopers on Long Island. His elbow was still cocked, his fist on his weapon as he watched, making room for me to get out. I leaned the door open, put a foot on the asphalt and stood, the world reeling at such heights. I considered telling him I was acrophobic. I put my hands on my head. I counted, swallowing three times. Then I turned and puked. “She had a baby,” I said when I was done. I wiped my mouth. I repeated, “She had a baby. I don’t know her. She broke down up there and had it—that baby—in the back. I think we need an ambulance. I think we need an ambulance right away.” The attendant, behind the trooper, gestured to move, but stopped. “You don’t know her?” the sergeant said. “I live in Boston,” I said. “I was driving to Orient for the nine AM ferry. I saw her in the breakdown lane.” He looked at me for forever. “The ferry leaves at nine,” I said, in case he hadn’t heard, but he turned his face to the radio on his shoulder. Almost before he signed off, the first big ambulance moved in like a tank. He put his free hand up and wiggled two middle fingers. He said, “License?” Thank God my wallet was in my pocket. “What happened to that window?” he said. “No clue,” I said. “That’s how I found her.” The sergeant examined the license. I put my hands back on my head. Already two EMTs had squeezed in back when the baby boy cried. His voice seemed hoarse and sore, but he didn’t sound ungrateful. He called out, like a distressed animal, a baby goat or a toad shouting for its own. I wanted to go see him but again the sergeant put a hand up.

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“Don’t move, sir,” he said. My back was soaked, my shirt stuck to my neck and inside it the cold ran down and down. I shivered and tried to stop blinking. My arms and my chest were hot and ached but my neck was ice spattered by rain. Two more EMTs appeared, forming a wall of uniforms. The sergeant took his time. “Spinelli?” he said at last. “Your name is Spinelli?” “Yes,” I said. “You know any Spinellis in Queens?” “Yeah,” I said. “I do.” “You know Frankie Spinelli?” “I know his cousins.” “And his brother John?” I didn’t know if I should lie about Johnny. “And little Gerard,” I said. “Gerard?” “Gerard.” He smiled like all this meant something. Then he pointed a finger at me, a warning not to move, and went to the Mercedes. Between the cruiser and the ambulances a dozen red, white and blue strobe lights discolored the cars and the clouds as he leaned in to ask questions I couldn’t hear. When he was done, he held my license up between a thumb and a finger and waved it at me, like an Ace of Hearts. He carried it over to the cruiser and got in. My hands on my head, I had nothing left but to listen to the new kid. I heard traffic moving in front and behind. Farther off I could hear the loud noise of birds in the trees. The rain seemed a feast for them, so I listened as the rain hit the asphalt and the windshields, to the infant baa-baaing under his roof, and somewhere else not too far away, the noise of birds. Now and then a two-way squawked. Crowded together, in around the Mercedes, the EMTs bustled in and out of the cramped seat and I wondered if there were woods behind me. I didn’t know birdsong

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from birdseed but I imagined I could hear jackdaws and sparrows and robins and a million jenny wrens off in the rain-soaked leaves banqueting as if they were all close in around me and I remembered something Tommy taught me one afternoon as we sat in the yard watching his mother pull weeds. I had mentioned how everything seemed close to me then, too, at that moment: the Corolla, the neighbor’s house, the sky. Tommy stood and kicked his lawn chair to straighten it and sat down again to give me a long description of what he knew about light and sound and how they travel through the damp atmosphere, in the rain. When the sergeant summoned me, I went to the cruiser and recited the number of my plates. He returned the license. I hesitated, then put my hands back on my head. “It’s about two hours to Orient Point,” he said. “You’ll miss the boat.” He jabbed at something under his dashboard, a small console, for a long time, before he spoke again. “Where exactly is your car, ha? Up there?” he said, and pointed past me. I nodded. “Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Stay away from the girl.” I wasn’t sure how to answer. “I recommend you get yourself a meal,” he continued. Again, he looked down. “And a strong cup of coffee. There’s a diner right here on Sunshine Boulevard, the Café Reggio. It’s only a mile. I suggest you walk. You can’t miss it. The marquee is big as a house.” He shouted when I turned to go, but I didn’t turn around. “Eh! Spinelli!” he said. “You can put your hands down.” But I kept my fingers on my hair, for the sake of balance.

The Slaughterhouse

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fter Dad got promoted to VP for accounting, he said even less to Mom and me. Now and then, if he’d had a third Dewar’s after work, he would make pronouncements from the head of the table in his bright white shirt and striped tie. Once, he passed me the carrots and pointed to my brother, Sam. He said that for a man to be happy, he had to work with his hands. Dad was a Protestant, like everyone else on our street. Mom claimed she was related to Spinoza. Mostly the Jews stayed several blocks east, although, by 1969 in Queens, that hardly mattered. Who trusted anybody? After the nightly news, our dinners only became sufferable when Mom learned to shut her mouth. Sam, who was almost old enough for the draft, sided with Dad. One wrong word from any of us as we passed the lamb or the ribs and the silence came down like a metaphysical meat cleaver. I kept away as much as possible. After classes I went straight to Holland Park where a few girls from Saint Theresa Ávila, the Catholic high school, hung out by the courts. Jimmy Brosnan always arrived before me with his basketballs, a flask of Christian Brothers brandy and a Marlboro box crammed with joints he sold for a dollar each. Those girls liked to get a little juiced and sometimes Jimmy and I invited two or three of them under the 21

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trees in back of the fence. Noreen Dobbins, with the long wavy hair and the freckles, stopped me once as I pressed her against the chain-link and asked me about Sam—Samuel Frydman Kane, as she called him—with a coy smile. I told her to forget him, he was a loser. “He’s too old for you,” I said. “Besides, he’s always miserable.” But she craved details. “Why miserable?” she said. “Where is he on the weekends? He has a girlfriend? He can use the car?” If I gave a few answers, I could kiss her again and touch her here and there. It was a bargain for both of us, but girls like Noreen never went out with me. They liked me for my connections to Sam and Brosnan, or for hanky-panky behind the fence, but nothing more. I was good in school but not in basketball. I always had a battered anthology of poems under my arm or in my jacket. I was only a freshman and besides, I already had a girlfriend, a French girl named Isabel DuValle who lived a block from the park. Isabel was a sophomore at St. Theresa’s too, with a devastating accent and eager green eyes. She invited me to go with her and her mom to French movies in the city. She got me into parties of college kids her sister knew and necked with me in the corner. Isabel never asked about Sam, but I knew by the way he cast his eyes down when I mentioned her that he was jealous. For this, I couldn’t understand him. He was taller than me and better looking and had been the point guard on the varsity basketball team until he quit to spend all his afternoons with his physics homework, or to help Dad refinish the basement. Sometimes on the weekend the two of them stayed up running a Skilsaw and hammering till three AM, which pissed me off and had to piss off the neighbors. Sometimes I shouted in at him as I went out the door on a Saturday morning, “What’s the matter with you?” He just looked at me and said, “What the hell is the matter with you?”

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On my fifteenth birthday, Dad bought himself a red pickup truck with an American flag decal on the windshield and a giant silver toolbox bolted to the bed. Two months later, he bought seven acres in west Jersey. I partied with Isabel and her friends more and more, overdoing it a time or two on an afternoon, although no one at home noticed. Mom had become skittish and self-contained, endlessly searching the pages of her gardening books. Dad taught Sam to drive, traveling to Jersey and back every Saturday and Sunday to check the progress of contractors or to work. Sometimes when the weather was good they slept over in the new house. Easter Sunday of my junior year, Dad delivered another of his dinnertime edicts and we moved to the country. They became a fresh, thriving new family, the three of them. Mom put in a quarter-acre of vegetables and sweet corn. She and Dad and Sam planted dozens of apple and pear trees. They built a hen house. On the weekends Dad and Sam built and poured a foundation for the barn while I hid in my new bedroom with my harmonica and a copy of the Portable Chekhov. Mom disappeared into the basement the day Sam decided to accept a job with a furniture maker in New Hope and defer, for a second year, his scholarship to Rensselaer Polytech. Nothing more was ever said about it. In New Jersey, nothing improved for me. I missed Jimmy Brosnan’s Colombian Red and the Catholic girls. I missed Isabel, who had gone back to Paris. According to her last letters, she and her mom were giving wild parties while her dad was away on business. I missed the nights at Holland Park, which had become a popular spot for musicians in warm weather. My only hope was that Mom or Dad or someone would see their mistake. Sooner or later they had to, I was sure. Then, in the fall, Sam got the idea to raise pigs. They already had the huge freezer in the basement when Sam and Dad went out one evening and settled on a corner behind the orchard for

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the pen. The next Saturday morning the two of them came into my room, forced me out of bed, and put me to work. Sam measured and cut the forms. A flock of crows ridiculed my muddy rubber boots from the branches above as I pounded stakes and mixed icy water, Sakrete and gravel in the wheelbarrow. When he had everything level and had poured the slab, Sam ran inside and called the lumber yard to order a dozen oak posts, 150 feet of heavy-gauge mesh, and 200 cinder blocks. He went about all this with a kind of mute authority I despised. In the afternoon I watched from the kitchen window as he went back and forth from the garage through the orchard with a big wooden toolbox or a sledgehammer in his fist, and my hatred expanded with every step he took. With his new tool belt, his Redwing lace-ups and his new muscles, he had transformed overnight from a strange city kid to a phony redneck— the charade reached its asinine perfection in the afternoon when he called the farmer next door and told him he wanted to raise pigs. The old Pole laughed so loud that Mom and I, sitting at the table, heard him through the phone. Sam blushed and turned from us. He explained he had already poured the slab for a pen. Mr. Poniatowsky hung up but called right back, his voice loud; he was excited and yelling half in Polish. He had a boar a neighbor had been after for his sow. If we two big strong boys could get the boar into his truck and over to Maggie, Mr. Poniatowsky would give us his cut of the litter. An hour later, Sam trailed Mr. Poniatowsky as he hobbled around his barnyard waving his hands and shouting about how to move this pig he called Brezhnev. I leaned my chin on the Dutch door and stared into the pen and figured I had more in common with the massive, porcine stud than with those two clowns. Something bestial and at the same time pitifully human about him affected me. How had he survived all these years from one bucket of slops to another? Had he dreamed of suicide? He was

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in a fix, you could see it in his bloodshot little pig eyes and I knew why Mr. Poniatowsky called him Brezhnev. Something bright and huge and harsh lived behind his swollen cheeks. As he peered out of his pen at me, I saw in him a depth of wounded pride, and the sweetness of despair. Early Sunday morning, when Sam threw open the gate, Brezhnev sat up, confused, embarrassed, exposed by our flashlights. Straight out in front of him, his legs were short, shapely and naked—childish, like a midget chorus girl’s. He looked down at his filthy hooves, as if we had caught him sleeping in his dancing shoes. He blinked at us and made some gruff noises, as if to say, “What? Whatdidja wake me for?” With lots of yelling and waving by Mr. Poniatowsky, Sam backed the truck in. Sam and Mr. Poniatowsky needed all morning to assemble the chute down into the pen. I tried to help, but the project was tedious. “Why don’t we pull in right next to the door?” I said. “Then the three of us grab Brezhnev by his feet and his ears and heave him into the truck.” Mr. Poniatowsky appeared not to understand. Sam hadn’t even stopped banging, so I sat down on a bale of straw with a book, The Art and Essence of Things, by Magnus Längenskiold, and ate a banana out of the lunch Mom had packed us. In chapter one, there was a comparison of paintings of women by Botticelli and Chagall and after a while I looked up to see a slender pine with its trunk bowed, bellied out gracefully and leaning against a fence. This seemed notable to me, so I yelled, interrupting the noise of Mr. Poniatowsky’s hammer. I pointed at the tree. “Doesn’t that tree look like a pregnant woman?” I said. Both Sam and Mr. Poniatowsky stared over at the hedge, then back at me. “You are such an idiot,” said Sam. Mr. Poniatowsky went back to work. Sam stared at me too long, as if I were a stranger who had just walked uninvited into the

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yard. I took out my Hohner and ignored him. I studied the little diagram of chords that came in the box. Soon Mr. Poniatowsky called Sam and they were at it again with the sledgehammer as I worked my tongue between the reeds, blowing and sucking with all my heart. A minute later I had failed to find a decent note and put it away. I sat a long time. I soaked up the cold sunlight. I got my book out again and stared at the pictures. I closed my eyes and dreamed I was climbing that strange tree and then about halfway up, in rocking chairs high on a branch, I encountered Isabel, her sister and her mom. “Why did you leave us this way, alone in the septième arrondissement ?” they complained as they rocked, swinging the incoherent branches of the dream. When they were ready, Sam kicked me awake. In a state of confusion I went up over the cage and down into the sty. All three of us in his pen now, Brezhnev started in a circle. From deep in his jowls came a colossal rumble, traveling like the radius of a small earthquake. Once he had momentum, he began to huff and chant something like, “No you don’t, no you don’t, no you don’t.” “C’mon, Brezhnev!” said Sam as he turned to the boar and spread his arms, as if he were his Uncle Sasha. “Let’s go get Maggie!” But the pig saw what a faker Sam was, standing there, ankledeep in shit. Brezhnev went faster and foamed at the mouth. He was something out of Picasso: the octagonal snout punctured with two brutal holes, his ridiculous jowls, his forehead, eyes and ears all slanted too far forward. Sam told me to grab him and when I gave him the look, he implied with a gesture that I was no better than a schoolgirl. I had read enough of Tolstoy and Turgenev to see his point. Sam and the circulating Brezhnev had the weight of history behind them—this was my moment. If I were too weak to take this death ride, would I ever have enough balls to live? Why had Isabel stopped writing to me? Maybe there was something elemental I had failed to prove to her as well. So I leaped into

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Brezhnev’s path and like an anvil he hit me at the knees. I went down, my arms and face into the liquid dark. Sam didn’t even laugh and I knew why. For all his posing, he wasn’t Johnny Redneck or a farm boy or a carpenter. He was a half-Jewish kid from Queens who won the high school math and physics award two years in a row. If he had any sense at all, he should have been into his second year of an engineering degree from RPI. Too weak to kill him, I just looked at him and he looked back. “Who are you pretending to be?” I shouted, but he had already left the pen with Mr. Poniatowksy. The farmer returned from his house with one of his wife’s sour-smelling dishrags in each of his ham-sized fists. Once I was cleaned up, he passed in a long heavy plank and ordered us to stand abreast with it in front of our legs as we forced Brezhnev toward the chute, levering the plank against the studs and reducing the space until there was nowhere for him to go. Finally, we had him pinned against the gate. His teeth were a few inches from mine so I could smell his hot, sweet-and-sour breath. He twisted his eyes away from Mr. Poniatowsky and looked directly at me, as if to say, “What next?” “I don’t know,” I told him. “I don’t know what comes next.” “Maggie,” said Sam. “Maggie comes next.” • • • I named the piglets Scruffy, Tuffy, Doughy, and Lancelot. When they arrived at the age of six weeks, each was the size of a grown house cat, but muscular and hard-driving, focused in a way no house cat ever was. Right away Lancelot discovered where he could drive under the fence and force it up, though Sam caught him just as he got the hole big enough to break out. We stacked a dozen cinderblocks on the fence as a quick fix and later, when we brought them the after-dinner slops, found all four at work under another corner like a crew of gold-fevered miners. They greeted

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us with howls of solidarity. They grunted and swore and pushed each other away, each to prove he was more driven than the next. Lance snorted and in his East Orange accent told me they were working-the-goddamn-fence-until-they-could-bust-their-assesout-of-this-miserable-joint, as if unaware I was his warden. He repeated himself over and over and muzzled the fence and looked up and in his eyes I could see that terrible desire to be understood, to make his point until we could see it. Sam right off jumped the fence and grabbed two of them. He yelled at me but I hesitated. He yelled again and I climbed over and caught the others one by one and tossed them into the hut. While I stood in the doorway to block their way out, Sam lifted the ramp, a long fortified plywood sheet, and we fitted it over the opening. With a combination of cinderblocks and concrete nails we closed them up and went back into the house while they called out to us from within. Early the next day, Sam returned from the lumberyard and got me out of bed. We dug a foot-deep trench in the mud around and under the fence. The pigs screeched behind the blocks. We mixed ten more big bags of concrete and shoveled it into the trench and reset the mesh and stakes before Sam rushed off to work. I went back in and showered and without breakfast ran out to catch the rural school bus. When I came home in the afternoon the concrete had set enough that though the pigs had broken out of their hut, they hadn’t gotten under the fence. I climbed over again and had them all about my feet, stepping on my toes with their sharp tiny hooves and staring up into my face for some explanation. I pulled down the remaining blocks and pulled out the nails and laid the plank back up into the doorway. I gave them an extra scoop of feed and Mom filled the bucket with slops again and they charged through their meal. That afternoon, like most afternoons, I was alone. I hid in my bed with my homework, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for

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Sam. I really had no one else, no friends in that place, though there was Mr. Cornac, a French and English teacher who encouraged me to read the craziest things. I had gotten through much of the Bible, astonished by the cruelty in Maccabees and Job, the sexiness of the Song of Solomon, the ruthlessness of Jesus, the B-movie Acts of the Apostles and the open-hearted hatred of the Jews in the Gospel of John. Mr. Cornac gave me a long list in alphabetical order. I read some of Abelard, Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine. I had been studying French obsessively without letting on to anyone, especially Sam, and memorized whole sections of Les Fleurs du Mal. Isabel had been back in France seven months already, but she haunted me so persistently that I lay in my bed until the dim evening light darkened my room, repeating to myself the way she pronounced plaisir. I sat at the window and imagined her hands and her sharp eyes hovering near me and the sweet taste of her as I peered out my curtains into the warm west Jersey darkness. I went down into the livingroom for a few minutes but the TV shows were idiotic and the news terrible. Reading so much had only aggravated a dim anxiety, like a low-grade fever, that life, real life in the world around me, in the fields and woods or in the city, which was unreachable to me now, was racing past. These west Jersey girls, once they got to know me a little, wanted nothing to do with me. Sam treated me like a slave, but at least he distracted me; he forced me to get out in the mud, out in the warm fragrant air. Otherwise, up in my room, I was in Baudelaire’s purgatory, waiting for suffering to begin. I wanted the grim winter Paris. I wanted to sit in cafés with prostitutes, to find Isabel again somewhere on the Left Bank and seduce her with lurid poems, to sit in some seedy bar in a silk scarf and a tunic and touch her knees as we kissed and sipped absinthe. A couple of times I went into the kitchen and stared at the phone, but there was no one to call. The few kids I knew at school treated me like a retard. Nothing I said made sense to them. If I

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said, “I liked this French girl named Isabel,” they looked at me like I had blown my nose on my shirt. If I asked a stupid question— “Do you think Betsy Taylor would go out with me?”—it was as if every door in the high school had slammed shut. Maybe that was why I loved those pigs so much. They were like city people in their undaunted noise and foolishness—they were philosophers and holy fools compared to the semi-suburban, semi-rural princes and princesses of west Jersey. They were aggressive and rude and passionate and warm. They understood that in a certain light we are all hopeless creatures and that the loss of such self-knowledge is the basis for despair. They were only pigs but they made sense to me. They were like the kids I had gone to PS 24 with. I fell asleep before dinner. The rain on the window woke me in the middle of the night. It rained all day. I waited for Sam to come home early from work, but he didn’t arrive. In the afternoon I put on a raincoat and went out and found the pigs having a circus. I had no idea how they got it started—maybe one slipped down the wet ramp into the mud. Now they took turns. They were all inside the hut when Lancelot charged out and leaped into the air, hit the slick ramp on his backside and slid down into a chute of mud and flew twenty feet before he crashed into the fence on the far end. Scruffy did the same and ran back inside, followed by the others in a sequence that went faster and faster. They competed, they jeered each other—you can hear the same noises in the cheap seats of Shea Stadium. One time, Lancelot bounced off the fence with such force he completed an entire flip. I praised them too—one after another they ran over to me and gestured, jerking their little pink snouts up at me. My loneliness and envy of everyone—Isabel in Paris, my brother on his job site, my enemies at the high school who were probably drunk and racing around the slippery back roads in pickup trucks and station wagons, my friends who were finishing their last year of high

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school together in Queens, even these poor doomed piglets—got the better of me. With tears of self-pity in my eyes, I showed them each a fist as symbol of my misdirected love, as encouragement to them. I said, “Sure, Scruffy, yeah, Lance—you’re the balls. You’re number one.” • • • The pigs got bigger. I should have done something about the bulge in the fence which got bigger too and rounder and lower until one warm Saturday, when I was asleep in a lawn chair, all four broke through into the garden. Within minutes the potatoes had come out of the dirt in bucketfuls. The pole beans were flattened, tomatoes smeared into the dirt. Mom woke me when she came screaming out of the house. Sam had just pulled in from work and we both ran out into the yard. The ducks scrambled into the henhouse. The chickens, even the roosters, were all on the henhouse roof. Scruffy was caught in the fence but the others stayed out. Doughy and Tuffy had driven their snouts deep into the dirt but both looked up with an astonished expression at me as we ran toward them. Sam cursed me, blaming me as he leaped over the tomatoes. Doughy went out from under him and off through the lettuce. I ran the other way but Tuffy was already on his way down to the pond. I went after him, not sure what to do with him even if I could get my arms on him. He was the size of a large dog by now, but ten times as dense in bone and muscle, with more street-smarts, his lower teeth like the blade of a jigsaw. I chased him around the pond three times, but he howled and ran past me. Sam went the other way after him but each time I came upon Tuffy he leaped past me. I threw rocks and sticks in Doughy’s direction but he just screamed and ran off. We chased them all afternoon, their noise the worst I’d ever heard. It was the cry of murder and injustice. It was an

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embarrassment: every neighbor for miles around had to know. We went in and Sam called Mr. Poniatowsky for help and he laughed so loudly we all heard him again through the receiver. After the sun was gone, Sam and I gave up. We sat outside and watched the shadow of Lance slide repeatedly into the pond. Tuffy stayed with his face down on the warm dirt under the porch. Doughy rooted aimlessly beyond the yard. The moon sat like a stranded child in the darkening branches of Mr. Poniatowsky’s woods. This was my fault—I had neglected to fix the fence—and I was at Sam’s mercy. By some instinct, I had to attack his contempt for me as directly as possible, provocation being its only remedy. I scanned the yard again for the pigs. I looked at Sam. “At the Sea of Galilee,” I said, “Jesus drove the evil spirits out of two madmen into a herd of swine.” In answer now to the insulting expression he made, I had no choice but to go on. “The swine turned wild,” I said. “They spoke in tongues, they rolled in shit, they foamed at the mouth and fought till they bled, behaving more and more like madmen until they drove themselves off a cliff into the waves.” For effect I made a descriptive gesture with my hand, an arc that in the end pointed at the pond, but Sam wasn’t watching. “And that farmer wasn’t even pissed,” I said. “He ran into town and told everyone and everyone came out to follow Jesus. I guess Jesus might not have sympathized much, passionate rabbi that he was. That farmer wasn’t exactly kosher. What was he going to do with all those pigs anyway? Milk them? Make cheese?” “You are an asshole,” Sam said. A short silence followed. Sam spit once, twice. He looked around for Tuffy. I took out my Hohner and picked out a few notes of “Oh, Susannah.” When I was satisfied I put it away and said, “If your mother is Jewish, that means you’re Jewish, too.” “Says who?” he said. He tossed a pebble at my shirt. “Besides, shut up.”

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“More or less everybody. I read it in—” “Shut up,” he said. He was thoughtful a moment, then said, “It’s embarrassing to have a brother who wastes his time talking the way you do. It really is.” He was quiet another moment. I thought of several answers. “Jesus,” he said, before I spoke. “You embarrass me. See those pigs over there. That’s ’cause of you.” “So what?” I said. “Who cares about your stupid pigs?” “Hey,” he said. “Have you ever asked yourself why it’s so annoying to have you around? You know why? It’s the way you talk. And you know it, too. You do it on purpose. To annoy. Because you are a pathetic loser and have nothing else to do.” “I go to school,” I said. “I do my homework.” He stayed next to me but said nothing more. A light, then another, had come on in the house. What difference did any of it make? He would be going off to work in the morning whether the pigs were in or not. I would be off to Brandeis University outside Boston in the fall whether the pigs were in or not. As always, Dad stayed upstairs in his study. Once he put the roof on his barn, he took little interest in anything that went on around the house. He had even begun to avoid Sam. When Mom finally came out, it was almost too dark to see her walking with her bucket past the pear trees and over to the pen in her big rubber boots. Like ghosts, the pigs appeared out from the hedge, from behind the henhouse, out of nowhere. They followed her like she was the saint who had come to lead them satisfied and exhausted into Paradise. With flashlights Sam and I relinked the fence and poured more concrete and put up another sheet of plywood. He drove nails to hold the sheet in place until the concrete set. In the dark, after we had gone in, Mom stayed out in her rubber boots and rubber gloves with the flashlight, burying the potatoes and carrots again, restringing the beans, saving what she could of her damaged garden.

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• • • In the fall, when I returned from Brandeis for Thanksgiving, I learned that Sam’s number had come up fifty-sixth in the lottery— though he hadn’t heard from the draft board yet, he would soon, for certain. Dad was at work or upstairs. From another room, as if eavesdropping on another dimension, I overheard Mom whispering excitedly that Sam had to enroll right away in a college. He had to at least get his applications in for the spring. In case things change, she said. Just in case it makes a difference. Sam said, no. He didn’t want to go to college. Besides, he said, it was too late. She continued to encourage him, in a voice that was quieter, more desperate, more difficult for me to understand. Sam answered in the same way. It was, he said again and again, too late. It was too late in another way as well—the pigs were overly large, two months older than was ideal, but Mr. Poniatowsky had called and made arrangements for the Friday after Thanksgiving. I worked my way through the emotions as I might have with a problem in freshman calculus. I convinced myself it would be all right—it was the right thing. Animals were raised to a purpose and we had no choice but to fulfill it. Besides, my life was elsewhere now. I could have avoided the entire thing, except that I had been there at their conception. They had been, for much of a year, my best company. I had to follow them as far as I could. I might have left the last of this to Sam—I had a plane to catch at six in Newark the next morning, but maybe because I imagined it made no difference to him whether I came along or not, I had to go. It was something I would never have another chance to finish. We didn’t feed them in the morning. Mr. Poniatowsky drove his truck over the frozen ground and we all pounded the chute quickly into place this time. We dumped a small amount of silage on the bed of the truck. I had to get in and give Lance a sniff of

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an apple and toss it up the ramp. He started tentatively into the chute and I got right behind him and shoved. Lance raised holy hell but Sam came behind me and in a minute the pig was up in the bed ripping into his late breakfast. Tuffy came next. He gave us a half-hearted struggle but went right up after Sam pushed him. The others ran up as if afraid of getting left behind. Dad came out and looked in at the pigs and slapped Mr. Poniatowsky on the back and thanked him for everything. The two of them laughed about something I didn’t get. Mom stayed in the kitchen. I brought some books along and as Mr. Poniatowksy drove, the three of us sat in the cab and said more or less nothing. After a while I took a book out. As I was reading, Mr. Poniatowsky looked over at me a few times. Sam said, “I never read in the car.” I stared out the windshield a while and watched the houses and fields and the bleak autumn gardens go past. I watched Sam too from the corner of my eye and said nothing else to him on the way out—whoever he was, he appeared to have become this silence, as if from so many years of practice, it was by now his fundamental truth. He wasn’t acting any more. I couldn’t read that well in the truck. I was distracted by the motion and the thought of a Cuban girl from school named Rachel Gúzman, who had phoned me in the afternoon from her home in Miami. She said she loved that I had started taking Spanish. She taught me a refrain: En español se le habla a Dios, en francés a los amantes, y en alemán a los caballos.

I was imagining the music of her voice, the way she brushed her hair over her shoulder, when some quiet moving around behind the cab distracted me. Lance came to the little window and looked in curiously, as if confused that I hadn’t provided an explanation. Peering back through the glass at him, I remembered

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how Brezhnev and Maggie eyed each other at first with fear and contempt, finding themselves together in a tiny filthy pen and her in inflamed heat. Brezhnev had been exhausted already and foaming at the mouth from his battle with Sam, Mr. Poniatowsky, and me, but after an hour or more, he regained his stamina and the chase began. It was never clear who was chasing and who was fleeing, or if both were doing both at once. Dad had insisted it would be a great education for us to see, so we stayed. What I learned was that Brezhnev’s pecker was an oversized rose-colored corkscrew. It was impossible to imagine how Maggie could have looked forward to that, but before long the first frenzy was finished. We left Brezhnev there, and to hear that old farmer, Mr. Poniatowsky’s friend, tell it the next day, there had been plenty more such joy. Once we arrived at the slaughterhouse, I pleaded secretly with myself. I wanted to stop the whole thing but saw no hope. They gave us tags and Sam jumped in and stapled them to their ears and while the screaming continued I helped join our chute to the yard and Lancelot, seeing females for the first time in his life and rivals to boot, charged out the second Sam pulled the gate. I wished for some kind of ceremony at least, some good-bye, some signal that one of them understood something and had looked back but Scruffy, Tuffy and Doughy raced right in after Lance. The last I saw of him, he was fighting another young boar, both of them bellowing and foaming at the mouth, their pink faces both smeared with blood. On the ride home, I tried to picture Rachel again, but I couldn’t see her and failed to feel anything. I searched my pockets for the Hohner but before I blew a note, Sam gave me such a look that I put it away. I believed I wasn’t sad or upset. My life now was with my classes and the friends I had found at school. The piglets had changed while I was away. They were oversized, serious farm animals now, a poor reminder of a family I seemed

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to have outgrown. Not one of them, as the chute came open, had hesitated or looked back. I couldn’t have said what emotion it was, but I had a terrible time getting comfortable. More and more my chest ached as if something hard and cold, like steel or ice, had lodged somewhere between my heart and my throat. To hide the trouble I had breathing, I extracted a book from my bag and put it on my lap. After we drove a while I was able to settle in and read. I can’t explain how I could have been so stupid, but when I came across one section, I wanted to read it aloud to Sam and Mr. Poniatowsky. This was a habit Rachel and I and some of her friends had developed in our Religion 121 study group, all of us insanely happy sitting together and analyzing the texts. In his lectures, Professor Orlovsky sometimes read to us and then said nothing, as if certain things remained beyond comment. At first this seemed strange and awkward, but by Thanksgiving I had come to understand how these moments described the full range of awe and sadness and joy: the amphitheater silenced, Rachel next to me, her legs crossed and her hands on her knees, her thick black hair hiding her small face as she leaned over her book. Mr. Poniatowsky and Sam and I were driving along listening to the sound of his engine and shifting gears and the tires on the road when I started to read aloud. Sam interrupted me, but I said, no, this is really unbelievable, just one paragraph, let me read it, okay? And I read them this: We need tarry no longer, for the enemy is upon us. Let us hasten and offer ourselves as a sacrifice before God. Anyone possessing a knife should examine it to see that it is not defective . . .

“What the hell is that?” Sam said and pushed the book off my lap onto the floor. When I had the book in my lap again Mr. Poniatowsky was staring straight ahead through the windshield. “Just let me read it,” I said. “It’s the most amazing thing.”

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“No,” said Sam, but I kept reading: The women girded up their loins with strength and slew their own sons and daughters, and then themselves. Many men also mustered their strength and slaughtered their wives and children and infants . . .

Mr. Poniatowsky interrupted. “That is from the Bible?” “This is told by an eleventh-century rabbi,” I said. I flipped back through the pages to check. “Solomon bar Simson. It happened in Mainz, in the Rhineland, near the start of the first crusade. They had refused to convert.” Mr. Poniatowsky turned his head and saw me for the first time that day, the first time in a year, the first time ever. In his eyes I saw the final opacity of his incomprehension. They might as well have been two green-and-blue marbles. The rest of the ride was death. Mr. Poniatowsky let Sam and me off at the top of our driveway and I followed a few paces behind, down the drive to the barn where Sam stopped me. He looked me in the face for a long time, and I saw how bewildered he was by me—and that there was a seriousness to him I hadn’t imagined before. He put a hand on my shoulder in a gesture that wasn’t unkind, as if there were some awful truth he had been given the burden of explaining, as if he’d already waited much too long. Then he took my elbow and pulled me behind the fence and put me against the wall. He stared at me and when he hit me, he hit me so hard the harmonica flew out of my pocket. He hit me again; he knocked me down. Lying in the dirt, I waited for him, stunned by the pain in the side of my head. He took my book bag and laid it against the foundation— this I only understood when I found it later. I don’t remember everything that happened. I know he forced my face sideways into the mud so that I could only partially see him, the last time

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I saw him. I could at least breathe through my mouth. The way he held my face down so long a time was almost gentle. When he knelt on my shoulder, in the growing silence, and pounded my swollen face with both his fists, I began to understand at last what his point was, what his point had always been, which was how much he loved me. I don’t believe he ever stopped.

