Tacánecy tenses as she waits to begin her next count.  The lightning is closer now, and she readies herself for a silent and measured five.  She prays her sleeping husband will not hear the sound she is about to make.

Despite herself, she jumps when a piercing flash lances through the window in the opposite wall and, in a spasm of blue-white light, illuminates her husband’s Hawken rifle hanging on the wall beside her.  It flickers lethally for a moment before the room goes black again.

One. Two.  Three.  Four. Her grip tightens on the soft doeskin shroud on the floor at her feet.

Five. On cue, the thunderclap vibrates through the soles of her moccasins and rattles a china cup against its shelf-mate.  Its roar masks the whisper of leather against wood as she drags the bundle a few steps closer to the cabin door.

She pauses as the rumble rolls away into the black night’s silence.  There is a moment when her knees nearly buckle.  A moment when her mind rekindles the image of what lies inside the wraps of doeskin:  the death-white skin, the slightly open mouth, and the patches of red that mar the neck and face of her daughter’s lifeless body.

Was it only last night–another life ago–she had dragged Lena from the river?  Her throat still burns from the awful sounds she had made, strange animal sounds, as she pulled the dress over her daughter’s stiffening limbs, combed her hair for the last time, tried to close her resisting eyelids, wrapped her in the doeskin shroud.  A keening claws at her throat again, urgent, like a caged bear.  She chokes it back.  The wailing time must wait.  Now her heart must be stone.

A stirring from the bed in the next room propels her hand to the haft of the skinning knife under her beaded belt. Would she actually use it against him, Medina, her husband of twenty-eight snows?  She has no plan, no talking way, to explain her actions should he awake and confront her.  A week ago, battling him with a blade would have been unthinkable.  Now her white-knuckled grip betrays the depth of her new obsession.  Everything has changed.

When no further sound comes from the bed, her hand relaxes and returns to the bundle. Another flash invades the room.  She counts four beats this time.  Another crash and another stealthy drag, and she is at the door.  Her hand finds the cast iron latch and rests there.

The thunder noise is alarmingly loud.  Glancing toward the bed, she worries that the sound of the storm, rather than the click of the latch, will rouse him.  When the next thunderclap comes she eases the latch open with one hand and wrestles the corpse over the threshold with the other.  The rusty hinges, greased the day before with lard from the can she keeps by the wood stove, do not betray her.  Her shoulders relax.  She feels the stirring cool of the storm’s wind against the sweaty roots of her hair.

The wind!  She had not planned for wind.  Like scouts for an advancing army, chill drafts slip past her into the open doorway, lift the corner of the oilcloth on the eating table, and chase the warm, tobacco pipe air of the cabin into the next room and across the inert form on the bed.  The storm had answered her prayer to cover the sounds of her escape.  But she failed to consider its whispering outriders.

She swings the door closed.  It whumps against the door jam.  The latch falls into place with a metallic chunk.

“God be damned!”  Her hissing curse shocks her as much as the wind itself.  Never before has she uttered such words.  Her hand clutches for the rosary beads around her waist.  Then she remembers.  The black beads dot the floor where she flung them the night before.  Glistening reminders of Jésu’s betrayal.

She presses her ear against the keyhole and hears…what?  The straining creak of bed ropes in their sideboard moorings?  A footfall on the squeaky floorboard under the Hawken rifle?

With a stifled grunt she hefts the bundle into her arms and staggers off the porch.  Her hip joints creak with the strain of it.  With unsteady steps she gimps toward the barn.  Flashes light the way.  A single, giant raindrop splatters on her cheek and runs down into her open mouth.  It tastes of salt.  She is crying, she realizes.  She bites her tongue to make herself stop.

Her heaving nostrils draw in the unmistakable, welcoming smell of rain washing through the thirsty air in the foothills a mile or two to the west.  It will be here soon.

She eases the bundle to the packed earth inside the main barn door.  Memory guiding her, she grabs a handful of grain from a bucket inside the tack room and runs through the blackness to a side door into the corral.  Storm-spooked horses mill about, tails aloft, necks arched.   She holds the grain out to a big roan gelding.  He approaches her with wild eyes, the prospect of a treat temporarily overcoming his urge to bolt and run before the wind.  But before he can eat, her daughter’s black mare, the one called Shy Bird, shoulders the roan aside.  She entices the mare into the barn with the grain.

Inside, the familiar smell of hay, trampled horse droppings and sweaty leather overpowers the gathering storm smells outside.  She slips a rawhide chin rope into the tall mare’s mouth, slings the single rein over its neck and urges it toward the front door where the bundle lies.

Upon scenting the body, Shy Bird snorts and side-steps, eyes rimming white.  “Do not be afraid,” Tacánecy says, to herself as much as the horse.  She strokes the animal’s quivering shoulder and croons a sleep song remembered from her childhood.   The song had always quieted Lena when she was a wide-eyed baby.  With her other hand she reaches into her waist pouch, fingers feeling yet again the beaded bumps on the small leather bag she had removed from her daughter’s neck the day before, the amulet she had given to Lena to bind them together.

Shy Bird, you will carry Lena one last time.  She pins the mare’s chin rope against the ground with her foot.  The bundle resists as she strains to heft it high against the horse’s side and wrestle it up and over the tall withers.  Its ghastly stiffness unnerves her.  She ties a rope on either end and pulls down hard to bend it in the middle and snub it down.  Another cry swells in her throat.  She bites her hand to quell it.

From the tack room she grabs two large blankets she had rolled up the day before.  She leaves the saddles and bridles where they rest on wood rails.  Tonight I ride in the style of my people, she thinks. And for this, of all rides, it is a good thing to have Lena’s horse.

From the open barn doorway she peers back the way she came.  In the next lightning flash, the log house jumps out at her from the blackness, its dark logs and white chinking both momentarily reduced to a uniform, silvery gray.  Nothing moves in the shadowy doorway.

She leads the mare to the pole corral fence, climbs onto the first rail, hoists her right leg over the mare’s back and settles stiffly into place behind her daughter’s body.  It is the first time she has been on the back of a horse since her vow, taken in the long ago in atonement for her sins, to never ride again.

She takes up the single rein in one hand and the blanket roll in the other.  With her knees she urges the big mare forward.  Fused by the gloom into a single, shadowy shape, they move toward the compound’s northern side, the one nearest the river.  Two more big drops splat on her rein-holding hand.  Ahead of her waits the wooden toll bridge.

She takes one last look at the log house as another lightning flash ushers her out of the compound.  Still no sign of life.  Maybe she will make it.  Then Medina can rave at her all he wants, beat her, even.  He will never find Lena’s body.  She will make sure of it.

In the early days, she could never have gotten away undetected.  He would have heard the door closing, or even the soft brushing of the leather against the floor.  His years as a trapper and scout had taught him to sleep on the edge of consciousness, to come fully awake at any unusual sound, his Hawken rifle within easy reach.  But during their time at the Crossing he had grown less cautious, and at sixty-three snows, less keen of ear.  Besides, he had drunk several cups of whisky that night, unusual for him, but understandable considering his shock.

“Taos Lightening” the whisky was called.  A grim smile pulls at her mouth.  Two kinds of lightning are helping her this night.  She wishes it’s magic could somehow bring Lena back to life.

At the bridge she reins in, waiting for the next roll of thunder.  When it comes, she digs in her heels.  The mare clatters across in a burst of storm-sparked energy.

Barely visible on the opposite side stands the fort.  Square and squat, its whitewashed stone walls are slitted with black gun holes.  Built by her husband after a Ute raid years ago, the fort has never been used for its intended purpose.  Just like the fancy schooling her husband had tried to cram into Lena.  At the thought of her daughter’s unhappiness at the nun’s school, bitter bile rises in her throat.

Tacánecy turns left in front of the fort and lopes westward along the riverbank trail, heading upstream directly into the storm.  The splatters of rain are laced with tiny needles of ice that sting her hands and face.  The drops are more frequent now, formed in the tumult of the great looming thunderhead that blots out most of the night sky.  Windy gusts snarl through low willows, chasing the dank scent of moss-coated river rocks away from the onrushing rain.  Its growing roar overpowers the river’s steady rush.

In a flash of lightening she sees ahead a wall of rain so dense that nothing can be seen beyond it.  Then it swallows them, drenching them in seconds, blotting out all other sound.  Behind them, the hoof prints in the silty clay of the river trail melt away without a trace.

They arrive at the spot where a small stream enters from the South.  Dry Creek, the settlers call it.  After tonight it will have to be called Wet Creek.  Like my eyes.

Her plan was to follow this rivulet a while before returning to the main channel across a rocky sandstone ridge.  This maneuver would have slowed her husband’s pursuit long enough to complete her work.  But the storm makes this bit of cunning unnecessary.  She sends another prayer of thanks for the storm.

Despite the chill and wet, she relaxes now that they are safely enveloped in the storm’s center.  The mare slows, picking her way along the trail through the liquid mud.  Shy Bird feels warm beneath her legs.  Steam rises from the mare’s back into the rain-soaked air.  Despite her long absence from the back of a horse, she molds herself to its rocking rhythm, marveling at the body’s memory of things past.

An image of Lena astride the mare forms in her mind.  Long black hair blowing in the wind like a second horse’s tail.  Face alight with smile.  Lithe body glued to the mare’s back.  Like me when I was her age.  Back when I still had dreams.  She banishes the image with a kick in Shy Bird’s side.

After an hour, the rain dribbles to a stop.  A nearly full moon emerges from under the western edge of the storm cloud, bathing the landscape in startlingly bright silver light.   Cottonwoods stretch their dripping arms skyward.  Pine needles glisten.  Bushes on the nearby slopes make dark silhouettes against the buffalo grass waving in the fresh washed breeze.  A dismal beauty, considering what is now revealed in the river trail behind her:  Shy Bird’s hoof prints, stark as signposts, outlined in moon shadow.

She glances back over her left shoulder and sees the tipi-shaped butte named after her husband.  Beside her on the right, perpendicular to the river, rises the rocky spine they call the Devil’s Backbone.  Hair prickles on her neck.  What if he has managed to follow her? She urges Shy Bird into a trot.  Not too far ahead lies her destination, the beautiful hidden valley atop the imposing sandstone ridge that stretches up before her to meet the moon.  It was to have been their escape route, her and Lena’s trail to the north land.  Now it would become her daughter’s final home in this world.

When she reaches the ridge’s base about half an hour later, the place where the river cuts through, she pauses to push the bundle back into place over the horse’s withers.  The coldness of what’s inside nearly unnerves her.  Then she urges Shy Bird a few steps forward into the river as if she were going to wade upstream through the narrow rock cut and continue along the river trail.  Instead, she dismounts onto a huge flat sandstone slab that slopes gently down from the rocky bank into the water beside her.  She unrolls the two blankets and spreads them next to each other over the stone.  With a tug on the chin rope, she coaxes Shy Bird to step onto the blankets.  When all four hooves are on the second blanket, she retrieves the first and places it in front of the horse, urging it forward once again.  In this fashion, blanket by blanket, they depart the river trail without leaving a trace on the sandstone or the slope above.  After nearly twenty such blanket changes, she stops behind a bush, ties the blankets back on the horse, remounts and moves up toward the saddle in the rimrock that allows her passage into the shallow, hidden valley that lies between the double crested ridge.  From the summit she looks back and is startled by a blanket of white that begins about half way between her and their home and extends well past it onto the plains.  Hail, shimming in the moonlight, fallen there, but not here.  Awestruck, she murmurs her gratitude for the storm’s gift.

Turning from the summit, she crosses the valley, moonstruck into visibility, and reaches the even higher crest on the west.  She turns north and rides parallel to the cliff but well back from its edge.  Juniper trees and stunted pines rise darkly among a wild jumble of sandstone rock formations.  Her eyes cast about for the one she is seeking.  The rock spirits gather around her.  Their whispering voices fail to bring calm.  She feels lost.

At last she sees it.  The entrance to the cave-like hideaway.  Two huge sandstone slabs leaning together to form a tipi-shaped cave guarded by a thick juniper bush cover over the entry.  Lena’s resting place.  The secret spot Otter Woman, in the form of a gray jay, had led her to the month after Lena’s ride in Denver City.  Its purpose had only come to her during yesterday’s death watch, the day that seemed never to end, the day she sat beside Lena’s leather-wrapped body keening a death song until her voice gave out.  In this cave she will do for Lena in death what she failed to do for Lena in life:  protect her from her husband’s reach.

* * *

To the east over the vast plains, where a hint of dawn outlines the horizon, the storm sparks and crashes.  It is well past their home now.  She imagines Medina sleeping there, and bitterness seizes her heart.  Medina, her proud, stubborn, husband.  If only he had not insisted on sending Lena back to that accursed school, Lena would be alive today.  If only…

But as she dismounts and leans against the leather shroud, feeling the shape of Lena’s stiff legs against her body, something unwelcome sprouts and spreads:  a guilt so profound she must grab Shy Bird’s mane to keep from falling to the rocky ground.