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might have married Charlemagne, if he weren’t so black. If he weren’t as old as my own dead father would have been. I’d been waiting tables at the Circle Hill seven days a week for two years already—at twenty-three it was my whole life—and I had depended too much on him. He had more authority than anyone I knew, and I relied more on him for some things than anyone else, like the way he wrapped himself in a big white apron after he fired up his grill in the morning and never took it off till quitting time. This way we all knew that when the apron came off, it was time to lock up. We all were careful to respect the manager, a nervous college kid named Raymond, but Charlemagne knew when it was time. When that apron came off, nothing Raymond nor any of the others said mattered: the kitchen and diningroom were clean and it was time to go. He was a head taller than Raymond, two heads taller than me. He was as slender as a shortstop but not so limber anymore— sometimes on Sunday mornings when he came in, the kitchen was cold and he limped about in his apron till he warmed up. He kept to himself that first hour in a manner I never understood. I watched him as I came and went from the diningroom, how he ignored us as the grill heated up; he stared at the headlines for a long time before he licked his thumb and began moving his 40

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fingers through his newspapers. Sometimes a queasy desire arose in me, from somewhere near my stomach—sometimes his hands and head seemed all wrong to me, all a touch too big for his slender frame, and for that I wanted him and despised him too, because I wanted him perfect. His hair was pure white around his ears, almost fake in its beauty, since the rest of his hair was like his skin, blacker than the night behind the stars. After the breakfast rush, he was more at ease. His manner changed. It was rare that he laughed, but when he laughed you could hear it clear out in the diningroom. He was less predictable after breakfast. Two of the girls hated him: Alex and especially Annie. Every time we stepped out for a smoke, they rode the same miserable little carousel of talk, going round and round on the same vicious wheel. First Annie aimed her cigarette at Charlemagne’s Cadillac and carried on about how he went off by himself during his breaks and paraded those three big chamois rags (with his jacket over that filthy apron!) and Windexed the chrome and hubcaps and polished the golden letters of El Dorado scripted on the trunk like it was a christened yacht. “Just because Charlemagne’s black and has a better car than you,” said Cheryl. “Nope, it ain’t that,” said Annie. “I don’t care about that.” “Yes, you do.” “No, I do not.” One day during all this, there was a nervous silence and then Annie stared at me a long time before she reported a rumor that Charlemagne had a wife and three little girls in Haiti and that although he sent money for the first few years, he stopped after he got the loan for that car. “That can’t be so,” I said. “Oh, yes it can.” That was when I stomped my cigarette and went back in. I avoided him but after lunch he was pleasant to me; he smiled and

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on towards dinner he even looked at me as if puzzled by something, and shook his head in a way that embarrassed and pleased me. He treated me like a child—I knew that when he pretended to disapprove it was his way of pointing to something else. He was the most intelligent person I knew, the way he stacked the papers in English and Creole next to the grill and read them from a distance while he worked, flipping the pages between orders. As he read he was always railing, whispering against us, the USA, that is, for something horribly cynical or unforgivably naive we were doing some place in the world I never heard of. Once when I ran by he raised this big spatula as if it were a flyswatter and something small and alive was circling my face. “You Americans,” he whispered to me. “You have the Fly of Death sitting on your nose but you cannot see it because it is too close.” Then he put his face close and wiggled his big fingers at me. “You see? Why won’t you chase it away?” He bit his lip and waved the spatula over his head like he was winding up to smash the fly. When I tried to look at my nose and crossed my eyes, he laughed so loud Raymond ran back into the kitchen and told him the customers were wondering. Later Charlemagne winked at me; my nose felt funny for the rest of the day like something tiny and ticklish kept landing on it; twice I ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Charlemagne was right, though, and I knew what he meant. Sometimes you don’t even see what you see. Once when I was a little girl riding my bicycle on a Saturday afternoon, the sirens from all directions were louder than anything imaginable; a column of black smoke like a lazy tornado rose from the center of the next block, my block, where my house was. I had only that morning learned to ride and was already flying down the sidewalks too fast and off the curbs. Mrs. Murray waved a dishrag from her porch and called me into her house. Everyone else ran suddenly out onto the avenue toward my street. After they were all

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gone a few minutes later I watched Charlie Wilson through Mrs. Murray’s picture window, the one black kid who came around our neighborhood and who was always accused of stealing bicycles. I hated him because he always acted tough but now as I watched him run toward my house, his face was a gray color I’d never seen and his eyes were frightened. As stupid as it seems now, thinking back, I felt sorry for him. But that was eighteen years ago. Another example was how my ex-boyfriend Jimmy came home drunk after work every night for two years, whistling and repeating the crazy things that went on at the Pussy Cat Club and I never minded, since at least then he would talk to me and not be mad. I laughed at his stories about the dancers and the bouncers, and I listened, but there was always something more he wanted from me, something he could never ask for, something I never knew how to give. Then he hadn’t gone to work in months before I noticed, as obvious as it was. I couldn’t see he paid no bills, never changed his clothes. I didn’t see how bad things had become until the night he came in more shitfaced than ever and went for me with a hammer and chased me screaming around the kitchen table and out into the livingroom and around the sofa back into the kitchen until a neighbor called the cops and they came and dragged his ass away. He came around the restaurant one time after that and despite the fit he put on out by the register, Raymond was afraid to throw him out. Jimmy was shouting I owed him money and he wanted it right goddamn now and some of the customers even left but Raymond with a wave of his hand to Rachel, said no, don’t call the cops. He didn’t want cops coming all the time. Everybody stay calm, said Raymond, and he put his hands in front of him and waved them, going around Jimmy in a circle, as if that would calm him. I went back into the kitchen but I heard Raymond apologize to Jimmy and say this really had nothing to do with him or this restaurant and suggested he go around back and I would meet

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him there in the lot to figure it out. Of course I refused and then Raymond came in pleading with me to please go get rid of him. Throughout all this Charlemagne sat on a big can of Lo Melt pretending to read or stood to flip a hamburger. Raymond pleaded and I shook my head and we went around and around until Charlemagne took down a pair of bread knives from the wall and pushed between Raymond and me and out the back door, giving it a slam. All the girls crowded around the door and I couldn’t see but I could hear him letting loose some high-volume voodoo (that’s what Annie said it was) which was far worse than police cars and sirens. After that I moved into a little three-bedroom place with Annie and Cheryl above the post office in Wittstown and began to work seven days. Every day when Charlemagne came in to get ready for lunch he ignored me for a while and I ignored him too and then after he had his coffee and cinnamon toast he came along and asked me why I was in such a bad mood. This became our little ritual. “I’m in a good mood,” I said. “What in the hell’s the matter with you?” “I feel wonderful,” he would say and frown at me in a way that gave me a terrible pleasure. I was a little afraid of him now— Jimmy had never reappeared—and if you ask me, that only complicated and sweetened the excitement of Charlemagne. You find a way of trusting people (I always do at least) and in a place like Raymond’s by and large the people who come and go are good. They pay their bills, they give a reasonable tip, they don’t make much mess. One evening a couple came in that seemed as worthy of faith as anyone alive. They were the outdoorsy type, sunny and serious, dressed in big boots and wool pants and Patagonias, as if maybe they had just come in from ice climbing, though the father carried their baby in its carseat and put his finger over his

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lips and whispered to me for a booth where the two of them and the carseat could sit. She stood behind him, smiling at me as she finished looping her ponytail into a knot. “You bet,” I said. “Right this way.” Once they settled in, he carried their jackets over to the hooks and she leaned over the carseat and cooed into it, like she had just opened the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The baby was unusually well behaved though, judging from what little I had so far observed. Alex, the only one of us who has kids, says she never loves hers like when they’re asleep. When the hubby came back he studied the menu, turning it over and over, reopening the flaps in search of something I guess wasn’t there. She wanted a hamburger and fries and he settled at last for the Greek salad. “Coffees?” I said. She said yes and he said no. I took more interest in them than most customers, at first because I saw them pull into the front and there was something shabby about their coal blue Volvo but then, when they came in, they looked so handsome and healthy I envied them. The father had the nervous authority you see in newly minted doctors and lawyers, young people that have gone through some impossible exam and come out not wise and wealthy but on the straight road to wisdom and wealth. They may not know much about their professions just yet, but they sure as hell know more than the rest of us about everything. She had a bright smile and a sense of humor and the grace that comes from knowing you’ll soon enough be rich and respectable even if your current Volvo has 130K on it and a hubcap gone. He asked me if I had any green tea and I said I wasn’t a thousand percent sure but doubted it and he asked for OJ. The next time I came back they were holding hands across the table and Baby was as quiet as before. I gave her coffee and him juice and hesitated before I asked if I could have a peek at the child. The

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mother looked a little concerned, only a little though, like she didn’t want her to wake up, but the dad said, “Without a doubt.” Then he turned the blanket away. “Oh!” I said and wanted to cry or scream or run. I wanted to call Raymond but something stopped me. I was embarrassed, thinking something was horribly wrong, that the baby had some deformity or worse, and I not knowing what to say I only said, “So precious!” I couldn’t see what it was that seemed so familiar and so misarranged. Its nose was a little high and the lips as thin and stretched as one of those little red rubber bands, the eyes as if pasted shut with Elmer’s glue and first I thought she must be some kind of preemie! But she looked as stiff as old snow, there was nothing pretty about her. “What d’you call her?” I said. “Roxanne,” said the husband and they both looked hopefully at the child. “How old?” I said. “Two months,” they both said and smiled, both beaming again into the carseat. I watched the father and saw what I hadn’t seen before: he was the kind you dread. He moved his beautiful brown eyes too anxiously around the table and the big room, then back to the carseat and I expected him at any moment to make some gesture with his finger, a signal that I was now to go place the order. My own dad had been something different, someone who performed somersaults down a hill and played the ukulele and insisted on pistachio ice cream for breakfast or, when Mom wasn’t along, that a friendly pretty waitress should sit down with us. At the wake, with his casket open and his head like a stone in the silk and his hands over his heart, I couldn’t see who he had been, what I should have known about him, or that they both, Mom and Dad, were truly gone. They had sent me out in summer with my bicycle and money for me and my friends for the Good

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Humor Man. They liked to have a drink or two and a little private time together on a Saturday afternoon but when I got back I always found them in bed just having a nap. I knew this was different, I understood they were dead, that the smoke had killed them quickly while they were asleep not the flames and so on and so forth, as everyone in the world explained to me, as if it need explanation fifty-thousand times over, but what I couldn’t see at the time and what no one explained to me was that they were gone from me forever. They were permanently absent, like Brian McGuiness who drowned in Readington Pond the spring before and the next day at lavatory time the custodian came and removed his desk from the classroom. I wasn’t so stupid I figured they would bring the coffins into my bedroom at Aunt Ruthie’s although when Daddy’s coffin went down into the hole it was abruptly too clear they wouldn’t, that there were so many feet of dirt and rocks between me and him. Somehow I didn’t even care so much, not till Mom was lowered down. Until then I hadn’t seen what it was. Until then it had been kind of fine to be at Ruthie’s because she let me have chocolate milk three meals a day. Back in the kitchen Charlemagne was dipping a basket of fries. I said, “Charlemagne, you come out front a minute because I want you to have a look at this new baby.” He shook his head. He had two hamburgers and a grilled cheese working. “I don’t like to see no new baby,” he said. “You go out there and go crazy over the baby all you want but I just stay in here and short-order until it’s time to go and then I go, you see?” “No, I don’t mean I want you to come and just ogle the baby but there’s something worrying me about it, about the baby,” I said, whispering because I didn’t want the other girls involved. “I just need a confirmation because I’m getting confused and upset and want you to come see for yourself.”

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“No,” he said and gave a very annoying little chuckle. “Charlemagne,” I said. “Please? For me.” At last he turned and could see how worried I was. He said nothing and wiped his hands on his apron and looked into the vat and tossed the fries one time all very slowly as if to say, “All right, I’ll come along but I will do it not a split second before I am good and ready.” When he was done with his orders he even sat down and opened his paper and only folded it when I came back in the kitchen and led him out to have a look. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said and sparkled cheerfully at the young lawyer or whatever he was. “I was telling my friend about your baby and he just had to come see!” Charlemagne and the dad eyeballed each other with all the collegiality of a cat and a crow, neither of them believing what I just said and neither of them believing the other believed it. The mother of course whispered, “Harris, it’s fine. She won’t wake up.” She was right. The dad removed the cover and the baby did not wake up. Charlemagne stopped. I felt his whole body and his long legs just stop where he stood. It seemed his heart stopped a second, too. I wanted to touch Charlemagne, his arm or his shoulder, but I was afraid. Then he said, “Ooof, that is something. That is really something.” He looked at me then he looked at the father. “That is something. Thank you very much for the honor of that and I must get back to my kitchen. Thank you, thank you very much.” Back in the kitchen he put his thumb and his index finger together, very close to the point of my noise and said, “What in hell was that? Are you nuts out of your mind? Are you playing some games with me? What in the devil was that?” I had no clue. I had cajoled him into coming out into the diningroom against his will, I said, because I wanted his opinion. I was upset by the whole thing but now I was more upset. I wanted him to explain to me what it was.

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“I don’t know,” I said. He was so angry at me and I was so confused I thought I might cry. I fought it though, and I didn’t cry, which meant now I was angry too. I was also afraid—I didn’t know what was happening or what to say. “What was it?” I said. “What was it with that child?” I was used to Charlemagne’s anger, how all the hatred in the world was sometimes focused through the sights of his newspapers at me, of all people, as if I were to blame, but I was as unaccustomed as him to his not knowing. His face had changed in a way that made him look old and gentle, almost potentially generous. I hardly recognized him. “I think,” he said, “maybe you must call the police.” He stood up and went over to face the grill. “You come with me,” I said. “No,” he said. He looked at me sideways. “I don’t know what to tell them,” I said. “I don’t know!” he said. “I’m not going to call them, not by myself,” I said and sat down on his bucket and crossed my arms. “Then you forget it then,” he said. “Forget it. You put up the order?” “What order?” He stood and wiped his big hands on the apron and stared at me. “Do you have a wife and children back in Haiti?” I said. He ignored the question, but looked at me. He was scared. Alex and Cheryl crossed between us, both of them giving us filthy looks. “You put the order up, right now,” he said. “I don’t care one little bit about the order. No order is going up until you come with me to call the police.” “What about Raymond?” “Raymond who?” “Raymond the manager!” he shouted.

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A minute later we were out by the men’s room where the phone was. I called information. I asked for the police. She said, “This an emergency?” “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure.” I turned to Charlemagne. “Is this an emergency?” He didn’t answer, as if he couldn’t understand the question. His eyes focused too intensely on my nose again. Had that fly returned? The dispatcher hesitated. “You don’t think so?” “Something strange with this baby in the restaurant here where I work,” I said. “The baby looks like it might be in serious trouble.” “Please hold on,” she said. “Please, do not hang up.” The phone clicked a few times and a different woman said. “Clinton County Police. This call is recorded. Is this an emergency?” “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think maybe the emergency is already over.” “Why did you call 911?” “I didn’t call 911.” “What?” “I didn’t call 911.” “This is 911. Is this an emergency?” “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” She answered with silence. “There is a baby in the restaurant,” I said. “I don’t know. She looks—wrong.” “Wrong. Wrong?” “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s with her mother and father. There is something really sick about it.” “The baby is sick?” “Uh, yes. No. Maybe. Maybe worse.” “Please remain on the phone. Street address?” “Circle Hill Diner,” I said. I looked at Charlemagne. “What is the address here?” He made another face.

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“I don’t know the street address,” I said into the phone. “Next to Donny Donuts?” “Yes.” I gave her my name and the phone number and we waited. Charlemagne and I hid in the dark hallway like two beaten children. I couldn’t think like that and began to ramble, as I do when I’m upset. Fear had invaded Charlemagne’s eyes. I wanted to soothe him, so I talked and talked. “We must be telling Raymond,” he interrupted. “You go tell Raymond the police coming.” “She told me to stay by the phone. You go tell him.” “Like this?” he said and opened his hands, indicating his dirty apron. “So take the apron off,” I said. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” he said. “You were out on the floor a minute ago like that. That’s what started all this.” “No, no, no,” he said. “No more. You want me to lose my job!” “Okay,” I said. “Take the phone. I’ll go tell him.” He wagged the finger at me again. “I don’t talk to no police.” “Charlemagne,” I said. “Where did you get such a fabulous name?” “My mother,” he frowned. He turned and surveyed the dark hall and what he could see of the diningroom. It was nearly dark outside, beyond the front windows. “You have children?” I said. His eyes went rapidly left and right. He gave no answer and showed no defensiveness or shame. What Annie said was a lie. “Why do I always fall in love with useless men?” I said. He acted like I had changed the subject. His eyes were serious when he said, “I don’t know, love buggy. You in love?” I was distracted by the phone making another clicking noise. He touched my shoulder and said again, “You in love?”

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It wasn’t exactly the case. The game somehow didn’t fit the board, like playing checkers with a chess set. I looked at him and he looked at me and I only half-lied. “Amazingly enough,” I said. “Oh, you got a date?” he said. “You going to make some butter tonight, eh?” He made a gesture then with his knees, a kind of swooning motion that might have been taken as lewd. Fred Astaire or Frank Sinatra got away with such things too. “No,” I said. “Probably not. Look, go tell Raymond.” “Who you in love with?” “Forget it,” I said. “Look, we have this—this thing out there in the diningroom. I have the police on the phone—” “No, no, no,” he said. “You tell me.” His willingness to cooperate was at its end. I began to lose nerve, to feel guilty. How many tables were out there waiting for service? Where was Raymond? Who was covering? How could I have been away so long? “I can’t tell you,” I said. “Especially you.” “Why?” he said. “Since when you don’t tell me something? You always tell me too much. Now you cannot tell me an interesting thing. Why not?” “Since it’s you.” I said and put the phone down on the shelf. “Eh?” “Since it’s you,” I said and tried to run but he got hold of my arm. • • • The girls and I sat in a booth for a long time. Raymond made two pots of coffee and kept filling our cups. He brought down a pecan pie and a gallon of vanilla ice cream and plates and forks and napkins for everybody. Cheryl said, “He didn’t even look surprised, I mean the father didn’t.”

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“Yeah,” said Annie. “But then he kind of did, like who me? when the cops told him to stand up. Like who are you talking to me?” “Yeah,” said Alex. “But he was such a little mouse.” “Who was a mouse?” “The father, if you want to call it a father.” “Can you imagine? Not even noticing even?” “Geez! I don’t think I can eat.” “How long do you think it was like that, I mean, like that—” They all looked at me. “How do I know?” I said. “You’re the one who saw,” said Cheryl, her eyes distorted, accusing through her glasses. “What do I know?” I said. “I don’t work at the morgue, do I? Maybe an hour? Two hours? A day?” “Naw! No way.” “I never see nothing. Nothing at all,” said Alex. “I didn’t even know what I was seeing,” I said. “It was Charlemagne that knew.” “Where is that prick?” said Annie. She turned and surveyed the empty room. I said nothing, though I had seen him put up his apron and go out the back right after the police interviewed him. They talked to him for most of an hour. With me they spent five minutes. “Did you see that fireman?” said Cheryl. “The one with the hat? Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Next time my oven catches fire I’m gonna call his ass in. And tell him to bring his hose.” “What about the mother? Wouldn’t you think she might have noticed?” “What do you think?” said Annie. “Did they somehow not know? Were they pretending or something? Were they in the grip of some bizarre kind of evil or were they psychologically all twisted?”

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“Sometimes if something is too difficult your mind just makes it invisible,” Alex said. “Like, someone once said—I forget where I heard this—imagine how an elephant looks to a flea.” “This was two fleas. A mama and a papa flea,” said Annie. “They were cracked,” said Cheryl. “That’s the thing of it, isn’t it? It was both of them. The two of them.” “Maybe they were on LSD. Charles Manson was on LSD.” “Didn’t they put the father in handcuffs?” “The two of them!” “No!” “Yes!” “No, they did not,” said Annie. She looked to me. But I didn’t know, I told them, and I told them the truth, which was that I didn’t know anything. Then I almost told them how worried I was about Charlemagne, that I hoped he was all right. I wouldn’t say I hoped he’d come back. I just said I didn’t know. I hadn’t noticed handcuffs. I hadn’t seen. We were quiet a minute but I had to say something. They were all facing me a long time, then they faced me again when I said, “It was somehow as if that was me in there, in that carseat. I swear to God.” Then they all looked at each other. Annie almost said something but Alex stopped her, touching her under the table. I started running on then, like I do sometimes when I’ve said too much and then can’t stop. The thing is, I was sure all this was my fault, I said, somehow I believed just by being there at that moment I caused, somehow even arranged the whole godforsaken thing. How else could you explain it? The girls stared at me in horror, so I went on to tell them I was in love with Charlemagne. I told them about the call we made together and how afterwards when I told him how I felt for him, he made a strange, frightening face, like I had just cheated

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him out of a hundred bucks, like I had offered something he had always wanted but could never have. “Maybe it’s true,” I said with emphasis, looking all around me, “the thing Annie says about him.” I told them about the phone call, when I was alone with Charlemagne in back and after he got his hand on my wrist all I could see past him was the length of the dark hallway and a crowded table in the diningroom. How he put his face close to mine and made a stirring motion around my nose with that big black-and-pink finger. It hurt to look, so close like that, and I found it hard to breathe, as if that finger had lodged between my ribs and my lungs; I turned my eyes away, I said, and remembered how every winter since my house burned, after things had seriously begun to freeze, when the air was so cold it made you cough, I went down Route 212 in the mornings before school to Readington Pond where Brian McGuiness died and rode my bicycle out in expanding circles onto the ice. I continued doing this even through my last year of high school. I stood up on my bike as I went out, my pedals going down and down in the slippery weightlessness until the pond began to crack and slope away under my tires. The girls were all wide-eyed. I knew I should shut my mouth. But I also knew I had been caught in a moment that had too many implications, like the first loser who happens upon an auto wreck on a back road. Charlemagne had whispered something more but I couldn’t understand him. When they arrived the cops used their lights but not their sirens—the blue-and-whites were flashing in the suddenly shiny, spectacular night. There had been a perfect silence, thank God, in the back by the phone, and this black stranger holding me in the electric darkness, both his big soft hands too tight around my wrist.

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hen I came down, Granpa’s door was barely open. A blade of candlelight from inside crossed the floor and the livingroom couch. Mom whispered orders. Someone prayed. When I peeked in, Mom’s hand touched the bed and her other was on Granpa’s chest. In the candlelight his mask was too thin, too much like his face. His chin had fallen. Someone closed his eyes. I went upstairs and practiced lying stiff, my own eyes and mouth gaping in the dark, and wondered if the silence I heard would go away, if a deeper quiet would come, something Granpa could now hear. I sank backward into my mattress. I felt death like fast water rise and run over my sheets, my pillow, my ears and shoulders, the whole length of me submerged, all but my nose, a lump in the fast surface. I listened until my heart became loud, a meat-faced giant with bloody boots stomping through a village, so I awoke again and practiced not listening. I concentrated on all that was left of me, my open nostrils like two diminishing circles of breath that rose and fell. Next came the noise of the birds and the light. Already the horizon sizzled. The distant pop and crackle of firecrackers was steadily marked more and more by an echoing boom. I remembered the excitement and the fireworks—it was the 56

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Fourth of July—and all the things my brother Rocky taught me that summer: M80s, bottle rockets, sizzlers, ashcans, and bottom-blasters. Granpa was dead on the Fourth! He had looked like a dead man for so long and though I’d never known him when he wasn’t out of his mind, I couldn’t imagine the Fourth without him. Our entire family, all the Fitzgeralds and the Tomasinos (Aunt Maureen had married an Italian) always staked out the front of the Belleville firehouse with lawn chairs and coolers and boxes of sparklers for anyone who wanted one and all of us came to wave at Granpa in his fire chief ’s hat and sash as he rode smiling like a mummy on display and waving from his own beach chair strapped to the roof of the hook and ladder. He’d been chief of the Volunteers for thirty years and honorary Parade Master every Fourth since he retired. The Fourth was the one day he got out of his pajamas. At home, he was skin and bones, his shoulders a hanger draped in a yellowed terrycloth robe as he wandered the house, as quiet as the cats. Dad explained I should treat him more like a four-year-old than a grown-up and be as patient as I would with any of my littlest cousins. But Granpa and I had a running game of Tom and Jerry. Once I tied kite string around his ankles while he slept sitting up on the couch and when at last he stood, he toppled over the coffee table like a two-by-twelve. He didn’t even have time to put his hands out. Another time I dropped a shrew down the back of his union suit. His hair grew a little long and shaggy now and then and I got my cousins, the little Tomasino twins, Lynnie and Marie, walking tippy-toes and whispering, to put curlers in his hair while he snored. In return, I expected him if I was at my homework in the den or the kitchen having a doughnut. I could smell him or just know he was behind me and turn in time, before he put a gunnysack over my head or screeched in my ear. Once, a fireplace poker came down across my bowl as I lifted a

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spoonful of Cheerios. Milk went everywhere, onto the walls, the floor behind me, all over my shirt and face. Another time I was at the table doing penmanship when somehow I knew, thanks to an unmistakable sensation, a steak knife was at my temple. What I loved was to be in a quiet room, alone with my baseball cards or a book and realizing he was there too, in the chair next to me or standing with his back to the bookshelves and staring at me, his eyes lit like candles. When Dad came to me with the news, I was in the livingroom watching Sunday morning cartoons. I listened politely and turned back to the TV. What concerned me though was the arrival from Vermont of my cousin Doreen, who always came for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and the Fourth. I was eleven and she was only nine but already in the fifth grade and smarter in her school than anyone. As far as they knew, I tolerated her because she was good at sports, being double-jointed, with quick, wiry little monkey legs. Because she was two years younger and a girl, I didn’t always treat her well, but secretly I loved her more than anyone. Always after she went home, she was all I thought of for weeks, the first thing when I opened my eyes in the morning and again as I had my cereal. For days I had long imaginary conversations with her. She was the last thing at night I saw before I fell asleep. She was so pretty, it pained me to look at her. Her chin and cheeks and forehead were so perfectly shaped and so empty of freckles I could barely remember what she looked like. She used to squinch her nose and follow me everywhere when she was five, no matter how mean I was. Now her nose was as straight as a line drawn with a ruler and her glasses always slid down so she could peer over at me with her small gray eyes. Sometimes her eyes were green or blue, depending on her mood or the time of day, whether I was telling lies or not, whether she hated or loved me, though I never knew which color meant which.

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She must have loved Granpa more than I did. She was crying into a big hanky when she stepped out of the car into the driveway. She wouldn’t look at me, though I’d been waiting for her all morning. She had come straight from church in her white stockings and blue round-toed shoes but when she finally looked at me I was startled at what a mess she was. Aunt Angela was a mess, too. Her nose-blowing sent all three cats—Spooky, Clumpy, and mine, Ratface—around back. Uncle Paul, in a black suit and black tie, looked like he might be dead, too. He sat bolt upright in the driver’s seat and stared over the wheel after Angela and Doreen left the two passenger doors wide open. Doreen just stood in the gravel, gripping her hanky. She stared at her shoes, her shoulders all jumpy as she sucked her lips. I looked hard at her and wondered why she was putting on this show. I had waited all morning and now that she was here, I despised her, as if she were some dressed-up circus chimp. Was she the one I loved? I wondered how to get rid of her. Angela clumped noisily up the steps and pulled my head to her big bosom and squeezed me. She smelled sweet and sweaty, her bare arms hot on my neck for a moment before she ran indoors where the noise, the wailing, thanks to the Italians, began in earnest. For a long time I stared curiously at Doreen, until I got bored with the pathetic little battle between her lips and her eyes. “Hi, Doreen,” I said. “You submarine.” Her gray eyes flashed green outrage and blue injustice. Then she said, “Hi,” and exploded into tears. I thought of something and ran into the house. When I got back, I had two orange popsicles. She had gotten better hold of herself by then, the hanky and both her hands were in her pockets. “Popsicle?” I asked. She scowled. “How can you be thinking about popsicles?”

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I looked at her for a long time, almost telling her I was glad Granpa Fitz was dead, then decided against it. I felt lovesick for a second, holding the two melting treats in my fists. Then I hated her again. “Nothing wrong with popsicles,” I said. “I don’t care who died.” “Aren’t you even upset?” she said. “What?” I said, pretending I hadn’t understood. “Aren’t you upset?” This time she screamed, her fists and front pockets forced down hard into the depths of her lap as she leaned toward me, peering up into my eyes, as if to see the inner dome of my empty skull. “Why should I?” I shouted. “Granpa Fitz is dead!” This made me so angry, my shoulders, my arms, my whole body shook. How could she be such a little lap-dog? Who put her up to this? “Haven’t you any sense?” I said, mimicking Mom. “What did you say?” she said. I could have screamed, but I whispered, “Granpa’s not dead!” “What?” she said. “You’re sick.” “He’s not dead,” I said. “You’ll see. At the parade. Granpa wouldn’t miss the parade. Not ever. Even if he was dead.” Now her eyes were red with hatred. Her mouth was open, gasping for air. “Cross my heart,” I said as she watched. I dragged my finger twice across my shirt. “Hope to die.” • • • There was such a fuss all morning. Two reporters from the Belleville Sentinel, the EMTs, the county coroner, the police and all the stupid little second-cousins in their church clothes came marching back and forth past us as Doreen and I sat on the porch in sunlight. We had covered a lot of ground by then.

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“I can’t imagine what it’s all about,” I said and stood up. “Mom knows. So does Pop. I don’t see why everyone’s faking.” Normally Doreen took a superior attitude whenever I got into a fix as ridiculous as this, but what pleasure our secret gave her by now. She peered intelligently down her perfect nose through her lenses at the yard, as if the inexplicable situation were some iridescent insect crawling across a slate. By then I had so easily enlisted her that I was unbearably bored. Where was Rocky? The morning before, he and Bean, his best friend, dragged me out of bed and assigned me a bag of dinged golfballs to carry down through the woods by the country club, where Bean buried the capped butt of a lead pipe in a mound of dirt. A hundred yards away, beyond an electric fence and a meadow, was the target we could see with Beanie’s binoculars. When everything was ready, he struck a match and held it while he peered through his binoculars with the other hand. Once he shouted FIRE, Rocky set an M80 to the flame then dropped it into the pipe. I shoved in a golfball and we dove for cover. That was fun. There had been no wind and Rocky had our cannon calibrated so that pretty soon we hit the tee every shot. After the blast Bean jumped to his feet with his spyglasses and watched the old guys tee up, smoking cigars, climbing in and out of their carts oblivious to the white ordnance that bounced in their midst and danced into the high trees. Bean wouldn’t let us touch his binoculars but he gave a full report of what happened each time and Rocky made adjustments. Before long we were rolling in the dirt. One big fat guy Bean called Butterballs was so slow-moving we took three shots at him. “Once,” Doreen said, interrupting my thoughts, “I heard Mommy say how rich she’ll be once Daddy kicks off. They both laughed but I didn’t think it was funny. Dad said if he could just convince the insurance company (Doreen looked gravely at me when she said these two words) into believing he’d fallen into the

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incinerator at the garbage plant, we could live like royalty. Daddy said he’d grow a long beard and come back to get hired as her gardener. That was really all he ever wanted anyway, to just dig in the dirt like a dumb old gardener.” She put the palms of her hands up and looked at me with big eyes. I wondered if I should ditch her and head now for the woods or wait until Rocky came for me. Rocky was always out of the house before all of us. He might not even know about Granpa yet and I suspected I knew where to find him. But shouldn’t they have come and got me? Maybe Bean couldn’t get any more M80s. “Maybe Granpa just wants to fool the insurance company so we can all live like royalty,” she said and put her chin on her knee. I could see her thinking, how do royalty live? I had no clue either and before long I went down the steps to kick gravel out of the driveway onto the lawn. After she said a few more stupid things I realized I was furious at her for buying in so easily, but when I looked at her sideways she caught my eye, becoming suspicious at once. “Granpa’s dead,” she hissed and her lip began to waver. I hated her so much then I shivered. “He is not, stupid.” “Is too!” She spit the words at my feet. “I’ll prove it to you,” I said. “At the parade.” “You won’t!” she said, without looking up. “Goddamn you to hell,” I said. “You’ll see.” • • • At noon Mrs. Falato arrived, trailed by her sons Mark and Paul with huge trays of ham, roast beef and sliced cheeses in their arms. They ran back out and returned with another tray of subs and three cases of root beer. Doreen and I had made tentative peace by then and ate in a hurry on the porch. The commotion inside, the crying, the laughter and the drinking (the liquor cabinet had

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been opened early in the morning) reached a hysterical volume. When we were done we hid our plates under the hedge and charged through the Whalens’ yard out to London Road and ran the whole way into town. Our place in front of the firehouse was already taken so we ran for a long time on the sidewalk, through the dense crowd of families past the Comet Market, the Presbyterian Church, past Albee’s stationers and the hardware store. “Wait!” said Doreen and stopped and put her hands on her knees to catch her breath. I breathed fast too, but waved at her to come. The parade was about to start and we wouldn’t see a thing. When she pointed up behind me, I knew what she meant. No one was up by the flag yet except a fifth grader named Jamison who was bouncing a basketball against the pole. We ran and ducked through the gate and up the steps and arrived in full sunshine with a perfect view. We claimed our places on the wall. We sat a minute until I said, “Save my seat” and ran back down the stairs and under the rail again, through the crowd and into Albee’s where I found myself looking up at the counter and a Styrofoam pyramid bristling with twenty-five-cent flags. Mr. Albee had turned to the top shelf for sun lotion a woman in a straw hat had asked about. In no hurry, I reached for a flag for Doreen. Then took one for me. Mr. Albee was still searching the shelf. I waited and watched him. A second later I was outside in the sunshine again, lost in the crowd. Flags waved everywhere. Everyone was all smiles. It must have been the warmest, sunniest, friendliest day in the history of America. When I heard the drums my heart nearly burst. Already our wall was a throng of kids and I charged up the steps to find Jamison standing in my spot next to Doreen. “Hey!” I said and she looked at him sullenly. “He’s just there till you get back,” she said. “No, I ain’t,” he said. He had the basketball under his arm and a stripe of chocolate went from his mouth almost to his ear. He

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looked at me and tossed a crumpled Hershey’s wrapper into the crowd below. “That’s my spot,” I said but he just smiled and gave me the finger. When the trumpets sounded everyone turned, even Jamison, and I shoved him so hard he fell over an empty stroller. His basketball went bouncing onto the road. He was too surprised to even cry and the last I saw of him some adults with a picnic basket and a baby had jostled him out of the way. “You’ll see,” I said and turned to give Doreen a flag. I said it again as the VFW brass came marching down the hill and she turned her eyes from me. Despite the excitement, the brass were a dull gang in suits and sashes and I would have shouted something rude if not for the majorette who marched in front. She was a lady I never saw except on the Fourth. I wondered who she was, embarrassed and thrilled by her tall white hat and feather, the black curls that framed her pretty pointed face, the short white marching skirt as it flapped about her thighs and her white boots that went up and up past her knees. She twirled the baton over her head, around her back and through her legs. I stared and stared at the white gloves over the elbows of her otherwise bare arms, hypnotized by a strange desire, and could find no escape from her until the Vietnam vets finally hit the drums at the hilltop. Then they sounded the trumpets and tubas and their fabulous band played medleys of tunes like “I Feel Good” and “Shake That Thing” and a jazzy version of “Sympathy for the Devil.” We had to stand on our toes to see Jonah O’Neil. He was the most famous war hero in Belleville now because of the things he had done in Vietnam and the collection of mementos everyone said he kept in a safe in his mom’s basement. Rocky once said Jonah had eyes like a cruel retard, which had given me nightmares, but he looked pitiful and bloated when I finally saw him, with

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giant elephant legs, the purple nose, his face the color of a spoiled ham. No one laughed at him as he marched in his fatigues, which were tight enough to burst the buttons and zippers, or the green beret bobby-pinned to the side of his head. Next came the Korean War vets. Granpa had been a major in Korea and these were his best pals. Like the group before them, they followed Old Glory but all had their jaws squared and their corsairs tilted jauntily on their heads. Mr. Reid, who was a Scot and must have done something in Korea as well marched alongside them in a kilt and a bearskin busby. Mostly because of the busby, they got warm applause. Amidst all the shouting and applause and laughter, the crying, the squealing babies, the sea of flags, the noise of the bands and the fire engine strobing red and blue intermittently beyond the hill, Doreen had been silent. Now and then she stood on tip-toes for a minute to scan the crowd. Once I got tired and sat down next to her feet. Her knees and her ankles in those little white socks were so pretty I wanted to close my eyes. “Granpa rides the hook-and-ladder,” I said, looking up at her. Since she obviously knew, she didn’t bother to answer. I wanted to tell her Granpa never marched with the WWII vets either, when they came down the hill, but that would have been pointless also. All of them—except Mr. Cleary, who had lung cancer— had always looked bigger and stronger than him. They carried an attitude of victory and heroism in a way none of the others who had come before them had and a hush came over the crowd. No one shouted. Everyone stared at this, the largest troop of all, white-haired, bone-skinny or pot-bellied old geezers in sashes and corsairs marching silently below us as I tried to imagine all the Krauts and Japs they must have killed. This year only three from WWI were alive. They rode in a racing blue Corvette convertible driven nervously by Lucy Farr, the prom queen who must have just gotten her license. Mr. Pilsen,

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who was ninety-two, kept standing in the tiny back seat to throw kisses and wave his flag but Mr. Stuart who sat in front in a kaiser hat turned around every few seconds and pushed him down into his seat. The other old guy, whose name I didn’t know, seemed asleep in the back as he slouched forward, resting his big strawberry of a nose on Lucy’s shoulder. After that came the Civil War cannons. They were pulled by horses, the big wooden spokes in a blur followed by a dozen ponies of the Kilsy Civil War & Cavalry Club. The ponies were mounted this year by Union riders with blue uniforms, sabers, black boots and white gloves. All kinds of things came next—three librarians from the public library; Boy Scout troop number 111; the Belleville Brownies; the Masons; the Farr County Clown Club. The freshmen marching band, in torn-up, ketchup-stained blouses and bandages, canvas knickers and tricornered hats came near the end and sent a wave of laughter and applause through the crowd by playing their disorganized “Yankee Doodle Dandy” with tin whistles, flutes, a parade drum, a triangle and a bugle. It seemed the whole thing would never end when a cheer went up that was so loud Doreen covered her ears and sat down. I tapped her shoulder and handed her my flag. The cheer went up again and I realized the firemen marching in front of the engines, Irishmen to a man, were singing. The crowd all up and down the street began to sway and join in too, though by then whatever it was sounded more like a brawl than a song. As the hook-and-ladder approached I could barely see over the shoulders of the grown-ups. The third cheer was so loud I had to scream at Doreen. She took my hand and I leapt to my toes in time to see Granpa’s sash and the fire hat laid out on the seat of his empty lawn chair, which had been duct-taped to the roof over the red cab and floated away from us, far out in the middle, like a toy boat on a wide colorful river.