“Floor ‘Z,’ please.” The school elevator was packed, but no one spoke. I noticed several kids glancing at me in the reflection from the brass doors. RING! “Excuse me,” I said, squeezing out into the hall. I was the only one. The doors closed and the elevator resumed its journey. I heard conversation as it sped away. They didn’t trust me. I threw my gym bag up over my shoulder and began down a short hall toward a set of very large double doors. “Whatever. They just don’t know you yet,” I told myself. A shiny plaque on the wall read: Acuity and Physiology. I paused for a second and took a deep breath, mustering strength. “You got this!” I said as I pushed one of the big doors aside and walked nervously to a large desk in a well-lit, modern-looking waiting room. “Hi.”

“Good Morning, Mr. Stone. We’ve been expecting you. Please fill this form out.” A robust woman was sitting at a computer. She was blue and had four arms. She handed me a clipboard.

“Thanks,” I said as I turned and took a survey of the waiting room. My eyes fell instantly upon a great mass. The room was empty save twenty chairs and one person, one very, very, very big boy. He had the face of a young teen, zits and all, but the body of a goliath. He took up four chairs and was sitting there rather awkwardly thumbing through a Sports Illustrated. It looked silly in his great big hands. I sniffed quietly. He was nervous too.

“Hey,” I said, trying to imagine how he fit on the elevator.

“Hi,” he said back as he flicked some shaggy brown hair from in front of his eyes. I expected to hear a deep growly voice, but his was not. It actually sounded pretty average, which was a little freakish coming out of his great big face. “I’m Sam,” he said. I sat down across from him and smiled.

“I’m Michael.”

“I know,” he said, smiling back. “Everyone knows.” He looked back down at his magazine.

“Really?” I sat back and looked up at him. The angle was so great it hurt my neck. “How?”

“Dude, you’re Frankenstein.” He grinned. He had big shiny braces on his teeth. They looked like fences.

“No, no, that’s just a nickname the idiot jocks gave me. My name’s Michael, not Frank.”

“What’s your middle name?” he said as he glanced down at the form on my clipboard, still grinning. He raised his eyebrows up high on his greasy forehead and waited for a response.

I didn’t want to answer. I pursed my lips and pulled the form to my chest. “My middle name is…Francis.” Oh come on, I thought. I hadn’t put that little piece in the puzzle yet. I was gonna kill Uncle Ivan.

The giant laughed. “Francis, France…Frank! And Stein means Stone, dude…Francis-Stone…Franken-Stein.” He overly emphasized it to make his point. He was a little obnoxious, but had me and knew it.

“Alright, alright I get it!” I said. “Son of a…” I mumbled. I forced a smile and looked down at the form on my lap as Sam chuckled, quietly repeating it again.

“So, did the townspeople chase you out of France with pitchforks and torches?” The giant giggled. He wasn’t gonna let it go.

I smiled up at him. “And I suppose you fell down the beanstalk,” I replied. He furled his thick eyebrows and then suddenly burst out laughing. He actually thought it was funny.

He put his hand out for a five and barked “Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum, dude.” I smiled and slapped the big catcher’s mitt.

“Alright,” I laughed.

“Sam, Michael, we’re ready for ya.” A middle-aged man in a white lab-coat came into the room through a set of double doors. He had thinning brown hair and a large gray moustache that covered his lips. “Come on. Let’s have some fun. My name is Doctor J. I’m going to need to perform a few tests on you guys today to get some baseline data, something to compare to.” We gave him the clipboards and followed him into a gymnasium. A variety of different machines and apparatuses were set up in stations, around which was an oval track and a couple of b-ball hoops. The room was tall and had some bleachers set up against one of the walls. He described some of the tests we were going to do and gave us a few minutes to get dressed.

Sam was pretty funny. I was glad to have someone else in there with me. I’d have been pretty scared all by myself. We stretched a little and met Dr. J back at the first station, a big steel machine with a computer station and a variety of bars and cables hanging off it. “Okay, let’s start with a strength test. Either of you two weightlifters?” We both shook our heads. I was pretty excited to see what Sam could lift. His arms were about as big around as my entire body. “This machine measures the pressure you put on it, so we don’t need to put weights on a bar. We’ll start with biceps curls. “Sam, go ahead, kneel here and pull the bar up to your chest as hard as you can.” Dr. J demonstrated. Sam smirked at me and took position.

The bar disappeared between his enormous hands. He stuck his bottom lip out, got a serious look on his face and then groaned like a determined bull. “Hrrrrgggg!” he exclaimed, pulling the bar up with all of his might. I imagined a front-end loader yanking up a bucket of dirt. The area instantly filled with the aromatic odor of giant sweat.

“O—kay! Nice pull, Sam. I think…yup, that’s a new student record! Alright!” Dr J nodded his head as he studied a monitor and then recorded a number onto Sam’s chart. “Wasn’t sure how this was gonna go, today.” The doctor looked at me. “Good luck, Mike.”

“I hope this isn’t a competition?” I joked nervously as Sam and I changed positions. The big boy slapped me on the shoulder and grinned.

“No, of course not.” Dr. J glanced from me up to Sam and back. “Just do your best, son.”

I’d never lifted weights before and so grabbed the bar awkwardly. Dr. J had to correct my position. It was wet from Sam’s sweaty hands, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to embarrass him. I took a deep breath, planted my feet, and pulled up on the bar with everything I had. Suddenly it made a strange noise and then bent at both handgrips.

“WO! What the heck happened there?” Dr. J trotted over and examined the machine. The display was flashing. “Well, I’ll be. Sorry, Michael. I think Sam may have exceeded the max on this thing,” he said as he reefed on the bar. He couldn’t bend it back. “Interesting,” he said, glancing back over at me.

“Oops,” Sam bragged and shrugged his shoulders.

“Wow,” I said. “You must have weakened the steel.” Sam assumed a WWE pose and flexed out like a pro wrestler. I laughed.

“That’s titanium actually. Let’s try bench press,” Doctor J said. “Michael, how ‘bout you go first on this one.” His moustache wiggled excitedly. “Take it nice and slow.” He showed me how to operate it. It was simple. I had only to lie on my back, put both hands on the bar, and push straight up. I glanced over at Sam who smirked. “Here goes,” I said and gave a hard push. Again, the machine groaned just as both ends of the bar bent up at forty-fives. “WOW!” Dr. J exclaimed while punching a few numbers into the keyboard on the machine. He pulled his calculator out and clicked feverishly, occasionally stopping for a second to scratch his head and count out loud.

I sat up and grimaced. Sam scratched his head. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t even touch it!” We both laughed.

“Okay, carry the one, eh…Michael,” Dr. J said, “I’m not 100% sure, but I think you just bench pressed thirty-two hundred pounds.” He said that with a big question mark on his face. “Is that possible?” He was now asking me.

“ I don’t know, Doc. I’ve never lifted weights before. Is that good?”

“That’s awesome!” Sam laughed. “See, I told you that you were fricken’ Frankenstein!”

I was suddenly embarrassed and began scuffing my shoe against the mat. “Michael, you’re not in trouble. That’s fantastic! This is what we’re here for. Wait just a sec. I have an idea,” the doctor said as he ran off like an excited child toward the exit. “I’ll be right back!”

Sam sat down on the ground and pulled a candy bar out of his pocket. “Want half?”

“Sure,” I replied. He pinched a King Sized Baby Ruth in the middle and tossed part of it over. I smiled and squeezed a pulverized bite out of the wrapper. “So you’re a giant, huh?” I said in between chews.

“Yeah.”

“Cool,” I said. “How bout your family?”

“Yeah, They’re Giants too. So are my grandparents and, heck my whole home town’s full of Giants.”

“Really? Sweet. How do you…hide?” I asked. “I mean from…people.”

“We really don’t. It’s way high up in the mountains. We get hikers that stumble into town every once in a while though.” He laughed.

“What do ya do?”

“Rip their arms and legs off,” he said with a straight face. I stared at him for a few seconds until he cracked a smile. We both laughed. “Actually, we fit in just fine. My parents both work for Gateway. They field a lot of helpline stuff.”

“Wait just a minute! Let me get this straight. So people think they’ve reached India, but their actually talkin’ to Giants in a remote mountain village somewhere?”

“Oh yeah. We’ve got a lot a telemarketers, web designers, that sort of thing,” he said.

I stared at him closely for a few seconds. I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg. He didn’t crack. “That’s awesome!” I exclaimed. The image was very funny to me. I thought it was great. I suddenly wanted so bad to see that town. “Hey, I’d love to it some time.”

“Sure, dude. Cool.”

“Michael, I have an idea!” Dr. J shouted from the entrance. He had returned and with him was Coach.

“Hey,” I said.

“Good Morning, Mr. Stone. Dr. Jekyll tells me you’re not just a good basketball player,” he said as he slid his big varsity jacket off and draped it over the bench. He started rolling his sleeves up like he was getting ready for a fight. I looked around nervously, but he was staring right at me.

“What?” I asked putting my hands up in the air.

“Michael, since the machine is broken, I thought we could do this a different way.” In the doctor’s hand was a very thick, knotted rope. “Ever play tug-of-war?” He waved at me as he walked.

“No.”

I followed him over to an open area on the gym floor. “Here. All you do is pull. Coach Atlas, take the other end please.” He handed opposite ends of the rope to each of us.

I was suddenly nervous. Coach Atlas wasn’t as big as Sam, but he was far scarier…besides, if he was the real mythological Atlas, it meant he was an actual Titan and could hold the weight of the entire world on his shoulders. “I’m not sure about this,” I said through a nervous laugh as the heavy rope went taught. My armpits started to sweat. I bit the inside corner of my lip. “This is crazy,” I said.

“Okay, on GO.” Dr. J’s eyebrows were now dancing with his moustache. He was very excited. I suddenly noticed some background noise. In the hub-hub, I hadn’t seen that some kids and teachers were filing in to see the show. The Doctor told. That’s all I needed…an audience.

My palms were sweaty. I took turns drying them on my pants. I was fully convinced, at that moment that the broken machine had nothing to do with me. It had to have been Sam. I hadn’t noticed that I was super strong. Seems like I would have if it were true. I looked down the rope to the monstrous Titan. His normally squinty eyes were mere slits and his lip was curled up in a snarl revealing several yellowed matchbox-sized teeth. The expression was terrifying. It was his game face. I didn’t have one myself and so grimaced with fear as the countdown began. “Three, Two, One…GO!”

With a mighty heave it happened, exactly what I knew was going to. Coach Atlas yanked me, and not just across the gym but clean out of my high-tops too. I hit the ground with a screech and a thud, and rolled almost all the way to his feet. It was humiliating. The audience burst into laughter all at once. Coach too as he reached down and pulled me up to my feet. I looked up at him. “This wasn’t my idea,” I said.

“I think I jumped the gun. Let’s try that again,” he said.

“No, no, you win,” I conceded, putting my hands in the air.

“One more time, Michael,” he commanded.

I nodded obligingly and walked back over to my shoes. I slipped them back on and tied them extra tight. Again we took up the slack, and Dr. J counted down. “Three, Two, One, GO!” Again I was slow to pull, but this time Coach waited for me, matching my strength as I leaned back and into it. The large room fell silent. You could have heard a pin drop. I was planted like a tree and watched with surprise as the big man started to shake. His game face was gone. The rope became as tight as a guitar string. I breathed slowly and steadily and felt as if I’d somehow shifted gears. I leaned back even farther. I had more strength in me and so pulled even harder, but the titan matched it. From below me came a funny smell. I didn’t look down but could feel heat on my feet. The rubber soles of my Pumas were melting. My toes began to rip through the fronts. Coach adjusted his grip and pulled back even harder, but I matched him. Drops of perspiration glistened on his head. He gritted his teeth as his eyes widened, his mouth turning up in a determined frown. We stayed that way for nearly three entire minutes…an eternity, until suddenly the rope stretched, started to smoke, and then…SNAP! It broke! Both of us stumbled backward. Coach Atlas recovered, but my narrow heels shattered the wooden floor. I stumbled backward, crunching through the planks awkwardly until I fell on my butt.

“HOLY HYDE!” Dr. J erupted. Coach laughed excitedly and slapped his hands together. The audience applauded and cheered. I laughed too, looking down at the smoking black rubber splotches that marked my footprints. “No one has ever matched Atlas in a feat of strength…ever!” Dr. J congratulated me, patting my back.

Sam pulled me up to my feet. “Wow, dude. SWEET! You okay?”

I looked down at the palms of my hands. They were smoking. I hadn’t felt the pain during the competition. I flipped them over and noticed my skin had flushed, but not red…avocado green! I nodded. “It’s okay. That’s normal…I think.”

Coach Atlas walked up and patted my back. “You’re full of surprises, Stone. Maybe instead of Frankenstein we’ll call you Hercules.” He winked and smiled as the kids poured down from the bleachers to congratulate me. I was one of them now, no longer a boy trapped between worlds. It seemed with misfits and monsters, differences were measured as similarities. And I was sure measuring up as different.

Until then I hadn’t thought I needed to belong to anything, but I was wrong. Despite a pair of melted Pumas and a couple third degree burns, nothing had ever felt better. I grinned and reveled in that shining moment, a glimmer of what could be.

Berto’s earliest memory was not of a vision but a smell. It came from under the door of the room that he was forbidden to enter. He’d been playing a game with sticks and pebbles on the floor – war, against the Austrians – while his mother simultaneously nursed the newborn and rode verbal and physical herd over his younger brother and sister. The older brothers were outside working the vineyard with his father and the older sisters were for the moment out of the kitchen and on various errands of some sort.

He was oblivious to the domestic commotion around him. He put his head down against the stone floor and sighted an imaginary rifle. “Fump!” Down went an Austrian. Then “fump-fump-fump!” More white-coats fell. “Move ahead!” he commanded. Then in another voice: “Retreat! Retreat! Over the mountains and behind these trees.” His eyes scanned the battlefield with minute intensity while his arm and hand, descending from the sky, orchestrated troop movements.

Every inch of the floor was known by him and so it was his private world, his diminutive Eden. He knew where and how the dust collected and he knew the various scars etched in the stone as he knew the markings, the texture, the fragrance of his own hand.

It was then that the smell came again from under the door. A musky smell that should have disgusted him. Human, carnal, decaying even. He knew who was in there. Behind the door, he must be moving about, the boy thought. He looked up at his mother and knew that soon she would be going over the hill, to her sister’s farm for butter since they did not have a cow or goat. And he knew where the key to the room was.
With surreptitious sideways glances across the battlefield he observed her. She finished nursing the youngest, swaddled the drowsy infant and wrapped it to her chest. Then she wrestled with the other two, grabbing them by the arms and whispered harshly over her shoulder, in obvious haste “Berto, come along now!”

“Mama, can I stay and help Papa in the vineyard?”

“Fine,” she said. “But go now! You’ve been playing enough.”

He waited in the open door until she’d turned the corner, waited another five seconds to be safe, then closed the door and returned to the big room, finding himself alone and feeling suddenly miniature and bathed now in that perfect and lead-heavy silence found in the wake of the centrifuge’s exit. A soundless and perfectly still Eden hung with invisible fruit. He pulled a chair to the counter, stood on it and reached high for the key behind the breadbox.

A moment later he was standing before the door, key in outstretched hand. Then he hesitated. He’d never so flagrantly disobeyed such a prominent family edict. In his mind, he searched for an ambiguity upon which to hang a future equivocation or mitigating argument, but found none. I am facing the door rather bravely for being a boy, he thought. There is still time to turn back. I have done nothing yet … but no, fine, I will accept any beating that comes my way. And besides, it will only sting for so long.

Yet his hand trembled and he could not do it. He went to the window and looked out. He could see down a row of vines his father’s back, a dark shape bent over the hoe, methodically scratching. He could see the brothers too, doing the same. And then it was as if he could see into his father’s head, see the unhappiness (for he didn’t know the word “bitter” yet) that he knew was there and which he, Berto, was now starting not only to recognize but also resent, recoil from. He returned to face the door, the keyhole itself seemed like a vast space. He inserted the large loose-fitting key and jangled it into position, cleaving the silence with what felt like a tremendous rattling noise, leaving him standing at the epicenter of the disturbance. Then without turning his back to the room, he pushed the door shut behind him.

The full force of the smell struck him now, as if he were slapped by a decaying armpit. It had been at least a week since he’d last seen his mother carry a wash bucket in with any success. Possibly two weeks. His grandfather had been refusing her, occasionally shouting, enraged and defiant.

“Who is it!” the old man demanded suddenly, sitting up. His eyes were wide and scattering like those of a horse, searching the room’s horizon and not seeing the boy before him at the foot of the bed. Then the eyes fixed on the boy and the old man shouted: “Identify yourself!”

“Berto. Nonno, it is me, Berto,” the boy whispered.

“Are they here yet?”

“Who?”

“Who? What do you mean, ‘who’? Don’t frighten me with such news! With such, such, such ….!” The boy saw the fear swirling inside the old head like a whirlpool of wasps desperate to burst outward into a thousand individual directions. He could see confusion too, see the old man desperately trying to regain his train of thought.

A moment later the old man found it, imploring the boy, in a strange, formal manner: “You must be prepared for the battle, you must be prepared to lead the men, Gonzaga. The French are almost here, I can smell their cowardly hearts trying to escape to the North, but we must not let them escape without punishment for humiliating us, right Gonzaga?”

“Nonno, I am not Gonzaga, I am Berto, your grandson.”

“Stop it, or I will beat you like a mule! Now is not the time for modesty or trickery! I thought I could trust you! You must speak directly to me. The rains are coming, I know, and then, disaster, if we are not prepared …. Are you prepared, Gonzaga?! You must be ready. Everything … everything …”

“Shhhhh Nonno. I am Berto,” the boy said.

“I say you are not Berto! Damn you, when are you going to start listening? You cannot trick me. You are Francesco Gonzaga. I hear you drawing battle plans outside my door, and so I know you are a competent General. You cannot lie to me. But you must focus on the French, not the Austrians. We will defeat them later. Have the rains started yet?”

The boy saw spread across the old man’s face the vulnerable desperation, the desire for an allegiance.

“Yes … yes … of course you are right,” he said. “I am Gonzaga. But I need help with the battle plan. Can you help me?”

“You? … Well, yes-yes, but we are running out of time, for God’s sake! Come here, come here, and let me whisper to you. There are many traitors among us, you know. You can trust no one. No one! How else could we let ourselves be dominated for 10,000 years, like a bunch of pigeon-toed Sicilians?!”

“Ten thousand?”

“Yes, maybe more. But come here, Francesco.” Then he whispered to the boy, and the boy saluted him, and he gravely saluted back.

“Nonno,” he said.

“Yes.”

“We must keep this battle secret, right?”

“Of course, there are traitors everywhere.”

“So, you will not tell Mama and Papa about me, right, about Gonzaga’s visit?”

“Who are they?!”

“Who are they …?”

“My handlers cannot be trusted with military secrets! Damn it, you should know this without speaking it, General! Now go, please, for there is little time before the rain comes. Please, I beg of you. Do not hesitate!” The old man was whimpering as the boy left.

In the following days he waged battles with the pebbles outside the door, now against the French, and a little louder than before. “We have a battle plan now,” he declared. “First we lance them, then we take their horses, then we take their money. And then, we have a parade. A large one, with many canons.”
“Shhh!” his mother hissed violently. It was a manic and desperate eruption, the sound of an exasperated woman long since ripped of any semblance of patience. A woman now desperate, drowning in the chaos of her own domain that had once, long ago at least, been her orderly autocracy. Because after about the fifth or sixth child (she was nursing her eleventh now, not counting the four that had died at birth or in infancy) she’d been in a constant state of hostile retreat, with every domestic infraction a hammer against her defeated soul, so that she often looked out the window and longed to be anything, a bird, a ewe, the large farm animals that occasionally passed on the dusty road and were only beaten for cause and were otherwise so tenderly cared for and actually valued; anything but a woman, crumbling under the mountain of demands piling upon her and supported by the twin, buckling pillars of expectation (hers and others’).

She continued hissing, “Do not disturb your grandfather! How many times do I have to tell you! Mother of God help me!” then crossed herself, too busy to even glance up.

“Can I see him?”

“No!”

“Why Mama?”

“Because he is sick, as I’ve told you ten thousand times, and I don’t want you to catch the disease.”

“Ten thousand?”

“Yes, ten thousand! Now, ten thousand one! And if I catch you going in there, I swear, I will beat you till every last stick on the farm is broken, or your rear end falls off, whichever comes first. And I have a strong hand –”

“—Which disease, mama?”

“Which? Stop asking questions or I will put you out of doors. Can’t you see, I am busy. And who is to cook dinner? Who is to bathe your grandfather? Who is to wash the clothes? Stop your battles and go outside and feed the chickens and rabbits! Go now, before I throw this shoe at you!”

“But what if you catch the disease?”

“Me?!? Don’t be ridiculous. He won’t let me get sick because He knows that someone has to run this house! And He doesn’t have time to deal with the wreckage if He kills me now! He doesn’t want the work! You better believe me. Go! Go now!” She crossed herself again rapidly, rattled off an Our Father in less than three seconds, and continued tussling with the children.

A week later his mother left for butter again, and the silence and the opportunity was again the boy’s. He opened the door, noisily again, and slipped into the room.

“Who is it!”

“It is me, Gonzaga,” said the boy. “Did you not receive a message that I was coming?”

“No. Don’t lie to me. Have we been betrayed?! I have seen no messenger. Just a traitor posing as a maid, trying to get secrets from me. But I kicked her out again before she could wash me.”

“You will need a bath, Nonno.”

“Yes, but not now. Are the rains coming? I cannot see out my window … but I smell rain.”

“But as General, I command you to have a bath, or the French will smell you.”

“No, that is a lie!”

“No, they will smell you. Maybe not them, but their dogs will. My scout tells me they are approaching with
dogs trained to smell the enemy. You must bathe. I will send in a woman who looks like my mother, to bathe you tonight.”

“No, we can’t trust ….”

“No, I give you my word, she can be trusted to bathe you. But do not speak to her of our battle plans, commander. It will be done?”

“Yes sir, General. But the rains, the rains,” he moaned.

“Yes, the rains are coming.”

“Oh God,” he wailed, “we don’t have much time. We must plan. We must – you must have a battle plan! Are you going to take them head on, and slaughter them?”

“Should I?”

“No. There will be too many dead on our side, even if we are victorious. Are you going to cross the river? It is dangerous. Your men will drown, the horses will drown, and all will be a disaster and we will be considered fools in school by idiot teachers who never held a lance or fired a rifle or even killed a rabbit, let alone a man!”

“Then what should I do?”

“I don’t know, God damn it, that’s why I brought you here! You have got to figure it out before the rain comes! I smell the rain, I smell the rain, God help us if you can’t figure this out, we are doomed. Oh Fornovo! May you never be a curse again. Now get out of here! Go!”

The boy left. He could see the fear crawling over the face, trying to burst outward and unburden itself, the eyes, as popping as eggs and the face gaunt as a rotting squash, and yet containing the furious wasp-thoughts, and again he felt the weight of the obligation to preserve the old man’s sanity. It is me, it is only me who he trusts. I am just a boy but I must be brave, I must save him.

That night after dinner his mother went into the room prepared for engagement and battle, carrying a wash pail and the tight lips of feminine determination. She emerged later smiling and said to her husband: “He let me bathe him without any fight at all.”

“He is coming around,” the father said matter-of-fact. “Maybe he is getting better.”

“No,” she said. “I fear he is giving up.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you then,” the father said with irritation, looking at her directly now. “You are upset when he won’t let you bathe, and now, you are upset that he will let you bathe!”

“I am not upset.” She said, looking at him squarely.

“Not upset? … no, no, no! You just said you were upset!”

Then she spoke very slowly, enunciating each word as if she were speaking to a child: “No, I said I was worried that he was giving up.” She resumed bustling about the big iron stove, rattling the various items with a simmering anger.

“Well, what’s the difference? Either way you are fretting about –”

“Forget it! I was just trying to talk to you about –”

“And I was trying to listen! But don’t I have the right to ask a few questions if you are not making sense?! Are you telling me –”

“I’m telling you to forget it!”

“Alright then, but don’t raise your voice in front of –.”

“Stop it! Stop it!” She slammed a rag down on the table and glared directly at him. All the children stopped too and watched. He got up slowly, not talking his eyes off her, and said, “I am going outside to chop some wood. And when I come back in, I expect to find my house calm, with a calm wife. Because why? Because I don’t need to be bothered by all of this. A man has enough troubles to worry about, such as raising the food for his family, which is not easy, I tell you! Look around. NOT EASY, UNDERSTAND!”

“Go then,” she said quietly. “Go chop some wood. No one is stopping you.”

He turned his back and went outside and grabbed the axe that had been in the family for unknown generations and hacked with fury at some downed oak limbs which he had saved for a moment like this; his body already knowing before his head or even his heart told him, knowing what all men knew and had discovered throughout the course of domestic history, or at least since men and women had cohabited under something smaller than just the heavens, that the woodpile was the only acceptable receptacle for a man’s rage and so he must ejaculate that rage into it until spent in a sort of purifying ritual.

The limbs had been stripped of their branches and were lying in a long pile next to the barn. He grabbed one and dragged it from the pile, cursing under his breath when it snagged. Bastard! he muttered, kicking the other limbs off. The birds ceased and scattered.

Then he began. His arms swung jerkily at first, violently as he drove the axe downward between his spread feet pinning the limb to the ground. Soon the first beads of sweat trickled down his forehead and brow, then cheek and beard, and ticked to the earth. It felt good, he anointed now with his own currency, with the physical proof of his labor and thus by this purchase, the fury and the outrage slowly validated, justified and even sanctified in some interior ledger, and more, as he continued to chop and the sweat ran, he was permitted now to reflect on the matter as an omniscient might, still chopping but smoother, more efficient and even beginning to calm now, and then he pictured his wife and her dark, tight little shrewish face with the hair parted in the middle and pulled back tightly too, scolding him but not even giving him the courtesy of looking at him, just yammering at him like a crow as she moved back and forth about the stove. He relived the scene and then felt a second surge of rage boil inside him, instantaneous, the fetus of calm instantly shattered like the dry limbs below his groin and against which he was hacking.