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Doreen let go of my hand. I looked up the street and down toward St. Paul’s. The commotion was everywhere the same. Everyone in the world had crowded onto the streets of Belleville. Weekenders from Boston and New York and Montreal had come for a peek at our majorette, our soldiers, our hook-and-ladder bearing an empty lawn chair dressed with a red fire chief ’s hat and a green sash. For a minute the noise and crowd were complete, a deafening loneliness, the same as the silence I heard in the morning in my bed, after concentrating so long on the puzzle of Granpa’s absence. Doreen sat at my feet and covered her ears again. It was the strangest thing, that Granpa Fitz was dead, as if something too big to see had changed—and changed everything else in ways that were too small to see. I sat down next to her, only half intending cruelty as I whispered into her delicate hair, but she shook her head, eyes closed, hands over her ears, to stop me. I tried again but she was trapped by something. She kept her ears covered and shook and shook her head. I waited, until a platoon of state troopers on Harley Davidsons cleared the road with their metal thunder and brought me to my feet. Rocky loved motorcycles more than anything on earth. More than God. Almost as much as he loved Granpa. You could never say anything against Granpa or the Ultra Glides when Rocky was around. Where the hell was he? Shouldn’t someone find him? And tell him? Did he know? I searched the crowd for him but it was pointless. I checked the front of the firehouse. I watched the formation of white helmets pass below us and disappear into a rumble in the crowd, then turned back to the confusion up the street. Everywhere a thousand red, white and blue flags waved. When I saw Doreen’s hands over her face, I figured at least now she could hear. I knelt and said, “Hello, Doreen. You jelly bean. Did you see him?”

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She turned a savage, unfocused glare at me. She stared at my mouth now, hating me with perfect reason, as if I’d led her into a dangerous place then run off and left her. “Did you?” she answered. “Did you, honestly?” Something in her eyes scared me. I almost said it was a stupid question and didn’t matter anyway. She had been such a sucker. In a moment of violent confusion I had to stand, turning my back on her, and run to the flagpole which I kicked and kicked. I began to shake and the shaking took hold of me until my nose itched. I rubbed it furiously with the backs of my hands but my cheeks got hotter, my lips and all the muscles from my nose to my chin cinched tight by the time she called me, and asked me again. When I turned she was standing with both flags in her hand, as if offering me a flower. I showed her a fist and said I would strangle her, anything to shut her up. I pointed a finger too close to her eye. She only frowned and crossed her arms. Then she scrunched her nose and looked past me over her glasses.

The Blue Carriage

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oanie rode the E into Manhattan three Saturdays in a row but found nothing good and no one helpful. On the fourth Saturday, she laid on the bright blood-colored lipstick, lashed her hair into a gleaming bun, put on her pinstripe suit, her paisley neckerchief and her heels. Now when she walked into the stores in midtown, the clerks either scattered or ran towards her. She asked a few sharp questions at Macy’s and a sales manager made three calls and sent her to Albee’s uptown. At Albee’s the salesman, with a pencil behind his ear and the name Morris embroidered on his apron, was too old and bored to be intimidated by the outfit. She pointed a pencil at him and then at her list of questions, but he had already walked away. He pointed down the aisle: he meant to show her the models that were moving fast. First was the TrèsChic line from Montreal, which was in his opinion more popular, et cetera, than the rest. One in the window had blue patent-leather mudflaps and a blue parasol printed with white lollipops. The Hans Solo model had Nerf-rocket launchers on either side and was a hot ticket too, he said, with the Upper West Side types. Joanie, who admitted she knew nothing, argued anyway for a more conventional model and color, something blue or yellow or even neutral. 69

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“Neutral?” said Morris. She asked about a blue one that looked reasonable, with a reasonable price, but Morris took her too firmly by the elbow, like an errant child, to show her what he had in back. He said almost all the popular ones had the lock-and-catch. Some collapsed sideways like an accordion or forward like a jackknife and each horrified Joanie, who imagined her little sister’s tiny daughter crushed to death in some desolating accident Joanie would forever take the guilt for. Morris smiled. He repeated himself over and over, moving his big finger back and forth in front of her face, as if to hypnotize her. Then he waved at each of the carriages, asking her to imagine an adorable little baby inside. He smiled at her again, showing his lousy teeth, like a carnie who would offer her anything off his shelf of teddy bears, only two bits a shot. The carriage her sister had now was filthy, the canvas ragged at the seams. According to her mom, a disgrace. And now that the baby, Louisa, was eleven months, Rachel was pregnant again. On the phone Ma said Rachel had made her promise up and down she would not tell Joanie. Rachel wanted to surprise Joanie when she came home at Christmastime and would kill her (Ma became more and more upset as she said this) if she found out Ma had let on. “But,” her mother had managed to say, through all the emotion, “the carriage for Louisa is a sure bet.” Joanie broke away a minute, walking off and ignoring Morris, though for a few seconds he failed to notice. She wandered the row of four- and eight-wheelers, replaying her mom’s aggression on the phone. Joanie had thanked her for the idea, whereby Ma opened her attack. How can you thank me for breaking a promise? What if Rachel finds out? And you! Some big sister! How come you never talk to her? Where has this family gone wrong? What has become of your life? How come you never had your own children? You’re too sophisticated for children.

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Morris followed her, saying nothing. Once he caught her attention again he started right in. He waved all his fingers at her now and when she closed her eyes she saw them, a whole long string of dancing sausages under a spell designed to levitate the MasterCard from her purse or else cause her to disappear in a blue tuft of smoke. Joanie opened her eyes and watched him talk and understood that under his endless pitch and pushiness he was a simple old man who only wanted to get back to his newspaper, his cigarette, his coffee. She heard nothing of what he said, only the inner demon who hissed at her, reminding her that maybe Ma was right, she had wasted her life, that she regretted everything. She regretted moving East long ago, breaking contact with her family, abandoning them until Daddy died. But what a blessing it had seemed, the good fortune that shined on her when she went to Yale and fell in with Jim Toomey, who was such a star. They had had plans. He was vegan before anyone knew what it was, a political radical, a sex symbol to the undergraduates in philosophy and an anarchist in the Spanish tradition, like Uncle Philip, a revolutionary if it came to that. Joanie had been an ace in the poetry classes, too. Now she looked at Morris and wished for nothing so much as an exchange of pleasantries with someone, even Morris or preferably his wife who sat yawning up front behind the register. Maybe the wife could help her select the right thing? Sometimes Joanie even wished that Jim, now almost thirty years later, only a little overweight and a little stooped, would talk to her at the table between his noisy mouthfuls of black-beanand-seaweed casserole. She watched Morris amble unevenly down the aisle and remembered the first week of Jim’s lovemaking, so many years ago, and the mattress on the floor in a dank New Haven basement. The morning sunlight warmed the sheets and illuminated the fabric of a threadbare towel that covered the window when he knelt before her, his sex like a sturdy pink stem rising from the

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sapling of his body. She had been swept away by his fine flesh, his poetry, his trust in revolution—his promises of danger and a life underground stoked their hunger for each other. He had more seriousness, more intellect, more certainty than any man she knew. There appeared at that time no greater force than the merciless love that drove his young heart. Sometimes even now in her neighborhood she saw a jet from LaGuardia go overhead and the violent old passions rioted in her heart. She wished for drama, for a glimpse of history. She ached to reach out as if to touch something so sleek and cold and fast and high above her but before she could stop herself she saw the whole thing come undone—the plane in its upward trajectory and then a boom echoing like thunder as it stalled in a dirty spray of flames and debris and smoke as it came apart ten thousand feet above her and she and everyone else in her neighborhood ran to save their families, their small homes, their small lives. Soon Morris gave up. His spells had failed and Joanie, alone and stunned, reappeared on the sidewalk. Thanks to her heels, her ankles ached. She had nothing, no carriage, no hope, nothing to say to anyone. The train ride back to Queens was slow and dismal. As the bleak neighborhoods rumbled under the tracks, she wondered when Rachel would finally call her about Baby Number Two—and how convincingly Joanie would keep Ma’s lie, pretending she hadn’t known. She hoped the call came soon, that Rachel would ditch the idea of waiting until December, to get the farce over with so Joanie wouldn’t feel like a shit when she got there. She had gone to Sacramento last year as well, when Louisa was born. She stayed at Ma’s for two weeks, everyone in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown. Joanie overdid everything. She overcharged her card. She bronzed the baby’s first shoe, before Louisa even wore it. She blamed her hormones, their last terrifying inquisition before they gave up on her for good. Every

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time Joanie came in the room, Rachel’s husband Noah took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, and got up to leave. She bought a teddy bear, a new fluffy rabbit-skunk-kitten every day she was there, a dozen doll-size nightshirts covered with hearts and kittens and lambs, a mobile of multicolored toucans Noah attached over the crib but removed the minute Joanie left (she learned months later from Ma), because it put the baby in hysterics. As the Harlem River passed under her, she stood up to look out the window and made a silent speech to herself. She had to fight these small, family-inflicted humiliations. Had she lived her life already on the East Coast? If she hadn’t been accepted to Yale, she might never have left California. Her whole tribe—her father and two uncles—had moved west after they first escaped Vienna and then the Bronx. None of them had looked back. Now, at forty-seven, what did Joanie have? A forty-seven-minute commute? Joanie and Jim at last owned their own cramped little apartment in Queens. She had her seniority as a co-editor of the AARP newsletter and, thanks to Jim’s flatulence, a pair of twin beds. No wonder Joanie, like her mother, when Rachel at last informed her about her new little forthcoming treasure, would have to lie. During the week the blue carriage, the one that had seemed right, haunted her. Baby carriages of one type or another were everywhere she looked, umbrella strollers jamming subway doors; big ones, built like Cadillacs, crowded the elevators. Though a daycare center had always operated in her building, suddenly the lobby was a gridlock of prams. In a nightmare she wandered, a refugee in a caravan of the doomed, searching carriage after carriage at a checkpoint for her lost baby as Morris in a black uniform swung his sausage-like finger, once in approval, twice in disapproval as each was let across or rolled off the cliff. In one she found a Virginia ham, still in its shrink wrap, in another

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a pink rubber doll with all the limbs pulled from its torso. She begged Morris to let her in but he barked at her, huge at first like a St. Bernard, then growing smaller, a collie, a yapping poodle, a nasty little Chihuahua. The next night she mentioned the dream to Jim, but he lowered his issue of the Nation and gave her the same bored face as Morris. She remained adamant nonetheless. In this she was alone: Joanie had come to believe the blue one was right. Some instinct told her. She was certain. • • • The next Saturday, she slept till noon. Jim came in and sat down on her bed. “You sick?” he said. “Yes,” she said, without looking at him. “Sick.” “Going to live?” “No doubt.” “Anything I can do?” “I’ll be fine,” she said. “See you at dinner.” The next Saturday morning Joanie suited up again and got to Albee’s at 9:45. She went right in when the doors opened at ten. When she cornered Morris he stared, not remembering her or the blue carriage. She described how you could lift it and pull its front bumper and the navy bassinet shifted forward. It had two white and blue rows of double wheels. The canopy was blue as well, with a bone-white frame, blue wheel caps, white rubber tires. Without comment he disappeared into the back. He returned empty-handed ten minutes later and offered to show her the whole line, all the hot tickets, et cetera, again. Joanie said no, she knew what she wanted. As hopelessness grew, so grew determination. For Louisa she had to have the blue one, with all the wheels and the off-white bumper, she said. She described it to Morris again, waving her own fingers in the air this time, to suggest the

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canopy. She showed him how she had kicked the brake in by forcing her toe down and up while he gripped the handle. “It was only a little complicated,” she said. “Remember?” Morris retrieved a stack of catalogs and sent her across the street to the Acropolis Diner. Doubtful, she went and sat in the cold by the window and flipped the heavy pages. Maybe Jim should have come with her. For the first time in fifteen years she wished for a smoke. There were at least a dozen catalogs and by the time she was done with the first she was so pissed she slapped two dollars down on the table, stacked the binders in her arms and marched back across the street into Albee’s with a vicious tongue in her head but when she got through the door, there he stood leaning on the counter with Joanie’s carriage in front of the register. “How was the coffee?” he said. “You’ll never guess what I found.” Ten minutes later she and the carriage tackled the steps down into the IRT. Twenty more minutes and she settled into her seat on the E. She locked the wheels, set it before her and looked coldly at her purchase, to gain detachment. She decided to try collapsing it and stood up in front of all the other passengers—a nun, a transvestite, four or five generations of a Chinese family, a transit cop—making enough fuss that they all watched her. She found you really had to force the handle down, rather than release some catch like the others, the ones that snapped shut like a pair of mechanical jaws. In the end, everyone—the nun, the cop, the man in the miniskirt, the Chinese grandma—seemed satisfied and so she sat. She stood again as they passed over the river and everyone turned to watch her again. She held onto the carriage with one hand and the overhead bar with the other and looked out the windows. She wanted to see how beautifully the water reflected the rusty-silver light of the city.

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When Jim got home he didn’t say much. He undid his tie as he looked at the carriage, then went into the bedroom and changed out of his work clothes. He returned barefoot a few minutes later, circled once and nudged the carriage forward with his toe. “For the baby?” he said. “For Louisa.” “It looks all right to me,” he said. Then he examined it another minute, as if puzzled. “What is it?” she said. He shrugged. “It’s for Louisa,” he said. “I’m sure she’ll love it.” • • • After takeoff Jim opened the new edition of Was heisst Denken? while Joanie stared into the clouds. Two hours later there were mountains, more clouds. Was this how Raphael imagined Heaven? To her the puffed whiteness below and the paintbox blue above had all the inherent joy of a religious funeral. How come everyone was always sure Tom, Dick or Harry—no matter how petty and cruel the jerk was in life—was up here now in Heaven? How could nature or Paradise at this height resemble nothing so much at sunset as a sea of multicolored cotton candy? She guessed God in his cheapness never figured anyone would look from this angle. Now and then she sneaked a glance at Jim, bent over the bibliography. His hair had thinned on top but grew in great gray masses in and around his ears. He looked well enough to her, despite his thickening shoulders and arms. She liked that he still blushed now and then, although it seemed completely arbitrary what embarrassed him. He had been very understanding when she purchased the twin beds two years ago, after he developed the implacable condition. He tried many remedies: charcoal pills, refiltered water, appetite deceleration, innumerable infusions and regular tablespoons of

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orange-flavor Metamusil. Nothing had worked until last summer when the co-op could no longer get the elephant garlic. Once they figured out what the source of his trouble had been, she knew he was relieved, though no mention was made of replacing the beds. He was fifty now. Fifty! Her closest friend ever, her only true friend, she decided, as she considered the round gleam on top of his head and the way he scratched his nose with his thumb for hours at a time as he stooped over a tome. When they got to Rachel’s, Joanie learned it was the last night of Hanukkah. In a hurry, they lit the menorah and Noah, his stethoscope around his throat and anxious to get back to the emergency room, managed Louisa in one hand and the candles in another while he recited the prayer. Rachel tried to open the big box but Jim had overdone the packing and Rachel struggled with the scissors until Noah became exasperated and took them from her. Still holding Louisa in the other hand, he knelt and cut open the box with a one long stroke of a utility knife he brought in from the kitchen, which sliced the canopy lengthwise, they discovered, after all the paper and plastic and peanut shells were cleaned up and the carriage popped open. “Oh, hell,” said Mom. “But it’s nice.” “We’ll repair it,” said Joanie, turning to Noah, who shrugged and turned away, setting the knife on a shelf. “I’m sure we can replace the canopy.” “This is for Louisa?” said Mom. The sisters looked at her. “Mom? What do you mean?” said Rachel. “I’m so old-fashioned.” “So, Ma, you don’t like it,” said Joanie. “At least it’s no death trap.” “It’s fine,” said Mom. “The dimensions are perfect.” “It’s collapses very easily,” said Jim, the expert, as he showed them. “Like this.”

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“But not too easily,” said Joanie. “Some were animal traps. Believe me. You should have seen them. I’m having nightmares.” “Animal traps?” said Rachel. Mom looked at Joanie. “Oh, I just love it,” said Rachel. “It has plenty of wheels. Very sturdy. Sometimes the ones with fewer wheels are unstable. Lots of wheels means stability.” “So many wheels?” said Mom. “It’s perfect!” said Rachel. “I love it. Thank you.” She got up, crossed the room and kissed Joanie. “I love it too,” said Mom. “Don’t get me wrong.” Rachel kissed Jim. “I only have one question,” said Mom. “Not that it isn’t perfect.” “What?” said Joanie and Rachel together. “It’s blue,” said Mom. Rachel blushed. Noah was silent. “Ma?” said Rachel. “I’m old fashioned,” said Mom. She looked at Jim. “I’m old fashioned. Maybe it’s for number two? Should you ever have one. Are we already favoring a boy?” Joanie looked quickly at Rachel, and then tried to cover it. “I’m sorry,” said Joanie. “I’m so stupid.” “Oh, stop it now. Everybody!” interrupted Rachel. “Who cares if it’s blue? It’s beautiful. It’s fine.” “I’m old-fashioned,” said Mom. “What are you talking about?” said Noah. “I’ve no idea what anybody’s talking about.” “The carriage is blue,” said Mom. “So?” said Rachel. “That’s right,” said Mom. “So what? For Louisa the carriage is blue.” Rachel made it clear with a wave of her hand that enough time had been wasted. After dinner, after Louisa had been put

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finally, painstakingly to bed, Joanie sat with Rachel on the back porch and stared at the darkening yard. The fragrance outdoors surprised Joanie as the blinds moved now and then, the only hint of a breeze. The silence seemed richer and deeper, more textural than she could have expected—she wondered if that alone might be compensation for living in a place like Sacramento. How long would it take to lose appreciation for it? Rachel’s yard was plenty big enough for the three fig trees she could see just beyond the light of the porch, a picnic table under the plum tree, and the wild roses along the fence. The grass needed mowing, but what’s a husband for? She smiled at herself and imagined sitting on such a porch with a banjo, spending a week just learning to tune it. Then a few chords, some finger-picking techniques and in no time she’d be playing “Oh, Susannah.” Now there was something to give your time to. She was astonished to find herself back in the West beside Rachel, her beautiful sister—twelve years younger, already thirty-five now, and was worried they hadn’t more at this moment to say to one another. It had been a long flight, a long day. A moth drew an irregular line in the light above the grass and after a long silence Rachel laughed and said her backyard looked like the devil. Neither she nor Noah were much for yard work. After another long silence Rachel touched Joanie’s arm and whispered, “I have news.” Joanie calmly remembered her strategy: no phony faces to give her away. No gushing this time. She would simply tell her how happy she was for her. Maybe she would take her hands and tell her she loved her. Rachel pulled her chair close and their knees touched when Rachel looked back over her shoulder into the kitchen. For the third or fourth time that evening Joanie was moved and amazed by the beauty of her little sister, the black hair in the porch light, the black intelligent eyes fixed as if on Joanie’s heart.

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“I don’t know what you’ll think of me,” Rachel said. Then she shook her head. “Only, don’t pity me. My life—my situation— might seem untenable to you, but this is what I want.” Joanie, confused, said, “Rachel, I have no doubt.” “No,” she continued, almost breathlessly. “I know what you must think of me. California girl, suburban bourgeoisie, Sacramento housewife. Pumping out babies like some kind of, I don’t know, factory worker. All I do is change diapers. When was the last time I finished reading a book? A living cliché, too, the doctor’s wife. All the aunts and uncles dancing in a circle. She married a doctor! She married a doctor! Like I have no identity of my own. Noah is four years younger than me, but subtract my husband and all he’s accomplished, take away Louisa, and what’s left? Zero. You must think, like, ‘Ow!’ every time someone mentions my name.” “Rachel—” Joanie said. “Just don’t look down on me, or pity me.” “Jesus,” said Joanie. “What are you talking about?” “Don’t shout at me, please?” said Rachel. “Who’s shouting?” “You’re shouting.” “I’m not!” “Now you’re shouting.” “Oh, Rachel, please. Not this. Please.” Rachel slammed her chair back. On her feet now, the beautiful sister was trembling, her fists pressed together in front of her. “Don’t ever talk to me like that! Ever! Do not condescend to me.” Joanie felt Jim’s hesitation fill the screen door behind her. She wondered how long he had been there. “Rachel,” he said. “The baby’s awake.” “I didn’t mean to,” Joanie said. “I didn’t mean anything against you. You started to tell me something. I wanted to know what it was.”

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But Rachel had already pushed past Jim into the kitchen. The screen door wheezed and slammed. • • • The next night Rachel phoned Mom’s, where Joanie and Jim were staying, and apologized. She was busy and couldn’t talk, but tomorrow night, in memory of Daddy, Rachel was making scalloped potatoes and schnitzel. Afterwards, she had to go out. She was taking two courses (for her sanity, she said) at the Jewish Community Center: Bookkeeping III and Preparing for Personal Wealth. Would Joanie stay over and watch Louisa? “Maybe we’ll get a chance to talk,” said Joanie. “When you get back.” On Tuesday night, after Joanie and Jim and Louisa sat at the table, Rachel rushed upstairs then returned to the kitchen with her coat on and the book bag in her arms. She said, “This is really so excellent. Mom is helpful but she traumatizes me—and everyone else.” Joanie, whose mouth was full, raised her fork in sympathy. “I’m just too busy,” Rachel said. “Mom has nothing to do and so she wants me to entertain her, you know? And Louisa has a Twinkie every time I leave her at the nursery. But Louisa—watch her!—she leaps up the stairs like some genus of giant lizard. She goes right up the bookshelves! Any day now I’ll catch her crawling across the ceiling. I swear to God.” She stopped and looked at the clock on the stove. “Noah works twenty-two hours a day. Can you believe it? Would you want a zombie operating on you in the ER? For dessert have a cup of this tea—it’s Brazilian,” she gestured toward the counter. “Don’t ask. Noah’s secretary gave it to me.” Joanie said she never heard of Brazilian tea. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Rachel said. “They don’t grow tea in Brazil. At least, I don’t think so. Maybe they blend it there? Who knows, who cares?”

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Jim blushed. “To complicate things,” Rachel continued, “Noah has been interviewing for jobs. He’s met twice with the bigshots at a clinic in San Francisco. He even went shopping for real estate up in Sausalito! He couldn’t stop talking about it. A hardwood porch— teak? Is that possible?—and it goes all the way around the house. In front there’s a view of the Bay and in the backyard a whole forest of redwoods for the kids to run around in. A grape arbor— would Daddy have loved that?—and four marble cherubs pissing in a fountain.” Joanie watched Rachel watch Jim put his napkin down on the table. “Louisa sometimes is an angel. Give her Good Night Moon at 7:30. By 7:45 she’s out cold, guaranteed, unless of course she plays you like a fiddle. Don’t let her give you shit.” She was going to say more. She scanned the kitchen. She looked at Jim’s plate heaped with potatoes. “Have some schnitzel,” she said. Jim smiled, as if smiling hurt. “You know I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone’s,” Rachel interrupted her own thoughts. She stared at Joanie intensely and the shadow of something crossed her eyes. “More than anything—” she said, but stopped again. It was time to go. “While I’m not here, me and my big sopping teats,” she continued, “Louisa shouldn’t be too horrible.” She gathered her bag onto her shoulder and waved the car keys, saying “We’ll talk later! Sorry, and thanks.” Louisa wasn’t too bad. She twice gave a grisly scream, rejecting the bottle, but by eight she gave in, weeping as she sucked, her eyes as hard as diamonds. Five minutes later she was out. Joanie read until Jim went up to bed. She hadn’t slept well since they left New York, so she went onto the back porch to wait and sip the air like a warm watery cocktail. She opened her book but never got past the title page. She fell into a dream but startled when she heard

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something, someone—an animal in the yard. She sat paralyzed a long time, watching for motion near the trash cans and the dark fence, waiting, secretly grateful something terrible might happen. Moths fizzled near the light and the silence now was less a rich, wild garden than a place to hide, a wall where rabid raccoons or dogs waited for her to doze off, a blanket tossed out beside the trash for psychopaths to crouch under. She sat and waited, ashamed at such pointless melodrama, such loneliness. When she had courage, she jumped up the stairs and into the kitchen and locked the door behind her. Then she waited in the kitchen, listening, her heart hammering. It was nearly midnight when Rachel came in and dropped her books on the floor; Joanie forced herself to walk, not run into the livingroom, and found Rachel fallen into the loveseat, smiling wearily in her coat. She was half asleep already and when she saw Joanie, she apologized for keeping her so late. After Bookkeeping, one of the girls wanted to have a drink. She thanked Joanie. Joanie said she was glad to see her safe at home. “And Jimmy?” Rachel said a minute later. “In bed,” Joanie said. “Long ago.” “Thank God,” Rachel said, “Noah is almost done with this residency.” She closed her eyes. “Soon—” she continued abruptly, “Soon there’ll be money!” Joanie said she’d kept the water hot. “Great,” said Rachel. “And Joanie!” She pointed at the carriage open in the shadow next to the bookcase, the sliced canopy like a blue flag unfurled in the corner. “Thanks.” By the time Joanie returned from the kitchen with two cups and a sugarbowl, Rachel was asleep. Joanie sat quietly with her tea. Rachel’s head had fallen back against a pillow, her mouth open, a thick line of hair across her eye. One soft hand lay in her lap. The other, the band and diamond on her finger, was set softly against the arm of the loveseat in a gesture of pushing it away. How much she looked like Daddy! Had Joanie never noticed?

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Between sisters, Ma always told her, it’s never too late. She looked at Rachel and considered in silence the meaning of the word never. You had to either absolutely or absolutely not believe in God to use such a word. She finished her tea, and wondered whether her mother believed in God. She got up, put on a sweater, turned off the lights and went out to sit on the front porch. The air was cool with a different fragrance, more as she remembered it. She watched the street until she felt cold, then went quietly in, past the sleeping Rachel into the dark kitchen. She was about to go up the stairs when Noah appeared, coming in from the front like a ghost in his scrubs. She watched him move through the livingroom, not seeing Rachel. She watched him go up the stairs and then waited a long time after the toilet flushed for him to come down and look for her. Twenty minutes later she gave up and went upstairs, too. For a long time she lay in the attic room by her husband and listened for Noah, sure he would get up to go find Rachel, to quietly call her name at the top of the stairs, his hand against the wall, his finger tentative on the light. She listened forever until sleep came like a strange motion, moving her, floating her over the valley, the hills, the Sierras, over the desert in the wrong direction. When she woke in the early light she knew, first thing, she had been right about the carriage, even the color blue was perfect—though now the canopy was ruined. Against the flow of logic, she saw the sudden irrefutable proof that, yes, though the carriage was fine, everything else was wrong. Under it all, Ma was right. Joanie had abandoned them, abandoned Daddy and never looked back, abandoned her mother and her little sister. There was no trust and no forgiveness. Rachel hadn’t even told her she was pregnant. Her own sister! Now nothing was left to her but the dull pain of having made a mistake. She reached for Jim’s wrist but needed a minute to find his pulse.

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• • • A week before their flight, the visit was as good as over. The day after Christmas she overheard Noah on the back porch hissing at Jim: “Fuck the Palestinians. Fuck them all.” She went to the door and listened for Jim’s answer. She heard nothing, only her husband’s patience and hatred joined to the fragrant silence of the backyard, the fruit tree, the picnic table. She was ready to get back to New York, but they had planned to rent a car and spend a day in wine country, two nights in San Francisco, a day at a beach hotel near Santa Barbara. They decided to keep to this plan but changed their seats to fly home New Year’s Eve, two days early. When they returned to Sacramento everyone treated everyone with tense kindness. The chief of surgery was throwing a New Year’s bash and Noah and Rachel had been asked to join him for dinner at the club beforehand, but Rachel insisted on taking them to the airport first. She was already running behind—it was late afternoon and she had to get ready. Ma said she wished she could take them. Rachel scolded her for never learning to drive. “Imagine that!” said Ma, shaking her head. “Fifty years in California and I never learned to drive. It’s taken me this long to realize I should have stayed in Manhattan. I never should have married your father, either. Anyway, I’ll come with you to the airport.” “No,” said Rachel and that put an end to it. But Rachel made such a fuss dressing Louisa. She zipped her into five different jumpers before settling on one with big red and white stripes, and tied a red ribbon into the one curl hefty enough to hold it. Suddenly Jim’s patience, despite twenty-five years of tai-chi and brown rice and tofu, was treacherous blood pressure mounting in the redness of his neck and eyes. He went outside to wait. “Our flight leaves in forty minutes,” he said to Joanie when she came out after him. “I want out of here. I don’t want to miss

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that plane.” He busied himself with the suitcase and the coats, setting them into Rachel’s trunk. She watched him lean against the car then, under the raised hatchback, to wait out the sudden, surprising rain. He had once been a passionate young man like few others, she thought. In his lovemaking so long ago she had wondered at his maturity, his exquisite slowness and at the endurance which now seemed all that was left of him. Twin beds, she thought, twin stretchers. Maybe their plane wouldn’t make it. Maybe they would go down against the western cliff of the Rockies. As the sky darkened, she sat on the steps under the awning, and listened to the rain on the house and the small diabolical cries from inside. Jim asked if Noah was torturing a cat. Joanie smiled and said no, it’s only Rachel giving Louisa the formula. A minute later the sunlight leaned through the clouds, brightening the car, the wet trees and sidewalk, the roof and windows of a neighbor’s house. Joanie had grown up three blocks from here but saw the neighborhood now as if for the first time. Like every yard on the street, Rachel’s had an orange tree in front, rhododendrons under the windows, the same porch, the same stoop. “Jimmy,” she said. “Remind me why we never had kids?” He shivered visibly then, though his sweater was buttoned to the throat. He put both hands in his pockets. “You told me you never wanted to,” he said. “A hundred years ago. Hadn’t you been preventing it all that time?” “I thought you didn’t want them,” she said. “I’m sure that’s why I said it.” “You were probably right. I probably didn’t. I had important things to do.” “That was a long time ago,” she said. “That’s right. It was a long time ago.” “Things change,” she said. “Yep,” he said. “Things do change.” “You wish you had a son?”

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Jim inhaled and blew out a breath. “Or a daughter, maybe,” she said. “That might have been something.” “Don’t say a thing,” she said and glanced quickly up at the porch. “Rachel is pregnant.” “You’re kidding me?” he said. His face turned gray, a color she hated: it meant the patience, for a few seconds, was gone. “Noah is a pig,” he said. “A real slob. How does she stand him?” “Don’t say a thing about the pregnancy,” Joanie said. “If anyone asks, you don’t know anything. I don’t even know.” He was about to answer when Rachel threw the door open and danced down the steps in her heels, turquoise tights, a linen miniskirt, a long silk lavender blouse, the seersucker diaper bag, the blue carriage looped under one arm and the baby—three ribbons in her hair!—balanced against her neck. Rachel looked terrific. Very sexy, Joanie thought. Jim checked his watch. “Oh, God!” Rachel said. “I almost never get out!” and smiled at Jim as she kicked open the rear door. Joanie took Louisa’s bag and threw it in front. Jim put the carriage in and closed the hatch. With both fists Louisa fought going into the carseat, and began right away to scream. Rachel tried everything to calm her while Joanie gave directions but a sudden hailstorm stopped all traffic on Winslow Avenue. After ten more minutes of a breathless, ascending scale of misery, Louisa’s face began to switch back and forth between violet and blue. She continued to screech on and on until Joanie began to feel hoarse shouting over her. At Threshold Reservoir, Joanie couldn’t remember which way to go. She hadn’t lived there in thirty years! “Just go straight, I think,” she said but Rachel said go left and when Jim ran a yellow light a minute later Rachel said he was going too fast. Joanie would have done anything to slow the pace, to stop the car, to stop Louisa’s miserable bellowing, to stop

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the plane on its runway. There was no point to speed now, no hurry, no place to go. She wanted to stay here, not in California but here forever, in this car with her little sister. She wanted only a moment of peace with her. That plane could go to hell. How could she explain to Jim? When they got caught in traffic on Clarity Highway, Louisa began to scream for real. Rachel tried the bottle of expressed milk again but Louisa spit a mouthful across the knees of her tights. Rachel said they had to stop because otherwise she couldn’t go to the dinner. She would stink. She had to be at the Berkeley Club in an hour! She had to take off the tights. “Twenty-five minutes till take-off,” Jim said, staring ahead. “We can’t stop.” On Barcelona Boulevard, he was going eighty. Rachel had her feet up on the back of his seat, her skirt hiked up around her waist, the tights at mid-thigh when a fruit truck ran a red light, forcing them into a wet spin on the boulevard. As they glided half the length of the block and through an intersection, the baby suspended her grief for a second. Joanie remembered a royal palm, a red light, the San Martín Basilica and a long copper-green fencerail all going in a slow circle around them. When the car glided to a stop, Rachel howled, completely—Joanie thought—losing her cool. Then Rachel jumped out of her door, leaving Louisa in a paroxysm, and marched around the car three times in her bare feet as pedestrians and the other drivers looked on. She sat on the curb a minute before she vomited between her knees. Nothing could be heard over Louisa the whole rest of the way. Joanie hoped Rachel somehow would give her the news before it was too late, but was primed both for truth and for deceit. At the airport, in either case, she would take her hand, give her a kiss, give her the blessing of a lifetime. In the parking lot they tried to put Louisa in the carriage but lost hope when Louisa turned as blue as the carriage itself.

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Rachel pushed the carriage ahead of her with her toe and held the baby in her arms as Joanie and Jim managed the luggage. In the terminal, with four minutes left, they pushed straight to the head of the line. “If you want to get going,” Joanie said to Rachel, “we understand.” Rachel ignored her, as if she too was determined to say one last thing to her one sister. But Louisa kept up the fight. Joanie took the baby but panicked when she forgot where she had the tickets. She knelt for her purse and Louisa dove for a penny by Jim’s shoe. When Rachel screamed No! the whole check-in line turned to stare at Rachel with her finger in Louisa’s mouth. Joanie checked in her bag. Not finding the tickets, she lifted the luggage onto the belt. Jim tied labels furiously. By then Louisa’s face, fingers and jumper were smeared with dirt and tears. Now she pulled Rachel’s hair, held her breath, turned colors. A woman behind them suggested they check her diaper. Or at least take her outside. Someone said, Holy Moses, don’t you feed her? When Jim pushed the tickets across the counter, the agent studied them for too long, then told him to relax, all flights had been delayed an hour for the weather. What could Joanie say? All this wasted grief and all she could do as the agent conversed with Jim was stare at the conveyor moving endlessly under the black straps? She should have called ahead? There was nothing any of them could say, so they said nothing as they followed Rachel and the newly bellowing child to the Sky Club and the couches by the big windows. As soon as Rachel opened her shirt, Louisa heaved a moan of desire and was suddenly soft and silent, except for the low savage suckling, half-whimper, half-suffocation. They sat and stared for minute, then Jim got up, saying he wanted the Times. Joanie looked at Louisa, then at Rachel, her linen miniskirt, her bare thighs crossed on the plush couch, the

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dressy shoe dangled from a toe. A blue vein stood out in her forehead, her hair was thrown over her shoulder. The weariness and fragility of her little sister, the black eyes, the milk-whiteness of her throat, the shadowy slope of her breast upset Joanie so much she blinked to hide her tears, casting her eyes about. Everywhere was a sea of color and noise and commotion. Two crowds of travelers crossed wherever she looked. Beyond them, at the entrance to the gates were the clustered monitors, a bank of escalators in motion, the flags of every state in the nation flying in the breeze of giant fans. When she got hold of herself again, the world was quiet. Somewhere within the airport din, at the very center of things, was only little Rachel, like a dressed-up child in her heels, her bare legs, her shirt open as Joanie sat, staring at the flushed globe of Louisa’s head. Joanie might have been watching for an hour or a minute when she saw that Rachel was crying too. Rachel had been so quiet, Joanie only noticed when she saw the tears glistening in Louisa’s soft hair. Jim returned when it was time to go. Joanie bent to kiss Louisa and Rachel and they left her there, deep in the couch, the front of her lavender blouse open and stained with a damp embroidery of black and purple flowers. The carriage was empty at Rachel’s foot, one of Rachel’s buttons pulled tight in each of Louisa’s little fists.