What was a man to do? He worked practically every minute of every day! He knew other men with vices but he himself didn’t have even one. I don’t even want to be appreciated, he thought. I just, once in awhile, want to be left good and well alone and not badgered. A minor request, by God … but by God I damn well deserve that!

He felt pity for himself and it was ugly and so he hated himself too. Pity for having to slave away day after day, just to put food in their mouths without any appreciation and more, every time he entered the house he was subjected to her moods while she patrolled the home’s interior like some mad despot, some impotent ruler in full decline, flailing in the knowledge of her own suffering, her own prolonged and anticipated defeat.
He was done now. He set the set the axe down and began to gather the firewood, stooping and gathering until he had an arm full. His undershirt was drenched, his nape wet. He moved toward the house to where he would stack it. The house, his house inherited from his family as the only adult male offspring (and so not really his own, at least not of his own toil and labor and so this mocked his own masculinity too) and yet, he recoiled from it now, knowing she patrolled it without even the façade of that thing she once possessed when they first married, that sureness that wasn’t despotic at all, that didn’t need to be despotic, that was a thousand times more powerful than despotism, that was calm; that sureness that was somehow simultaneously yielding and controlling, submissive and authoritative, that mostly quiet (though to be sure, even then, there had been outbursts of affrontment and indignation which he’d considered passionate and even endearing) confidence and knowledge, that he could only know as femininity, that was soft as water and enduring as marble and as timeless as both, that aura which he understood but didn’t understand because, as he learned, it was never meant to be understood but merely engaged and honored, not by brain but by the guidance of the heart. Gone now, stolen, dethroned and bereft of tranquility, which is the only thing a man wants from middle age onward. And so she was only to be avoided.

“That boat’s awfully far out.”

We were on the beach, playing one of our games (getting your fir cones into the opposing team’s basket). One of the other boys had stopped and stretched out a scrawny arm to indicate a spot somewhere near the horizon. Shielding our eyes with our hands, we could barely make out a black speck just below where the blue of the sky met the slightly darker blue of the water. Even in fair weather, our fishermen would seldom venture so far out.

A few of the men who had been mending their nets by the upturned boats up the beach joined us now. “That’s not one of our boats,” said an old man who had come down from the town, and indeed it was clear by now that whatever it was was very large.

Men and women were massing now to glimpse the spectacle. They came out from the town, but they huddled about the gates, caught between curiosity and trepidation. But some of us, younger men and older boys, ran to the shoreline and heaved in our boats. I leapt in an outrigger with two of my friends, and we commenced paddling out to meet the ship. There was some giddy chatter when we started, but as we got closer we were awed into silence. Its size was inconceivable. How could something so large float on the water? It loomed over us like a mountain. It had neither sails nor oars, but it drove steadily forward toward the shore as if pulled by an invisible rope. Its sides rose like cliffs from the waterline; odd tubes, like smooth, grey, hollow logs, protruded in rows from either side; a single line of black smoked streamed from a conical chimney atop its deck, and from deep within it emanated a low, dirgelike purr and clunking thrum. But strangest of all was its skin. We had never seen any material like this. It was stretched taught, but it did not pucker like leather or billow like cloth, and it had no texture like wood or bark. It was clearly unyielding and dense; the waters fled in fright from the prow. This weird hide was grey as granite, but when it caught the sunlight it glinted like mica; it stretched on as smooth and unbroken as the sky in pieces the breadth of a longhouse, and where they met you could see that they were stitched together with dowels of the same fantastic material. One boat dared to paddle right up to its flank. The man in the bow leaned forward and placed his palm against the side of the ship. He quickly drew it back is if burned. “Cold,” he said in a whisper.

Then, the thrum abruptly stopped, and the ship coasted to an uncannily short stop. Suddenly, a mammoth horn sounded from within it, a low, jarring blast, and we ducked and covered our ears. When we looked back up, we saw a gap opening in the side of the ship, two pieces of the skin, where there had not appeared to be a seam, suddenly separating, and in a panic we leaned on our paddles and pushed for the beach.

We dragged our boats onto the sand and ran to the city gate, and only then turned back to see that the mother ship had disgorged an offspring, a pup of the same grey substance. It was crewed by creatures, human in form, robed in white. Four were seated with their backs to us, pulling on oars. Two stood. They wore crowns of stiff white cloth. The one nearest the bow glimmered, pricks of light shimmering from his chest and head. The other, just behind him, seemed to send beams from his eyes.

Their craft scraped the beach with a sound we had never heard before, so harsh and loud and rasping that we shivered and took a step backward. The four rowers got out first, then helped the standing two to jump to dry sand. Their white garments extended to their knees, revealing what appeared to be skin but almost as white as the cloth, before picking up again at mid-calf. But what was most striking, as they strode boldly up the beach towards the town, was the sources of the shimmering light we had seen before. They had sticking out of their bodies, sometimes through the garments and crowns and sometimes straight from their ghostly pale skin, bits of this uncanny material. In places it was the grey of the ship, changing from dark to bright with the light like an autumn cloud, but elsewhere it was of different species. The one who had seemed to send beams from his eyes actually had, no less strangely, black wires sticking from his ears, stretching forward to wrap around his face over his nose, where they suspended over his eyes a pair of transparent disks which, with each turn of his head, caught and scattered sun rays. The other, clearly the leader, had bits of glowing yellow and bright white protruding from his chest in rows and stretching in lines over his shoulders. It was so remarkable, so entrancing, that I forgot to be afraid. Without realizing, I strayed from the mass of people clustered around the gate and came gaping forward to meet the visitors. The leader stopped and looked down at me. It seemed a person’s face, but it was so pale and smooth and round and so very high that I did not think he could be fully human. He dropped then from his great height, leaning on one pale knee before me, and studied my own face. He saw me surveying the magical encrustations on his body. One glittery sinew came out from his waist and stretched up to his chest, where it disappeared into a flap of his white garment. Following my stare, the chief creature reached to the top of this yellow strand and pulled it slowly upward. More of it appeared from the flap until he finally produced a large, smooth, red-yellow circle of the same material, covered in mystical etchings. He wrapped his long-fingered hands around it and held it to my ear, and I heard its swift, clicking beat. I understood. That he had pulled his own heart out from his body. That he had this stuff inside him, too. That whatever these creatures were they were no ordinary mortals. And so awed was I that I could never, still have never, overcome the impression that they were partially divine. In this I differed from my kinsmen only in degree, for even after we came to comprehend that these were people from far over the waves, that their bodies were essentially like ours, that they made their ships and instruments and adornments from substances called iron and silver and gold, still we always called them, and thought of them, as the Metal Men.

Metal was news to us. We had no mines and no forges. We had some gems that we found in the washes of the mountains, where we could also, I suppose, have collected bits of ore, if it had ever occurred to anyone. We had shells from the sea. We had some tools fashioned from stone. But what we mostly had was wood. The alien beings who landed on our beach that morning encountered a city of wood. Battlements of solid logs, hewn from the firs that towered in our forests, circling the entire town and capped with dozens of towers and platforms, all connected by ladders and catwalks. Gates of tightly interwoven boards on heavy wooden hinges. Inside, dozens of storehouses and cookhouses and outhouses swirling around the central longhouse, where the Big Man kept court. And overspreading it all, countless carvings. Yes, those carvings. They’re all anyone asks about when they find out where I’m from. Yes, I always say, they were all quite like the ones you see in museums. Yes, I say, they depicted both people and animals, and yes, the male figures often did have bird beaks in place of their genitals. That’s OK, I say, I found it funny, too. We used to get quite a lot of giggles from them. But then, we were just kids. Yes, I say, I understand they are quite collectible. No, I say, I don’t find it offensive that you’ve purchased one. (I generally don’t say that I find this impenetrably stupid.) Yes, I say, we were proud people.

The truth is, I don’t know if we were a proud people. When I think back, what I recall is a profound humility. We were humbled by the sea and the forest—silent, soul-swallowing vacancy on one side, crepuscular, conifer-canopied immensity on the other; by the unapproachably distant, immeasurably massive mountains beyond the trees we were positively humiliated. Our world was a sandy littoral strip. We barely ventured a toe into the realms beyond.

Now the crowd fell back until the Big Man himself was standing front and center. He looked into the eyes of the newcomers’ chief—up into his eyes, since he was head and shoulders shorter than the man in white—and held his stare with a stoic and faintly fierce expression, then abruptly turned and strode through the gates. The new men followed, surrounded by the throng of Trojans, and were led into the warren of buildings within the town, passing under the wooden gazes of grinning otters and grimacing she-wolves and occasional sea-hawks protruding from male groins. Finally, the Big Man and his counsel entered the Long House and sat on one side of the fire. Benches were provided on the other side for the visitors, and the rest of us crowded around the building to observe through the slats.

The pipe was filled, lighted with an ember of charcoal, and presented to the Big Man, who took a deep drag and passed it to the men in his counsel and then to the visiting chief. He took it, raising it gingerly with both hands and above his head and nodding to the Big Man in a way that he probably did not realize seemed to us rather pompous. He then took his smoke, and immediately convulsed into coughs and sputters. The men of the counsel could not help but laugh; these then were men, and of a somewhat comical sort, if their leader gags at the pipe like a boy in his initiation.

Time for trading, first of words. The new chief pointed to an object and offered his word, and we in turn presented ours. Bench. Fire. Antler. Hand.

Eventually, he turned to the thin man, who produced from a flap in his garment a small box. The chief opened the box and poured something into his hand. When he held it out palm-up toward the fire, it seemed to hold several large black seeds. He took one of these and tossed it into the fire. We watched, wondering what would happen to the flames. For several moments, nothing—then suddenly, a deafening explosion, like lightning hitting the top of a tree, and the fire jumped, the long house shivered. Slowly, abashed, we pulled our hands from our ears, and the chief, with a look of satisfaction, passed the seeds to the Big Man. They were of the same material as the ship and the protuberances on their persons, but night black—cold, smooth, seamless. The Big Man, having examined them, looked to the chief to see what he would take for his magic seeds. He indicated fresh water, venison, dried fish. The Big Man nodded. Then the visitor pointed into the center of the fire. Charcoal. He stretched his arms wide, palms inward. He wanted a great amount of charcoal. And he passed the entire box of seeds to the Big Man, who nodded again.

Matters seemed to be concluded. But the visitors did not move. Their chief, it seemed, wanted to affect one more trade. He pointed to the center of the long house. What did he want—the house itself? Shaking his head, he rose and moved to the center beam and with a vertical wave of his hands indicated one of the poles that stood alongside it. It was one of the tallest poles in the entire town, carved top to bottom with faces and figures. The Trojan men simply stared at him, struck not so much by the effrontery of the request as by its sheer strangeness. Why would this visitor want part of our long house? The chief, then, as he had done when I approached him at the gates of the town, reached to the chain at his waist and withdrew threw the flap on his chest his mystical spheroid ticker. With a click, he detached it from the glittery sinew that had held it to his body and passed it to the Big Man, who cradled it gingerly in his open hands like an egg, inspecting it, feeling its tiny pulse. The other chief mimed a pushing action with his thumb, and the Big Man, comprehending, depressed a knob on the top of the object. It abruptly cracked open, and we all started, expecting some magical bird to emerge.

Our men took turns observing the minute, seemingly animate ticking and whirring of innumerable, interlocking wheels and gears, the rest of the Trojan populace crowding the long house to get a look at the little marvel. But not me. I followed the Metal Men. I watched them load baskets of fish, meat, water, and charcoal, and finally the enormous carved pole into their steel boat. I stood on the beach as they rowed out to their silent, looming vessel, the leader clinging to the pole and barking orders to the others. And in the gathering darkness, I longed to join them. Something had changed in me. With a kind of metallic click, I found myself snipped off from my people. At the moment that the strange chief unhooked the contraption from its chain, I understood that it was not his heart, and that he was just a man with wondrous objects. The other Trojans saw this, too, but for them, it was the magic of the objects that mattered. The visitor’s watch was a talisman for them. For me, it became a compass. It pointed to a universe of technology and industry, of science and time. These things were out there somewhere, over the waters, and I wanted to go there.

Less than two months later, I knew it as a ship, and I was aboard it. I was giving the bespectacled one his evening rub-down in his quarters. The Metal Men remained anchored at our beach, coming ashore every few days for another parley, giving us more of the exploding seeds or small disks imprinted with images in low relief, taking some food and water and as much charcoal as we could provide, and each time their chief would exchange one marvel—a collection of impossibly sharp knives that interconnected and folded into an object that fit in your palm, or a square slab of gold that opened to reveal two surfaces as smooth and reflective as a static pond—for one of our carvings. And with each visit, the visitors became less wondrous and more ordinary.

For some days after their first arrival, my friends and I would greet them when they came ashore in their boat and walked up the beach to town. But eventually, everyone lost interest in the routine, except me. I would always be there, dancing and chattering as they beached their boat. Their chief would give an indulgent smile and stride by, but I would skip alongside the other men, peppering them with questions they could not understand, and they would ignore me, or roll their eyes, or give answers that I could not understand and that might well have been impatient curses. But sometimes I would simply point, and they would give me words. Shoes. Hat. Elbow. Nose. Spectacles. It was the bespectacled one that was most forthcoming. I pointed to myself and said my name. He repeated it, but, to my recollection, never used it again, preferring obscure nicknames of his own invention. I pointed to him, and he said, “Bosun.” I pointed to his chief marching in front, and he said, softly, “Captain,” and held an index finger up to his pursed lips. He never asked for my words, but thanks to the elasticity of the adolescent noggin, I was soon conversant in the Attic tongue.

Once I brought an offering, a bit of dried herring and water in a bucket with a ladle, and Bosun, glancing ahead to make sure Captain was not looking, took a swig and pocketed a herring and, with a wink, slipped something cool and smooth and round into my palm. As the troop marched on to the town, I inspected the little metal token: on one side, a man’s profile; on the other, a man bestride the back of a strange, long-necked quadruped; around both images, obscure scratches, like a hen makes in the sand. I had a trading partner.

So I would bring him whatever small things I could scavenge—huckleberries, eagle feathers, sand dollars—and for each he would give me another token and a wink. I found that there were five species of tokens, some small and thick, some wider but thinner, some yellow-brown like the aspen in autumn (“gold”), some shining-gray like the belly of a trout (“silver”), some glowing red like an ember near death (“copper”). Each type had its own design, front and back. After studying them, I would pierce a hole in them with a flint and string them with my redwood burl beads on the necklace I wore.

So as the Metal Men had become to my fellow Trojans ever more mundane, to me they were ever more thrilling. I hovered around Bosun, even sitting behind him at parley, and so insinuated myself into the group of visitors that no one thought to object when I eventually accompanied them back to their ship, and after having done so once, there was no reason to comment on it thereafter. These absences were noted by my father back in town, but he, like the rest of the Trojan men, was preoccupied by the need to produce more charcoal for the trade. But it was assumed that the Metal Men would be on their way when they got enough of what they wanted; in the meantime, the wastrel pastimes of uninitiated boys were of little concern to mature men. So I would go out daily, board the floating metal island, descend its metal warrens, feel the pounding of its metal heart and the humming of its metal soul. I would find Bosun in his cabin and try to make myself useful, fetching his tea from the galley and his uniform from the laundry. And I learned, with his stern encouragement, to give him his rubs, as I was doing now, massaging his legs with oiled hands, and, since his face was buried in a towel (these were the only occasions he took of his specs), trying to judge from small grunts of pain or pleasure whether to go higher, go lower, press softer, press harder.

There was a brief rap at the door, and a young officer stuck his head in. He gave me a short, disapproving glance and said, “Captain wants his tea,” and was gone.

Bosun, unmoving, murmured, “Get me my shirt, fartling. I have to fetch the Captain his tea.”

“I can get it for him, Bosun,” I said.

“Can you now, turdlet?” Bosun said.

“I fix your tea, Bosun,” I said. “I know the galley; I know Captain’s quarters.” I was pathetically eager to please him. Bosun was like a big brother to me, which is to say that he was to me jocose and abusive, and I worshiped him with an abjectness tinctured by fear and loathing, and ached for his approval. I was also eager to see the ship, and, if I could, to impress Captain as well.

Bosun, who still had not lifted his face from the towel, said, “Well then, dingleberry. Be quick about it. And don’t talk to the Captain unless he talks to you.”

I was already so familiar a presence on board as Bosun’s servile mascot that I drew no comments or even glances from the crew, nor any endearments, either; I had come to see that the ship functioned with a combination of punctiliousness and bored numbness. In the galley I gathered saucer, cup and tea—which, as bone and leaf, were essentially familiar elements of my world—and then strainer, pot, and tray—gleaming silver all, and all therefore still exotic and thrilling to me. Last, the tiny, intricately engraved spoon, from a drawer of identical spoons, some of which I knew would be brought as barter with each visit to my town. And in the corridor, straining under the laden tray, I passed the magazine and saw through the locked grate the beautiful, black tubes, shining with menace where they hung in rows, and on a shelf above hundreds of boxes of the exploding pods.

At Captain’s door, I carefully balanced the tray with right hand and shoulder and knocked with my left.

“Enter,” came the distracted response.

Captain was at work at his desk, his back to me. I was grateful to have a moment to get my bearings. For a moment, I seemed no longer to be on the ship. The cabin was crammed with carvings. I saw the central post from the longhouse, wedged diagonally between bulkheads. I recognized a suckling she-bear that had been over the entrance to the house of one of my friend’s clans, and a grimacing man with an osprey-head at his groin that had adorned the forest gate, and a wolf-spirit mask in the style of my father’s brother’s wife’s family. A path remained clear through the middle of the room to the chair where Captain sat, and this and the desktop were the only parts of the room uncovered by wood. Captain still had not turned from the book he was scribbling in, so I strode cautiously forward and began to place the service on the desk. The lower-right drawer was half open; briefly glancing down, I saw that it was full of gold pocketwatches, like the one he had pulled from his breast and traded on the first day, all of them clicking softly as if to comfort themselves.

Reaching for his cup, Captain finally took note of me. “Oh,” he said, and then swiveled and contemplated with a kind and indulgent expression. “I understand you have learned Attic,” he said.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Very impressive,” he said. “You are a clever lad.” He glanced around his crowded cabin. “I live among your people’s handiwork now, you see. I admire it very much.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“I want you to know,” he said, “that I will always treat every piece with great respect. You may relay that assurance to your people if you think it is right.”

“Yes, Captain.” I could not imagine anyone discussing such a thing.

He surveyed the collection again before turning back to me. “The other peoples along your coast—your people trade with them as well, yes?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Do you ever exchange art with them?”

“‘Art,’ Captain?”

“Your—,” he broke off and smiled wryly, apparently to himself. “I know that the other peoples in this region also make carvings in wood.”

“Yes, Captain.” Of course they do. What else would they make carvings in?

“And do you ever trade your carvings for theirs?”

“No, Captain.” I thought I understood their language, but he seemed to be speaking nonsense, which is a strange feeling for a boy to have for an important adult. Yet he seemed to be fishing for some sort of explanation. At last, I offered, “We make our own carvings.”

Again, that wry smile, which seemed to me rather satirical. “Naturally, you do,” he said. “What do you trade for, then?”

I considered for a moment. “Shells and beads. And salmon, depending on where they are running, or moose, when they are caught.”

“But you seek only what you need, yes?”

Again with the riddles. What was he asking me? I decided I might look less foolish simply by asking than by trying to intuit his purpose. “Why would we trade for what we don’t need, Captain?”

His eyes became somber even as his grin grew. “You wouldn’t, of course. And when you parley with the other peoples, what else is there you do?”

“There is a feast, usually. There is music and dancing. There are games, sometimes. Running races. Arrow shooting. Log fighting.”

“What is log fighting?”

“Two warriors stand on a log,” I explained. “They try to knock each other off.”

“With their hands?”

“No, Captain, with…” I searched for their word. “With swords.”

“Wooden swords?”

“Yes, Captain.”

He nodded. “War games,” he said. “Is there sometimes also war with the other peoples?”

“Yes, sometimes, Captain. Parley is always better, my father says.”

“He is a wise man,” said the Captain. “When was the last time there was a war.”

I cocked my head and thought. “I can’t remember,” I said.

He smiled even wider now, but not, it seemed to me, in mockery, but in deep satisfaction. “You are a good lad,” he said again. “You are welcome aboard ship. Just don’t spend too much time away from your home. We don’t want you to become estranged from your people.”

“What is ‘estranged,’ Captain?”

He patted me on the head. “Just don’t forget who you are,” he said.

He turned back to his desk, and I took myself to be dismissed. I returned the silver tray to the galley and went back to Bosun’s cabin. Bosun, still prone on his bunk, had not even lifted his head from the towel. I returned to his rub, and his rhythmic grunts picked up as if they had never stopped.

“Bosun,” I said, while massaging his ribs, “why does Captain exchange gifts so often with the Big Man?”

“He is a smart man,” Bosun muttered. “He trades things he does not need for things he does. A ship always needs food and water.”

“If he needs food, why doesn’t he fish?”

“So long as you people keep giving him fish, he doesn’t have to. Does he, my little crab nit?”

I considered this. Bosun made it sound obvious, but I had trouble understanding it. “Does he also need the charcoal?” This had been bothering me. It was still summer, and it was always warm inside the boat.

“Especially the charcoal.” He finally turned his face towards me. “We’re low on coal, crud buddy.”

“Coal, Bosun?”

“We burn coal, deep in the ship. In the engines. It makes the ship go. Captain will stay here and trade with you people until he gets enough charcoal for the engines.”

I was laying this information alongside the conversation I had just had with Captain. “Will he also burn the ancestor poles?”

“Oh, no. Those are not for the Navy. Those are for himself.”

“So what will he do with them?”

“Nothing. Just keep them. At least, he thinks he’ll keep them. We’ll see what happens when he finds out how much someone will pay for them.”

“But why does he think he wants them, Bosun?”

Bosun sat up now, put on his glasses, and ran a hand through over his short, damp hair. “Well, my maggot, he likes them for the same reason that your people like the compasses and pocket mirrors he pawns off on them. He thinks they’re magic.”

This was only getting more puzzling for me. “What does he think they do, Bosun?”

“Oh, not that kind of magic, pisspot. He thinks they’re something special. Not just wood, not just beavers and owls and little men with gulls for dicks. He probably plans to put them in a room and look at them, and he probably figures other folks will want to come look at them, too. And he’s probably right.”

“But what does he see when he looks at them, Bosun?”

Bosun stared at his pale, thin knees. “He sees you, shitling. He sees Troy.” He looked up at me now and, a rarity, smiled. “He just loves you people.” Bosun could see my puzzlement and didn’t make me ask him further. “He loves that your town is made of wood. He loves that your weapons are made of wood. Imagine. Wooden swords.”

“But your metal weapons, Bosun. They must be much more dangerous.”

“Of course they are, dungball. That’s the point. You can’t mean much harm if you give your warriors wooden weapons.”

I thought of the war parties I had seen, and the hunting parties—returning, bloody and exhilarated, with a moose on a pole. I wondered if even Bosun knew how much harm one could inflict with wood, properly fashioned and properly wielded. “And that’s why he loves us, Bosun? Because we have wooden weapons?”

“It’s not what you have, fartlet. It’s what you don’t have. You don’t have navies and you don’t have naval academies and you don’t have admirals. You don’t have locomotives or cinemas. You don’t have lawyers. And you don’t have money. He’s got to think about money all the time. He’s got to keep track of it, and he gets orders about it all the time. And he’s got a ship full of fellows thinking about their money. That they aren’t making enough wages, that somebody else is making more wages, that they haven’t received their wages—when there’s nothing Captain can do about it, and there’s not piss all you can buy before getting back to port anyway. And then here’s you people, in your log houses and your leather britches, eating berries and bear meat, letting him have all he wants for silverware and magic beans. He loves that you can’t even conceive of money or what it would be for.”

I found this astonishing and tried hard to take it in. “Money, Bosun,” I said. “It is what you use to trade with people, right? It’s what you use to say how much of one thing for how much of another thing? It’s what you give to people instead of giving them things.”

“That’s right,” said Bosun. “You’re learning, shit pea.”

“But Bosun,” I said, “we do have money.” I took off my necklace and held it out to him.

“No, you silly fuck,” he said. “Not our money. Just cause you take our shiny coins and tie them
around your neck, that doesn’t mean you really understand money.”

“No, not that, Bosun,” I said. I untied the ends of the necklace and took off one of the burl beads. “This,” I said, and handed it to him. “They are given at feasts, and traded at parleys with the other peoples.”

Bosun stared at the palm-sized bead. “This?” he said. “This is your money?” He grinned, and then he threw back his head and laughed. “That’s rich!” he exclaimed. “That’s fucking brilliant! You should tell the Captain this, dingleberry. Next time you bring him tea. He’ll eat it up. He’ll love you people even more.” He reached to the bureau next to his bunk and took a copper coin from the top of a stack. “Here,” he said. “Take this and go home. Next time you come out, I’ll have some real work for you.”

I turned and stepped to his door, clutching my necklace. “Hey, stink bug!” Bosun called suddenly, and I turned back just in time to catch my burl bead. “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” he said, and he laid back on his bunk and laughed. I had no idea what he meant. I still don’t.

The sun was low when I got home, but the longhouse was oddly vacant. I realized that no men were around. I found one of my younger brothers and asked him where our father was. “At the ovens,” he said, in a tone indicating that he had asked the same question and received this response. It took me a moment to take in what this meant. Normally, we would have already stored enough charcoal for the autumn and winter. If the ovens were re-fired this late in summer, it meant that our supply was already running low. The Metal Men were depleting our stores with their incessant barter, and men were now returning to the forest to forage for timber, while others manned the kilns, which burned day and night and had to be tended at all times. This was a bizarre disruption of a fixed social cycle, and the town was tense and weary. I was thrilled. It meant that my presence or absence would be even more inconsequential than usual. I could steal off whenever I wished.