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ittle Jimmy surveyed the mirrors on the ceiling, the spotlights above the runway, the horseshoe shape of the bar. Everything was cleaner and brighter than he imagined. A semicircle of tiny tables, each set with three chairs, zigzagged all the way around the room. He put his arms behind his head and stretched his long legs out between his two extra chairs. When the waitress passed, he pulled his feet in and like a schoolboy raised his hand. He ordered a margarita, then loosened his collar. Little Jimmy was six-four, and though this had been true five years already, it seemed his very bones were a lie. He had been five-three until his last semester of high school, when he was eighteen, so the growth had come too late. Despite his outsized limbs and hands and head and feet, he was still Little Jimmy Rose in his neighborhood in Stapleton, in his mother’s kitchen, and in his heart and soul. He avoided looking up at the mirrors, to see how he dwarfed his table. When the waitress returned with the drink, he said, “What time do they start?” “Hold your horses, cupcake,” she said. “Any minute.” He said he would run a tab and she looked him up and down and said, “Screw.” So he dug in his shirt, attempting to hide that he had a hundred dollars in various denominations folded in each 91

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of his various pockets. He tried to pull out only the seven singles he needed for the drink but as he extracted them a whole lump tagged along and fell out over the table onto the floor. “Careful with your money, darling,” she said and left him bent down under the awkward little chair. By the time he settled in again and the drink washed away the blush that poisoned his face, he went back to savoring what he had in his pockets: twenty-five singles (minus seven), five fives, five tens in his shirt, the same configuration in his pants and two fifties in his wallet. Three hundred minus seven. That ought to do for the night. In the far corner an emaciated creep, watching everything but Jimmy, was ugly-handsome with his string tie and pocked face. He looked too physically weak to matter, leaning with his elbows on the bar as he smoked, so Jimmy’s attention was absorbed by the drink in front of him, the salt around its rim, the small circle of his table. For a minute Jimmy reflected on the day, and might have congratulated himself if he knew how. He imagined what Mr. Steen would say in the morning, once Mr. Steen saw what Little Jimmy had pulled off. He dismissed a long painful reverie then, or a short one, considering the relativity of time when a synapse misfires. “Ha!” he said almost out loud, against this new idea of himself— Little Jimmy with Money—and saw the too-small boy in a white shirt and blue tie against the fence in the yard of St. Rita’s School. The youngest in his class, weak with his fists and wit, too freckled, too pale, too dirty blond, he had been the target of schoolyard derision, a mouse of a boy with five older sisters and hyperactive bowels. He was no one’s favorite, not even his mother, who feared the judgments of his father. He wore his shirts two or three days at a time and often felt dirty next to the others, especially the tall Italian girls in their kilts, knee socks and immaculate green vests. He had his fights—he wasn’t without a temper or valor—but almost always lost, even against the girls.

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Once, in the neighborhood, a gang of teenagers he admired and envied, even loved in his lonely, furtive way—Mike Brosnan, Paulie Rocklyn, Johnny DiStefano and the rest—poured a bucket of piss they had been filling all week over his fresh crew cut. Once they stripped him naked and drove him in back of Rocklyn’s Camaro out to the docks where they forced him to inhale from a cigar until he puked. They left him there, tossing his clothes into the harbor before they drove away. He hid until it was dark and ran three miles, keeping close to the weeds, or down the abandoned streets or the streets where all the windows were lit for supper time. The worst was waiting behind the Caldaris’ hedge and watching his house three houses down, trying to see how to cross the yard in front of the picture window and break in without getting caught by his sisters. High school was better, Staten Island Community College almost perfect. A girl named Colleen Davy who had her own Honda Accord and red, Robin-Hood style boots flirted easily with him after an accounting class and once touched his arm when he showed a little nerve; she even laughed out loud when he asked her if she wanted to go with him sometime to CBGBs. This humiliated him but was better than nothing at all. Next came this job and adulthood, which, he discovered, provided the cover he had always missed. Everyone on the North Shore worked on Wall Street in one capacity or another, but Jimmy actually loved the markets; he loved getting so close to the money. Especially today. They liked him at work and treated him well because he knew his math and his Irish manners. He commuted on the ferry; he loved getting jostled by the crowd in the big bright echo chamber of the terminal. He sat on the lower deck in the smoking cabin, though he didn’t smoke, and loved the smell of the crowds with their papers and cigarettes and steaming coffee. Every Wednesday on the way to St. George he dropped two suits at Richmond Cleaners and picked up his shirts Thursday evening

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for the next week. Everything was scheduled. He was busy, punctual, optimistic and lonesome. He never made it to CBGBs and worried whenever he saw or heard the adjective isolated as applied to an individual in the paper or on the news, as if the word, the state, like Satan or the Mother Mary, awaited him somewhere with infinite patience. His father had died three years ago. He visited his mother Sundays; he liked to tell her he was bullish. He kept in shape by avoiding the subways on workdays, walking from South Ferry all the way up Trinity Place to Fulton Street. Sometimes he imagined himself an older man, thirty-five or forty maybe, with money, a leather briefcase and an apartment in Brooklyn Heights or a big house in Jersey. He had a recurring dream, too, though he was never sure if the dream recurred or happened only once though he somehow returned to it over and over: he had lost his shoes as he fled down the steps into the IRT where everyone on Wall Street had gone to escape; the tracks, the platform, the trains were packed and Jimmy, desperate for a toilet, to be alone, for relief, ran in his socks through an immense public restroom underground, from one filthy overflowing stall to the next. He examined his margarita again, had a long swallow and dismissed the dream. Sometimes he had too much to think about and was surprised, embarrassed, upset even to realize a girl had come out of the back and as if without noticing him settled at a table beside him. He blushed again and wondered where to put his hands. He crossed his arms and bent over his drink and sucked the straw. But this was no ice cream parlor. He sat back, removed the straw and set it next to his napkin. He had another look at her. She wore no makeup at all, which offended him on one level. On another, he figured what moron would put makeup on a face like that? She had small, innocent, purposeful eyes she directed carefully around her as she settled in, and the simplicity of style

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you’d expect from a Catherine or a Claire, the kind of saint who right away and forever leaves your soul hungry. Something seemed vague about her, too—hers was the kind of good looks that was mostly the absence of distracting features—no freckles, a nice nose, bluish eyes, a healthful slenderness and the medium-length, chestnut-colored hair she folded over her ears to reveal how her eyebrows softened her expression. But something troubled her. He could tell by the doubtful way she put her small canvas bag under her chair. She got a cigarette and matches out of her jacket. She blew smoke straight up without inhaling then gave Jimmy an eat-shit look that surprised and wounded him, but not fatally. From long years of experience he knew what to expect from these St-Joseph’s-on-the-Hill prep-school types, and his double margarita fortified him. He had two hundred ninety-three dollars in his pockets. Today was the day of his life! Tomorrow, and the day after, there would be far more money. So he signaled the waitress again. “Where are the dancers!?” he asked when she came but she ignored him. Addressing the table next to Jimmy, the waitress said, “You want something?” The girl smiled. “No thanks.” “Mineral water, Coke, spritzer? What?” The girl hesitated. The waitress rolled her eyes and looked at Jimmy, as if this was his problem. “I’ll be right back,” she said. Jimmy did what he could to eliminate all thought of this girl. On the phones for the last month all the brokers Jimmy knew talked about nothing but this little joint. This was where the babes were, living goddesses, the most exquisite lap-dancing shedevils in Heaven or Hell—or so the story went. They put up the most outrageous acts in town and the reason they worked here was because Wall Street boys (like himself, like Little Jimmy) were wolves with money and appetite and wolves with money

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and appetite were the greatest suckers on earth for a G-string, a spiraling crust of rhinestones and a spray of big pink feathers. So what was Miss Dignity doing here? He ran his eyes around the rim of his empty glass, around the edge of his table and sneaked another look. Then he was ashamed and embarrassed, and went back to thinking about the money. He was only twenty-three and at the game two years but it made him nuts to think he’d taken so long to make his first killing, to get into that zone in the clouds where the silver linings pile up. He was conscious of something foreign in this flavor of thought, as if he had learned someone else’s language overnight and spoke it to himself now in secret. No matter. Now was his chance to maneuver or move to another brokerage. Antonelli’s Associates was going nowhere. The name itself was proof it was doomed to remain small time, entrenched in the boroughs, serving the middle-class Jews and Italians that had escaped Bay Ridge out to Staten Island or Rockaway. The only other associate in the house with a record was Mr. Rowan, the broker who had made a killing once, too, but had been satisfied and worked only part-time ever since. Jimmy cast his gaze past her, past the bar onto the bright runway. The tequila had made him impatient. Where were the girls? Tomorrow morning Mr. Steen would take him aside, maybe down to Whistler’s for coffee and a danish. Maybe together Mr. Steen and Jimmy could see Jimmy in a new light. At the bell today Jimmy had been at his desk finishing off the paperwork and was the only one who understood what he had accomplished. He looked over at Mr. Rowan then too, with his legs crossed as he towered over the Daily News, twisting the cigarette in his fingers like a miniature dagger, now and then bringing it too close to his face so he could French-kiss it, oblivious that the tobacco was gone and all he was smoking was the hot filter. Rowan was the only person Jimmy knew who was taller than him. Everything about Rowan was vertical. Like the wings of a falcon, his feathery

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eyebrows were always raised high over his tiny, sparkling eyes. The long swollen veins in his flat nose reminded Jimmy of the falcon’s legs, its claws descending into some mutilated prey hidden inside his moustache. Rowan put his head back and showed his yellow teeth and sneered when he told his story, how one day everyone said “sell” and Rowan said “buy.” It was as simple as that, he said, and looked up as if to God Above for blessing him with such guts and clarity. He had lived as a professional cheapskate ever since. He wore the same coffee-colored suit year in and year out. He wore the same socks every day too, or else found three pair that fell over the backs of his shoes exactly the same way every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Mr. Giuliani was the cartoon at the other desk. He was no relation to the mayor, although you never know, he liked to say, with a wink. Short and squat, his eyes large and hyperactive, bulging from his big head, Mr. Giuliani was the opposite of Rowan. He never seemed to have sold anything or bought anything in his life, other than magazines wrapped in brown paper he returned with from lunch and locked in his desk. He had been employed twenty years ago as a broker but had devolved, within a week, to a kind of receptionist. Mr. Steen kept him on for no known reason, though Mr. G distracted Mrs. Steen when she came in, in her furs and fishnets. Jimmy had to admit for a woman her age there was something stimulating about her. He liked the black mascara and the dark messy hair and the way she sat down with Mr. G right out in front of everybody and talked to him, sometimes in a loud sexy whisper, sometimes a cackle. Jimmy looked up at the waitress who set down another double. She stood over him with arms crossed and legs apart like a cop. Less clumsy than before, he unbundled another seven dollars. By the morning bell tomorrow, Mr. Steen and Jimmy would be the only ones who knew something no one else knew,

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no one but Mrs. Spino, Jimmy’s one serious client: that the two of them, Mrs. Spino and Jimmy, were both all at once on their way to getting seriously rich. Jimmy loved that idea—it lit up all his hidden circuits. Keep it straight and narrow, short and sweet, go directly to the hoop was Jimmy’s advice to anyone who would listen. That’s what Jimmy had done. He found Primogeny, a stock he believed in, that he knew was undervalued, and put up his own stake. Then he found somebody with a real share, and got her some, too. Now Mrs. Spino was almost $100,000 richer than last week and Jimmy’s $3,000 was $12,000. In the morning, he would move it all to cash or blue chips and pray for NASDAQ to shit the bed again, then go shopping for more. He was deep in thought when the whispering distracted him. “Hey, d’you have any money?” He looked around. No one was there but Miss America. He looked the other way: no one. He expected the waitress to be after him again. In the corner the skell with the string tie was lighting a cigar. A fistful of guys, guys like Jimmy, pushed through the door shouting and pounding each other on the neck. He searched their faces hopelessly. Maybe he knew one of them? Maybe they had spoken on the phones? At least he hadn’t come to the wrong place. He turned again to see where the question had come from and realized the girl beside him had given him another chance. She smiled vaguely—an apology, maybe—and blew smoke away in a dense cloud. “Hey, wake up,” she said. She put the cigarette in the ashtray and both hands flat on the table, her elbows close at her sides as she leaned slightly forward; suddenly her eyes were bright, conspiring. Her accent was musical and strange and Jimmy had no idea how to place it. His cousin Paul had once been to Texas. Was she from Texas? Or Mars? She bent her head, not quite coyly, without smiling and asked, as if out of simple curiosity, “D’you have any money?”

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Jimmy said, “Would I be here if I had no money?” “Who knows what brings someone to a place like this?” she said. She smiled uneasily this time and prodded her ashtray with the cigarette. Soon she had smiled two or three times more, each time a bit more bravely. Despite her efforts, Jimmy leaned over for another inhalation of his drink. To hell with everything, the voice inside him said, I like it through a straw. After another swallow he could feel the ice in his veins begin to glow. He looked again at her. She wore no rings, not even earrings. If a cop asked him to describe her, what would he say? Her white collar was folded up and Jimmy had noticed a V-shaped section of her throat? Maybe two or three years younger than him, she was the type of looker that put in no effort; something contradictory about her, a hint of class, a hint of quiet panic, however well smoothed over, gave him courage. She said, “Can you give me five dollars?” One unvirtuous little animal inside him said no. You take me for a sucker? Another said, sure, sweetheart, whatever you want, are you kidding me? He pictured Mr. Rowan in this situation, in his shabby suit and soiled socks, his cigarette down to his red-hot fingertips. Mr. Giuliani would have given her fifty by now. Mr. Steen would have invited her to come join him and his wife and taken her somewhere decent for drinks and dinner. Or maybe he would have her bounced out the door. Jimmy figured what the hell and pulled the cash out of his shirt. He counted five singles onto the table, folded them and handed them across to her. This time when she smiled there was warmth in it and he right away regretted what he’d done. He should have given her a five and kept the singles for himself. He fretted a minute then said, “Wait, give me that back.” She wrinkled her nose but gave the singles back after he passed her a five. He chastised himself for having surrendered so many singles to the waitress. Those had been for the dancers. Now he had only eleven. Next time he’d pay with a twenty and ask for

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ones in change. A hundred minus seven minus seven minus five left eighty-one. Why was he worried? He had another roll in his pants. He wouldn’t want too many more drinks either, considering he hadn’t eaten since the buttered roll he had for breakfast. He checked his watch: 6:20. “Hey!” he said and the waitress stopped in front of him, examining his drink. “Where are the dancers?” he said. “I thought they started at six.” “That’s right,” she said. “Six.” Then she was gone. “What’s your big hurry?” said the girl next to him but before he could answer she jumped up and with a show of disgust at how little pleasure the cigarettes had given her, carried her ashtray to the bar and left it there. He couldn’t help notice the polish in her nervous new energy as she returned, her beautiful slender knees, her leather loafers, the graceful way she moved her skirt and her girlish but commendable can when she came back and slid around her small table to take her seat, fueling a flame in his heart and neck that he doused urgently with another gulp through the straw. It wasn’t only the drinks that roused his nerve. His donation—her debt—helped too. “What are you doing?” he said. “You don’t even smoke.” “You’re right,” she said. She wrinkled her nose again, a gesture that was a bit ugly—it seemed he saw her now for the first time. “I never smoke,” she said. Another cigarette appeared out of her coat. She offered it to him. He shook his head no. He felt her watch him as he stretched his arms out. He flexed his hands and exhaled. For the first time all day, for the first time in weeks maybe, he was beginning to breathe. The front of his brain was pleasantly numb. He wiggled his fingers and flattened them and raised his hands in balance, as if to levitate the table, the bar, the runway behind it. When he looked again at the girl, she reinserted the cigarette into her

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pocket, then put her chin in her hand, her elbow on the table, and directed her eyes back at him. She gave a sigh and a frown, as if wondering what she could possibly do to satisfy his curiosity about her. “What on earth are you doing here?” she said. “I’m here to have a few drinks. To see some gorgeous girls dancing naked.” “Oh, really?” she said, her gaze vacant now. “How deep you are!” He laughed. “Yeah, I know,” he said and turned his face away. He decided again to ignore her. Another herd had come in. He wished he knew some of them, someone he could talk to. Someone to ride the ferry home with. Someone he could tell about his unbelievable day on the Street. He wondered if he would recognize Rich Morelli, a track-star from high school and a currency trader now who had made a bundle already and moved with his wife and kid to Middletown. Or what a pisser if Jeremy Stark, whom he hadn’t seen in years, walked in. Stark had been a bony little guy like Jimmy once, long ago, but was a fireman now and Jimmy heard that some of the firehouses downtown hung out here on a Wednesday night. But only the suits came in. One after another strode in through the door and turned and took a long glance at the girl next to Jimmy before looking for a table or a barmaid. Jimmy had another swallow of his drink. “What did you think?” he asked her. “Isn’t that why a guy like me comes to a joint like this?” Her elbow still rested on the table, her chin in her hand, her eyes leveled at his neck. “Not like you,” she answered. “I see how you suffer.” “What?” he said. “Do you think I’m blind? You’re not like them at all. You’re sweet and shy. You’ve had too much to drink and you’re pretending you’re Harvey Keitel, but you’re not.”

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This time she smiled in a way that suggested this truth was as painful to her as it was to him. Who had ever bothered? Was that what it was like to get the attention of a girl? Who the hell was Harvey Keitel? “I made a lot money today,” he said, regretting it immediately. Her eyes sharpened. The aftereffect of the nose wrinkling was gone. Nothing on earth was better than her eyes. “How much?” she said. “A lot,” he said. “How much!?” “Why would I tell you?” “Please?” she said. Again, that troubling smile. “Why not?” “A little over twenty thousand, total,” he said. Her eyes went to the far end of the bar, which was empty, then in the direction of the loser with the string tie. He couldn’t tell if she was unimpressed or disguising her awe. “To me that’s one helluva lot of money,” he said. She looked at Jimmy. “All in one day,” he said. “That’s how this market is, if you know how to play it.” He sat up straighter than before. She adjusted her seat, then stood, taking her coat off and laying it across a chair. She swept her long sweater under her and ended up sitting closer to Jimmy. First, she fanned her face, a gesture that said, “It’s hot in here!” Then she turned to address him, but appeared confused, or afraid to raise her eyes. “What would you do?” she said, after taking a breath, “if someone, a complete stranger, told you she were in trouble?” Jimmy blushed again. He felt the heat in his face. He knew she saw it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I might tell her—tough shit.” Her face turned to death, like someone in the lead role at a wake.

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“Look, I might be sympathetic in some cases,” he said quickly, secretly cursing his stupidity. “It might also depend on what kind of trouble it was.” “What if she couldn’t tell you?” she answered. She quickly glanced at the end of the bar. Or maybe the door. “What if she didn’t really know, or understand, how much trouble she was in?” “Then I don’t really know, either,” Jimmy said. “What if you found her attractive?” She beamed, as if to encourage him. “Or what if you just liked her and suspected that despite her circumstances she was someone good, a good person and reliable, usually, only a little naive and—in need of help, in a silly, slightly precarious mess.” She hesitated then continued. “Let’s say times are tough. She could pay you back, only she needs money, fast. What do you have to lose?” “Times are tough ?” he started to say. “It’s just,” she said, “that I’m scared. You know? Scared and alone.” The wideness of her eyes was something she couldn’t have faked. Her hand, on the table again, was exquisite and small, her fingers too delicate, too fragile, too easily injured. As brightly lit as this place was now, before the show, an oily shadow lay in all the corners, under the tables, behind the bar. It was already dark out. “I’ve only been in the city a couple of months,” she said. “I right away got involved with the wrong guy. I need some money. I need—” she said and stopped, re-figuring something. Her expression changed. Now her face flushed, its childishness shining through. Something in the way her hair was swept back to reveal her ears reminded him how young she probably was, how young they both were. She focused eagerly on him. He tried to make sense of what she was saying. How could she even talk to him? With such earnestness, and seriousness, as if he was the last decent joe in the world. The one who could rescue her.

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“I’ve never been in a place like this before,” she said. She looked down, searching the table, as if for the page missing from a script. She shook her head, clarifying something to herself. “I’m a dancer,” she said. “I don’t need to know,” he said. “Not this kind of dancer!” Jimmy was stumped. Ballet? Ballroom? Go-go? Why was she hanging out in a strip joint? “Some Jazz,” she said. “Some Modern.” She tightened her lips in a way he might have missed if he hadn’t been watching closely. She considered her fingers on the table. Jimmy had no clue. Somehow it was only now, during this brief lapse, despite all that had happened in the last minutes, that things went too fast for him. “I don’t know,” he said. “What if I give you ten bucks more? Will that take care of it?” He reached for his pocket but she touched his arm, stopping him. The firm way she set her jaw and the determination, the tears forming in her eyes was something again that Jimmy hadn’t expected. She was serious and believed he would help her. He wanted to explain something to her, something too obvious even to form as an idea: that no one had ever asked so much? That he wasn’t a sucker? Was she kidding? “When does the dancing start?” he said. He pointed to the bar with a movement of his head. “I mean this kind of dancing.” She glanced at his watch but didn’t answer. She was gathering strength to say one thing more. Jimmy interrupted her. “You want a drink?” he said. “No,” she said. “Sure?” “I never drink,” she said. “How about some beer nuts?” he said. Again, no.

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“What exactly do you want from me? Maybe you should just leave me alone.” She adjusted her seat, moving her hands and sliding the chair. A second later she tilted her head close. “It seems like a joke,” she said. “But it’s not. I’ve made a mistake. I’m really, really afraid. I borrowed money from someone I shouldn’t have.” He resisted forming the two sardonic question marks with his eyebrows. “An ex,” she said. “We lived together for two months and I had to borrow money from him in order to leave him. But he’s unpredictable and he scares me.” “Who is he?” “Emile,” she said. “Emile?” “The cabbie, in fact, who brought me into the city from Newark. He seemed so charming, so funny, so sweet! There is no way to explain to my family. It would be the cruelest thing that ever happened to them.” “How much you need?” he said. “By noon tomorrow I need two thousand.” “Two thousand? Two thousand dollars?” “He gave me a deadline.” “Deadline?” Jimmy tried to get up but she put a hand on his. “Or give me two hundred,” she answered rapidly. “If you give me two hundred I can pay the fee here and they’ll let me perform. They said they’d give me a chance. I could earn a thousand a night, maybe. Depending how good I am, how far I go. Maybe enough—” She spoke carefully, “To buy off an asshole for a few hours.” She threw her finger out and pointed at the runway. “Wouldn’t you like that? To see me up there?” she said. “No one comes here

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to see these girls, not really. What all these guys come to see is—me.” Suddenly there was a noise, a snap-snap-snap and the overhead lights went down. The fixtures on the wall glowed a powdery pink. Her voice wobbled only slightly. “Then you could come again tomorrow night, too,” she continued. “I’ll be here every night till I pay him off. Maybe every night for the rest of my life! Wouldn’t you love that?” Jimmy racked his brains. Some incarnation of truth lay nestled in all this, like a worm at the heart of an apple. He was oddly elated. Should he be worried about the boyfriend, too? What he liked were her small, soft hands, her slender fingers, the precise way she folded her napkin on the edge of the table, the way she looked up when her eyes focused on him, and the melodrama, too, her desperation, her dependence, her faith. For a second, maybe two, he was ready to do anything for her—or maybe it was better to delay, to hoard the moment, to keep it alive. The unbelievable thing was, he almost believed her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought it was a good idea and I swear I came here with every intention of getting up there and making a go of it. I only meant to ask you for the fee and pay you back at the end of the night—that’s the God’s-honest truth. And then I saw you. Now I’m confused. Maybe it’s not so great an idea. Or maybe it’s too late.” She shook her head again. She swept her hair from her eyes. “I don’t know. I would never have believed it would seem so wrong—that I would be this upset. Now I don’t know. I’m afraid.” A strand of the hair fell back across her face. She swept it away again and this time he noticed, no wider than the point of a sharp pencil, an imperceptible line, a soft scar curved up from the corner of her eye and angled back almost to the opening of her ear. It was so perfectly drawn it seemed almost by design, something only the powder-pink light from the fixture behind her might pick up.

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Suddenly the room was crowded. She moved to his table, putting her coat over one of his empty chairs. She took a small wallet from the pocket of her fleece and pulled out an ID with the word NEBRASKA printed in red across the top, a driver’s license. She examined it intensely before she set it on the table, as if it might tell her something about herself. “What if I give you this? As collateral, sort of. It’s unconscionable of me, I know. I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s all I’ve got. You have to believe me.” Jimmy tried to examine it for some clue, a name or an address, but she quickly put her hand over it. “Do you mind?” she said and took it back. “I’ll give it to you, if you need it.” She returned the license to her wallet, her wallet to the pocket and smiled at him courageously. Under all the good looks, the near-perfect poise, was some distinction everyone, even a cabbie named Emile, would right away recognize and use, given a chance, and Jimmy was perceptive enough to see this was what brought all three of them together. A sequence of events had begun somewhere long before him and would only end long after him. Why should he participate? Because the place was so packed, because she felt so good so close to him, because of the margaritas maybe, he wasn’t scared. Or maybe whatever brought Little Jimmy and Emile together was greater than what divided them. It’s not impossible, he imagined, even though his thoughts by now were slurred. She seemed on the verge of something. She shifted in her seat and when, as if by accident, their knees touched, the effect was both delicate and brutal. He couldn’t stop staring at the almost imaginary line of the scar and how smoothly it blended with her skin in this light, how fine it was, how faint. When he said, “Who are you?” she touched his hand again. She looked at his eyes. He sensed her arms under the sweater, her

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small shoulders, her legs shifting under her skirt. That quickly, her tenderness and the drinks had worked their combined sorcery: whatever she was after, Jimmy wanted to give her. More than anything, he wanted her to be believed. Someone turned the volume up. The bulbs above them began to flash. What time was it? He leaned away from her and blinked when the spotlights came on, circling and illuminating the crowded mirrors. Jimmy’s head pulsated against the music. He tried again to get up but the floor was too steep, the music too loud, the crowd of broad backs in white shirts or suit jackets jammed against his table and all up and down the bar. He turned when a cheer rose around him and all he saw over the heads was a hair-do and a tiara like the Queen Mary glittering in the oceanic dark. Again Jimmy tried to lift himself to see but his new friend pinned his hand to the table. He turned to look at her and the tension in her eyes directed not at him but somewhere behind his tie implied, against all logic, that she was waiting—waiting for Little Jimmy. So Jimmy waited, too, as if within the noise, a deeper silence enclosed them. It had been stupid to talk to her, and this saddened him. Generosity saddened him too, because he hated it, because generosity carries too much sadness of its own. He looked across at her and wagged his head, as if that would clear his brain. He was too lonely to get sucked into something like this. What could she mean to him? He was only from Staten Island, true, but as of today this had been his city. As much as anyone’s, because of what he’d accomplished. Because he’d proven the worth of his own wiles. Because of the money. Now if only for a few days at last he owed nobody nothing, no deference, no apologies. He looked at the girl and moved his hand to his forehead, then his shirt, as if making a confused Sign of the Cross. He felt the numbness above his eyes. He wanted to get done with her and at the same time to never let her leave. He wanted to give her something, too, everything, but

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was unsure where to begin or end. When he at last moved to stop himself—as if he had been watching from above—it was too late. He had reached into his pocket and counted out five tens. He shifted in his chair and took the same out of his pants and two fifties from his wallet. She sat straight up now, very close to him and watching his hands, her posture perfect. At first she seemed unaffected when he folded the two hundred and offered them to her. Then she shook her head, saying, no, that’s not what she meant. Jimmy held the cash out to her too long and stared. At last, without looking up, she swept the money from his hand and shoved it into the same pocket as the wallet and the license. He had no idea what to expect. Maybe she would get up and pat his head, maybe kiss him on the forehead and go. She only sat there, too close to him with her head down. With the combination of nerve and dignity that might have been his grandfather’s, or a parish priest’s, that seemed more Mr. Steen’s than his own, he reached over to touch her hair. She pulled back slightly but Jimmy was gentle. At last she tilted forward and her forehead came to rest near his collar, her hair soft under his chin, the back of her head small in his hand. He could see the canvas bag she left under the table behind her, her coat on a chair, carefully folded inside out in the tinted darkness so that it showed the lining and the label—something in Italian or French. She put her hand on his again. Did she believe she could come into a joint like this and ask a guy like him for two thousand dollars? He wanted to see her, to inspect her face and fingers, but she had hidden herself by moving so close. Maybe giving her the money, giving what she had asked for—to the extent he had—proved him smarter than he hoped. For two hundred dollars, wouldn’t Jimmy die to see her dance? Maybe what she needed most was to get up there and move her ass around in a wide circle. Maybe that was what she wanted. He

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imagined trying to explain to Mr. Rowan, Mr. Rowan staring down at him from the high stalk of his head, or Mr. Giuliani, who would be sarcastic and aghast and thrilled, or Mrs. Steen who would only reapply her lipstick and stare at Jimmy, incredulous that he had been such a gull. But something in this nameless girl’s simple physical proximity—the fragrance of her hair, the warmth of her hand on his—was all he’d ever wished for. How he hated her now! All she wants is money was the lyric that traveled though his head, like a melody played over and over on a jukebox, until he no longer heard it. Eighteen hundred more by noon tomorrow? He could take the drivers license and pin it to his bulletin board like some kind of diploma. He could speak to Mr. Steen in the morning, once the margaritas had dried out and all that was left was an ache in his heart? Or maybe it wasn’t the money. What was eighteen hundred? For Little Jimmy? Maybe money was the easy part. What stopped him, what hurt him, was believing he and the girl could talk the next day in front of a bank clerk peering back at them through a plate-glass window and make enough sense to each other that he could give her what she asked. Would she call him in the morning? If he said maybe? What could he say to her then? He reflected as carefully as he could until the waitress appeared and pounded a finger on the girl’s shoulder. She set a wide-mouth tumbler, filled to the rim with some amber liquid and a scoop of crushed ice, next to her elbow. The waitress pointed at the drink, even though the girl’s face remained hidden close to Jimmy. “The Dog can see you now,” she screamed against the noise. “He wants to see you!” The girl from Nebraska stiffened. The waitress pointed to the end of the bar but Jimmy couldn’t see anything through the crowd. “Look, you silly little bitch,” the waitress continued, shouting. “He’ll give you a shot. Someone didn’t show. If you got

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your fee and your strings you’re on in fifteen minutes. You’ll get up a bunch tonight, too.” She stopped, to catch her breath, then continued, “You’re lucky he likes you. Better go now. There’s at least six chicks on the list after you.” The waitress waited a few long seconds. She wasn’t surprised when, at last, without looking up, the girl reached into her pocket and in a single motion slapped the money, Jimmy’s money, enough to pay her fee, down on the table next to the unwanted drink. The waitress scooped it up, counted it quickly, and was gone. Jimmy almost said something, but again something stopped him. For a long time, the girl with the imperceptible scar made no move. Soon Little Jimmy’s neck hurt. His foot had gone to sleep. The music was nothing but noise. He wished she would say something. He wished for the small hand pressing down forever on his. Though her ear was an inch from his lips, he would have to shout for her to understand him, though he didn’t want her to move. He didn’t want her to move just yet.