So early the next day, I was back in Bosun’s cabin, straightening his sock drawer, polishing the buttons on his dress shirts, while he sat on his bunk, methodically spinning a yo-yo, letting it skitter along the steel floor on each drop before yanking it back up with a flick of his wiry wrist (he had promised to teach me how), but watching me with an blank stare, inexpressive but intense. “Time for a rub, crapling,” he said at last. He took off his clothes and lay down on the bunk. His face was turned from me as usual. “Plenty of oil, Bedbug,” he said, and added in a lower tone, almost as if not addressing me, “I’ll show you what to do with those little hands.”

Shortly afterward there was a rap at the door. I turned as it opened, expecting to see the petty officer again, calling for Captain’s tea. But it was the face of Captain himself that looked at me, registering a moment of pleasant surprise before a look of dark disapproval fell over it. “My quarters, Bosun,” he said, and the door shut.

Bosun lay still, and I wondered if he had even heard Captain, if perhaps he had fallen asleep. But then he pushed himself up stiffly from the bunk, wiped the oil off his back and legs with a towel, got dressed, and left. He neither looked at me nor spoke to me.

He returned after only a few minutes. He leaned back against his door with his arms crossed and stared at the floor. “You have to go,” he said.

“Yes, Bosun,” I said. “Same time tomorrow?”

“No. You have to go now and you can’t come back.”

I looked imploringly at his face, but his eyes were on the floor. “Why, Bosun? What did I do?”

“You didn’t do anything. It’s Captain’s orders. He says it’s inappropriate, your being here. He says you’re innocent.” And finally he looked at me, but with a small, cold smile, almost a sneer. “Are you innocent, do you think?”

“What is ‘innocent,’ Bosun?”

“There’s your answer,” he said morosely, and taking the two strides across the cabin laid himself out on his bunk.

“Please, Bosun,” I begged, “tell me what it means.” I recognized the word, but only in the context of crimes. “What does Captain think I didn’t do?”

He was sprawled on his bunk now in the position he took for his rubs, prone, his face buried in the crook of his arm. “It means you don’t know how to be bad.”

This was so contrary to my view of myself that I thought we must be talking at cross purposes. “Me? Or the Trojans?”

“You are Trojan, asslick.”

I was feeling unjustly slighted now, and angry. “Whatever innocent is, Bosun, I don’t want to be it.”
Bosun sighed. “It doesn’t matter, little crapper. We’ll be leaving soon anyway. The Captain just about has what he wants from you people.”

“But Bosun,” I pleaded, “I want to come with you.”

Bosun managed a laugh into his elbow. “Captain would never let you come with us. Not in a million years.”

“But I thought Captain loved us.”

“He loves you here.” He roused himself from the bunk and reached another coin from his bureau. “Take this, dung beetle,” he said, pressing me towards the door, “and beat it.”

But I turned and caught hold of his sleeve. “Don’t leave me, Bosun!” I felt a catch in my throat as I said it, and I knew Bosun could hear it in my voice, and I knew it was a mistake.

He yanked his arm from my grasp and in the same motion brought the back of his hand sharply across my face. “I said get out, goddamn it. Captain’s right. You are innocent. No one want to be confronted by innocence every day. It starts out nice but you get to hate it eventually.”

I was looking away from him now, holding my cheek. He had moved back to his bunk, but I sensed that he was feeling regretful. “You think you want to be one of us, Kiddo. But you don’t really get us. And you could never be like us. It’s better this way. Just go. In a few days we’ll be gone, and you can forget us.”

I managed to shuffle to the door. I paused with the knob in my hand. “You know, Bosun,” I said, “when you first came to our beach, we thought you were made out of silver and gold.”

I didn’t turn around, but I could see Bosun’s glasses reflected in the brass knob. After a moment, Bosun said wearily, “Don’t feel too bad, Bedbug. Some of our fellows thought you people were made out of wood.”

I was awakened by voices. “Will they come tomorrow?” one said.

It was one of my uncles who had spoken. He and my father were steps from me, but unaware of or indifferent to me, curled up on my bedroll. They had just returned from the ovens; they smelled of soot, and in the half-light of the stars blinking through the slats in the roof I could see the outlines of their forms slumped in exhaustion.

“We should expect that they will,” my father said with grim impassivity.

My uncle, who was younger than my father, leapt up with a spurt of angry energy and grabbed a javelin from a hook on the wall. “They violate every rule of the behavior of guests!” he said. “I say enough is enough. We’ll send them back to their boat.”

The slouching shadow of my father did not move. “The Big Man would never allow it.”

My uncle twitched his head nervously, and then dropped back down next to my father. He managed to keep still for a moment, but then I saw his silhouette turn fiercely toward my father. “I give them one more day of parley,” he said. “Then, Metal Men or no”—I saw the fierce blackness of the javelin pierce the dark-grey of the roof as he brandished it—“I’ll show them what a good piece of wood can do.”

My father said nothing. I was awake now, and jittery with urgency. I slipped unseen from the house, pilfering on my way out one of the flint-headed spades we used to dig fire-pits.

I was the only one to meet the crew as they beached their rowboat. The sea rocked quietly in a late-morning reverie. Mists still clung to the edge of the forest, merging with the haze of smoke from the ovens hovering over the town. The gates were open, but no one seemed to be about. I strode straight up to Captain. Bosun was, as always, two steps behind him, but this time he did not acknowledge me or even look at me. Captain looked at me, but I knew he would not notice that I had my bow slung over one shoulder, my quiver over the other.

Captain stopped and kneeled before me, just as he had on that first morning. I saw again the gold chain leading from his second button to the left pocket of his shirt. “This is our last visit, lad,” he said. “After today, we will be…”

At that moment, I reached out and snatched the chain. I felt the weight of the watch come lifting out of the pocket, I felt the last link rip the button from his shirt, and I glimpsed, just as I had hoped, his gaping, round-eyed stupefaction before I turned and sprinted up the sand to the forest. And I was pleased to hear Captain, having overcome his initial shock, chasing after me, his shoes scraping on the sand as he shouted at me a string of names I did not understand, none of them “lad.” I had anticipated all this— I had calculated the odds, dividing his assumptions of privilege by his presumptions of knowledge of other people’s behavior. Now I heard Bosun calling after Captain, then ordering the other crewmen to stay with the boat, and I knew that there were three of us running up the sand.

I plunged from the brightness of the beach into the shadows of the forest. I could still hear Captain shouting his imprecations between panting breaths, and the scraping of his and Bosun’s footfalls on the sand before they were muffled by the soft floor of pine straw and moldering leaves. I slowed slightly; I knew I could outrun them, and lose them easily in maze of trees, but I wanted them to stay close enough to follow me, but just far enough back that they would not see me cut briefly to my right to avoid a patch of branches and straw in the middle of the trail.

And then, abruptly, the shouting stopped too, and there was silence behind me. I doubled back, and peered over the edge of my pit. Bosun was apologizing as he scrambled off of Captain and tried to help him to his feet. The two of them, querulous and confused, their uniforms stained with fresh-dug mud, looked round the rim of their trap, slowly realizing that they were too deep down to reach the rim and that the walls were too steep to scale. And then they saw me, standing at the rim, an arrow, fletched, aimed straight at Captain’s eyes.

“What have you done?” barked Captain. “Let us out of here at once!”

What I had wondered all night was whether I would be able to hold both my aim and my voice steady when the time came, and now I found, observing myself with a kind of extrasensory detachment, that I could: “You don’t tell me what to do now, Captain. I tell you.”

They were more amazed now, their mouths forming a pair of Os in the shadows of the pit. “What is it you want?” said Captain.

“I want you to take me with you.”

“With us? Out of the question. You don’t know what you’re asking, you foolish child. It is a naval vessel—it is not a place for interlopers, let alone foreign children. It’s simply impossible.”

I was surprised to find myself deeply thrilled, somehow pleased to hear him reacting with all the haughty petulance that I had expected. I barely managed to keep my composure as I steadily leaned forward and drew back my bowstring. “Then you’ll never get out of this pit,” I said. “I may be a foreign child, but I know how to hunt. You’re much easier prey than deer. I can put arrows in both your throats before you can draw breath to scream. Your men will never find your bodies.”

Captain was speechless now. He seemed shrunken, too, swallowed by the depth and darkness of my pit, while I suddenly had the stature of a redwood. I had an inkling then of the feeling of authority, looming over others until you come to sense that it is natural and right. I could vaguely make out his upturned features; I saw bewilderment, and even fear, and I was pleased, and I wondered then, as I do now, what this said about me.

Bosun was different. The shadows of the forest canopy took away the glint from his glasses, so that, despite the weakness of the light, I thought I could see at last to his eyes. They were darker than I expected, and smaller and more deeply set, and when they met mine I saw not only surprise but something more, something much more unexpected: respect.

“What will it be, Captain?” I said.

“Yes,” he said softly.

“You’ll take me with you? You’ll give me your promise on your honor?”

“Yes,” he said more strongly. “Of course, yes, if you’ll let us out of this pit.”

I lowered my bow and unfletched the arrow, and tossed down a thick vine, having already tied its other end to a nearby tree trunk. Pushing off from Bosun’s cupped hands, Captain managed to pull himself, grunting, to the lip of the pit and drag himself out. Bosun came up behind him, hand over hand. They stood up and brushed the dirt and leaves from their whites. I stood patiently before them and waited for their panting to subside.

Finally, Captain straightened and looked at me with a strained but subdued expression. “Well,” he said, “you are a surprising and resourceful young fellow.”

“Thank you, Captain. I’ll be a good sailor.”

“Quite,” he said. “And that’s quite a weapon you have there. May I take a look at it?”

“Yes, sir, Captain,” I said. Captain’s expression did not change as I passed him the bow. But behind him I saw Bosun abruptly slouch and turn slightly away, shaking his head. It was back—that posture of superiority and condescension and satirical regret of the pathetic naiveté of others. I’d done something wrong, something to lose his respect, and I didn’t even know what it was.

Captain hefted the heavy bow for a moment, taking stock of its weight and balance. Then he raised one knee and with both hands bent the bow against it. I wasn’t sure what he was doing—testing its flexibility?—but I could see now how angry he was, his neck straining and his forehead pulsing with the effort not just to bend the bow but to restrain his own blood. The bow was laminated pine, and even a man as large and as worked up as Captain couldn’t bend it far. After a few moments, he dropped his knee, and looked me in the face again, and then brought his free hand across my cheek with such speed and fury that it sent be staggering backward.

“You!” I heard him say now to Bosun, as I rubbed my face and tried to blink away the tears. “He’s been your little confidant for all these weeks. Did you put him up to this?”

“No, Sir!” said Bosun, shocked and affronted. “I sent him home as soon as you told me to, Captain. I didn’t know anything about this.” He looked straight at me now. “Little imp must have come up with it all on his own.”

Captain considered this for a moment, then wheeled back on me. He reared as if he were going to throw the bow at me then apparently thought better of it, and still clutching it marched back toward the shore. Bosun followed without a glance.

When I reached the beach, the Metal Men were gone. They had left without parley, and their rowboat was already arriving at the ship. I heard a scraping of metal, which I knew was the anchor weighing. The mighty horn sounded again, as it had on the first day. The engines resumed their low, sad song, and the ship began to pull back from the shore. I sat down in the sand to watch. I could not help but admire the poetic mass of the mighty vessel as it glided backward and to the right, ponderously slowed as the engines shifted to forward, and then progressed southward. The late-morning sun glinted off the magnificent metal hide of the starboard hull.

As the ship pulled alongside the town, the metal tubes along its sides, whose purposes I had never divined, erupted and belched flame. The forest behind me shook with the noise. For a moment, I took it as some kind of valedictory salute.

Then, the shells hit. They struck the gate and the ramparts; they struck the long houses and the outhouses and the towers and the parapets and the poles and the carvings, and Troy, our wooden metropolis, went up like a match.

I was eight when Perry Cole moved into Blacksburg. She was special ed. She was tall with string for hair, and no one even saw her. All the special ed kids were invisible, except when they weren’t and we’d snicker and watch our boys toss paper at them, make kissing faces at the skittish girls. She wasn’t dumb, not even slow. Perry was quiet, silent really. She never answered her teachers before coming to our town—at least that’s what I figure now because I’ve talked to her. I don’t mean to say that I was her friend, but just that I knew maybe a bit of her.

At eight, kids already know who they are and who they’re supposed to be according to all the grown ups, yes, but also all of the other kids. And they know where those two people—the real and the intended—intersect, and where they fall terribly short of expectations. I was falling short in all sorts of areas. First of all, I was clumsy. Second, I was not pretty; surely every mother worth half her salt tells a daughter she’ll break hearts—mine never did. Third, my handwriting was for the birds. These are the ways in which an eight year old fails her parents, friends, and self.

We were in the latter half of second grade which meant lessons in cursive. My hand cramped up every day and once I even landed on the nurse’s cot for the afternoon. That’s where I met her. She was in there sitting on the bed’s pillow, her back against the wall. She made me nervous with her pale face and corduroy jumpsuit. Of course I knew her from recess and reading times after lunch, when all second and third graders came in for Little House on the Prairie read to us alternately by the third grade teachers. But she’d always trailed in behind rocking boys or shaking girls—each one of them clinging to a rope that with the way two boys in particular rocked back and forth, must have given a terrible burn to the palm. She wasn’t like them that was clear, at least to me. Nevertheless, I was eight and knew so much of the workings of our miniature society.

During recess, Jana, Michelle, Caroline, and I played four-square. Jana was always king; I was always in the dunce square. There was social order on the blacktop, too. The one four-square grid went to us. The blonde boys swung around on the monkey bars. Those who were almost blonde, almost rich, and almost smart, hung around each circle just hoping we’d call red rover. Girls with curly hair dragged their toes in the dusty path along the field, tugging at the drawstrings of their sweatshirt hoods while their counterparts, the curly-haired boys spat and tussled over who said what and why. And most of the special ed. kids trailed around the playground equipment holding hands, running off when one of the regulars moved near.

Jana’s parents were rich. My father was a chemist at the university. I could not compete in hand-me-downs from cousin Dale. Jana’s headbands were satin ribbons to match every outfit. Mine were thin plastic bands that often snapped in my hands by lunchtime. She wore black and white saddle shoes and pink and green Sportos on rainy days. I wore blue canvas sneakers from the $5.00 bin at Woolco. Jana was mature. I threw temper tantrums for dracaena marginatas or parrot shirts or my own camera; my mother often left me at the store. My position, even as dunce, was precarious; my straight yellow hair maybe my only saving grace.

So it was Jana we watched. She never got out in four-square, and as king always made up the most creative, though frequently terrifying, rules. “Double bounces only!” Jana shouted. “Say your middle name between each bounce!”

She served into Michelle’s square. Bounce, “Anna,” bounce.

To Caroline. Bounce, “Abigail,” bounce.

A names: very respectable. We all smiled for them.

Caroline threw into Jana’s square; we never let too many throws go by without Jana being part of them. Bounce, “Margot,” bounce. And she pronounced the T. How lovely, how exotic.

To me. Oh, God. Bounce, “Lallage,” chicken feet. My own bounce landed on my own feet and skidded to the swings and then was gone down the hillside. It was bad enough I’d had to tell them Lallage. I ran after the ball, hearing Caroline and Michelle behind me: “Lallage?” “She said ‘Lallage.’” “Sounds like a disease.”

You see, these weren’t my good friends. These were my make do friends. I didn’t have good friends, and while sometimes I got confused and was surprised by them saying my middle name sounded like a disease that involved hair falling out and eyeballs drying up into rocks, I mostly expected that sort of thing.

So I took my time getting the ball which I’d lost sight of down the hill beyond the blacktop. That’s where I first saw her close-up. She was at the bottom of the little hill holding our red ball. Truly, she wasn’t really ugly. Maybe only partially ugly, or maybe I’m veering here, being too kind to myself. What frightened me was being near her. We had theories as eight year olds, about touching and breathing near kids who were different. We held our noses. We sucked our arms tight to our sides to avoid the slightest brush against any kid with white hair, an even-out shoe for a leg four inches too short, or gold chains around the necks of nine year old boys.

There was a boy named Will who started that year with Jana and Michelle and Caroline and me. He stunk something awful, like chemicals and basements and my house’s felt-floored screened-in-porch when it rained. His hair was slick with oil, finding its natural clumps and cowlicks in so much body extrusion. He was late every day, all day long everywhere we went he was late getting there. He lived far out from school I’m sure, in the mountains with no running water and those house-raising pig roasts. Really, I have no idea—it just seemed to me that he had to be a Grit in his silky shirts unbuttoned to the second rib, and tight, baby-blue jeans.

One morning when he was extra late and our teacher, Mrs. Gorman was extra frazzled, she told us he peed on himself regularly and that’s why he smelled so bad. She was like that, couldn’t keep a secret to save her life, resented us failing to memorize our vocab words. The least little thing could trigger her, and so when she sat down at her desk that day and let out one of her endless sighs, we knew it was coming, we just didn’t know who it would be this time. We began dropping things—erasers, crayons, SRA readers. We couldn’t take that long moment of not knowing. We toe-tapped and rocked the feet of our desks and felt our eyes wet and our cheeks hot. But that time it was Will, not even there that day. We were safe, each one of us, and seemed to form a pact that quietly swore we’d never miss a day of school, and blamed him for this little trauma to our fragile psyches. A kid can’t live down such a thing when all the desks around his inch farther away each day. He lasted only one week more at Margaret Beeks. Then he was off to Christiansburg where, no doubt, he fit in just fine.

So there I was standing at the top of the hill when I saw Perry down at the foot of the hill—tall and still growing, big enough to do something if that’s what was in her. What I’d like to say is that I thought of all the ways she and I were painfully the same. Rather, in my head I measured distances between her and me, between her mouth and the red ball, between our eyes. And that necessary distance came up short. I ran back to the four-square grid where the girls were chalking in suns and moons, and ponies on daisied hillsides. I told them the ball was gone.

I made myself lose Perry offering up the ball to me, made myself forget that she might bring it up to us. I grabbed a pink piece of chalk, though I wanted blue—concessions were in order—and rubbed a heart with an arrow through it, then printed each of our names, first names only, in my square. Perry came back up from the hill and sat on a swing watching us, her knees cramped with how low the swing put her long legs to the ground, our ball spinning in her hands.

Caroline saw her and whispered something too soft for me to hear. Michelle swore, “I’m never playing four-square again ‘til they get us a new ball. With the stickers still on—just to be sure!” Jana turned her back to the swings.

The girls teased me with my middle name from then on. I was never again Elizabeth or Liz or Lizzie or even Betsy. I was Lallage—Lallie when they were feeling affectionate, which wasn’t very often. All the kids picked this up. Even Mrs. Gorman, who wrote Lallie on my assignments when I forgot to write any name at all.

So this year was rough on me already. Now there I was, locked in by the nurse and arm’s length from Perry.

You see what the problem was, don’t you? Some sort of muscle spasm in my right hand, my writing hand. I couldn’t finish the lessons, found myself stumped by the middle of the page. I could feel Mrs. Gorman stroll by, then come back, then stand there behind me while spelling out new words in the sentence to the rest of the kids, while I struggled with an uppercase Q. Mrs. Gorman loved throwing in the Qs; little girls in her sentences were always quiet; she began every sentence Quite possibly. Not to mention all the quick quills.

So I was already dangerously close to being on the outside of my own classroom. I clung to that line. I tried. I practiced my letters at home, with Mother shut into her bedroom, Daddy napping on the sofa in his den—but still my hand would clench up so fast, and my loops never were graceful, were always hard triangles. Jana had already painted her name in all cursive onto a pair of white canvas Keds. My mother bought me a pair of plastic cream colored slip-ons, but I could only print. And so I wrote Lallie for them to see I was willing to give in on quite a lot.

The day Mrs. Gorman sent me to the nurse my hand began shaking even before she gave us quince. Michelle shot me a look. My fingers clutched the pencil and would not pry open even when Mrs. Gorman bent over me trying to settle the hand. My paper swung all around my desk for my hand rocking as it was. I tried with my left arm to reel it in and steady myself. But then I thought about Will and his one day gone from here. My pencil tip gauged the paper and ripped long gullies down the page. They all knew, something was terribly and permanently wrong with me. When Mrs. Gorman whispered to me that I should go to the nurse, I walked the whole hallway with the pencil still in my clutch.

Medicine of every level, save veterinary, was casual in Blacksburg. I’d broken my ankle just the year before and after convincing my parents to take me to the hospital—for hours they insisted I should still be crying if it were truly broken—my leg was wrapped in such a loose and slanty cast that when I was again allowed to walk on the foot without crutches, the whole leg almost gave out from under me; I’ve been spraining my ankle regularly now for years. Our school nurse was no more interested in careful pursuit of the tenets of medicine. She had no intention of calling my mother or checking me for a fever or speaking soothingly to lessen the terror living in my hand. She read Mrs. Gorman’s note—in beautifully-looped cursive, of course—took a look at the pencil sticking out of my fist, pointed me towards the second cot in the other room, and shut the door. And as I’ve said now a couple of times, there was Perry Cole.

The room was yellow for the hum and glare coming through the swirled plastic sheeting of the light-box overhead. The walls were tiled pool-green halfway up. The beds were skinnier than real beds. They creaked and inched around on their rickety feet when you tried to get in one. There was a little white enamel sink chipped around the faucet and drain, glass canisters of cotton and tongue depressors, and thermometers in electric blue wash, all squeezed onto the backsplash. The door pushed in at us every now and then, still latched in its frame, just the life of the outer door breathing, making it try to move. A first grade blackboard was on the backside of our wall, and Miss Kelly’s chalk went on scratching it. So near the lunch room, we could smell the pizza and canned corn, the little bricks of brownie. We could hear the single-file feet marching through the hall. And we could feel the way we weren’t a part of it so profoundly, as a real terror of who says what when one is absent, for cause. Soon the green air of this closet room overtook lunch, and that’s all there was.

We. She was there, as I said.

You see here is where I have trouble, and so, hoping any of my circumstances might matter, I tell you about cursive lessons or my mother, how awful my friends were to me or the panic of being shut away from a class that may very well be hearing that you once stole a freshwater pearl ring from Dottie’s desk before she was held back for screwing up the tail end of the alphabet, or that sometimes you can’t fall asleep without your angry mother folded onto your tiny corner chair reading the paper and hating you. Perry isn’t someone I like to think about. But I’ve been thinking of her an awful lot lately, and trying to reconcile who I am and who I think I am. I cannot do that without thinking of Perry. So here she is.

She was sitting up on the bed, her back against the wall. She wore a green corduroy jumpsuit that zipped up the front. Her hair was maybe blonde with shadows or grease. And she looked right at me. I remember the sound of the cotton paper over the mattress. I sat on the other cot, hoping it wouldn’t tip. I remember being afraid of her so I smiled. I remember worrying that whatever she had were catchy. I remember wanting to go to the nurse and ask to go back to class, though I knew she’d never let me; clinic was like prison—release had nothing to do with wellness, but with a teacher’s note walked down to the office, an arbitrary time she considered served, whatever crime—cough, spasm—forgiven but remembered for parent conference day. I lay down.

What happened then was that Perry Cole talked to me. The girl everyone else thought retarded and mute talked to me. “Why didn’t you want your ball back?” she said slick as all. I couldn’t answer her. I stared up at the ceiling for what seemed like all of lunchtime and half of recess.

I pretended to sleep, squinted up my eyelids to make her go away. But she wouldn’t. She didn’t even stop talking. “You’re not asleep,” she said. I squeezed my eyes even tighter. “A person doesn’t sleep with her eyes all screwed up like that. It’s supposed to be real natural, real easy.” I breathed deep and let it out as natural and easy as I could. Perry Cole laughed. She laughed at me. But not a mean laugh. Not a Michelle kind of a laugh. A nice laugh, a laugh you make when you like someone. I opened my eyes and looked right at her.

“What’s wrong with your hand?” Her voice was like Caroline’s or even Jana’s—casual and happy and confident it would never be turned away. I remember that surprising me. And so I answered her against all the better judgment in me that let me hold my breath to pass right by the Grit table in the lunchroom so I wouldn’t inhale their pungent smell of unclean bodies and hormones coming too soon—they were always being held back so their bodies were years ahead of the rest of us—and the better judgment that hoped my mother would bring home the right shoes, the satin hair ribbons instead of yarn.

“Cursive,” I said.

“Oh,” and the way she said it turned the world on end. She said oh as if she felt sorry for me. As if she saw what was wrong with me just as clear as if I rode the special ed. bus to school every day. I cried. I turned in to the wall, buried my face in the pillow, and sobbed for all the ways I was not Jana.

Perry touched my back then, she said I shouldn’t be afraid of it, and I had no idea what she meant.

“They’ll hold me back,” I whispered when I had enough breath to speak at all. “They will.”

You won’t believe what she said next. She had this way of talking that mystified me, that still seems so wise. And it is possible that I’ve recast her as swami over the years, rewritten and adjusted her to make my life easier. But this old-woman girl is truly how I remember her. “You’re afraid to be marked,” she said. And all I could think then was that she must be older than me, than us, that she must be in fifth even sixth grade.

She watched me and talked to me as though she’d been waiting a long time for me. Like I’d made appointments with her before but never showed. And now here I was and for some reason that mattered to her. She saw me in a way my make do friends never did. To them I was their reflection but slightly off. I wasn’t a person, an eight year old girl failing cursive, but nice and smart even if her shoes were plastic or blue canvas, even if her mother tied her too-wispy pigtails in fat yarns. I’m not sure what I was to Perry, but maybe years and years before, maybe I was her.

“We just moved from Concord,” she said.

“Where’s that?”

“It’s nowhere,” she said. “Sarah—that’s my mom—said we probably won’t stay for long either.”