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ucy surveyed the patio. In the glass doors she saw her reflection in the white swimsuit and wondered if she’d lost her nerve. Her eyes hurt. A cloud, high overhead, weakened the shadow of her little table. Sunlight dappled the water. At the far end of the pool, the branch above Scott swayed, the only hint of a breeze. She checked her watch and felt the sun on her arms. It was already past lunch. Time to go. She squinted at the water, she leaned back and rested her eyes. She meant to relax, in spite of Yolanda, to indulge in one last sniff of Yolanda’s vodka, but where had she left her sunglasses? Most everything was packed. She dropped her sandals and put up her feet. She raised the heavy shot glass to her face and swallowed, wincing at the reflected light. Scott, fifteen now, difficult to see over the glare, showed his teeth in a defiant, bewildered smile. She put her drink back on the little table. Shouting so he would hear, she said, “You ready to go?” He shouted back, “No!” and again, “No!” It was Sunday and Lucy also wanted to stay forever. She reached again for the drink. For three days Scott had refused to put his toe in the pool. If only he would swim one lap. Yolanda never spoke of such things— she was nothing if you subtracted her generosity—but how could Lucy forget the five hundred Yolanda put up for lessons at the 112

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Academy? If only she could stand and point at the pool when Yolanda arrived and say, “Hell, he swam the length of it!” As if for the last time, she took in the long curved pool. A sparrow hopped above the glare on the high wall. She made a toast to Yolanda—and to herself, to what might have been. What if Lucy had gone to New York from St. Paul twenty years ago, rather than San Francisco? Or never made that party four years later on the beach, where she met Raoul and where Scott was conceived. Or never met Raoul’s cousin Yolanda—but here she hesitated. She resisted the picture that formed in her mind: an ice cube with a fly in it. A plastic cube really, a confusing gift Raoul had given her as a joke at the party Yolanda threw for them when he agreed to marry her. The wedding had been cancelled by remote control from Uruguay on the morning of the ultrasound, not by Raoul—it wasn’t entirely his fault—but by Señora Maribel, his mother. Now Lucy hurried a slurp of her drink and the icy heat between her ears forced her eyes closed. Raoul had returned to his studies in Montevideo but Yolanda had lived up to her promise to do what she could. She always had Scott and Lucy in to sit her house when she left for the weekend and the only duty Lucy felt was to keep Scott from destroying the collectibles. They spent almost all their time by the pool. Each had a room on the first floor—eight more bedrooms were on the second—and in the kitchen was a set of stainless steel plates, no doubt selected with Scott in mind. Yolanda kept a wet bar to outclass even the MetroClub in Escondido (where Lucy waited tables two decades ago): the finest Argentine and Chilean wines, Iberian sherries and a dozen single-barrel bourbons. Lucy loved the Swedish vodkas best—Yolanda had an impressive inventory in a horizontal freezer with a rack of iced glasses. Lucy raised hers and again toasted the sun-washed patio, the French doors behind her, the densely woven, blue-leather straps of the lawn chairs, the narrow, vaguely trapezoidal curve of the

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pool rimmed by turquoise stone and set in a chessboard of tiles that went halfway around the house. She made up her mind to savor, for these last seconds, the fragrance of eucalyptus. She toasted the Episcopalian version of God, too, or rather, His absence. She toasted the irony whereby Heaven could be fooled into gracing her and her son—this unlucky pair—with such stylish seclusion. She up-ended the glass, refilled it with the last half-shot from the sweating bottle, and raised it again. Before toasting anyone or anything more, the image of a 757 descending at 400 mph over the Sierras stopped her a moment. At last, she swallowed the shot, set the glass on the marble-top table and licked her lips. Maybe she should go look for the goddamn sunglasses. As often as she planned everything ahead of time and promised herself she would leave a brief grateful note and get out before Yolanda returned, she always groped through the final midday for something she had misplaced on the porch or in her room, though by then it was too late. By then Yolanda burst into the foyer with her windbreaker over her arm, striding like a prince into the livingroom, her carry-on whistling behind her as she sang, “Hola ! I’m ho-ome.” Whatever Lucy lost, Yolanda always found it the moment Lucy left and FedExed it overnight to her. This happened three times so far, with Lucy’s reading glasses, Scott’s flip-flops, and a Christmas catalog from Crate & Barrel Lucy had checked and marked with the names of everyone on her list. Lucy loved Yolanda, but the specter of her arrival made Lucy’s teeth hurt. She clenched them, which brought no relief, then pushed her tongue around inside her gums until she saw her own pained smile in the big windows. As bright as the day was, she could see—she could feel—a sickening darkness, like a massive pall, descend within her. She lifted her drink. Two sparrows hopped along the masonry above Scott now and suddenly the heat of regret washed over her just as the last

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rushed gulp of vodka had: how do you force any kid to swim? If only he had learned before they booted him from the Academy. If only she had finished her BBA in Marketing at the University of Minnesota twenty years ago; if only she could start over, erase her life, like a misspelled name on the blackboard in a classroom somewhere in the public schools of St. Paul. But this was an unwholesome manner of thinking. If only she knew where her shades were. If only she wouldn’t drink so much when she came here. If only, this morning, she hadn’t battled Scott about the swimming again and threatened to heave him into the deep. The terror ran over his face and Lucy all but dropped her towel and bolted for her Corolla, leaving him to stand there, shuddering and whimpering on Yolanda’s patio. How stubborn and willful he was—and how deadly his determination to please. You don’t fight a kid like Scott, you only injure him. She stopped chewing her lip as soon as she noticed she was doing it again and got herself up. She took the empty glass and the bottle—it was half empty in the morning when she brought it out—and headed back to the freezer. A bit unsteady on her legs, she forced the glass door aside and searched the hallway for her sunglasses before she stepped in. A high red-and-gold vase, probably from the Ming dynasty, surprised her just inside the door, balanced delicately on a threecornered table. The empty bottle and the shot glass each in a hand, she hesitated, confounded by violence, the vandalism within her. She closed her eyes for a second, then rested against the door and studied the astonishing vase she had walked past a thousand times and never seen. Sometimes at home, in their apartment, late at night, when Scott was in his room and she didn’t see or hear or smell him, she startled from her book or the newspaper, awakening as if from a nightmare; that she had no notion where he was, that he could have sneaked out, sickened and exhilarated her. Sometimes she

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feared for him, feared she hardly knew him, or just feared him. Scott’s language was minimal, no better than it was two or three years before—maybe that lack of progress kept him unknowable to her. In those days he was the strange compulsive storyteller, a plump, expressive little boy with a big lopsided head and a scabby buzz cut. She stopped whatever she was doing and watched in amazement when he put on one of his silent, secretive skits in her livingroom. Who knows where they came from? From dreams? A story she read him long before and forgot, an episode from the tube? Once, she was reading the Sunday Chronicle with coffee and a danish while Scott, in his too-small pajamas, circled the little coffee table on tip-toes, his hands fluttering ahead of him and magically, no, artistically, converted to an entire flock of birds winding its way though trees or scattering down an alley as he reached, racing to catch them. Scott performed this way most every Sunday in those years, transformed by her attention, but the show wasn’t always pretty. He often shushed her first then varied his pace, starting with a motion that was slow enough to be imperceptible, like a trained mime. Then slip-sliding his socks on the carpet Michael Jacksonstyle, his robot hands parallel to his feet and twitching by his waist, he accelerated into a noisy, goose-stepping march. Sometimes he tumbled the length of room, arriving feet flat against her bedroom door. He grabbed the carpet then and pushed and pushed with all the might in his thighs, wild-eyed, a kind of hairless, horizontal Samson squeezing to get in, squeezing the apartment walls. Lucy once tried describing all this to Laura, the bookkeeper who came to the office Mondays, but Laura answered with a cough of disgust. Lucy never mentioned it to anyone again, except her sister Claire, whom she only spoke to on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Claire suggested Lucy get him a Labrador retriever. Like everything Claire said, the dismissiveness of such a thing annoyed and insulted her, the way it missed the point. She could

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only imagine the veterinarian bills, the immense bags of chunky food, the wind-up leash, the walks at six AM and six PM with a pocketful of plastic bags. • • • When Lucy got back from the freezer with a new bottle and a fresh frozen glass, she felt braver. She shielded her eyes and called Scott, commanding him to come. He pulled his towel over his face and howled his scorn. She raised her glass to him then, to the pain-in-the-ass he was. They would have to forget the Jacuzzi. Scott would have one of his harebrained fits but by now, Yolanda was probably passing the gate, waving at the guard. The weekend was over. It was only October, the fourth month into the fiscal year, and on Friday, to get him the extra hours by the pool, Lucy had used up her last vacation day. Her boss, the young McQuigley of McQuigley & Son, whose office-supplies warehouse she had all but singlehandedly run for ten years, whose dictation she took, whose letters to his clients and grandma she typed, whose grammar she corrected, whose teenage daughter called Lucy every day after school for her daily transportation crisis, rather than the girl’s own idiot mother who turned off her cell during a two-hour yoga class and whose dry cleaning she managed, left a yellow Post-it dead center of her monitor, as if she didn’t already know: Lucy. You only have one V-day left. Lucy cradled the icy shot glass against her heart for the solace of the cold, the joy of breath taken away. Yolanda always brought fresh flowers for Lucy on the way from the airport. She offered to pay both Lucy and Scott for sitting her house. She invited them to stay for dinner, to stay another night. By her gestures of concern for both of them, the way she sat with her elbows on the livingroom table, leaving her bag on the kitchen floor, and looked at Lucy, you’d think she missed them—Scott and Lucy,

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that is—during her long weekends away in Chicago or New York, rubbing elbows with the snobs from Amnesty and Americas Watch. She seemed anxious to talk. She wanted to know how they were, what they had done, how they felt. All this was delivered in such a positive tone, with a pitch-perfect simplicity that, more than anything else, drove Lucy to promise herself she would get out next time, to flee, screeching out of the garage as soon as the automatic door was half up and race the length of the drive, past security onto Rosalita before the flight from LaGuardia hit the tarmac at SFO. Lucy hated not only her loss of independence— the very body and blood of well-being in Minnesota—but dependence itself. Charity and pity were too inevitable, too humiliating. She feared for Scott, his dignity. Some things every child must learn, even him: to dress himself, to ride a bike, to read, to add and subtract and to swim although she had long ago given up the reading and arithmetic; and he never dressed himself if there was someone ashamed enough by his nakedness to take it on. The Academy provided swimming lessons for all the kids deemed able by the nurse. Yolanda had paid the five hundred for supplementary instructions with Carolyn, a young UC-Berkeley poetry major with orange hair and a racing-red swimsuit. But Carolyn called Lucy right away at work after the second lesson and suggested Scott had little interest in swimming. She’d refund the remaining four-fifty if Lucy wanted. Lucy skipped work the next week to observe in secret from behind the stands. Carolyn was open-minded, focused, and Scott jumped right in, delighted to float in her arms. She shouted put your head in or now kick! He complied with screeches of joy but when she let go he all but drowned. After forty-five minutes, something happened and Carolyn climbed out of the pool and crossed her arms. She pointed at him and, it seemed, refused to get back in. From where she hid, Lucy couldn’t hear. Had he been inappropriate? Had he tried to touch her? To some extent

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such things had to be anticipated. Had he refused to stop? Scott climbed out and sat stubbornly on the edge, rocking back and forth with his feet in the water, his fists thrust down between his legs. Lucy was surprised by her emotion. She never cried, not since childhood, but her frustration erupted at last behind a Chinese take-out menu she found folded in her purse. • • • Lucy and Scott visited the Oakland SPCA three years before, on his twelfth birthday, to escape a heat wave. They wandered the airconditioned rooms for a long time; Scott grabbed the bars when he got away from her and shook the cages, despite her threats, howling at the cats. In the last cage at the end of a long row, a pair of blue-gray kittens went in circles and fell over and twisted their cute curious heads at them. Even Lucy laughed. Except for their eyes, they were perfect twin sisters; their heads followed precisely the same angles and their noses in perfect unison followed Scott’s finger as it went back and forth in front of the latch. Scott pointed at the one with the tiny silver-blue eyes and began to make a noise he’d never made before, a cackle of triumph and desire that the second kitten—the one Scott named Devil—answered with a cry of her own when the attendant lifted the first, already called Angel, from the cage. But Devil went around and around in such despair there was no doubt they would take them both. After she lifted the cardboard box up the stairs into the apartment, Lucy discovered her own small air conditioner had failed. She opened the windows but outside was no better—the flight pattern from the airport worsened all evening; the planes going over sent the kittens under the couch. Scott peered after them— screeching and imploring, promising to save them from the heat. The more frightened they became, the more he screamed. “I’ll save you!” he said and charged in a furious little circle. “I’ll save you!” Twice she asked him to please to be quiet, then

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lost patience and shouted at him to shut his mouth. Scott ran to his room and buried his face in a pillow. Lucy went to him, but he bellowed with such violence when she touched the door that she retreated right away. She left the windows open for the air and the jets roared overhead every few seconds in the filthy heat. She wouldn’t have believed she slept even a minute, or missed anything that had gone on that night, but in the morning when she reached into her freezer for coffee she found both Devil and Angel inside, wrapped around each other in a clot of icy fur. • • • She lifted her shot glass again and held it up, a signal to Scott that she was waiting. They stared at each other across the pool. He laughed and kicked his feet in the air when she said, “Now is your last chance!” Calvin, the director of water sports at the Academy, had filled in for the last few lessons. By the end, according to Calvin, Scott could swim. Carolyn e-mailed Lucy, confirming he had all the skills which, put together, amounted to swimming. He floated belly-up or face-down, he blew bubbles to exhale and turned his face left and right to inhale; he kicked from his hips, not his knees; he duplicated the motion of his arms going over and over his head. Calvin claimed he had him swimming five, ten, fifty feet without touching down. Lucy wrote back, thanking her and asking a few questions, to which Carolyn admitted only Calvin had witnessed Scott’s accomplishments in the water. But Lucy had observed Calvin at the pool the day she visited and saw something too familiar in the way Calvin climbed up and down the lifeguard’s chair or paced alongside the pool and shouted at the kids. She hated him instinctively, his sleek, gleaming tan, the sunglasses on top of his head, the black, tightly packed Speedo. He was lying, she was sure.

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Lucy wanted to laugh. She raised the drink to herself again. Maybe she hadn’t done so bad? She had gotten him into the school, right? And played psychological pick-up-sticks when they threw him out. She had taken three of her last four vacation days. She let him into her bed and read him his special books that entire weekend—Stuart Little and Winnie the Pooh—and after that brought him everywhere with her, giving him all the love he could take. As counterpoint this morning, fortified by her third shot of Svedka, she had withheld all attention, all affection until he at least jumped in and tried to doggy-paddle one time across the goddamn pool. “Are you at least going to try?” she shouted. She lifted her watch and pointed at it. “No!” he answered and jerked his head. He made one of his noises. Maybe she had been too harsh. Maybe the thing was to back off. “We have to leave in—in four minutes,” she said. “No!” he answered again. “I want to, bang, bang—I want to swim.” He made a pistol with his finger and pointed at his head. “Swim now or forever hold thy freakin’ peace,” she said to herself and almost choked on the stupidity of that—something her father would have said. What the heck, the afternoon was perfect for a dip, the water neither warm nor cold. Scott made his faces, though not at her; he was just making the faces. She wanted to shout, “Scott, act your age!” But he wasn’t playacting. He smiled his smile, which signaled anxiety rather than joy: the tip of his tongue appearing between his teeth, his nose screwed into a twisted little clump, his eyes blackened, all but disappearing in his cheeks. • • • Lucy leveled her eyes across the pool and told herself that no, she had no drinking problem. She simply liked the best vodka

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at times, indulging the idea that life belonged to her as well, that Yolanda’s house was somehow hers, that mi-casa-es-tu-casa honestly meant such a thing, that mi-piscina-es-tu-piscina was true as well, that she still looked great beside the water in her white suit, that she wasn’t fundamentally and forever alone, that a charming and reliable man might yet take an interest in her, even though she would never see forty again. Raoul had come to disapprove of so many things about her, especially the way she drank vodka. “It is disgusting,” he told her, “to sip vodka. You must put it back like this!” And whoosh, his face went up and the shot glass over his moustache. But he had no stomach for it and the night they learned she was pregnant, like every night thereafter, he drank alone and after two or three shots, stumbled off to the couch. She went without a whiff not only of vodka but even of white wine, not even a spritzer for the next eight months—that was her proof she was in control. Even now she indulged only during these odd moments when she let the impossibility of her life go. It was only six weeks before that the Academy asked Scott to leave. They loved him, they said, and for the most part had treated him with dignity and patience. He was happy there, even a bit favored by the staff. After the fiasco in the pool with Carolyn, he learned quickly to ride a bike through the woods where the trail went up and down behind the buildings. The immense roots and rocks could have pitched him into the bramble in a moment of panic or lost coordination, but he managed well. After two months of this an awkward muscularity developed in his limbs and chest. He became quickly notorious on campus for his prowess in the woods, but one afternoon was late returning from his circuit on the bike. The alarm sounded and half an hour later the staff blanketed the campus until they found him under a hemlock with a girl named Erica, a quiet, waif-like mongoloid with a curly red bushel of hair, bright blue eyes and a shrewd smile. Thank God

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Erica had him straddled when they were discovered. She had her dress and underwear on and though Scott’s helmet remained strapped under his chin, his jeans and skivvies were at his knees. No one argued it was anything but consensual and the school hushed everything up. Scott was grounded—no bike riding for a month—but only a week later they caught him again, this time in Erica’s room with three others: Flora, a tall Chinese-American girl from Palo Alto with a whole pantheon of mental disabilities; little Sofia, an obese head-injury case who, according to Mr. Willet, the superintendent, coordinated the whole thing; and an angelically beautiful African-American boy named Dubois who had been institutionalized all his life. A full-blown orgy from the sounds of it, they got themselves so sexed up the entire dorm woke to the shrieking and thumping upstairs. The “pleasuring,” as Mr. Willet called it, had apparently been going every possible direction. • • • A large cloud crossed the sun and the afternoon light changed to gray. Just as quickly the cloud left and the porch lit up brilliantly. Yolanda had no doubt descended off I85 by then. Scott seemed far away now, across the pool. He waved. He shivered. He jumped up and dropped his towel. He shouted, “Ma!” He threw the towel over himself again and squirmed back into his chair. Scott had never again, after the kittens, mimed for her. Sometimes she heard him move around his room in a purposeful way. Once she knocked and opened the door to find him stopped in a predatory crouch, his fingers open and arched, head low as if he were about to leap onto a snake under his carpet. He waited a long time—he wouldn’t budge until she left. Now he was staring up into the tree at a riot of sparrows. He jerked his head. When he was tense, his chin strained left and tugged up and up and he made a strange, joyful noise. He never

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drooled; he just made that noise and gave an impassioned little gasp, delighting himself—these were things she hadn’t always learned to take. Soon she’d be back in her true life, in her too-small apartment in a dirty complex near the Oakland airport, Scott making his loud rutting noises in his room, the neighbors who lowered their eyes as they passed on the stair. They might as well hold their noses, too. Diego Martinez and his family could for once look down on a family of blancos who were worse off than them. Diego had been friendly enough over the years until Scott started in, after returning from the Academy, with his night activities. The more she begged Scott to quiet down, the louder he became. • • • When Scott screamed, Lucy dropped the big shot glass and cracked one of the lavender tiles. He stood at the far end in an odd pose, his mouth turned down, some terrible force, like reverse gravity, pulling his jaw the opposite way. His eyes, at once tiny and wide, black and bright, fixed on her, seeing nothing. What had adolescence done to him? He turned his thumbs down, one in front and one behind, and ran the towel between his legs, every muscle in his thighs and shoulders tight in the tug-of-war until, at last, he leapt, and the towel convulsed into the branches overhead. The skin of his chest flashed in the sun; his wild hair, his arms and legs rose above the shimmering water until the shallow end closed over him. “Scott!” she yelled, but the vodka broke her voice. She doubted he heard. All she saw were his arms splashing left and right against the angular surface—a motion suggesting will and desire as he made his way to her. He was swimming! Each time his head came up, his mouth came open. His head went down again and up and down as he leaped through the shallow end, as if he knew what he was doing. Oh, how he surprised her.

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His hands and feet, when he got control of them, as he had on the bike, could be quick and Lucy’s eye missed some things, especially now that she had finished another double. How he could pull off a belly-flop by the three-foot marker amazed her. He was already into the deep end though, and his motion changed. For fifteen years she watched him fail at the simplest things. Sometimes Lucy failed, too. Sometimes, she was sick to death of him: tying his shoe, adding five plus five, getting the button in its hole. She had always meant to be patient but he saw how weak she was. Why couldn’t he—at fifteen—zip his own fly? If only she could have gone out somehow, out of her own flesh and taken his, given his arms and fingers a bit more brain, filled his head with a useful notion. All his life she wanted to reach for him and say, Good! Now he slapped the water with his head down in a way that looked wrong, with all the hysteria and violence of a drowning man. Scott, her boy, was nowhere. Little waves splashed up and up. Was Calvin such a liar?—but no, Scott was gaining. If only he could focus, keep calm, turn his head, breathe, and come to her. No one knew for sure and the only way was to see. Maybe he could make it. Wasn’t that the plan? She got herself up from the chaise and shook her fist, crying out to him. Both straps of her white suit fell from her shoulders. Go, Scott! She growled and, surprised, spun around, as if someone unexpectedly stood behind her. Seeing nothing, she turned back to Scott and whispered. By then, in the depth of the hole, he wouldn’t hear her over his own gasping, the sucking sound he made when he lifted his face through the surface, like a vacuum with a penny in its throat. She stepped back, away from her impulse to dive for him. If he reached her now, what had she risked? If he failed? Did she love him enough to let him go? All this was thanks to Yolanda. “Here’s to Yolanda!” she said, holding up an imaginary glass. She turned, as if to put it down, or to reach for the real one, and stumbled over the little iron foot

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of the table. She turned her watch over and squinted to see it, but time was a stupid thing. Where was Yolanda? Maybe the flight delayed her. Maybe traffic. Maybe the landing gear collapsed on contact and the plane exploded into a gazillion flaming scraps. When at last she reached her glass, up-ended under the chaise, she almost fell over; she lifted it back onto the table and stood again above the black letters of the deep end, the number twelve. “Scott!” she said. Was it a second later, or a minute? A month of Sundays? “Look at him go!” she said. The sensation went off like fireworks deep inside the warm summer night of her head. She wanted to sit but smiled and bent down to see her manly little hero, a vague figure glimmering in slow motion. She put her hand down, losing her balance, and a trapdoor opened somewhere far below her, as if the pool descended all the way into a dense, blue Episcopalian Hell. The deep reflection hurt her eyes; she couldn’t see him until he was close—his face a yard or two from hers. She saw his open mouth first, the bluish gauze over his eyes. He battled sideways in the water now, coming straight for her. She knew what she was doing, damn it. She was the only one. She observed her mind going in and out, both at once, like a revolving door; Scott gaped at her through plate glass. Of course he was going to make it. Only Lucy had allowed him the chance. It was all his now. What creature would he mime? A white bear with silver eyes, a hammerhead shark, an eel? He put his head down and fought to break through, swinging his fists through twelve feet of water at her and she almost lost her balance again, imagining knives in his fists, stabbing and stabbing the heart of the deep end. The closer he came, the more hopeless her case. She reached for him, but he was far away. She sobbed once, or moaned, or howled. She couldn’t say which. Didn’t he know, brave boy, that he could save her?

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What a joker he was. She turned her back to him for good this time, to the table. Where were her shades? She had to go find them. She’d be back in a minute but first, with both hands, she covered her eyes. It was a silly little game he always, always, always loved. “Hurry,” she said, aloud to no one. “Tell me when I can peek.” But she lost patience: “Hurry up, you little clown. Auntie Yolanda will be here any minute and you know we have to find my shades and go. You know how Mommy hates it, hates it, hates it—but hurry now. I’ll be back in a minute, but for now I have to go.”

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ur lives were similar in some ways. When Sunny was eighteen, the day she got accepted to Columbia University, her father, in the locker room of Precinct 120, put his service revolver in his mouth and removed the top of his head. She inherited the house in Staten Island, which she sold right away to pay for college. Her mother had died of cancer long before. Almost twenty years earlier, when I was eighteen, my first day at boot camp, my father died of a massive infarction during a Columbia Presbyterian MRI. I learned in a note from Mother how he had mastered his claustrophobia over and over through West Point, Guam, Korea, and Vietnam but the MRI proved too much. They gave me leave for his funeral, but I declined. After that, the heat of the barracks all but ruled out sleep or food for the next few weeks and when the weapons training finally began, I began to get too anxious and too eager. To cool me off, they put me in the kitchen a while: something I said to the range instructor, the way I handled my rifle, how they had to stop me. I don’t exactly remember what it was. Sunny knew I learned to cook in the Army but not how I loved the heat and the smell of the firing point. How I loved it almost too much, as my instructor told me once, with his moron grin, or that he called me Trigger Happy, Sharpie, or Prince of 128

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Snipers, or how the other sharpshooters, because Father was a fifth-generation West Point graduate, just called me Prince. I loved to line up the hairs on a scope and the hairs on a target and poke those little holes at six-hundred meters. Sometimes each was just a ragged tear in paper, sometimes a perfect round puncture. I imagined the same in steel, in fabric, in leather, in sailboat teak when the distance collapsed and each splinter was something to examine with a magnifying glass. Those little clustered holes were my finest moments ever and for some reason, because it was so good, because I was so good—a sharpshooter, a sniper-to-be—or maybe because Father would have at last been proud, I had to leave it. Because after all, it was the one gift he gave. Instead I learned to cook. I learned cuisine. I learned to be calm. It was already seventeen years after my discharge, fifteen after chef school, that I met her. I’d been working evenings at the Fordham Club and I sent out four crêpes suzette, gratis, for a table of girlfriends in the diningroom; by then everyone knew they had finished the first semester of med school. They were all but raucous, into the cognac already, blowing off steam. They loved the crêpes and sent the waiter in for me. I went out and bowed and shook hands and laughed and afterwards they sent him in again. I sent out four quick coronets, all with a fortune wrapped inside: tickle your feet with a feather? They returned a napkin with four e-mail addresses written out in perfect Catholic-school penmanship. I got fired for that, and only one of the e-mail addresses worked. Last on the list was Sunny. She established the rules right from the get-go, at the West 85 Café, when she looked at me over the cage formed by her fingers. The flaws in her beauty trapped me more than her beauty itself: I had no hope against the high forehead tilted over the table, the soft too-small lips, the bright red lipstick, the upturned freckled nose, the ludicrous black pageboy and the peacoat buttoned right up under her chin. The clarity in her bright eyes focused on me

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and the unblinking eyelashes left too little concealed, as if she knew that to come out of hiding was all I wanted. Was she taking a risk? I guess, she concluded, not much. Her father, known in the neighborhood as Officer Detox, had raised her himself. She said her defiance of him—the drunkenness, the beatings, his revolver on the diningroom table, the way he threatened her teenage friends—propelled her all the way through college and medical school. He had nicknamed her Sunny, too. I could call her that if I wanted, two former boyfriends had, she admitted, the first time we woke up together—but in the end they reminded her too much of the Sarge. She smiled and straddled me then, the sheet over her shoulders as she pinned my wrists to the mattress. Next, she poked me in the ribs with her fingers. I reminded her a little of him, as well, she said, no longer smiling, but only a little. In no time, her schedule provided a schedule for me. I was never late for her, never too busy. She was twenty-six, on a fast ride to her future. At forty-two, for me, the game was more or less decided. How long could we last? What had she seen in me? The appearance of calm, of confidence? An easy bedroom manner? That I was a slender, six-one, straight Manhattan male with an acceptable wardrobe, who cooked like a chef? That I was from a waspy old New York bloodline? She had loans after all and I had money. I had to wonder how long these things would keep her, once her status and income changed, but I never hesitated two-and-a-half years later, once she was done with medical school and asked me to come with her. Overnight I sold two East Side apartments to a cousin—Gramercy Park and 14th Street—and packed my cookbooks and my laptop and rented a U-Haul to Delaware City for her first residency. By city bus, the Lenox Trauma Center, a glossy complex above Oak Grove Hospital, was twenty minutes away. On her first day, Monday afternoon, it was a hundred degrees. I phoned to check her schedule and Mariah, the nurse assistant, told me what had

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happened. Seven-year-old Lateesha Jacks, a girl who lived in the Rocket District, was out on her bike and in a salvo of gangland crossfire caught two bullets in the throat. By the time her father, Leon Jacks, the first EMT on site, got there, her blood reached the gutters on both sides of the street. Leon broke down on the asphalt. No cops or fire engines ever arrived. Stevie, the ambulance driver, with help from no one, retrieved her. “Semi-decapitation,” said Mariah, and then repeated it. Semi-decapitation. Not knowing where else to go, Stevie brought Lateesha and Leon to the trauma center. By then Stevie was speechless as well, only coming around the back of the ambulance to point at the doors. It was Sunny who opened up. I left a message for her to call. At eight PM, she came home in a new pair of scrubs. There had been a storm in the afternoon and the heat had eased. She changed quickly into shorts and was gone for a lap by the reservoir. At 9:15, she returned for a bath. I stared all night at the ceiling, having left it to her to tell me about Lateesha. At five AM, I found a cigarette, a Rothmans Blue King, abandoned in an empty utensil drawer by the last tenant. I set it on the counter and folded my arms until the kettle whistled, then put the Rothmans back where I found it and opened a Coke for myself. I poured the water and put her tea on the counter. She was out the door by 5:20. Thursday morning I waited while she showered. She put on fresh scrubs and sat with the tea, saying nothing until, at 5:25, again, she was gone. By 8:30, it was eighty-five degrees. I spent the day in my boxers, opening and closing WordPerfect, reviewing my Dewey-Whittier Fund, Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal. I peeked at a couple of soft-porn sites too but closed them right away. On Friday evening, I set her place for a spinach salad and a bowl of gazpacho from Olivier’s, a gourmet grocery I found a few blocks away. We sat together in the kitchen. She said nothing. I asked her how the week had gone.

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“Tough week,” she said. “How much longer in trauma?” I said. “Same answer as Monday, minus five days,” she said and shook her small face, a child’s almost, and the sides of her wet pageboy fell forward over her cheeks. Her green eyes zeroed in on my throat. “The orthopods get me November first. We’ve discussed this.” So I watched her eat. She enjoyed that, I guess—she smiled twice—and we followed her Friday night routine. She drank a half carafe of sangría while she turned her soup with a spoon. She smiled again: number three. I sipped my Coke. It had been another sweltering mid-Atlantic day, but again the evening was cool. Sunny went to brush her teeth and I followed her into the bedroom, lowered the blinds and sat beside her, waiting for her to talk. I could still hear Mariah, the nurse assistant, tapping her desk with a key or a coin as she told me a half dozen of the staff had come running to the receiving area. • • • No one was more determined, no one more a creature of habit than Sunny, but she could be wild in the sheets, even reckless, up to a point. For two and a half years of medical school, she reserved these Friday nights for me, no matter what. To start, she was both elusive and lively and when the time was right, I whispered the filthiest things. Sometimes she repeated the ones she liked back to me and I elaborated. Sometimes she groaned when I went wrong. She kept after me though—and I kept up the whole way. Now and then she put her face out for air. I stopped to admire her flushed throat, the pageboy spread out on the pillow, her tongue like a little pink bird diving into the sheet. She always wanted more and after I gave her what I had, she slept until her beeper went off at two AM Saturday. She ran into the livingroom with a sheet around her. I lay in bed and listened. She spoke quietly into

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the phone, though I could have heard her anywhere in the house. “Has he slept at all?” She seemed excited, frustrated, maybe scared. The breeze billowed the curtain gently. A parallelogram flickered in a window across the alley; a neighbor had fallen asleep with the TV on. “Oh, Jesus,” she said at last, so I got up and fixed her tea while she showered. I called the cab. I stayed awake all morning, waiting for her. She came home at eight PM. Again she got into her shorts and ran out the door. At 9:15, I poached a fillet of salmon and sauteed carrots in garlic. It was Saturday night—she only wanted wine on Fridays. When she was finished she brushed her teeth and put on her nighty and went in and got under the covers. An hour and a half later I lay with the comforter tossed aside, the unlit Rothmans between my teeth. I listened for anything, for everything. No one was out on the street, the air was warm through the screens. Now and then a pair of crickets creaked under the trees. I got up and looked in the drawers for a match. I hadn’t smoked since we moved—I’d never smoked more than one or two a day, but now I paced through the house, the pantry and the new kitchen, opening drawers. I went through all that again, three times. Finding nothing, I returned to the bedroom. I took the comforter from her shoulder, then tossed it away and the sight of her asleep on her belly like that was all the license I needed. I touched her gently, firmly, here and there. I moistened my hands and dabbed her in those places she liked it best. Half in sleep, she began slowly to move, to insist. Once again her fingers were splayed against the wall, her cries in flight through the open window. At midnight, I found the matches in a winter jacket. I put on my flip-flops, shorts, a shirt and went out onto the stoop. All the way up the hill, houses like ours, two- or three-family units, stood close above the street. As I smoked, a young raccoon ambled back and forth under a bush lit by a street lamp. I waited, then walked

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all the way down to the avenue. The window of the Dew Drop Inn was lit with red and blue lights and inside the flashing jukebox welcomed me, so I stopped in for a fresh pack of cigarettes and ordered a Coke with a slice of lemon. The bartender asked if I lived nearby. I told him I’d moved in a week before and asked if he knew my landlord, Josie Silva, who was the only person I had met, however briefly. The bartender had heard of him, but that killed all conversation. He retreated to the far end of the bar. Twenty minutes later, I went down the block to the Lisbon Club and ordered the same drink, tested the same conversation but the bartender, a tall college girl with a pale, pretty face and black eyes, a buzz cut and a ring in her lip, seemed more interested in me than my townie landlord. I offered her a Rothmans, sliding the blue-and-white box across the bar and asked her name. “Robin,” she answered. “Robin?” I said, surprised. We both smoked for a moment. “Like a bird in springtime?” “Exactly,” she smiled and blushed. “Robin red-breast.” I raised my Coke to her. She continued, “Except that my parents spelled it with two B’s.” “R-O-B-B-I-N?” I said. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess their English wasn’t great.” I watched her wash and rinse a pair of tumblers. She told me her father hated that she was in art school. I told her I’d always liked art students, they always seemed ready for anything. She took another of my Rothmans and we smoked. We watched each other in silence. “You ever see anyone dead?” I asked her. She examined me carefully. “Sure,” she said. “I’ve been to wakes. My uncle Paulo, my grandma, my brother Johnny, for example.” “Your brother?” “My little brother.” “Military?” I said.

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She closed her eyes and nodded. When I was done I slid my empty glass across the bar. “God bless,” I said, but she stared down at my dwindling ice cubes and the slice of lemon for a long time and didn’t answer. • • • On Sunday, Sunny slept all morning. I wrote her an e-mail: Dear Doctor Keenan, I knew a guy from West Virginia who played the violin. He got started on mountain music when he was eight. By eighteen, he was at Juilliard; at 28 he played with the New York Philharmonic. He used to sit in Union Square on the weekends in summer and play his grandfather’s fiddle. I sat by him a time or two, on the bench and asked a few questions, but he always answered the same way. “It’s the only thing I know how to do,” he said. “The one thing.” Then he went back to playing. Or he stopped and told me the names of the tunes: “Angeline,” “Rocky Top,” “Flop Ear Mule.” I just sat and listened. I loved to watch him play. Love, Rafe

When she woke up, she went for lunch with an orthopedics resident and returned after three. We watched a ball game, the Blue Jays and the Orioles. Monday morning, two hours after she put on her scrubs, and was out the door, the remodeling in the basement began. First I tried to ignore the noise, then I lay in my pajamas on the new futon in the livingroom, paging through the paper. I went to the laptop for a minute. I checked the news. I reviewed my funds. I phoned and left voice-mails for Sunny: “Your landlord is making a helluva noise downstairs. I think about you all day.”

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I wrote Mother. I told her how simple life was here, seven hundred miles from Madison Avenue. I thanked her for a transfer she made from the trust. Conscious that I was, letter by letter, typing a lie, I told her I checked the classifieds every day for a decent restaurant to work in. I told her about our landlord, who began that morning with a crew in the basement, making a diabolical racket. At first, I told her, I was upset. We weren’t informed of this when we moved in. I should have complained. When the boys came up out of the bulkhead, I stopped typing and peeked between the curtains. Josie, the landlord, stood next to a red-freckled giant with a long blood-colored beard and clipped dreadlocks. He looked too strong and his big brutal mouth turned in on itself when he stared the other carpenter down. I couldn’t spot his accent, but he had the voice to fill a barracks. Blistered scabs dappled his ears and hairline and he scratched quietly as he watched Josie, as if spellbound by him. Again, I e-mailed Mother. I told her Josie had a look like Christ in his doubtful moment or Charlie Manson, depending on your perspective—same bony pallor in his face, same hair, same light in his eyes and the same tense smile. The third guy was a black scarecrow. He was too skinny, as if someone put a vacuum down his throat and sucked out all his organs. His dirty T-shirt was tight around his ribs and when the Red Giant laughed out loud and jostled him aside, he ducked, leaning against the fence, his nearly empty jeans crossed at the ankles. He compulsively put his hands on his face, as if to confirm his nose and eyes were there. I dubbed him Bones—he smiled and yawned again and again, each time enlarging his eyes as if it hurt to inhale. Something in his jaw line looked too fine, too sensitive, too easily broken. When he looked up and saw me, staring down at him, our eyes met and I dropped the curtain. Ten minutes later a shipment arrived and I watched the three of them go up and down the walk to the truck with five or more

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big rolls of insulation, a dozen sheets of heavily foamed plywood and a dozen more of sheet rock. When they were done they disappeared downstairs. Right away the hammers and saws started back in. I returned to my e-mail. • • • Sunny came home on time, keeping the Monday schedule. Tuesday, I lay on the floor and smoked, listening to the activity below. Lunchtime, I put on my flip-flops again and walked in the heat and humidity down to Olivier’s for cherry tomatoes. I came back and lay on the floor again and smoked. Soon the rain, almost a mist, fogged the windows and I couldn’t see outside. The boys worked until seven. Around nine PM, Sunny returned soaked from her laps by the reservoir. Before she got in the shower, I chopped the tomatoes, the cheese and basil and stirred in the olive oil. Wednesday, I listened to them all morning. I smoked two packs of Rothmans by lunch break. I put on my shirt and went down to the corner for a carton and more Cokes. Thursday, I made swordfish but wanted something different for Friday; Olivier had Argentine beef so I bought Sunny a small de lomo and a bottle of Malbec. The wine opened her appetite nicely—she ate the entire steak and wanted more potatoes. It was the third Friday since we moved, everything kept on schedule, though I scarcely slept in the afterglow. By midnight, a new storm moved in, the clouds balanced above the streetlights and roofs like an obese tightrope walker. The trees began to thrash like shadows behind the screens. A car raced up the hill. On a stoop across the street a party of two celebrated loudly enough for me to hear them as they awaited the downpour. I touched Sunny once and she pulled the sheet over her face. In the morning she was out the door for the 6:17 Saturday bus. I lay in bed until the work began below.

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The next week was much the same, two or three packs of Rothmans and a six of Cokes every day, dinners for Sunny, the men downstairs. They went at it furiously now—they started in Sunday at seven AM and worked on through Thursday like the Flood was coming. I lay on the floor, I lay on the couch. What about Sunny? What if she left me for a brain surgeon? I went down to the store for my provisions and came back and powered on the laptop: Dear Sunny, I e-mailed Mother yesterday, and the day before. I write her every afternoon. She never writes back. I doubt her computer works. I wonder if she’s even alive. No one knows how to reach me. Sometimes I wish you answered my e-mails, too. This way I’d know you see them. Do you? This way I’d know you are alive. Are you? What if you came home one night and I was gone? Love, Rafe

Friday night came and went, nothing changed. Sunday she slept until lunch, which she had with Doctor Hassan, Chief of Trauma. Below, the work continued all week. I lay on the hardwood floor and listened to them as I smoked. They started in at seven AM and sometimes were at it till nine or ten PM. Sometimes I put the TV on, with the volume all the way down, or checked for the e-mail that never came. For dinner, I made Hungarian noodles; Wednesday an antipasto; Thursday, eggplant masala. When Friday came around the action in the basement ended suddenly at lunchtime. I sat by the window to watch them bring supplies up from Josie’s truck; the three of them together, like a team of ragged pallbearers, balanced their way, carrying a long wide hardwood crate up and then awkwardly down through the

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bulkhead. They hauled in three big boxes next, each probably two hundred pounds. At last Bones, a liter of Jack Daniel’s in each fist, ran up the steps and disappeared into the basement. So I moved to the floor and listened. For a long time I heard only quiet, unintelligible talk, and then they left. Were they done? Would I have peace now in the afternoon? If so, what would become of me? What would become of us? What would I do? It was already our fifth Friday living there. To mark the occasion, I’d gone down a bit early and made special arrangements. I doublechecked, with Olivier himself, the recipe for Cornish game hen and bought an Australian Shiraz to follow with raspberry crêpes and the Vouvray. Sunny was home at eight and out the door in a minute. She finished her bath early, got into her nightshirt and came to the table. Friday! I asked her how she was and she smiled, crossing her bare legs. She watched me balance the little roasted hen, a tiny blue paper sleeve around each ankle, onto the bed of broccolini. “You know you don’t have to do it,” she said and squinted up at me. This surprised me. Did she know how long it had been since we’d spoken? “You mean the hen?” I said. “You don’t have to make these—these gourmet meals every night.” She shook the wet pageboy at me. “Especially since you never eat them yourself.” She gave me her sweet smile. “What, are they poisoned?” She was tired, having worked all day, having gone for her five-miler before the bath. She watched me too, as she worked her fork and knife on the tiny bones, as she lifted each pink strip of meat to her teeth. “I don’t mind,” I said. “I love to cook. It’s more or less all I know.” She pushed the hen aside and turned her attention to the broccolini. When she was done, I poured the Vouvray and served

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her crêpe with a tablespoon of raspberry gelato and a ribbon of warm, semisweet cocoa. “You like the wine?” I said. “It’s uncommon here.” She tasted it and continued her dessert. The wine was fine with her, I could see. “How is trauma?” I asked. “I love it,” she said. “I think we should move,” I said, surprising us both. She shook her head. “Why? This place is perfect.” “I don’t like it,” I said. “Something about it worries me.” “I signed a lease.” “We can break the lease.” “No,” she said. “We can’t.” Later, in the changing light, we made love and afterwards something unlike her darkened the bed and window. When I woke, she had twisted herself into the sheet. I lit a cigarette and remembered how my father used to comfort me; even at ten years old, I rarely slept. Sometimes he came in quietly and set a tumbler on the sill. “Never you fret,” he said. “All the real bad guys, the real traitors and cowards and whatnot, we’re going to put them far, far away.” Then he nodded in the darkness. He described him precisely, the enemy, with a commingling of hatred and admiration. We were the safest people in history, he said, and described the soldiers he knew who went down the tunnels to keep it that way and fight him, drive him out of the darkest hole in the globe. He said there was nothing for me to worry about. So I lit another cigarette. When that was done, I lit a third in honor of Father. How much loneliness could there be in the end? For a long time I lay by the light of Sunny’s bed and listened to her faint breathing. How much better a place the world would be, I thought, blowing smoke at the ceiling, and repeated the phrase to myself, how much better a place the world would be. I slept a moment, for an hour maybe, until Josie and his pals surprised me

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awake. At first I thought they had the nailer out and were back to work after midnight, but the poppity-pop-pop of the shots—the regularity, the three-part rhythm, the sequence was something I recognized right off. Each little burst was more precise, cleaner than the blast-thud of the nail gun and carried more trajectory, more authority. Each had a source, a distance traveled, an end point, but the time was shorter and the echo in the walls below Sunny’s bed sharper. I could barely hear the sweetness ringing in the bullet boxes. All that insulation had done the job, I guessed. I listened for a long time, half asleep, half in a dream, before I understood the three of them had uncrated their .22s right below Sunny and were shooting. I began almost to laugh. The boys had built a shooting range in the basement! I hate the word giggle—the word is as dismaying as the act itself, like deformed laughter, but I began to giggle right away, though right away I fought it. Then I coughed in pain. Maybe Sunny and I belonged together after all? Maybe our love—all decent love—originated in a livingroom like ours, with its newly polyurethaned floors and the fresh paint on the walls, the new mattress, the new futon. On the kitchen table maybe, in the drawers, among the clean utensils, in the new block of Calphalon kitchen knives, and the warm Vouvray, the cork back in its bottle. In my father’s reassurance that all the enemies, the real enemies, would soon enough be stashed away, strapped down by the wrists and ankles in cells no taller than the mattress on my bed. They couldn’t even lift a knee, let alone a finger. Maybe it began with good solid news on the television and in a well-stocked medicine cabinet, in new plumbing. I coughed again and again at such a strange and stupid thing: our landlord drinking Tennessee whiskey and shooting right below us, in the basement, right under Sunny. I ran to the bathroom and when I was done, I wiped my face with a towel and knelt a long time between the wall and toilet and listened to them below me: from there the sound was softer,

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puffier almost, like furtive Jiffy-Pop over a low flame. They were, in a sense, more quiet than ever. I got up and washed my face, rinsed my teeth and went back to find her. I didn’t know what she would make of me, but for the moment, for the first time, I didn’t care. I saw her comforter had fallen away again and could hear the sound of church bells a thousand miles off if I wanted and I knew that she was going nowhere, that she was safe at home at last. I touched her shoulder. I touched her hand, but she just lay with one knee up and the black feather of the pageboy across her face. One arm was raised in front of her, the other thrown wide, a gesture like a child, little Lateesha Jacks, balanced on a bicycle, riding forward with no hands. To reassure her, to praise her for her bravery, I moved closer and touched her hair. The breeze lifted the hem of the curtain a moment later, as if an elegant woman had stepped in through the dark window. I got up to close it against the chill, then brought the comforter off the floor and spread it over her. I put my face near hers and listened to her silent breathing. “Congratulations,” I said, as quietly as possible. “At last you are safe.” She didn’t move. She hadn’t heard, but her eyelashes, black and exquisite, were something to kiss, if you could imagine being delicate or strong enough. Her ear was as small as a child’s, her lips closed against the pillowcase, as if she were about to whistle.

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nce or twice that week we exchanged glances. On Friday night, at the Proteus, she was watching me. Saturday night, same club, same crowd of locals, she worked her way closer. The same leather jackets and sunglasses at the far end watched me, too. She was a very young woman, a girl even, with a small, pretty face, a large coil of black hair tied over her shoulder with a loose string. Even when she stood near me, she didn’t seem to mind how I admired her air of sophistication, the narrowness of her wrists as she tapped the ashes off her cigarette, the quick quality of her eyes. She nodded perfunctorily when I gave her my barstool. Sunday morning she passed by as I sat on a bench in the plaza, reading the Herald Tribune. She said, “Good morning” in English and I asked if she would join me. Soon, we had some laughs. Twice she touched my hand. “How pretty you are!” I said. “You are staying at Greben’s, no?” she said. “How are the rooms?” I checked down the street: no one. An organ played inside the church. Across the street, the door of the Proteus was open. We went quickly up the stairs to my pension and she admitted right after I closed the door that she was only fifteen. Later she

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made owl-eyes at my naked chest, my belly, then up and down my legs and covered her face. “How ugly you are!” she said. “Maybe this will help,” I said and poured Jack Daniel’s in a glass. We each had a gulp and she pushed me down onto the bed. All through the afternoon we whispered sugary insults back and forth and she laughed too much. I put my fingers on her mouth and she kissed them. A constellation of motes sparkled in the dusty light of the window and now and then through the courtyard we heard the village: a schoolboy calling his friends, a new baby crying, the sirens of the police. The odors of sunlight and the warm Adriatic, a half mile away, mingled with the fragrance of my freshly soiled bed sheets and her cigarettes. All through that afternoon, she laughed many times but as the night went on she laughed less. She cried once or twice with unexpected passion. She cried out more often than that. In the early morning blackness, we sat up in bed. Her hair covered her small shoulders and much of her face. She produced a tin foil of hashish which she smashed and expertly rolled into a wad of tobacco. We smoked it and I listened for a long time, as if from another room. She talked quietly about her mother, whom she considered no better than a slave, how her brothers were ignorant peasants who would take turns beating her when she went home. She described the family mule named Benito, the litter of piglets that had come April first, her dream of going to university or traveling to England someday, even America. She asked and I told her I had stopped on the way back from a corporate retreat in Athens a month ago and stayed. What more could I have said? That my marriage and profession both represented the ultimate victory of form over content, both a lifelong rehearsal for a wellmanaged death? That I loved my daughters but hated the life I had given them—the London prep-schools, the credit cards, the presumption of superiority—as much as my father hated what he

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gave me? That he had been head counsel for IBNJ for twenty-five years? After that he was CFO for almost ten more and by the end had grown his budget from three to ten billion dollars. Almost a year ago, very early on New Year’s Day, the first bright cold morning of his official retirement, after having used up his last vacation days after Christmas attempting to paint with watercolors, he rinsed out all his brushes, put them in a coffee can and stepped out in his pajamas onto the porch facing the harbor in Marblehead, Massachusetts, tied one end of an extension cord to the flagpole and the other around his neck before he stepped over the railing. “For the life of me,” I said at last, “I don’t want to go back.” She laughed, as if that were funny. We remained in bed, in my room, for another day and night. In the morning, when she was ready, she got up and began to dress. “You seem very mature for your age,” I said. She was thoughtful a moment, then smiled, “I want to see the sunrise.” When I said I wouldn’t go, she became quiet and her eyes avoided mine for too long. She sat in a chair with her knees together, both hands folded in her lap, as if she refused to leave. Ten minutes later, I followed her down the back stairs to a path that crossed a high meadow of sheep and wildflowers and into the next village. We sat in front of a tiny café in the early sun until an old man appeared with a key, frowned at us both, and went in. We listened to him talking to himself inside until he called out to us. Watching her, listening to her shout for coffee, I saw her as if for the first time: her womanly slenderness (for which I had a mortal weakness) sweetened by the delicacy of her years, the childish wrist overhead as she waved, signaling him with those small beautiful fingers. When he had the order, she began to talk again in a dialect I only vaguely understood, becoming more animated and her right eye opened a little more than the other.

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After the buttery rolls and sweet coffee, the old man gave me a look of open contempt as he took my money. He offered no change. I was glad to get back to the room. I prepared to give her fifty euros and send her away, possibly to meet her later, but she began to undress. She folded her clothes neatly on the desk and leapt under the sheet. She pulled the corner up to her lips and shivered. “But this room is warm,” I said. “Oh, my God,” she said and pulled the sheet over her head. “I am too cold!” I couldn’t resist, climbing in and sharing the heat she endlessly absorbed. Some hours later I lay next to her but more and more that eye disturbed me. At first, looking into her face, I wondered if it really were asymmetric or just a bit swollen from so much love or sleep or an autumn allergy. In the afternoon she noticed something was wrong. She put the sheet over me and gently smiled, “Is there something spezijalan you want from me?” When I apologized she faced away from me, but felt moist and eager as I pressed against her. “I want,” I said, “what I have right now. I want nothing more.” She was watching me when I awoke, again with that inflamed eye. I meant to tell her to turn it away, that she mustn’t spy like that. Instead, surprised how earnestly I meant it, I said, “You are so beautiful.” Hers was a shameful, frail, wearisome, confusing, childish beauty, with a taste of madness, a taste of death, and a hint even of ugliness. I wanted to tell her again and again. Again, I whispered, only half lying when I said, “So, so beautiful.” “Yes?” she smiled and touched me. “No,” I said. “I want nothing more.”

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• • • The next morning she was up on the hill behind the village, putting up the hotel laundry. I had offered to give her money but her face only darkened, so I sat and watched her from the back porch with an empty brandy glass and a letter from London open on the table. No one but me would understand how delicately encoded this cruel masterpiece was: Dearest Tony, I wish you would send news. The girls have been brave and you know how much your silence hurts them. In truth, both little Amy and even Samantha are lost without any news of you. I have no explanation to give them. Mr. Dixon at Shearson calls every day. Any news? he says. He regrets he has to transfer your portfolio to Jimmy Lamb if he doesn’t get word right away. Your bonus has been compromised and he has to stop your salary at month’s end, too. If you lose your job, have you considered what happens to our visas? We will have to move back to Boston, I guess, which isn’t so bad but it would be disappointing to remove the girls from the Heatherton School. They love it so. Could you call Dixon? Is there a phone where he could reach you? It’s a damn shame, he says, after twenty years with Financial you burn all your bridges like this. Your loving, loving wife, Elizabeth

There was a postscript that went on for two pages, with details about her distress (she threatened to sell the Lamborghini) and a copy of a letter from Samantha’s teacher. I tried to continue reading but my head hurt. I hadn’t objected, had I? When she removed my daughters from me the day my father died, like a

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treasure too fragile, too expensive to be entrusted to me? When they never came to me? I never insisted and never went to their end of the house. Why should I go home? There was more than enough money now. “Dang,” I said to no one as I watched a cloud grow tiny beyond the yellow hill, a crow and a starling jousting above a quadrangle of pines. I couldn’t bear to conjure their faces or say their names. I tried to feel something, some responsibility or pain. When the waiter returned for the plate and glass, I asked for coffee and another shot of brandy. I lit a cigar as I watched the girl on the hillside. I imagined the picturesque creature she would inevitably become, a washerwoman or a hotel servant or a peasant’s wife with a head scarf and a colorful apron, ever more the simpleton over the years. For now, at that distance, she was the envy of angels. The sun and wind came alive in the sheets and in the way she moved, balancing the big basket on her hip as she hauled it up and down to each length of rope. Whenever she turned and waved I wanted to look into her face and understand what I had uncovered in her. I waved back. I barely heard her singing through the wind as she continued her work. I looked down at the teacher’s letter; I had read it a half-dozen times with no comprehension at all. When we got back to my room I told her I had to go. It was sweet and pathetic, the way she listened and questioned me, touching my shirt. I didn’t tell her much, simply, “I have to go.” Her eye was a little magnified again—with sadness or grief or anger; she had come to depend on me in some way, as I understood it—then she turned and with an unexpected resolve crossed to the window and pulled the shade. Her will and passion unnerved me. A singular darkness formed between us there, in that next hour, a dense complex of delight and shame that only exists when a man cries out for furtive love and a child answers. It was the most adult treatment I

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had ever known—there was no limit to what she wanted from me. I gave her everything, but she was out to settle a score she knew could never be settled. In the morning, she accepted money. I explained that a hundred euros meant nothing to me but might be useful to her. I was annoyed when she wanted to accompany me to the taxi but I let her carry my briefcase down the stairs while I managed the suitcase. The village slept, the sun warmed the walls and cobblestones. A damp morning fog, smelling of tobacco and urine, was already evaporating in the street. Her eye had taken a new shape when she stopped and handed me the briefcase. She looked urbane and womanly thanks to the way she dressed, how she spoke and carried herself, though behind this perfect disguise I had come to see the peasant and the child. And then she seemed much older, ancient even, like an Assyrian handmaiden in stone relief. The driver got out sleepily to open his trunk for my bags and then the door; I kissed her once on each cheek. When I looked back she was waving with that slender wrist above her head, the same gesture she had used when ordering espresso before the cafés were open. Then, I guess, she went home to her brothers. All the way up from the coast the old Mercedes climbed with a heartening speed. I sat back, thankful to be done with that place, and watched the mountain meadows and stone villages go past. I watched the driver, with his big absurd moustache, his pale eyes and his red cap for a while too, and wanted to tell someone everything that had happened in the last month. All the things I’d thrown away, how I had abandoned and forgotten everyone. How simple it was to sit in silence and say nothing, do nothing as all the lives around me were degraded by my silence. Of course it would have been a mistake to speak. Had he only kept quiet afterward and driven, it would mean he despised me as a fool. If he laughed and scorned my life as an exercise in cowardice and self-pity, I’d have agreed. If he sympathized and gave me

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his blessing, I would have prayed to God for a slick curve and a quick end for both of us. • • • I went straight to the office for an hour. I met with Dixon and Lamb and security escorted me to the door. I had several hurried dinners with Betsy and the girls. Their table manners were impeccable—they studied me with wide-eyed indifference as they lifted their soup spoons. It was too late for much else: Amy had her lessons and Samantha had an evening invitation from her friend Sylvia Barrington Barrister one night and the next another from Portia Von Homburg and then I lost track. Betsy was reliably drunk and vicious by dessert. I stayed a week in all before I left, this time giving no address. I transferred a hundred thousand pounds into a new account. I wanted a plane to as far away as possible but at Schiphol I found myself paralyzed in front of the departures screen. I spent the night in a waiting room. The next day I spent with a pint of Canadian whiskey in a Dutch Holiday Inn, blunting the desire that turned in my chest like a fork. I went for walks but couldn’t breathe or bear the quaint streets. Even the most unpretentious avenue along a back canal and the small footbridge and the clatter of trams seemed expensive and fake and cruel. In a basement in the red-light district, I bought a fifty-dollar bag of heroin. I woke up in the afternoons. I’m not sure how often I went to the airport and sat in a lounge and sipped cocktails as I watched the departures and arrivals for the name of a place to go: Bahrain, Bangkok, Buenos Aires. I went back to the red-light district for more heroin and even spent a half hour in a room with an emaciated young Pole. She walked in and out of the anteroom like a ballerina, with her toes out. The skin of her large bald head was the yellow of butter and her lipstick fire-engine red to match her kimono and the bloodshot behind her snake-eye contact lenses,

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but in private there was little we could do—she had less life in her than me. I went back to my room and read an old newspaper until at last I threw it down and rushed out onto the street for a taxi back to the airport. The only plane I could get left at nine PM and arrived at midnight in Skopaj, near the border. I spent two days in a hotel with the flu. On the third, they called a taxi to take me down to the coast. What I wanted was a restful ride and to find her, mostly just to find her, but Otmen, the driver, had lived in Brooklyn and wanted to practice his English. I explained I was sick and wanted quiet. He waved his hand as if dismissing this politeness and turned his dime-sized spectacles around to yell and laugh at me while he should have kept his eyes on the road. I interrupted him near Pajic and asked him to take a detour, but he pulled off the road and turned and looked at me again. I had a poor map and the name of her village and some idea where to go, but the little hamlets looked all the same. In near silence we drove for an hour down some steep back roads. Otmen’s car hypnotized herds of sheep as it crawled over the ruts. He fretted, grumbling to himself until I promised him a carwash and a hundred-dollar tip. We stopped to ask a farmer if he knew where she lived. He looked in at Otmen and me and answered with a yell, gesticulating and pointing up and down and left and right and under and over and we thanked him and continued on. I dug a bottle of the local schnapps out of my bag and passed it to Otmen. Within a few minutes we were lost again but his mood improved. Soon he agreed with everything I said, even if I hadn’t said anything, and was shouting at me in the mirror. If necessary we would go around and around until we were slobbering old fools, he said. The sunset illuminated the landscape and the sky. Gulls flew overhead toward the sea. We stopped at one farmstead that might have been her place, but I couldn’t say for sure. I stared down into

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the yard for a long time, watching a rooster hop off a wall into a cloud of hens. It must have been feeding time already; behind the house an unseen goat made a racket. A few minutes later we were crawling up the road again. Otmen asked me if I heard the one about the Romanian who had a good life. “No,” I said. “Please, not now.” “No, no,” he said. “It’s so damn funny. There was a mistake at the hospital, you see. Someone, not him, dies. In disguise, he attends his own funeral!” “Please,” I said. “In the back room,” he continued, “behind the curtains? Where the men go to drink and smoke? This Romanian was amazed to find his friends drinking and smoking, you know? Celebrating and having a hilarious good time. There were even a pair of gypsies, twin sisters, pulling tricks out back, making money hands over fists, at his funeral! If he hadn’t done the same thing at a hundred funerals? So what. Still he was furious. He wants to dump the whole tables over, with all the bottles and glasses and ashtrays, throw the stinking mess on the floor.” “You know what?” I said. “I’m looking for someone. There is someone I’ve got to find right away.” “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find him. Anyway, the Romanian, he finds his friend, his best friend for all his life, who says to him, ‘Hey, stranger, why are you looking so pissed?’ ‘But why are you partying like this?’ he answers. ‘Aren’t you sad your best friend is dead?’ ‘What a stupid question,’ his best friend answers. ‘He was the happiest asshole I ever knew. Why should I be sad for him?’ ‘Asshole?’ the guy says. ‘At his funeral you call him asshole?’” I only hoped Otmen kept on the road. “‘Are you kidding?’ says his friend. ‘I loved him more than my own mother. If I can’t call him asshole at his funeral, who can?’ Meanwhile over at the table his lifelong worst enemy, a Magyar,

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is telling a joke: three Romanians in a bar. One says he thinks his wife is sleeping with a carpenter!’ ‘Why?’ he says. ‘I found a toolbox under the bed.’ ‘That’s nothing,’ says the next, ‘I think my wife is sleeping with the captain of the secret police.’ ‘Why?’ says his friend. ‘Because I found a whip and a pistol under the bed.’ ‘That’s nothing at all,’ says the third, ‘I think my wife has been sleeping with a sheep!’ ” “Look, Otmen,” I said. “You think you could shut your mouth a goddamn minute?” “No, no, no, this is so funny,” he said. “The guy, he says, ‘Why do you think she has been sleeping with a sheep?’ ” “Damn,” I said. “ ‘Because,’ he says, ‘I found a shepherd under the bed.’ ” He laughed and punched the wheel. “Only one more joke,” he says. “Ha! Only one more!” It took forever to find our way back onto the highway. By then Otmen was quiet. I hadn’t given him more schnapps and he had become morose. At last he said, “I may ask you a question?” I agreed to answer one. He smiled, and said, in perfect Brooklynese, “What the fuck are you doing?” I told him. He asked me how I knew her. I said that made two questions. “Aha!” he said, “That tells me all I need to know.” • • • When we got to the coast, we went straight to the Proteus. I rolled down a window and asked the crowds of small-town Adriatic hipsters out front if they had seen her. Most pretended they didn’t know her, until one kid called Marko admitted he hadn’t seen her all week. I gave him ten euros and they all stood and yelled directions to her place. Otmen got the local dialect

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better than me, so we were on our way again, back up the highway in the oncoming dark. After a kilometer or less we turned off and after half an hour inland on dirt alleyways lined with high hedges and fences, a cow appeared like a mountain in silhouette. Otmen hammered his horn until I complained and he got out and went after it with a tire iron. The cow bellowed and lumbered over a broken wall and we drove on for another half hour. Then Otmen suddenly said, “Why you looking for this girl, eh?” “Why does anyone look for a girl?” I said. “You know what you are doing, man? These people over here are wicked.” I told him I knew. That didn’t satisfy him. He pulled to a stop, shut off the engine. He said and pointed at the expanse of his windshield. “You see these things like a tourist, no? Cute little villages, pretty children, peasants mowing in the fields, old women on bicycles? Everywhere flowers? Believe me, I know,” he said, squinting his eyes as he pointed up. “But my people have been fighting these motherfuckers for a thousand years.” I told him there was a girl I had to see. It was simple. I had no plans to trouble anyone. “Come back with me,” he said. “I find you a girl. Better than this, for sure. Over here these people have these most twisted ideas. First time you put your carrot in her daddy’s soup, you know what happens? Everybody for five-hundred kilometers knows by now. Now her father has to murder you. You understand logic? These people are worse than those Turks, worse than Russians, worse even than Germans.” He stopped and held his chin, considering carefully, before he continued. “You think this is the first time it happened? You take her away a few nights and noodle her this way and that like Jersey City style and then you send her back, you know, to her daddy? His little darling, his sweetheart, his princess. Whoa! Even if he hates the girl and wants you to take the little slut away forever

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and kiss your ass for it, still he has to revenge himself on you, if he wants to be a man.” His eyes went slack and he looked away, through the windshield. Then he stopped suddenly and stared up in the mirror at me. I was offended by what he had called her, but not irreversibly. We both sat, waiting for me to come to my senses. “These people are like that over here,” he said. “To them, it’s simple. Now, on my side? In my city, things are more complicated and more—more flexible . . .” We drove on slowly for some time, his taxi rocking like a boat. I might have listened more carefully. What if I could fake a way to get properly introduced? Or wait a year and come back and find out about her family and befriend a cousin. For the feast of St. Stefan, I could bring her mother a gift, a book of Slavic fables, for the brothers a few liters of scotch. I could sit at the kitchen table and wait for her to get a year older. I could become something I never was. What hurry was there? I could manage my divorce remotely and in the meantime become known to them as the Rich American. They would be throwing her at me. One time Otmen pulled aside for three police vans coming the opposite way, three strobe lights turning noiselessly as they crawled past. Otmen sat for a while, and stared into the mirror. As a reward for his efforts, I passed him the schnapps and he drank. I could wait for her. I could sit outdoors on sunny days and watch the hornets circling against the window. Or leave flowers and go into her village to drink and wait as the scant traffic raced past on the dusty little road. An occasional shepherd might come by on his bicycle and I could treat him to a shot, or give pennies to the little girl who runs up the steps to the café with packages from the butcher. Now and then whenever I visited with her or saw her in passing, I could relive in exquisite detail the things we did in silence

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our last night together. I could wait a lifetime to hear her talk, to lie in her bed and watch her dress in the morning for the market, to see what shoes she wore on Sunday, how she applied eyeshadow to that eye and selected her lipstick, how she combed her hair before she went out through the plaza where the men would be watching her. Otmen returned the bottle but I saw he was nervous so I passed it back to him. He gave me a cigarette then turned around with a light. She is only a child, I told myself, then dismissed the notion. What does it mean, to say only a child? Was she less than me? Less than Otmen? She was the one who saw so much more. Wasn’t her pitiless lovemaking what brought me back again? But was she the same now as ten days ago? Does she still make those little noises in the dark, when she’s asleep? Is there already someone from before, somebody’s husband who torments her childish heart in the most unchildlish way—for whom she dreams of hacking off her hair?—whose chest and thighs she wants to rub and suck? Is he three times her age? Or is he as slim and gentle as a boy, with a knife-like wit and that Slavic fire in his eyes. I looked at Otmen in the mirror and Otmen stared back. I wanted to tell him how she looked when she was at work on a windy day, how she moved like a young goat onto the hill between the flapping, sunlit pillowcases. These were things I had seen from the hotel porch—and more clearly again from as far away as London and Amsterdam—how her hands moved quickly with the pins and how she managed the billowing sheets in her arms. Sometimes she stopped singing when she had the pins in her mouth, sometimes not. I tried to remember her glancing toward the hotel, in my direction. Was I sad when she looked beyond me toward the sea? Had my heart whistled with pain? Had I gotten up to walk over and sit in the shade of a corner, by an urn filled with flowers? Had I, because of her, tried to remember one simple thing about my father? A bow tie, a pair of well-polished boots,

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a hundred handkerchiefs all neatly folded in the top drawer? A collection of the world’s finest pigments and paintbrushes he had been accumulating for almost forty years in the credenza? Anything besides his death, how the breeze shifted him now and then under the frozen New England sun until the harbor master spotted him in his binoculars. I glanced at Otmen again in the mirror and I tried to smoke but my lungs hurt too much. • • • A light was on in the house or we might never have found it. We parked on the road in the darkness and looked down for a long time at the cluster of silhouettes: a stone farmhouse and outbuildings and sheetmetal roofs. As the morning light progressed I saw the pattern of fields and fences. I had been correct hours earlier. It was the same farmhouse. Otmen said, “What are we doing here, man-o?” “Looking for a girl.” He shook his head forlornly. “I don’t like it.” “You expecting someone?” I said. “Of course I am expecting someone. You think they don’t know we are here? I think they know why we are here. If it was my sister, my farm, you better believe I would know all these things, whether I wanted to or not. What about that old turd that gave us directions before? What about those scumbags at the disco? You think they don’t have a phone?” “I think they are all happily asleep.” “You are an asshole.” “How much do I owe you?” I said. “You can let me out.” He considered the idea. I waited. “What you gonna do, man-o?” he said, looking up through his windshield. “This makes no sense.” “So you told me.”

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“So let’s get away from here,” he shrugged with both palms up, elbows tight against his ribs, as I imagine they do in Brooklyn. He was right. None of it made sense. In a few minutes, I would head to Greben’s and get a room for a few more nights. She would find out soon enough. Or I could go back to Skopaj with Otmen. Hadn’t he given me an invitation of sorts? It might be good to see what he had in mind. Soon more light was in the sky, the misshapen earth greener against the clouds. Otmen was drumming his seat. Maybe I’d had to get this close to her to forget everything else about her. In fact, I hardly knew her. Only the strange outsized eye seemed significant now. Both at once, I had to have her and had to escape her. Otmen was right. Maybe a new prospect, any prospect, was a better prospect. Otmen had his gentle and gregarious nature and I could imagine the girls he knew, casual and pretty, curious, full of life, game for adventure and cash. Multiply this sad Cyclops of a farm girl by a hundred and meet one of them the proper way. Meet her mom and brothers before you bed her—marry her even—and be blessed till the end by her beauty and strength and youth and even now and again a whisper of affection or gratitude. This was the sweetest dream, a dream I wanted another moment to savor, but it was too late. Someone outside, in the darkness, yelled. The door I leaned against fell open like a trap. Otmen reacted, trying to start his engine but the window next to him and my whole pointless plan, all at once, shattered. I fell sideways and before my head hit the rocks two were on me, one with a knee in my chest, another forcing something between my teeth. Throughout the violence that followed, an odd discourse continued in my head. I was vexed by irrelevant things: how I despised all the American presidents, all the way back to Hoover; that my mother, who left when I was four, had never finished Radcliffe; that I understood their language poorly and only in its

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standard form, not in dialect; that I had never truly loved anyone. Once I tried to speak to them—I asked them to please talk slowly but in answer one of them stomped my face. A few seconds or a few hours later I understood a rock the size of a golfball was in my mouth and a strip of packing tape over my lips. When someone referred to me as the “Englishman,” I tried to correct him until the puzzle of broken teeth silenced me. At first, they were four. Each had taken a leg or an arm and lifted me and I saw dirt and pebbles and grass run an inch under my nose for a hundred yards. At the end they dropped me face down on the floor of an empty stall. I lay there a long time, my jaw twisted against concrete while they sat on me, one on each arm, one on each leg. I made only animal noises as I tried to ask them to remove the tape from my mouth because—I had to explain—my mouth was filling with blood. Flashlights followed more men coming in behind me. Soon the acrid crowd, the smoke of cheap cigarettes and the smell of farm implements and cattle and concrete altered the ambience. Someone whispered and someone pulled my boots off, then my socks. The only one with a name was Stujan, who yelled at the guys on my legs to get up. They whispered profanities but got up and pulled the hems of my jeans until they and my boxers had been stripped off too. The air was cold on my back and on the backs of my legs. The two guys jerked me up and down again until I fell into a position over a bale of straw and a yell of approval went up. Stujan held my face down again—the others forced my legs wide. Through my own painfully swollen eyes against the concrete I saw everything, and then I saw less and less: a coiled rope, a rubber boot, the tooth of a harrow. I knew she was there when Stujan addressed her. No one had ever spoken to me, or asked who I was—they didn’t care. They only wanted her to say I was him. She answered with silence,

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standing a few feet from me, until someone slapped her and she began to scream. That was when I knew it was her, cursing all four of her brothers by name, Stujan, Kristof, Sherker, and Volod and then her father Stujan and her grandfather Stujan. I understood enough: pig-fuckers she called them and everyone she could think of, all the fathers of everyone there. She cursed the local grocer, the schoolteacher, the police, the mayor, the butcher who passed for a doctor. She cursed the local priest and the Father and the Son and spit on the name of the Holy Ghost. She went on and they let her, screaming or whispering until her voice became hideous and broken by weeping. They kept her there the whole while, I believe. For some time they had their turns with me. I guess they wanted her to see with both eyes, the big one as well as the other, what happens. The pain transformed once my bowels loosened but the filth and stench defeated even Stujan who left, though another continued with a hose and some kind of tool. I was dead for a while. In that distance pain mattered little—it was too tiny, too pointed, too liquid. My throat seemed to lose all shape, as if I’d swallowed broken glass. I continued bleeding inside and with my eyes on the floor, I managed the flow of blood in and out of my head. I found that if I breathed a certain way and swallowed when the blood pooled, I could direct it through a nostril and avoid drowning. When all was said and done (I don’t know how many they were), a door slammed and I knew she was gone. They pulled Otmen in and ordered him to bring his car and get rid of me. Incredibly, he swore at them, calling them dogs, and refused, insisting all the shit and blood would ruin his upholstery. One of them apologized and there was a roar of laughter. What about his window? he said. Someone offered him a fat piglet as compensation. They would hose me down, another suggested, and provide a clean sheet, and Otmen after some banter and negotiation, agreed.

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• • • The blue tablecloths and the blue-and-white finger bowls in the diningroom seemed faded in the light of the giant curtains they opened in the afternoons. For all the empty tables, there were only two waitresses and the head waiter. He stood six-three at least in black slacks and a white tuxedo shirt he kept open at the throat. I had never seen anyone so pale. He had a dozen tiny rings in the lobe of his left ear, a long thin nose, a jagged brush of hair that gleamed like black shoe polish and quick eyes that registered everything but reacted to nothing. Like all the staff at the King’s Hotel, even reception, he never smiled. At every chance the waitresses came from the far corners of the big room to chat with him, but he seemed to take no pleasure in them. Even the three cigarette girls—a brunette, a blonde and a redhead—in short skirts and black heels come in from the patio to cross their beautiful legs and lean against the wall near the kitchen as if waiting for him. A Hungarian masseuse worked every day between ten and two, but I was tempted neither by her nor the sauna in the lowest level. I spent most of my time observing the concierge as she decorated for Christmas. Tinsel wreaths went up in all the hallways and blue and white ribbons wrapped the length of all the banisters. Two small firs ornamented with reindeer and paper stars were set on each side of the entrances. The concierge hadn’t made her way onto the patio yet, where I spent my afternoons facing west, though I couldn’t see the Adriatic from there. Small orange trees in giant ceramic pots occupied every corner; the balustrades and tiles were painted the same creamy white, and trimmed with the same royal-blue, as the hallway and my room. No one addressed me other than to offer a menu. Now and then one of the cigarette girls wandered among the few clients offering a selection of tobacco products or candy from a tray. Our transactions were purely pro-forma. They always looked away as they approached. We had no eye contact at all.

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Otmen had dropped me at a clinic just over the border and they moved me immediately to the hospital in Skopaj. For threehundred euros, I spent a week in a private room and received a dozen stitches at each end. I lost two front teeth. The doctor gave me enough painkillers to get me through December. I never saw Otmen or the girl again, but every evening I sat for a long time outside and watched the sun paint the walls a luminous yellow or orange on either side of the streets descending in a crazy-quilt pattern to the river. When the sun at last was gone, I lit a big Montecristo in celebration of something I couldn’t quite define and tried to imagine how else this might have ended. A crude justice had been necessary after all. Maybe I’d known this all along. More than my trespass upon the life of a peasant’s daughter had been corrected by her brothers. In my own meat, in my own measure, I understood how my father had failed me, how I in turn had failed my daughters. How any prospect of my love for them had been so handily defeated by his absence. How weak I was. How free. The girls were as good as nothing to me now. Betsy would see to that. There was no point in pretending otherwise or reinventing them. Twelve-year-old Amy already owned a violin, a viola and a cello. I’d left on the day of her autumn recital, but I know she meant to wear her silver shoes and silver dress and leave the silver handbag home. She would no doubt excel. Betsy had the night before demanded that her sister plan to attend but blonde blue-eyed Samantha, who was fourteen now and prettier and more popular than Amy, already had an invitation.

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arah dumped his drugs—the Delantin, the Prozac, the Lipitor, everything, even the vitamins—down the toilet. That was the morning after Mike’s seventy-first birthday. A few days later, he showed the ghost of an appetite. He took coffee and bacon for breakfast. At lunch he was lively enough to refuse the Nutriform until she bribed him with a teaspoon of whiskey. During May, for the first time all year, he lost no weight. In August he was up and about. By Halloween he even beat her to the door when the Thompson ghouls arrived with their sacks open and flashlights beaming into the dark kitchen. She found him leaning on the window, treating them only to a glimpse of his bony palms against the glass and his bloodshot, wide-open eyes, his bared teeth, the blistered tongue. Mrs. Thompson hadn’t mentioned it, but Sarah learned elsewhere that little Emma had nightmares for a month. The day after Thanksgiving, while Sarah went for groceries, he got out of bed over to the stereo and turned the volume so high Sheriff Langford, who was home with the flu, climbed out of his bed, drove down the dirt road in his bathrobe and slippers and stopped in to unplug it. Mike got a satanic sparkle in his eye whenever Sarah mentioned the sheriff, but by afternoon he had collapsed again in the 163

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big chair. The blanket covered the bones in his shoulders and thighs but his shins were absurdly pretty, like a young girl’s, the ankles small and delicate where they entered his oversized slippers. She knew he watched her every step, every move of her hand, every time she looked at him he was already staring, which meant he wanted whiskey. “Did you offer the sheriff a cup of tea?” she said. Without waiting for an answer, she got up to go into the kitchen: the two of them, the professor and the sheriff, must have looked a pair in their robes and slippers. “No,” he said, when she returned, having forgotten what she’d gone in for. “Of course not.” “Why do you do that?” she said. “With the stereo.” “I don’t know,” he said. “You can’t possibly enjoy the music so loud.” “Yes, I can.” “It’s awful.” “It’s Vivaldi!” he said, and stabbed her with his eyes. Was she disloyal to Vivaldi now as well? She sat in her chair until she gathered enough peace to reach for her prayer book. After a moment, she rose and stood next to the stereo. “Can you hear me now, as I’m speaking to you?” she said. “Can you hear what I’m saying?” “Yes, I hear you.” She adjusted the volume to four and bent down to put the plug in. The CD light came on and when the music began, she said, “Can you hear that?” “Yes, I can,” he said. “How does it sound?” “Wonderful,” he said. He listened a minute. “Miraculous.” “Why then must you turn it so loud?” she said but he only shook his empty old head.

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Sarah searched back and forth from the kitchen to her bedroom several times; so many things had been misplaced. She switched off the lights and closed the doors knowing only vaguely what she was looking for. Back in the livingroom he ignored her when she said, “Have you seen my glasses?” She felt a chill then, and wanted her sweater, but stopped and looked out the front window at the sunset on the empty flowerpots, the porch table and the mountains across the way. “The nurse thinks maybe I ought to monitor your progress more carefully,” she said. “Give you a little quiz each day, shouldn’t I?” “No,” he said. “For example. Do you recall the name of your daughter?” “Sylvia,” he answered. “Oh, you monster,” she said. “You heartless monster.” “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.” She was quiet a moment, then continued. “Okay, what then did we have for breakfast?” His made a dismissive gesture with his hand and his face changed in a way that frightened her; when the moment passed, he swallowed painfully. “What is it?” she said. “Nothing,” he said but left his chin down on his ribs. “Mike, I’m sorry.” “Bacon and coffee,” he cried. “And some goddamn vitaminpill milkshake.” “Are you alright?” she said. “I don’t know.” “How do you feel?” “Like death.” “Can you look at me?” He didn’t answer right away, then, “No, I can’t.”

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“I wish you’d never started in with that language,” she said. “You never spoke like that.” “Turn the music up,” he answered. “You won’t hear me.” She went into the back room and opened and closed doors, making her way through the house; for a start, she wished she could just find her glasses. Or that he had been diagnosed early on, no matter what his disease. Even in a car wreck she might have sat in his blood and held his face in her lap. She might have said, “I love you, I’ve always loved you.” Or “Marie! Remember our darling little Marie?” and he might have looked at her, his eyes recognizing her in an elementary way, answering her with something, even just the beginning of his last tears. Of course she said such things to him sometimes now, but the words didn’t have the same intent. He seemed never to listen to her, as if these things were little more than chit-chat to fill the silence of a house where death was a tedious roommate. She left for the kitchen. She opened and closed cabinets, furious with herself. Back in the livingroom, Mike continued to stare at his slippers. She said, “Where on earth are my glasses!?” Without looking up, he said, “On your nose.” • • • The next morning, Sarah began to search in earnest. She checked everywhere. She opened the cabinet under the workroom sink for the first time in ten years. She gazed along the old back shelves. She opened the chest in the livingroom. Inside were two bundles of yellowed doilies she inherited from her grandmother, a bottle of silverware polish, her mother’s wedding dress, a crumbling leather-bound edition of Fauna and Flora of the Bible. She stared at Mike’s bedroom door for a moment, then went into the guestroom and rummaged everywhere. After losing hope, she brought a blanket from her room and sat next to the cold fireplace

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with her legs covered, until she became restless. She went for a sweater. She went in and out of the kitchen for a cup of tea, more sugar, a chocolate biscuit from the cupboard. In a drawer she found a flashlight that flickered when she pushed the button. She poured herself a shot of scotch, then went through the livingroom and pushed open Mike’s door and slipped in. She brandished the light under the bed then turned it off. She could have woken him to ask, but even if he understood, he would want to know why, after so many years, she needed to know. And why now? Why at all? She left the door ajar enough that a veil of light let her see her way into his closet. Inside the flashlight flickered again but she could see his shoes lined up on the floor, the suits and winter clothes on hangers. Behind a curtain, on the shelves, she found things she had long ago forgotten: a collection of bayonets, a whetstone, a box of bullets from WWI, some desiccated gloves that might have been her father’s. Her heart contracted when the light fell on a shoebox in the corner but she caught her breath—it wasn’t the one. An hour later, against her better judgment, she placed a call to Marie and left a hesitant, childish message. She kept to the kitchen then, rearranging the cups in the dishwasher. When the phone rang she almost ran—but it was Paniotis again, the second time this week. When she said hello, he started right in with his nonsense. “There is one thing,” she interrupted. “Seriously, I must get up into the attic. Is there a boy you know, to help me?” “I’ll bring my ropes,” he said. “Is there someone younger,” she said, interrupting him again. “There is a trapdoor, but it’s heavy.” She listened without listening, then said, “I’d rather it were someone else. I don’t know why I’ve asked you.” “Because,” he said, with his subtle, insistent accent, “it is me you are after.”

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“Paniotis, please, no. Mike is here. I can manage better myself.” “I don’t care about him. I’m not afraid of him. How could I be?” “I don’t want you here.” “Yes, you do.” Sarah opened the door a few minutes later, surprised to see how small and old and bowlegged—but agile, elvish—the old Greek appeared as he hopped up the step into her kitchen. She’d seen him around often enough over the years, at the supermarket, the gas station, but had always managed to avoid him. It was otherworldly to see him in her house again and the timing seemed beyond coincidence. In the last month, after so many years, he had begun to call again. His eyes, which were as slow moving and observant as ever, had the burnish of an old fixture, something built long ago for heat or light, a gas lamp or a copper kettle. He pushed his stack of white hair back after he removed his hat. He looked past her. He had earned his reputation as a teasing old codger, a cheapskate with a dozen properties in Boulder that kept him like Agamemnon. He had never been known to drop two bits in public for a cup of coffee. “Where is the old reptile?” he said. Without answering, she led him back through the diningroom to the hall. She handed him the pole with a hook on the end. “Is there a light?” he said. He searched his shirt until he found his glasses. “It’s on,” she said. He stepped backward and forward a few times. She pointed at the ceiling. “I could probably do this more easily myself,” she said. He muttered something dismissive and crumpled his face. He never took his eyes from above, proving his determination. The tension in his lips reminded her how handsome he had been a

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long time ago, in the old days, before Mike set out to murder him. With some pleasure and some guilt she pictured how he used to look, his burly physique as he sat at her table, the thick hair over his silver-blue eyes and the way he kept those eyes on her, even when Mike was in the room. He had first come to Sarah after he lost his wife, he said, because he wanted to look at Sarah’s red hair. It reminded him so much of her. He’d come and sit in the kitchen and stay all afternoon, till the table was set. Mike only got fed up after all this went on for two months. Once he said to him, “See you later, granpa.” Paniotis only turned his eyes to the floor and Sarah right away set a place. Later she had defended him. She enjoyed having him there, she said; he dressed better and was better looking than anyone she knew, with a more sophisticated manner, though he wore too many rings on his fingers. He still wore too many rings and when he raised the pole with both hands, his bushy eyebrows went up, too. He focused over the rims of his glasses and his arms began to wobble, so she tried to help. Together they held the pole—as he directed it, she steadied him. She recognized the spice in his old breath, some blend of lemons, strong sweet coffee and mint toothpaste, she guessed. She was momentarily unsure which way to turn but followed his wrists, turning the pole and stepping as he led her, recalling how she had once been tempted by a gesture. He was nearly sixty-five then and Sarah was forty-five. Mike was away and she accepted Paniotis’s invitation to the Cognos Café in Boulder. After wine and lamb, the espresso charged with brandy, he got up to go but before she stood he bent down to kiss her and touch her hand, slipping her a room key. She sat alone at the table a minute, until she understood, then put the key in her glove and went out into the cold. It was already late. For too long she sat in her car, starting the engine now and again for heat. She had always admired his strong hands. If only

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she could let him release her red hair one time in memory of Eleni, so that it fell over her shoulders, before it faded entirely to gray. Maybe that would be enough. If only she could be someone else for a short while, for less than an hour, someone who was born in an impossibly white village poised above the blue Aegean, who learned Greek first and then Italian, who moved to America to marry a rich man fifteen years her elder, and who died childless. It was daylight by the time Sarah had completed the long drive into the mountains. Now the trapdoor above them moved and the ceiling creaked in a disturbing, familiar manner as they hooked it and turned the pole. Together they pushed and pulled and pushed. The effort had proven all but hopeless when the latch clicked. “That’s it,” he said. “Now help me open it.” But with no warning, the trapdoor fell. The foot of it bounced and missed her head by an inch. Paniotis ducked away from her, a delayed reflex. She covered her mouth and gave a little cry. “Oh, my God!” she said. “That was much too close,” he said, and grinned. “I guess the springs were shot,” she said. They both looked up at the rectangular hole in the ceiling. She took the rope and helped him lower the ladder until it touched the floor. “You going up?” said Paniotis. She tested the ladder with a foot. She looked up doubtfully. The old man bullied her gently aside, then stopped. “Why are we doing this, anyway? What have you lost?” “None of your business,” she said. “Let me go first. You’ll kill yourself.” “Who cares? I’ve lived eighty-one years already.” “No,” she said and pushed him aside and started up the ladder. After three steps she said, “This is no good. I’m afraid.” “Ha!” Paniotis said and touched her ankle. “Paniotis Angeletos, don’t touch me!”

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“I want to go up. I’m afraid of nothing,” he said. He touched her again, quickly, then stopped. “We need a young fellow to help us,” she said. “Such a fine and pretty ankle,” he said. “Oh, God, I don’t know what to do,” she said. She turned her face to the door above. “What is it?” Paniotis said. “What is the matter with you now?” “Paniotis, please go away.” “Let me give it a try.” He leaned against the ladder and with his weight against it, she took a step, grateful his familiar warmth and strength remained there beneath her. She hesitated inexplicably. Grief gathered until she couldn’t breathe, for fear of releasing it. The backs of her legs blushed. She felt his eyes on her. Three more steps and her head was above the attic floor. A tiny window at the other end let enough stale light in for her to see her wedding trunk, a stack of blankets covered with plastic, the rafters and, at the end, the old wardrobe. She turned around and Paniotis blinked up at her. He said, “You happy now?” At the top she took the last two steps carefully, and stood in the attic, balancing with her hands out, as if on a tightrope. With a toe she tested a board. She recited a brief prayer: Holy Mary Mother of God. The bulb overhead came on when she pulled the string. A miracle! Paniotis called up to her and she answered but he didn’t seem to hear. She made her way past the trunk and blankets to Mike’s old wardrobe, watching the rafters so she wouldn’t hit her head. Paniotis was calling out too much at one point and she crept back to the open trap. “What is it?” she said, shouting and whispering at the same time. “What are you doing up there?”

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“Just looking.” “I’m worried,” he said. “Don’t make such a racket. If Mike wakes up, I’ll be very angry.” “He would be glad to see me.” “Paniotis, please.” “What are you doing? I am afraid for you, you know?” But she returned to the far end. Back inside the wardrobe, she rearranged the shelves and the old file folders, all painful with memories: a tin hand-painted with St. Patrick standing on a bushel of snakes; three handguns, each wrapped in an oily cloth; a box of rosaries. Mike wouldn’t have been up here for ten years at least. A row of black leather briefcases were squeezed in at the bottom. She stopped and held her breath for a second when she come upon a bundle of papers tied with a string, but they were notes for a course he taught at the university many years ago. She found a Bible and a box of pencils, a box of dusty photos. There was a collection of hunting knives, a small showcase of butterflies with a plexiglass cover, a roll of watercolor brushes tied together in a cloth, and more boxes, boxes of magnets, fish hooks, arrowheads, corkscrews, shoelaces, paper clips, tie-clips and more things than she could have imagined but not what she wanted. By now Paniotis was singing in soft, plaintive Greek. She went back twice, to tell him to pipe down. “Please!” she said but Paniotis kept it up below. He refused to leave, he said, until she came down. Only one drawer remained and after she had hurried through it, she put a hand against her heart and leaned her forehead against the shelf. When she was ready she went silently back to the trapdoor and watched Paniotis secretly from above, the top of his white head and his fingers tapping his forearms. He was at rest on the bottom step, his arms crossed on his knees, whistling and looking about the floor. The toe of one boot moved an inch forward, then back. Now and then he whistled.

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“You don’t know what I’m looking for, do you?” she said. He turned his face up to her, then to the floor again. “Of course not,” he said. “Since you don’t tell me.” “A box,” she said. “Yes, I know, a box. But what box? This is the grand mystery.” “Something I’ve been meaning for some years to return to you.” He twisted to look at her again. His eyebrows went up again. “A box of letters,” she said. “Letters?” “Letters.” He turned quickly away. “Now you know?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?” ”Maybe someday I’ll explain.” “Well?” he said. “You should have told me—” “I suppose I could have.” “No, I mean, you should have told me, because I have them.” She looked down at him. “You gave them to me,” he said. “At least, I believed you gave them to me. After all the stupidity, the screaming, the insanity, the broken windows, someone—you, I assumed—left them tied very prettily on my stoop. I always considered it an expression of love. If you want to know, I have returned this love ever since.” She had to think for a long time how to answer, if at all. She worried he would misinterpret his silence. “It wasn’t me,” she said. He looked up at her with something akin to hatred. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t me.” • • • The home nurse came first thing the next morning: Mike weighed in at eighty-eight pounds in his robe and slippers. He returned Sarah’s watchfulness as he sank back into his chair, his

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eyes a greasy yellow and the bones too high in his cheek. His hands resembled claws—the ten sharp fingers in his lap all came to a single point. At noon he coughed. She offered him ice cream but he waved away the spoon. The second and the third times he coughed she just frowned but mistook the fourth silent one for something worse: he stiffened and was lifted out of the chair by it, though his chin stayed down. She said, “Mike?” but he gave no answer. She looked at the top of his head and prayed to God that he say something, even the worst drivel. She reached over to touch his hand—he rose slightly again, squeezing his eyes open and closed. His mouth opened too, fishlike, gasping as he fell into his seat. “Is that it?” she said. “Are you done?” He closed his eyes and said nothing. “What is it?” she said. He made a chewing motion with his teeth. “Are you alright?” she said. He shook his head no. After a minute she asked again. This time he nodded. She came and stood beside him until his eyes closed. • • • At two she unwrapped a small tenderloin and a package of bacon. She poured herself a bourbon for a change and considered giving Mike a snort, but decided better get something in return. She set the bacon in the pan and watched until the clear pool of fat formed. She laid the tenderloin in and listened to it hiss. Mike had always had an appetite. At their wedding in Omaha forty-one years ago, when he should have mixed and danced, he kept to the table and even ate, with some slyness, her slice of roast. He was as lank and handsome then as she imagined the young Faust would have been in a tux, with his high forehead and

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his angular eyebrows. From the wolflike way he watched her, she knew how hungry she made him feel. This was their private little joke—how something about her stimulated his appetite for meat. She was twenty-one then, one redhead in a family of six girls. He was thirty already. She had run to him and knotted her fingers with his after the dance with her father, noticing how beautiful his hand was with the new ring. As he turned his fork to the plate, he smiled at her again, showing his teeth. “Michael!” she said. “Are you ravenous, poor boy?” Before he answered she pulled him out of his chair onto the floor. He tried several times to return to the table but she invented some emergency. They had to congratulate and give their gift to her cousin Jack, the priest, for the service. His Uncle Carl hadn’t been greeted yet. The altar boys hadn’t been tipped. Then her sister Kate arrived with a limo to rush them off to the hotel. In the suite she threw herself onto the bed and Mike went for her, his black bow tie tied crisply and she held his face with both hands. She watched his Adam’s apple plunge in his throat, imagining he’d swallow her whole when he groaned, “Oh, God, I’m hungry.” By the time the hissing of the tenderloin softened, Mike had been silent too long. In the livingroom she found him half out of his big chair and slumped sideways. She touched him and he started to hack dismally, his chest making a hollow chopping sound. He settled down at last and Sarah brought him a cup of tea with sugar and lemon. After he accepted her help with it, she retreated to the kitchen and turned off the stove. The steak was already too well done for him so she covered it, put it away and carried the phone into her bedroom. Again she tried Marie but got only Reggae music and the garbled outgoing message. Mike’s nose began to run. Had he caught the sheriff ’s bug? Would the symptoms have appeared so soon? She brought him tissues and he used them a while, until he hadn’t the strength.

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She put another blanket over him when he shivered, and took his temperature several times. She brought him water and a Tylenol but he refused. She considered calling the doctor, but by then it was already seven PM and she decided it could wait till morning. By eight, she began to worry. He seemed afraid and there was something childish about it, which further inspired her to wait. By turns he sat up slowly or bent sideways. Sometimes his cheeks were flush, bright against the yellow pallor of the upholstery, his eyes alive as he gripped his chair, watching her; when she next asked how he felt, he closed them. She tried to take his temperature again but he jerked away. “Where is Marie?” he said. “I miss Marie.” Because he didn’t see it, she wasted a look that was meant to injure. “This is something new,” she said. “You never missed her before.” “Oh, yes, I have,” he said. “Not for a very long time,” she said. “I can’t remember the last time you asked for her.” She waited another minute but he didn’t answer; she decided to get the fire going. She crumpled newspaper under the grate. She broke kindling and as he had always instructed her, stacked three logs on top. When it was all set, she turned and asked him if he wanted to light the fire, expecting him to wave away the formality, but he had fallen too far forward so she went to him and put her hands under his knees. She took hold of the bones in his lap in a direct unexpected way when she performed these tasks, like taking hold of a steering wheel. She pushed him backwards in the chair, not as gently as she intended. He looked up, not seeing her—his head had fallen sideways and his arms were down at an awkward angle. “I’m going to take your temperature now,” she said, once she had him settled. “And I don’t expect any guff from you.”

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She shook the thermometer forcefully and inserted it into his mouth. “Under your tongue,” she said. The fever was under a hundred. She went into the kitchen to unwrap the tenderloin and prepare plates for them both, then decided not to bother with two. She returned to the livingroom and ate hers with extra salt and a slice of buttered bread while he stared at her. For warmth she made tea afterwards and offered it to him. When he didn’t answer, her head began to throb behind her eyes, so she left the teacups in the kitchen and went to sit on the porch. The night was clear and cool; two bright red-andorange clouds sailed east, away from the sunset. Soon it would be cold. She wondered about the cold and imagined an absolute cold, a coldness empty even of itself. She wondered about the patience of death, her husband of so many years endlessly approaching death. The sun, down beyond the Divide, left traces of color high in the atmosphere now. Lights were on in houses across the valley. Headlights moved on the road below. Sometimes she feared losing him, sometimes she feared losing all but the most formal sympathy for him and was sorry for her impatience and even sobbed a little, stifling the noise with a hand over her mouth. She loved him as much as ever—she accepted that beyond a doubt, though at times it was impossible to feel. As if she could hold her love for him like a cup of warm soup in her hands, but never taste it. She crossed her legs, folded her skirt over her knee. She chided herself for all these silly, self-pitying notions and decided she was just tired. She wanted her prayer book then, for the softness of the onion-skin pages, the red ribbon no wider than a string, the leather cover as soft and worn as a hand in hers. Oh, where was Marie? When she got too cold, she went back in and sat by the fire. Already, a white layer of coals had thickened under the grate.

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Mike had named a second girl Sylvia before she was even conceived; somehow it seemed impossible they never had her. How could a child who never existed have come to mean so much? Would they have had another redhead like Marie? Framed above the mantel, a watercolor Marie painted thirty years ago, in first grade, reminded her of the excitement it caused among her teachers. In the dim light from the fire and the lamp, she admired the delicate, astonishing adeptness of the image she had memorized many years ago: a boat childishly rendered, but the sail luminous, the black, rust-flecked sky nightmarish above one tiny red-haired passenger waving her arms. When the phone rang again, Sarah walked into the back diningroom and let the machine answer. She watched the light flash as Paniotis made his case again. “Now that we are seeing each other again, I went to the postmistress and told her that you—well not you, as such, but some very special someone— was devastated that I’d given her the roses. I asked for them back and she laughed at me. In front of twenty people lined up with packages and little children in their arms she said, ‘Hell, no!’—she didn’t care if I cheated on her all over town but she couldn’t tolerate a cheapskate. ‘Indian giver,’ she called me.” With a finger Sarah lowered the volume until his voice became a speck of light. She considered for a second, a half-minute, then raised the volume again, only slightly. His voice had changed its tone. He was serious now, reading one of his poems. “To gain your love,” he said in an absurd voice that was too pompous, too high pitched. “I bleed and bleed and bleed . . .” This time she lowered it until she heard nothing. • • • The tea was long done and Sarah, exhausted, had begun to doze when a loud disturbance came from inside. At first she was sure an animal was at the door. For weeks a mountain lion had haunted

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the Wilsons’ back woods. She wanted to laugh out loud at the stupidity of it: a cat twice as big as a German shepherd bristling and meowling, rubbing her back against Sarah’s kitchen door. Had she smelled the bacon? Then she understood Mike made the noise. She squinted into the darkness and saw his silhouette in another miserable contortion, fallen sideways as if it wanted out of the chair but found itself trapped by the uselessness of legs. His chin had fallen to his chest again, as if his neck had collapsed, a grotesque and by now familiar position. An image of vultures crowded her mind. His shoulder blades rose behind him like the stumps of wings. “What is it?” she said and when she knelt before him he fell out of the chair into her arms. He cried out twice more, then began simply to cry. He stopped finally and for a long time she held him. When she tried to move he gripped her arms so hard she wanted to cry out, too. Soon both her legs on the floor ached. Saying nothing, his teeth worked incessantly. Something in the fireplace popped once but the house could go up in flames for all she cared. She was too tired. When she drifted awake, her leg was asleep. She got up from under him. She left him leaning on the chair as she freed herself, but he began to gobble like an infant as Sarah walked the rooms to chase the numbness away. Only by midnight had she gathered the will to lift him into his bedroom. Then, each time she tried to leave, he groped for her and kept her next to him. At 1:30, by the glow of his nightlight, she woke him and made him take the thermometer one last time, then propped him up for a Tylenol and a sip of water. If she tried to leave, he started out of sleep with an inaudible cry, one hand pawing the air. She considered lying with him but was thankful later she hadn’t. By three his breathing was raspy and deep and when she rose to kiss his forehead she stopped, seeing her chance. She made her way through the livingroom like a thief. In her bed at last, she

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neglected her prayers. For the first time since she was a girl, she slept in her socks. • • • Because she forgot to close the curtains, the sun in her eyes woke her. At quarter to nine, she went into the kitchen and fixed two slices of toast and her one coffee for the day. She ate slowly, convincing herself it was best to leave him be. When she stepped out the side door to shake the tablecloth, she found the box on the step. She brought it right in and attempted to untie the ribbon. At last she lost patience, found her scissors, and cut it. The letters were arranged precisely, the small lined sheets folded in half, the size of so many index cards. The pages were yellowed badly, some blackened almost but the tiny penmanship was clear. She checked at one end of the box and there was the last one, the one that had caused so much grief. She checked at the other end and found the first of them: Everything I see or hear insists on one thing only, the one thing over and over. The winter winds are the madhouse where I’m locked in at night. I try to sleep but the trees beat the sky until it screams your name.

She fumbled with the letter, embarrassed by her trembling and finally got it back in its slot and covered the box. She got up and turned off the kettle. She went in and out of the livingroom, then sat and looked at the cut ribbon on the table before she swept it into the trash. A few minutes later, she opened the box and selected one near the center: Marie came to visit us again today. She loves me, you know, like an uncle. No, like a father. But I don’t criticize her. I give her money and send her shopping with mother-in-law. I don’t know if you noticed but later I was up behind your place in

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the afternoon with the binoculars. I observed you from my car. You were in your garden. You stood once with an armful of flowers and I think you looked in my direction. Another time you covered your eyes and looked. You wiped your forehead and I think—I believe—you looked at me. Is it true? I must know. The sun was bright and you were wearing that bright blue dress with the short sleeves. The one with the big buttons there, against your heart. You wore those white tennis shoes too, with no socks, and your ankles, your shins reflected the sun in such a way that I had to cover my face. The light on your arms, your hands, your fingers. Oh, your arms!

How many of these letters were there? Oh, Lord, she guessed two hundred. She read another, but something in it made her gasp and get up to put the box away. She went into the livingroom and put it down on a side table. At first she had loved the complicated way these letters affected Mike, as if Paniotis had taught him to be jealous. Even as a newlyweds, Mike had never been so persuasive in his emotions as then. She had never considered hiding them from him and had made a game—she hadn’t understood how stupid it was—of reading them to him. Mike who was by nature so phlegmatic became furious in a silent, masculine, childish, fitful way that she in truth, in those days, delighted in. One day she hadn’t bothered to look at the latest letter and had saved it until Mike was home. After she read it to him, he put on his boots and brought down his rifle. As absurd and melodramatic as that seemed now, so many years later, she remembered that what scared her was how determined and calm he appeared—thank God she stood in his way. She looked at the light in her curtains now, the window, and her eyes began to ache. She thought maybe she wanted a Tylenol, or a drink. Or both. She didn’t want to remember how Mike said only, “He’s so full

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of shit.” Or how he laid the gun across the table when she commanded him to and brushed past her and went out to the shed, how he marched down through the center of town with the rake over his shoulder, straight to Paniotis’s house, with Sarah running after him. After he put the steel end of the rake through each of Paniotis’s front windows, he went all around the house to every window he could reach. By the time he went after the front door Sarah could hear Eleni’s mother and Marie screaming inside; two cruisers arrived with their strobe lights reflecting in the shattered glass and Mike threw the rake down and with no discussion at all got into the back of the second one, with then-Deputy Langford, and off they drove. Sarah didn’t want to recall any of this, but gave in to an impulse and brought the letters back to the kitchen. She tried to picture Mike the next day, the pain he no doubt felt as he sat at the table with both his hands on the box and stared at it. In the end, he was right. Returning the box to Paniotis was the simplest, most dignified warning possible; though it had been somewhat misconstrued by Paniotis, the signal held until now. She wondered if Mike had walked down through the town to deliver the letters, if he drove, or if he had one of the local kids deliver it. What about Paniotis, the windows all around his house covered with plastic at the moment he found the box outside his shattered door? She didn’t want to understand, but her fingers, her arms, her shoulders and heart completed the work without her—she removed the lid and took out the letter that had been the final injury: Did you know Marie is back from the Rehabilitation Center? She wants to go back to school too, but has decided to live with me. What can I say? She has been with us a week now and already everything is better. I gave her a room upstairs with a

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bed and a desk. We have many hundreds of books here. She loves to sit in her room and read and smoke. Yes, I let her smoke inside my house. All she needs is a little peace. She is better off with me, than with him, because there is no spite here. I know how to love the child, you see?

Quickly, without finishing, she inserted the letter into its place. She put the lid on and brought the box into the bedroom and slid it under the bed. Back in the livingroom, when she remembered she had turned the volume on the phone down the night before, she reversed herself and went into the room where the machine was flashing. “You say you are an old woman,” the Greek continued when she pushed the button, “but that is not how I see you. I remember you, not with these old eyes but with these fresh fingers. My Eleni was old too, as old as you are now when she left me, God rest her, but under the sheets? Where only my hands and my thighs and my flesh remembered her? She was the same as so many years before: my tender girl, my delectable young queen. That’s how I think of you, too. When I first set eyes on you. You were exquisite, eh? You blushed every time I looked at you because you saw how I wanted you, how I could have you. Tell me what has changed. Can the years touch you so deeply as these fingers?” She hit the button and went back to the kitchen. She stopped several times to rest, leaning hard with her hands on the counter. When she recovered her balance, she moved the dishes from the sink into the dishwasher, then went into the livingroom to open the curtains. She sat in the light and after a while, considered making more tea. She got up and carried a magazine into the kitchen where she sat. Many times she stopped short of going to peek in on her husband, then flipped the guilty pages. There was housework to do. She almost got up to go shopping while he was quiet, but first she had to go check.

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Later she decided the only real shame was what she saw in his eyes. Both his hands were caught open, up by his ears, as if by the flash as he entered a surprise party. She wondered who had been there to greet him, and might have taken some consolation in that, if not for the look of horror. Was there no one he wanted to see? She went in and out of the room several times. When she got her breathing under control, she went to the back diningroom and looked at the blinking phone. She lifted the handset and dialed and left a message for Marie to please, please call. She started to make more calls but stopped. Wanting something to say to him first, something about the deepest kinds of remorse, and about love and more than anything forgiveness, she went back through the house and knelt by his bed. She closed her eyes, she crossed herself and tried to address him but it was too late. She pressed her face to the mattress and for the longest time smothered the noise of her grief.

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arked at the scenic vista, Smithy watched the fuel truck through his binoculars. The operator went back and forth as if in slow motion between the gauges and the couplings at the far end of the hose. Smithy put the binoculars down on his passenger seat and lit a cigarette. He sat for a while, staring absently until the long gleaming tanker pulled away, moving east down the canyon. He watched as Mayor Goode drove in to top off his new Power Wagon. Goode got down and no doubt set the nozzle on the slow notch. He circled his truck and kicked the brand-new radials. With a finger he probed for nicks in the paint. He took the squeegee and wiped it with a rag and with an almost effeminate precision pushed it across and through the round corners of the windshield. He set the squeegee back and beamed for a moment through his sunglasses at the mountains mirrored in them like diamonds. Then he released the nozzle, slapped his gas cap on, and disappeared inside the MiniMart. Ijaz Ahmed, the owner, had three big shiny rows of pumps out front. Every other vehicle that came up the valley stopped in to fill up or get beer or bottled water. Half the time there was a traffic jam in the lot—college kids in SUVs, rock climbers in little battered Nissans, construction workers, dump trucks and the state troopers coming in for free coffee with their crullers. By 185

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Smithy’s calculation, that MiniMart had to net five hundred dollars a day during the week, and twice that Saturdays and Sundays. One-hundred-fifty thousand profit per year easy after Ijaz and his brothers paid themselves a salary. He lit another cigarette and looked across the hills at all the new houses and began to rub his face. It seemed this moment, this bright Sunday at noon, had been ten years in the making. He’d been to the AA meeting in the basement of the Evangelical church, just as he had every Tuesday for ten years and now, for the first time, he wondered, what was the sense in it? He had repeated more or less the same horseshit speech in which he described what hope there was for himself as well as anyone who put his mind to it. Did anyone listen? Had he been lying to himself and the others all this time? He would be as dry as a sidewalk in Arizona for ten years today, he had reminded them, after he tapped the mike with a finger. He went to work, he said, and worked his bones raw and built a business and a new reputation for himself because he didn’t want to end up like his and Lilly’s father who, as everyone there knew, had drowned in his own vomit in his own bed. Or their mother, who caused a head-on only two months before that, leaving not only herself but three Mueller boys—Rick, Randy and Ralph, aged sixteen, seventeen and nineteen, all three of whom had been students of hers in kindergarten—in a blackened heap two miles east of here in the middle of 117. But you all know all that already, he said, and gestured to the doors in back. Despite the contempt he knew was rife for her and therefore himself in this town, he wasn’t going nowhere. As much as he despised everyone in that room and everyone despised him (no one protested, they had given up protesting years ago), he knew perfectly well it wasn’t any different anywhere else. If you’re going to take a stand, and everyone of you out there is going to have to sooner or later, he said, there’s no place like the place where you already are. Steve Hempstead didn’t even look up from his newspaper.

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Sharon Young crossed her arms and glanced at Steve. John Hetnik startled, disturbed by the sound of his own snoring. • • • Almost five weeks before, a Wednesday, Lilly peered out her window, watching for her brother. Satisfied she was alone, she ran back into the hallway and lifted the mirror down from its place above the stairs. What if Smithy caught her messing with his furniture! The bottom edge of the frame balanced on her thighs, she knelt and lowered the mirror against the wall. She sat in front of it Indian style, covering her face and peeking through her fingers. She put her nose against the glass but panicked when she saw the smudge her nose left—she pulled up her T-shirt and wiped the mirror with furious little circles until the smudge was gone. Smithy wouldn’t be back for half an hour, so she stood and stared down into her reflection; she dropped her jeans and spun around, evaluating her legs. Frustrated she couldn’t see all of herself at once, from her hair clip down to her socks, she walked back down the hall for a more distant view. She unhooked her bra when she turned again and dropped it on the floor. She locked her hands overhead and examined her arms, her belly button and her breasts, which reminded her of the few seductive words Charlie Vedette had said to her. They were a bit small, he said, but oh, so tasty. Looking down now she believed him. She twisted to look at her ass. She was so white. She returned and knelt close to admire her shoulders. She came back into the mirror a minute later with her backpack, which she unzipped on the floor. Distracted again by the sight of her legs, she kicked off her socks and stood to drop even her panties. She pulled the clip from her hair. She checked the clock again. Something was bugging her brother. He spoke to her less and less these days, and that was fine with her. The last

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time he smacked her for talking back was almost a year ago, the day Martha left, but she couldn’t blame him too much. He loved her in his own twisted way and she had never been sufficiently afraid of him. But bringing his big mirror onto the floor? How could he understand? It was stupid where he put it. You had to stand on the stairs to look at yourself. She rummaged through her backpack until she found a pencil case and inside her favorite lipstick, sui rouge, shade 300. What would he do if he caught her with makeup? Sooner or later he would have to face facts. People around Hollandville probably said the worst things imaginable about her and him and only the most daring boys were friendly to her. She still liked Jason Brent, from the night before. For all his prowess on the wrestling team, he had been far sweeter than most, almost too sweet, and she got impatient soothing and encouraging him. She wouldn’t go with him again. This she decided firmly, after debating it most of the morning; she unscrewed the lipstick and twisted out the charge: she was the one who decided. She sat up in front of the mirror and rolled her lips over her teeth: I decide. Older men interested her more these days, anyway. Jason had made an honest effort but shivered through the whole thing as if he couldn’t get warm, even though it wasn’t cold and he mostly kept his clothes on. Willie Bowman the week before hadn’t been nervous enough. He was a United States Marine now, back from his second tour in the Gulf, and was a little scary and surprising in the ways he took advantage of her, so firmly getting what he wanted, no more and no less. It wasn’t that she disliked his odd demands, at once so unexpected and businesslike, but she wouldn’t go with him or even Charlie Vedette again, either. What would an older man be like? A father even? Someone who held her a good bit first and maybe sang to her or told comforting unhurried stories and then, only when the moment was tender enough, let her know what he’d like without coercion or

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shame. Someone who wouldn’t let her worry about her brother. Someone to make her feel grown up or, when she wanted, like a little girl again. She wondered about the odd character who worked for Smithy. He was shorter than all the others, with small hands, two blackened fingernails, a nervous smile she liked, a melodic, comical accent from somewhere down South and had developed a nice physique since the construction season began. His hair was as blond as hers but longer and lit with red now from so much time on the roof. He worked without a shirt and had a golden tan, even on his bald spot. Maybe, given a reason, he could stand up to her brother. She had only seen him up close a time or two, pulling into the driveway in his blue jalopy. Would he sacrifice his job for her? Take her the hell away from there? What if she didn’t have to skulk out of the house anymore and down through the trees to wait for the desperate, dirty-minded boys to pull over onto the shoulder in their muddy trucks and flash their lights? She was completely naked now. What if she did something to make her brother go insane? She got up and ran down the hallway to her room. Again, she checked her window. Sunlight bleached the trees and the long gravel driveway and the gray mountains far away in the north. She hit the button on her stereo and when a salsa beat came on, she went around and around on the soft carpet, waving her hands overhead and wiggling, taking quick, tiny steps as she headed back down the hallway. • • • Take it from me, Smithy said. He even had an employee of his own now, a college-educated fellow from Oklahoma. If he found someone trustworthy, he’d be hiring another as soon as he got paid for completing phase two of the new Goldfarb place, one of the finest houses ever built in Gilbert County, what everyone around had begun to call the Palace, though there wasn’t

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a roofer or a plasterer in these mountains who could show up on time two days in a row, and he planned to call the Colorado Employment Agency down in Boulder and even have them send a Mexican if that’s all they had because the Oklahoman even spoke a bit of Spanish. You all know Martha left me last year, he said, as he looked around at all those blank faces, and he couldn’t blame her— because of the prick he’d become. But consider the job I’ve done raising my little sister! Here he leaned forward and breathed on the mike. This had happened every now and then, at the Meetings, when Smithy came out of himself: he became someone new, almost effusive, and by now no one was surprised. Everyone there, he said, everyone there and everyone in Hollandville and all around the county knew what a prize and angel young Lilly was. Was there anyone in that room who could say as much about their own? Anyone doubt him? Not even a TV in the house. Take a look around, he said, and pointed again at the back door. Tell me if there’s another sixteen-year-old in the county that hasn’t been humped or horn-swoggled by every one of a list of rednecks whose names he’d be happy to give out although everybody in that room already knew which ones it was. Tell me, he said, if there was another sixteen-year-old virgin any of them knew of. That had opened Steven Hempstead’s eyes again for half a second and the rest of them looked up at Smithy like he’d stepped off a cliff. • • • Now Smithy got down from his pickup and stomped his cigarette in the dirt. He turned again to look into the valley. The silence that replaced the noise of his thoughts reminded him he had said too much—and in the end not only reported a falsity but made an ass of himself. What would Martha have thought of all that? How was it she hadn’t called even once in six months or sent a forwarding address? He had also never told the truth as frankly

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before that night, though maybe he should have stopped sooner. No matter, he figured. Martha was gone. She had taken her books, her laptop computer, her one suitcase of clothes and thrown them into the trunk of her Isuzu and driven away, just like that. You’d have thought she’d only come for the weekend. Once Goode pulled away, Smithy jumped back into his truck and followed 117 into town. He parked at the self-serve pumps and went straight into the MiniMart. Without saying good morning, good afternoon, or go to hell to whichever Ahmed it was behind the register, he slapped a twenty down on the counter for twenty dollars of regular and came out a second later, filled both his five-gallon cans and hoisted them onto the bed of his pickup. Then he drove across the street. He stopped in front of Dam Liquors, double-checked his mirrors, and moved forward two spaces. Before going in, he looked at his watch and smiled and said, “Good afternoon” to himself in the rearview. All he wanted was that much respect and recognition in the town where he’d lived his whole damn life. He hadn’t been inside the liquor store or the tavern for ten years and always believed that, unfair as it was, the hostility towards him there began with that, because he never drank or patronized the mayor’s establishments. Sometimes he suspected it was something deeper and more original. Or something nameless within him, like the fitful, kaleidoscopic way he sometimes saw things fit together. Now that he’d come this far again, now that he’d entertained that the fracture originated deep within the orbit of his own thick skull, he was right away convinced that no, it was them. Or maybe after all it was her. Maybe all this began the day Lilly came back from the foster home in Denver. Maybe she represented something to them, too. He got down from the truck and counted, according to the contractor’s habit, seventeen paces to the step-up into the liquor store. No one, neither Hobbit Carlson behind the register,

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standing five-two in his Whites, nor the kid called Pizza John who worked at Romeo’s and was shuffling through his wallet for an ID, turned to express surprise or acknowledge him. Smithy auto-piloted through a whole speech a few more times as he waited in line, repeating it in silence to himself, as if preparing the final version. Remember the swing set you put in when she returned? How you painted the whole damn thing pink? How she screeched your name at the surprise? How pretty she was as she went back and forth like a white flag in her Easter dress? Back in the truck, he put his key in the ignition and peered into the rearview at the red cans. And the bookshelf you built her? No one in town even once stopped and asked after her or said, “Good for you.” He was just twenty-one, ten years ago, on the wagon six months already and already had his own remodeling business up and running when Social Services decided at last. So he sold the flat in town and built the house, his first from the ground up, with little Lilly in mind. She was only six at the time, but he gave her the best room. He cut down a half-dozen tall pines and now she had a view from her bed not only of the Continental Divide but of all ten of the family lots. Maybe he should have done more for her, had more faith, trusted more. Maybe if he hadn’t been such a control freak, the insult Lilly pitched at his head like a hammer the day Martha left, maybe Martha would have stayed. • • • Oleg Johansen hit the gas and brakes in no recognizable pattern. He hurried at the thought of her or slowed down. He was unsteady driving in the predawn dark and every few minutes twisted his neck to gaze skyward through the windshield. He worried, with reason, that if Hell had circles in it, he was bound for the deepest and most claustrophobic. He was thirty-four already and a girl less than half his age, the sister of his boss, had overrun the

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mighty fortress of his soul like a pagan horde. What did he have now, other than this girl? Other than his obese half-sister, whom he hadn’t heard from in twelve years? Guilt and relief and joy and dread turned like a screw in his heart as he followed the yellow stripes into the hills. How could he confess to Smithy what he’d done? He lost concentration and was going too fast when he took a sharp bend and screeched to a dead stop. He muttered to himself, “It was her that started it, Smithy, honest to God.” He coughed twice, rolled down his window and coughed again into the cold morning. He said a prayer, after an old habit, then said sheeit and rolled the window up before he got going again. He had seen her the first time only three weeks before, in a flowery sundress, a straw fedora and white tennis shoes, pedaling up to the site on a red Schwinn with whitewall tires. When she called up to them and waved, Oleg, hoping only for a moment of masculine camaraderie, said to Smithy, “Who in the devil is that?” “My little sister,” Smithy said. Oleg never directly mentioned her to him again but the girl had come by every day thereafter, waving to them both and a week later stopping in to prattle with Oleg, complaining to him about her brother as if Smithy weren’t there at all. “When is he going to see I’m not eleven anymore?” she said, and crossed her arms. “I need a car. I need friends of one kind or another, too. Is it normal to have no social life at all? If he doesn’t want to buy me a car then I’ll take a job and get my own.” She shook her head. “I don’t mind.” She came down early in the mornings onto the front porch in a rumpled nightshirt to watch Oleg load the truck. Smithy said nothing, but looked north when she arrived, in a way that suggested she get her ass back in the house. Soon she had become as buttery as a French pastry, and twice at lunchtime brought them a fresh thermos of coffee, a bunch of bananas, and extra sandwiches

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in the basket fastened to her handlebars. She stayed around longer, too, ignoring her brother and coming to sit near Oleg when he got back to work. One hot Friday afternoon, near quitting time, she came up to the Palace and climbed the scaffolds with a clutch of wildflowers in her fist: Indian paintbrush and a few stems of bluebells. She sat on the planks next to Oleg while he, as if to hide the desperation mounting in his heart, blasted the plywood with the nailer. He stopped every few minutes for her questions; sometimes he ignored her, hoping Smithy, who was above them marking out the roof, would see his indifference towards her, but then she got up, paced back and forth along the plank and stopped to frown at Oleg, the flowers in a stranglehold on her hip. “Why don’t you get yourself a better car?” she said. Oleg removed his goggles and rearranged the pressure tube. Oleg looked up at Smithy, who went immediately back to work. “What’s wrong with the one I got?” he said when he stopped again, the thwarted compressor coughing on the ground below. “For one thing, it smells like a service station,” she said. “And it leaks by the gallon. Every day it leaves another puddle in our driveway.” She pointed down, for emphasis, at the ground twenty feet below. “I bet that car wouldn’t even make it to California,” she said. Something in this set Oleg’s antennae in motion. “Maybe you ought to have your brother increase my wages,” he said. He felt his eyes widen at the danger in this. “Maybe then I can fix it.” He saw how his answer vexed her. She crossed her arms and began to pace as she worked him over inside her head. • • • Conscious of the cans sloshing behind him, the brown paper bag and the carton of Winstons under the seat, Smithy drove all the

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roads in town a few times. No one waved and he waved to no one. He accelerated across 117 and two minutes later was back at the scenic overlook. He reached under the seat, broke out a pack of cigarettes, and got out to sit on the tailgate. By now it was well into Sunday afternoon. He watched the big blue clouds take shape up in the high country, but he also kept an eye on the MiniMart. He lit the cigarette and thought, funny how things end. A few minutes later, he tossed his cigarette into the road and lit another. Highway 117 had been improved only fifteen years ago and everything had changed. Goode’s timing was pure genius or great luck. Before that the lot as well as half the properties in town belonged to the family of Smithy’s mother. Where the mart was now, they had a big train station of a house with a store on the first level and a wide triangle of tall grass between the old 117, West First Street, and the Hill Road. There were never more than two vehicles at a time parked on the dirt semicircle out front. The porch and railing went all the way around the house and elevenyear-old Smithy could come out of the old store with a root-beer float or a box of Tiparellos and wait on the swing and not see a car come or go sometimes all day. Sometimes he liked to sit on the porch with a box of wooden matches and strike five or six at once on the banister and spray them over the railing. Ojoe Hopkins was not only an established drunk already at age twenty-two but also lieutenant of the Hollandville Volunteer Fire Department and once or twice a week in the summer had to rush down from his mother’s house in nothing but his boxers, his big rubber boots and a fire hat to put out the resulting grassfire that almost always billowed up in an easterly direction from the lot, following the wind. Mick, the One-Eyed Epileptic Mongrel, howled and foamed and chased the terrorized field mice all over the lot. Ojoe swore and stumbled as he and Smithy unwound the garden hose in a hurry or spent the

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afternoon stomping the tussocks and mud till all the smoke was gone and they both were sunburnt and dirty and smelled like wet trash. If Mick had a convulsion, Ojoe insisted they hose him down with the icy water too as he lay thrashing in the sunny dirt, though that never seemed to help. Smithy’s parents stayed more or less upstairs with the windows open during all this but even when he was right across the creek shooting at suckers with a .22 or planting cherry bombs in the mounds the fire ants pushed up into the lot like miniature volcanoes, he seldom saw their shadows on the screens. By age eleven he completely mistrusted them, their boneheaded alcoholic moralistic hypocrisy, his father’s barrage of pontification you could hear from the post office, followed by weeks of murderous silence. Smithy had dinner with them most nights at the diningroom table with the good china out and the candles lit while Mr. Olfeder closed up the store below, but some evenings he went down to the reservoir with Mick and a fishing rod instead and built a fire and stayed curled next to the dog and the warm stones until the early morning. • • • Oleg reread the Confessions of Saint Augustine before he packed his duffle and walked out the gates of the Theological College of Tulsa twelve years before. Maybe he hadn’t been born again after all. Maybe his baptism in a Catholic church, when he was only two weeks old, thanks to his Irish grandmother, had taken deeper root in him than he believed. Or maybe not. He went from one construction site to another, all over the Rocky Mountains, with the intention of purging himself of the endless pieties and falsities he had swallowed in Tulsa as willingly as Handsome Howard at a Texas pie-eating contest. A preacher is an artiste, a performer, Reverend Professor Archibald Jimsen had once told him, without a whiff of irony. But Jimsen had told him many things, that

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the birth of late-century feminism could be pinned squarely on Wilson Pickett for releasing “Mustang Sally” as a single in 1966, that William Jefferson Clinton was an albino who had secretly become America’s first Negro governor, that to take a bath in a tub was as un-Christian as sodomy, since it only moved the dirt from your asshole up around your neck. He couldn’t deny Lilly’s point now as he blinked into his rearview at the thought of driving to California. He’d never seen the Pacific, never seen an ocean. Why was he so scared? Because of the blue column of smoke billowing behind him in the morning blackness? The evening before, he had crawled under the Nova and confirmed that the oil had poured into a slick on the street and blackened the oil pan. Not just oil, though, as she said. That engine leaked gasoline, too. It had been dark and he had no flashlight, so he almost lit a match, but Saint Somebody, or Beelzebub maybe, delivered him from this stupidity in time. Now he wound his way deeper into the mountains, three hours early for work. It would be near dawn by the time he sneaked the two-hundred yards down Smithy’s dirt road and ran behind the house, climbed the seat of the Schwinn and reached her window. Only now, fifteen miles and thirty minutes away, had the final battle for his soul begun, but it was more painful than he expected. A girl was involved, a child by most definitions. Until now he had never hurt anyone, though not for want of trying. His first efforts out of college to become a drunk failed because vomiting terrified him so. He was stopped for a DUI once and instead of arresting him the Nebraska troopers just took his keys. He had to walk seven miles on a winter night to Exit 11, to pick them up, then seven miles back. And he couldn’t piss when he was too intoxicated. He quickly learned how dangerous and humiliating it was to hold the only john for ten minutes at a time in a crowded night in the Buckdancer’s Ballroom in Laramie, Wyoming.

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So instead of drink, he smoked weed all day and counseled the addicts in a Denver methadone clinic. Lured by the romance of heroin, he scored a few grams from a client, though in the end was too chicken to mainline it and snorting seemed to have no effect at all other than a nasty nosebleed. He’d spent a week total in jail: two nights for shoplifting a bottle of Colt 45 from a 7-11 in Junction City, one for getting his face stomped in a barroom brawl in Sheridan, and four for returning a stolen golf cart he found behind the Port-a-Potties at the Aurora Public Golf Course by driving it over a prairie-dog colony under habitat protection. But as for being absent of grace, in a generalized state of sin, he considered himself the equal of Attila the Hun. The only real difference between him and Attila was that someday for sure the skillet they were greasing in Hell for Oleg would be piled high with nothing but the charred meat and bones of his mediocrity. Even Augustine would have condemned him for that. Until Lilly. She at last had become a transgression of some note, because she was so young and innocent and trusting. Despite the fumes of the Nova, the headache, the nausea, the self-loathing, it was Lilly that kept him bound west, deeper into the heart of the morning. • • • More than Mick, more than his own mother, Smithy loved the big house, if he thought about it, and what the old store was when his father sold it to Goode and Goode knocked it down. On one end had been the soda tap, the freezer and an aisle of canned food: baked beans, green beans, yellow beans, corn-beef hash and smoked salmon. The jerky and hardware were on the opposite shelves: rubber boots, mink oil, bait, tackle. Firearms, ammo, whiskey and fireworks were behind the counter. Inside, it was always dark and cool and a whole wall was given to the greasy cardboard drawers labeled with diagrams and dimensions and

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inside the nuts and screws were so bright it hurt to look at them. The penny-gauge nails were just as clean but their color was as dull as lead. A bucket of galvanized roofing nails was open under a wall of tools and young Smithy was amazed how Mr. Olfeder or any of the locals who came in reached for a spiky fistful with their bare hands and dropped the whole thing into a donut sack. A cigarette machine, a pin-ball machine and the register all fit under a dusty, rickety ghetto of empty bird cages floating overhead. Mr. Olfeder, who ran the store with no interference from Smithy’s father for as long as Smithy recalled, had built the cages in the back out of whatever he came up with: copper wire, whittled pine-branches, catgut or bamboo imported from the Chinese shop in Denver, or the steel sheets he clipped and twisted with a pair of fence cutters. The cages all had doors painted to resemble replicas of the high-order playing cards—an Ace of Diamonds all in black, red and white; the Jack of Hearts with yellow eyes; in one big fist the King of Spades held a dagger pointed down. Smithy’s favorite cage had bars made with pairs of twisted barbed wire; roofer’s flashing was cut in a pattern of triangles for the roof and Mr. Olfeder had painted two little steel doors which came together as a perfect knock-off of the Jack Daniel’s label when he closed them. Mr. Olfeder could do anything and this was what Smithy admired most, even then. Mr. Olfeder also said next to nothing to anyone and had a knack for dooming a conversation. Once someone asked after his wife; he said she was the most even tempered woman he ever knew: madder than hell all the time. A trucker who had come in for bullets noticed the photos of JFK and RFK right under Old Glory and Mr. Olfeder claimed that, as for himself, he was half Swede, half Shoshone, half Rockefeller Republican. The back entrance had no doubt been put in for tenants or servants but worked just as well for Smithy’s mother and father who wanted to come and go without passing through the store.

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They never commented on the hutch Smithy built by himself out back or the rabbit they had for dinner every Sunday thanks to him or the runt named Ike he nursed for two months with a dozen cans of condensed milk and an eye dropper. When they decided to sell to Goode, Smithy’s mother was already pregnant with Lilly and Mr. Olfeder had to post the for-sale sign by the front door himself and meet the agents and attend to more or less everything except the closing. Mayor Goode was only Tommy Goode at the time, age twenty-two, same age as Ojoe, and eight years older than Smithy. He accepted everything in the store just as it was and Mr. Olfeder took his last week’s pay without saying goodbye or kiss my ass to anyone (secretly leaving a crate of bottle rockets out in the sweetgrass for Smithy) and drove his red Rambler station wagon, loaded with the empty cages, south on 117 in the direction of Central City on a Sunday morning, never to be seen again as far as Smithy knew. His father had sense enough to keep the flat over the High Country Tavern, though it was noisy as the devil on a weekend, and to get a few more parcels of land ten miles to the south. Smithy might’ve thanked him for that one day had his father lived. Goode brought in a demo crew from Fort Collins and the old house and store were gone in a week. They scraped it all away, the rocks and the tall grass and a week later three new gasoline tanks made their winding way up 117 on a convoy of semis marked WIDE LOAD and bookended by an escort of state troopers. They laid the tanks down like gigantic stainless-steel eggs right where the house had been. The next day a Caterpillar and a front loader arrived, transported as another wide load, and pushed the ground away and buried the tanks. Smithy crushed his fifth Winston in a row in the ashtray and tossed the butt out the window. It was already evening. As the sunset faltered, an small eastbound cloud high overhead went from orange to blue to violet. Smithy was grateful to Goode, in

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a sense, for the lesson. He had been fourteen already, the right age for a boy to set all such sentiment aside. When Mick the Mongrel, as if foreseeing the inevitable with his one good eye, wandered up the Hill Road by himself one afternoon and never came down, Smithy began to understand how things go. The last day in the house, he tossed all his baseball cards one by one into the old stove. So they could have rabbit for the last meal in the diningroom, he went out to the hutch with a paring knife for Ike. All the old cutlery and candlesticks had already been packed off. Six months later, only weeks after the birth of Lilly, they buried his mother. Two months past that, his father. And all he could say, if he thought about it, when it was all done, was that it’s done. Then you start again. And you wonder if the next round of getting done with such things, once it gets going, could be as easy. • • • The week before, she pedaled up the driveway in the powderblue dress and red flip-flops as soon as Smithy left for the Home Depot. She waved at Oleg on the roof. Next she appeared holding the top of the ladder, tilting her bare shoulders in a way that seemed almost practiced, as if to show him how pretty they were. She climbed over the ladder and up the slanted shingles and sat on a bundle and laughed as she crossed her legs this way and that and went on and on about roofing and how she admired roofers, really, because what hard work it is! And how strong Oleg had to be and what a great suntan he had. She pointed at her legs and said she was embarrassed by how white they were. Oleg tried to look at her, and glanced at the solitary beauty mark halfway up her shin, but he was too much a weakling. He squinted at the chimney above, as if concerned that something—the gentle breeze or the intense light—might tip it over. She apologized again for her lack of color, as if she owed him something better now. For a Colorado girl, she said, she wasn’t much for out-of-doors. She felt chilly to

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be so exposed up there, though it was a promising day, and she always felt a bit woozy on a roof. Wasn’t he at all afraid? Oleg was too hot, with the sun on the tar paper, but too shaken by the sight of the blue ribbon in her hair, the matching dress, her hands on her knee, to say so. Where in hell was her brother? She must have seen the sweat form on Oleg’s forehead when she asked if he wouldn’t show her around a bit inside. He put his T-shirt on and she apologized again as she brushed against him going down the ladder he held for her, again as he opened the big front door. She swept close by him in the livingroom, where he regained his tongue enough to explain that these were conduits for electrical and those the metal studs. She opened her eyes as if that were a delightful suggestion and leaned against him as they entered the master bedroom where he and Smithy had the day before installed the picture window from Sweden. She leaned her head on his shoulder and aimed her eye down the length of his arm as he pointed out three of the Seven Sisters, as the peaks along that section of the Divide were called, though he forgot exactly which was which. When they stepped out onto the terrace for an even wider view, she put her face firmly against his shirt and held it there. She shivered now—they shivered together. All this was happening far too fast and he wanted it to slow down. He first wanted to earn her trust, to confess helplessness, happiness, as well as his lifelong desperation, his endless failure, even his deepest shame, his nearly complete carnal innocence, and had almost gathered the strength to speak when she turned up her face and he, having no choice, kissed her. He was surprised how awkward and delectable it was; her lips and her tongue, flavored like strawberry chapstick, were almost too small. • • • Smithy put his boots up on the dashboard and wrapped himself in the blanket he kept behind the seat. He may have dozed during

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the night, but at 4:30 AM Monday, he was wide awake. He lit a cigarette, smoked it, and lit another from the ash of the first. He reached under the seat and unwrapped the pint. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed his own death. He screwed the cap back on and put the bottle in the glove beside a hammer and a box of nails. He watched the valley for a long time until he saw a pair of tiny headlights go past the dam. He moved quickly then, whispering to himself as he screeched out of the turn-off and raced without headlights back down 117 around the bend towards the center. He pulled in between the pumps and the storefront, and stopped. He figured he had five minutes; he reached for the hammer and a nail. He threw open his door and ran to the back. He dropped the tailgate, jumped onto the bed and straddled the first can. He checked his watch: 4:38. He bent over, put two fingers at the bottom of the first can and tapped the nail once, then drove it. He watched the gas stream out for a moment, made a ballpark guesstimate, then bent over and put the nail into the other can. He was back in his truck seconds later. He steered four quick K-turns between the pumps, the shift, the wheel, the brake and clutch all bound together by the strength in his boots and fists. In the sideview, he could see two jets of gasoline, as if illuminated by the stars, as if a pair of drunken angels were kneeling on the bed of his pickup and pissing out the back as he made his turns. For good measure, he stopped and got down and pulled the nozzles out and dropped them into the new puddles. He circled the pumps twice more, in and out of the fumes, then pulled away, leaving a stream of gasoline all the way back up 117 South, around the bend, past the sign that said Central City, 30 miles. At the overlook he got out, emptied the cans into the road and threw them over the side. Then he moved his truck up the shoulder. Again he stopped and checked his watch. He reached into the glove, took out another Winston and lit it. He unscrewed the bottle and had a big swallow.

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When the Nova crossed in front of the MiniMart, Smithy had to wonder. What fault of it was Oleg’s after all? What smalltown loser between Montana and Mexico would have passed up a shot at a girl like Lilly? He felt almost a sensation like partiality toward them all, his lifelong neighbors, the only people he really knew. He had to repeat this to himself a few times. The only people I know. How can you judge what you think of them? What do you compare them to? In fact, he felt good, almost sleepy. When was the last time he’d had a good goddamn sleep? He got down and walked out into the middle of 117 and pirouetted on his boot heel and laughed out loud. Ha! He wanted to scream and yodel and fall down in the roadside dirt and roll around like the drunken shit-head he hated more than anything, more than anything that ever was or would be. Like his father. Like his mother. Instead, he checked his watch again and wound up like a pitcher and threw a change-up, softballing his Winston into an arc that hit the road and scattered sparks, smoldering a second, until the gas jumped up like a two-hoof demon straight out the crack of Hell, and began running down the road, leaping and dancing, hurrying around the bend in the direction of the oncoming Oklahoman. • • • Through her big window, Lilly watched the mountains change. She knelt on the rug and examined her bookshelf. She put her finger to her lips, as if preparing to make some exquisite selection. Tenth grade began in two weeks. Last year she kept up her average; most of the teachers bored her to death, but she loved to read. She had little else to do while school was out and nowhere to go. Smithy even disconnected the phone when he left. She had looked around all the rooms, in the basement and in the backyard where the wires come in, but couldn’t see how he did it. She took down Baile! Baile! Baile! by the Argentine dancer-singer Sergio

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Amo, removed the CD, placed it in the player and opened the manual to a page she knew by heart. With the book in hand, she got up and went in a circle, raising her arms and moving her feet in the pattern of a lonely little tango, a step she imagined performing onstage someday with some notorious Latin lover. Now, with the stereo loud, Baile! Baile! Baile! in hand and Mr. Wolff, her English teacher, on her mind, she moved through the steps of the mambo. She shambled this way and that and laughed out loud at him. In fact, she loved his ridiculous little bow ties and the tweed jackets he wore even on the last hot days in June, how his eyebrows overhung his craggy face like a pair of broken firs. Most kids called him Mr. Werewolf and believed he was a lunatic, thanks to that moist light in his eyes when he got inspired about a passage and waved his big hands in the air. Once he sat in his chair and stared out the window for the entire class, reading page after page of The Catcher in the Rye aloud and not once looking at them. She knew he liked her because of the way he turned his lips in, the way those big eyebrows went up when she raised her hand. Besides, she had already X-rayed his clothes and imagined the hard little stomach under the Brooks Brothers shirt and a wide masculine chest. She loved the way he stalked left and right in front of the blackboard in shoes that looked like polished leather slippers. He had muscular legs, too—he was famous in Gilbert County for his mountaineering—and hooked his thumbs in his back pockets when he faced the class. She sat in front to be near the buckle and the tan leather of his expensive-looking belt. She couldn’t help trace the inseam of his slacks sometimes with her eyes. With her heart alive in her chest, she imagined the fleshy fragrance at work in there. She felt her own blushing and wondered if Mr. Wolff noticed at all. She put the booklet down on the bed and whistled quietly as she moved around the room. She slid her left foot forward in time

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with the music; she rocked right, she slid her left foot back—she was getting the steps! She couldn’t wait for school to begin. • • • It was five AM the Friday before when Smithy learned once and for all what kind of an ass he’d made of himself. Sitting out on his deck, watching the stars dim, he recognized the noise of Oleg’s little Nova rumbling way too early up the road. A minute later, he saw him skipping like a magpie from tree to tree. For all the fight he had in him for so long he now, as if for the first time, had nothing to say, even to himself. He gasped, sort of, at the pointlessness and disappointment of his life but swallowed it and sat through a moment of constriction with both eyes closed and one hand on the little iron table beside him. He was only thirty-one, for goodness sake. You’d have thought he was eighty-one. The silence was what he loved about the mountains but in that moment the celestial-blue emptiness amplified in all directions, until his ears hurt, like the opposite of a sonic boom, and was gone. He heard the creek in the culvert under the driveway, a music he never heard anymore. Nothing else moved: the trees, the cold, the light. As bright as the morning was, he could see the monochromatic darkness descend within him. He could feel it too, like a door opening. For a moment he thought he might lose his balance and for the second time touched the table. He reached for his cigarette but when he raised the lighter, he stopped to observe the hissing little flame. He watched it for a minute until the flame went yellow, down to the size of a match head, then lit his cigarette. Sitting in that porch chair in the new morning, his boots up, and smoking after he watched Oleg sneak in a wide circle around his house, past the swing set, he’d lost all sensation, not only in his feet, but in his hands and head. This numbness came upon him the way daylight does on the high hills.

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He wasn’t angry. He might never be angry again. He thought of his mother, Lilly’s mother, standing before an empty kindergarten, all the little round tables and the big letters of the alphabet pinned like a paper frieze to the walls. It was impossible to imagine her speaking to them, or teaching them a damn thing. He remembered her at home, seated at her vanity in a dressing gown in the old master bedroom, a vodka and tonic in one hand and a Parliament in the other, her golden hair all wound into what she called a chignon as she smoked and searched the mirror, not for herself so much, but something farther away, deeper in the background and more remote. He wasn’t angry at her or Lilly or Oleg or Martha or anyone else, not even the Muslims who had come in from whoknows-what corner of Mohammedan Hell to outbid him on the MiniMart. Not even Mayor Goode, who sold the MiniMart to shit-colored foreigners rather than him, a neighbor for four generations, a neighbor whose father had sold Goode the place to begin with, because of a difference of two and a half thousand dollars and without even allowing him a chance for a second bid. No, he wasn’t angry at nobody, he never really wanted to hurt anyone. • • • The first time Oleg had come to her very early in the morning, he climbed the Schwinn and reached her window. “What are you doing here?” she said when she put her head out at last, a finger over her lips, her reception colder than he would have hoped, her voice croaky from having been startled out of sleep. “What do you think?” he started to say but she shushed him. He clambered over the sill and they huddled under her blanket as she whispered embarrassed nonsense. She shivered in the cold morning and was ticklish when he touched her. She tried to explain herself, but he understood nothing. At last, she threw the

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bed cover back and jumped out of bed to drop her underwear on the floor and leapt back into the sheets. He unbuttoned his shirt and she held him between her legs for a long time, petting his face and dozing, whistling quietly now and then in his ears. • • • On Monday morning, Oleg accelerated when he saw the immense shadow of the dam bridging the dark mountains. At the top was only a solitary streetlight and an empty phone booth. What he needed, he figured, was love. Sexual love. Maybe he cared about nothing else. He had gone severely astray in his life and it was thanks only to this young girl Lilly that this self-knowledge had come upon him at last. With the thought of holding her again in twenty minutes, of sheathing his hopelessness there amongst such otherworldly confections one more time, his heart, thick with lust and love and lonesome perfidy, forced its way up into his throat. He might have choked when something, a fox or a redtail hawk, swooped across the yellow line and he had to pull over until he could breathe again. He wanted to say another prayer, to beg forgiveness, but again it was too soon. He forced himself back onto the road. He plummeted through the speed trap, past the reservoir and, a minute later, the little mart in the center of town. He was on his way up the next hill and only half surprised to see the first little flames make the turn toward him. He figured someone had an early campfire going but around the bend, behind the trees on his left, the orange light reflected too brightly in his right sideview. A second later fire was all around him, the road ahead swept by a hideous orange wind and black smoke. The flames—the height of a man now—fled down the center of his lane, bound head-on for him, so he hit the gas. He saw Hell Itself go all the way around the bend and back up toward the road to Mountainview. He looked in his rearview

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and saw the same racing underneath him into Hollandville. He couldn’t decide to stop or go, so he hit the gas again and all the lights, all of them a bright orange luminosity, lights he never knew he had, came on inside the Nova. • • • Mr. Wolff pedaled a tricycle up and down the rows of the classroom, the pockets of his jacket rising and falling with his legs, his knees above the handlebars and his shoes going around in fast, frenzied little circles. Lilly laughed when she woke up. She enjoyed that moment so much she wondered how to get back to sleep, to re-enter a dream. She pulled the comforter over her shoulders and threw herself down face first into the pillow, wishing and wishing. When she sat up, it was still dark in her room, but the new morning formed a bright blue frame around her window shade. Shoot, she whispered. She looked at her clock: 4:47. How she wanted to get back to sleep! She squeezed her eyes until they hurt. And what a mix-up she had caused with that weird guy who worked for her brother. Old Leg, as she called him, was cute in a way, but she hated how he smelled like tar paper and gasoline. She hated his leaky car. She hated him tapping her window. He would be there any minute and what would she tell him? She had managed not to think about it all weekend but now she had to. This morning she would pull up the window and tell him she had the flu—or the clap. She laughed and sat up again. She’d say her period had started and she was bleeding like a corpse. Or worse, her period hadn’t come and she wanted to hang herself. He had to leave right now or she would tell Smithy what he’d done to her. She felt a little guilty, too; surely she was as much to blame for all this as him. But wasn’t he supposed to be the grown-up? Could he have said, “Nope, it’s not right?” Were all men such

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simple sluts? She worried and then calmed herself. She thought about Mr. Wolff again, how adorable he looked in that rumpled jacket and how funny and nice it would be to have him here, in her bed. She threw a pillow down between her legs and squeezed it tight. She grabbed another pillow and sighed. Where was Old Leg? He wasn’t so bad after all and she might be relieved but also a bit hurt if he didn’t come. In truth, he had been a perfect gentleman in his dumb, docile manner. She clucked to herself. He might never get over her. She smiled at that idea and imagined how it would be to have a man obsessed with her, crazy in love. Crazy enough to stand up to Smithy and say, “Yes, maybe she is your little sister, but she’s a young woman now, and she’s mine—my lover.” She pictured that for a minute, two big guys, not Smithy and Old Leg but Smithy and Mr. Wolff circling each other like a pair of wild animals. She loved that idea—it thrilled and frightened her. Of course at some point she would intervene. She would say, no! And Smithy would look at her in a way he never had, with surprise and respect, as if he had never seen her before for what she really was and Mr. Wolff, or whoever, would respect her too even though desire continued to haunt him, searing his heart while he waited for her to save them both from their love for her. And somehow she would get to this, her final point, what she wanted to tell them all: what guys had to learn to accept, she said, almost aloud, pointing a finger to address her Tiger Lilly doll and all the bears lined up along her dresser, what boys had to accept with grace and dignity, whether young or old, smart or dull, handsome or not, was the meaning of No. This she knew for sure. This was the truth of the situation and she believed that all three of them, Mr. Wolff, Old Leg and even Smithy (somehow it made sense to include Smithy in this) would be grown up enough to understand.

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• • • Smithy sat in his truck, the door open, and watched the blanket of filthy smoke flap as it rose in the cool morning. Even from that distance, his brain and bones and skin and the hair on his fingers were illuminated from within by that secret discolored light he knew so well. No sirens yet. Except for a loud thud and a whoosh when the Oklahoman’s car flared up and veered into the ditch, there hadn’t been much noise, none of the kind that would right away raise a town from its sleep. Down by the MiniMart, he guessed, was a crackling muted by a loud hiss, a sound suggestive of warmth—a campfire maybe—a bright soothing noise to someone at rest way up in the mountains. He had no idea what to think; he felt a bit sick, a tightness akin to heartburn but he was neither sad nor afraid, only somewhat delighted, and more at home in his head than usual; he was unsure whether to get down from the truck or get back in and sit. Everything had gone according to plan. When the flame around the pumps all at once came together and ballooned as high as the telephone wires, sending a black ring into the sky, he leaned out his door and puked. Ijaz and the brothers had done a helluva job, hadn’t they? That MiniMart was stocked with all the things the fine folk of Hollandville and the weekenders from Boulder and Denver would ever need: magazines, newspapers, candy, bottled water, toilet paper, beer, potato chips, jars of instant. What if Goode had sold Smithy the place instead? How might that have mattered? The inventory and service would be the same, but everyone would have been a customer of Smithy’s. Had they gotten used to dealing with Smithy, to seeing what a fine businessman he was, how honest and meticulous, maybe they would have forgotten the Mueller boys. Or maybe they already had. Like a country fence the fire had reached all the way from the overlook down around the bend and continued for three hundred

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yards. It turned left past the new A&P, the High Country Tavern and Dam Liquors where it crossed into the lot of the MiniMart. It waved this way and that in answer to a breeze of its own making. By a distant association, Smithy remembered the laundry lines in a Denver neighborhood one windy day a week before Lilly was born, the only time his father had taken him to meet his cousins. Laundry lines crossed the yards behind house after house and how astonished he was by the beauty of it—the laundry, the landscape of small painted houses, the white fences and all the colorful sheets and shirts gusting in the breeze. Who took pleasure in a such a thing? But the memory had enough purity and simplicity to keep itself in mind, though Smithy remembered none of the cousins and had never seen them again and wondered why his father brought him there. The town of Hollandville had taken on a similar kind of empty timelessness now, a predawn, high-elevation version of the same. What a pretty little town it was this time of day. The silent back streets, the green roofs, the picket fences scorched by extreme whether, the weather-beaten chimneys, the laundry lines. Oh, a dog would bark any second now and the noise begin, the screaming, the crying, the sirens. They probably wouldn’t find the Nova until Horse Hopkins, Ojoe’s nephew, came racing down 117 this-a-way. Smithy was surprised how at ease he was these last few seconds, serene even. Serene, he thought, there’s a tendollar word. He looked down at the pint on his floorboard—he hadn’t had but two good swallows and wanted no more. Maybe he wasn’t slave to it after all? Maybe after all these years he was more a fool, and more free than he knew.