“My mother’s name is Sarah. Do you really call her by her name?”

“Sure,” she said like that wasn’t unnatural at all. “We’re like that.” Then Perry looked down at her feet, sort of twisted her ankles around on the paper. “My mother is the ugliest woman you’ve ever seen,” she said.

“Do you love her?” I asked, because a question like that made sense to me.

“Sure,” she shrugged, “sometimes. Sarah says we’re all of a sort—her and me, yeah, but everyone, really. Even you.”

“What sort of a sort?” I asked not sure I’d like the answer.

“She says no one is ever satisfied by her, but that that’s not particular to her as a person. She says to quit wishing for it.”

“For what?”

“To feel happy. To feel loved,” Perry said, leaning forward now, excited. “Don’t you see? It will come but then go, and Sarah says it’s coming and going both have nothing to do with a person, with her, with me, with you.”

“With me?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “yeah. We’re all bound to get knocked around; we’ll all have to pack up late into a night and then start driving even though it’s not even light yet and Sarah can’t see to drive well in the night. We all have to get away quick sometimes. Sarah says that’s the order of things.” Then she looked me up and down real good. “Maybe,” she said, “your bruise sits in your hand, Lizzie.” She said Lizzie. There I was before her my own self.

The bell rang and the nurse opened the door. Perry went one way. I went the other, my head swimming. But on my walk home, I barely listened to Caroline, barely noticed anything around me, except for the honeysuckle fearlessly climbing the kudzu sweet with hope. All I could think of was Perry and her mother.

At supper, I watched my own mother bring in the plates, her name resting between my tongue and teeth. I think I almost said it several times. And at one of those moments I became suddenly aware of how easy it would be for our Sarahs to be the wrong Sarahs. I could have been the one moving from nowhere-Concord, the one nobody knew, the one playing dumb to teachers because I didn’t feel like answering their questions. My plastic slip-ons were no different from Perry’s corduroy jumpsuit.

I was imagining dinner with Perry’s Sarah, sitting across from her, looking at my plate of casserole instead of her face. I wondered if pieces of her face were missing or just rearranged. What did it take to be the ugliest woman alive? But then I thought of her plainly: a woman without a spark—Daddy was always talking about spark those days, something lit beneath the skin—just a nothing face, nothing eyes, just nothing everywhere you looked—not so much painful, then, but painless. I wasn’t sure Daddy would notice if our Sarahs were switched, but I knew I would.

When she was in the kitchen rummaging, I asked him because I was flirting with it, with the idea of not fence-sitting anymore. “Am I ugly?”

“You’re lovely. Eat.” He pushed the noodles around on his plate. “Your mother, well . . . .”

They’d been sullen for days and I never knew why. Just sometimes they didn’t care a whole lot and so he would find a way to tell me he could have done better, or just maybe differently. I can’t remember a time I didn’t know that.

“May I please be excused?” I lay my napkin aside my plate and left him there alone.

I went to my room, worked at my Qs but they were no good so I dragged my tangled fingers through the letters in the two names I couldn’t lose that night, and then brushed my teeth for bed. She came to me just as I slipped inside the covers. I expected her and the flourish of her tugging the blankets up to my chin, her knuckly fingers wiping at my bangs, a few kisses scattered in my hair. “He loves me, you know,” she said, and I pulled at the blanket trying to cover my head but I could still see her and feel the way she wanted me to look at her. None of it was fair. “You don’t hear it all, Lizzie. At night, he says he still dreams of marrying me. That I’m the one he loves and there’s no undoing it.”

“Please,” I moaned, begging her to stop. I wasn’t a part of them.

She tugged against my grip on the satin binding. “You need to know this. I don’t want you thinking . . . he hates me.” She stood up from my bed and stormed out. Divorce wasn’t ever a possibility for us, so that’s what I dreamed of.

The next day Mrs. Gorman sent me back to the clinic when my hand seized up again. And I was glad for it, Perry was all I’d been thinking of and I just knew she’d be there. I could feel her all around me.

She sat up when I walked in, smiled with half of her face like she knew a secret, and found her place in yesterday’s conversation just as though we’d never left each other, never lay in beds farther apart, never practiced the other’s name in cursive letters that littered our exercise tablets, never dreamed our mothers dancing barefoot and trailing ribbons from tambourines.

“Sarah’s bruise sits on her face. Where everyone can see it, shapes her skin really.” She raised her hand to her cheek, but then rubbed at the worn elbow of her jumper instead, seeming not to want to touch her real self. “‘That’s how we die,’ Sarah says, ‘little words break us down until they’re all we are.’ And then we die.”

“I don’t want to die.” I was scared. Something was happening inside Perry Cole and it seemed to involve me, even maybe depend on me. I could see all her words plain as day in her face before she said them, before she even knew to say them. She was becoming in that little closet room, lying back on the wrinkled paper sheet, she was coming to conclusions about her world.

“Sarah barely spoke on the drive, barely even breathed,” she said. “When we pulled in behind grocery stores and slept tucked against the spare tire, I often woke alone and saw her crying under the midnight lamps.” Perry stopped a minute, pulled her jumpsuit zipper up and back.

I wondered, when she could string a sentence like that, why she chose to be silent all the time, especially knowing the trouble it got her in. Even more, I wondered who I was to be told. “Where’s your father?”

“We don’t talk about him,” she said. “We did, then we didn’t, then we went back, now Sarah cries at night and wears cowgirl boots out to the bars.” She said this staring up into the yellow glow, her pupils gone small as pricks in paper; she said it as though speaking of strangers. “There was someone else she started picking up the house for, and dancing his name around, but he didn’t last I guess. She woke me up one night too late and said we were going back to my dad. That was all wrong, too. It’s just us now. Sarah says that’s best ‘because the fewer people around, the less hurt each one of us is.’”

She could have meant me. And I wondered if I was part of them, or part of us. I didn’t mention the ball. But for all the times I’d looked at Perry Cole and held my breath, I ached. I held my stomach and squeezed my arms around my sides.

“I suspect Sarah’s wrong about a lot of things,” she said. From her cot Perry reached her raggedy fingers over to me and pulled that day’s pencil from my hand. My fingers unfolded and my white palm stretched the long slick impression there. I told her we’d be best friends. I said she should come home to my house to play. I wanted to grab hold of her, hold on tight for when I’d forget and see Jana’s perfectly full, shiny hair, or Michelle glaring back at me knowing what a fraud I was.

I told her we would walk home on the bike path together. I said she could stay for dinner. I told her she was pretty because, in a way, she was. There was breath to her. There was life.

Mrs. Gorman’s favorite, curly-headed David, came with a note for me a half hour before school was over this second day. Caroline and Jana asked if I was all right, though Michelle kept her distance. When we left at three, they were all too near to me. Perry Cole was waiting on the side steps, the ones the four of us passed every day on the way to Michelle’s bus and Jana’s mother waiting for her in the yellow Volvo. Caroline and I always walked the bike path together. There was only so much planning an eight year old could do, I suppose, and I’d thought of none of it.

When she saw me, Perry stood up, her corduroy jumpsuit greener than ever in the April light. She smiled. She hopped down each step and started towards us like it would all be okay. I wanted to run. Out in the air, in the light of Blacksburg, out front of Margaret Beeks Elementary, where just months ago we’d each one of us released floating balloons tied with names of books we’d read and Principal Morgan noted my card especially for its lengthy list of books I’d never even opened—out in the universe of that world, where buses braked and gassed and waited, where everything around me had hold of me, I simply could not find a place for Perry Cole.

I kept on walking, and though she approached the four of us, and though she dared to see us, no fissure of sidewalk swallowed me up. Caroline did not whisper, “Cooties.” Jana did not giggle.

I walked faster, trying to get us past Perry before we’d meet up. I looked down, to the side, across the street—anywhere but at Perry’s face. But it was too late, she’d jumped the hill and was straight ahead, willowy tall as an eighth grader.

I braced myself for what would surely happen now. She was coming right at us but Michelle did not try to stare her down, did not suggest tripping Perry Cole. In fact it was as though each of my make do friends would smile as they walked right past her, would curtsy and kiss my glorious friend.

She stopped right there before us, foolish as all. She shoved her hands in her pockets. “Is this the way?” she asked me still believing.

Then I remembered the red ball, Perry at the foot of the hill, measuring distances. I imagined what I looked like standing there, deciding if I should let her toss it to me. I saw myself—me in green jumpsuit, me with snarled and unclean hair, me too tall and old for second grade or fourth grade, me too tall and old and ugly, yes I was ugly, too ugly for any real friends. I was Perry Cole.

I did what I had to do then. There was no choice. I was an eight year old reflection if exceedingly off, failing everyone I knew, dependent upon my make do friends for any chance at surpassing my natural situation. Even if they weren’t themselves that day.

And so I said it. I thought of Sarah at home, ugly ugly but knowing everything there was to know. And I proved her right. I planted my feet squarely to Perry Cole. It didn’t matter that I was in love. I looked her in the eye though what I saw was black come over the world. And I shouted: “Go home, Retard.”

What kills me is that she was ready, even maybe expected it in me. I don’t think I was even hurting her, the way she looked right inside me she just knew it was who I am. Perry Cole knew exactly what was happening, what would happen to me for the rest of my childhood after my second year attempting cursive.

“Go on,” I shouted. I could feel Jana watching me, embarrassed, ashamed, seeing me. Perry Cole and I stood square to each other. There was nothing more, except that she never seemed to move out from in front of me, steadily watching to see what I’d choose all these years, to see how wrong she’d been to talk that once in the clinic. And in my dreams, our mothers, our Sarahs dance barefoot with ribbons trailing from tambourines.

I heard last year that Perry’s married, five daughters. I can’t imagine it. In spite of all the ways I proved Sarah right, somehow she was wrong for Perry. I don’t understand how a thing like that can happen—though Daddy knew it, something about spark maybe. Perry Cole moved again shortly thereafter. And I suppose she did a lot of thinking things through out there in the way back of Sarah’s Impala parked under the lamps. And so all I know of social order and progression is clearly wrong. Station means nothing. But even circumstance—nothing. It’s Daddy’s spark that drives the soul. That’s where Perry shines and I barely flicker.

I’ve spent years looking for her—hoping all those words weren’t really killing her, wanting to see Sarah and prove her wrong about the number of people one has around increasing the amount of hurt to astronomical proportions. But I know she’s not wrong.

Now I wish I’d slipped into her life, Perry Cole’s. Taken her Sarah, who’s been dying all her life, for mine. Slept in grocery lots all along the Appalachians while my mother cried for a man or something, some other life. But none of it is transferable, all that wisdom in the school clinic years ago, from mother to daughter to me, a momentary friend—it was all lost, just words, no way for absorption, no way to alter the soul of a person. There are those who dance, and then there are those fearing the rhythm and blood. I think I’ve never been more than that.

Out front of the school, that’s not where it ended. I had to see her. Glimpse her. The ugliest woman I’d ever seen—I had to see her. So I followed Perry home one day. The opposite direction from the bike path and Tech campus. Over near the K-Mart and the house with Shetland ponies behind a four foot chain-link fence. Some newer row houses gone up just a year before a block away. But Perry’s house was older, a nondescript beige square of a house with white shutters and door, a green asphalt roof. A gravel drive and a water-blue station wagon parked a little askew, like maybe she’d been rushing.

I sat on the curb across the street, tried to blend in to shadow beneath the silver of a truck’s bumper. She was in there, had to be. So I waited. Near dusk Perry took out a black sack of garbage to a can in front of the car, the side-door banging shut behind her in and out. I bit at the corners of my mouth, sucked them, pushed at them with my fingertips, ached with sitting in almost dark so far from home. I was ready to start back when it happened.

On came the side light. Out she came. Sarah Cole, the ugliest woman ever. Her nose hard, swollen, and bumped in several places. Her eyes slightly uneven while also being too close. Her mouth a mess of car-wreck teeth. Her body one long lump of unrecognizable bulges. And top it all off with those clunking boots and a stained and sunken-in cowboy hat. Dressed in a red tee-shirt and tight, painfully too-tight straightleg blue jeans with scuffed and worn knees and seat.

I didn’t notice Perry in the doorway watching her ‘til she called, “Ma, don’t go tonight.”

“Perr, give it a rest.”

“Eat first?”

“I’m going.”

“There isn’t anybody out there.”

Sarah didn’t answer, just stood still a minute.

I could barely hear Perry now, so quiet through the screen. “There’s nobody out there, Mama. Please.”

Sarah dangled her keys, tossed an enormous purse onto the front seat and was off, the red of her taillights all over me.

Lights came on, one two three, for Perry walking through the house and not wanting to be alone in the near-dark. Then she was in a window, looking to be washing dishes. I mapped out just what I’d say, rehearsed it just like next year I’d be singing timestables before the whole class. And if she wouldn’t open the door or if she started to slam it in my face, I’d beg and plead and tell her what a miserable, wrecked, dreadful thing I was.

I was not prepared for her to smile at me. To offer me macaroni and pop. To want me in her house. Even without Sarah there to know it was me the other day. Without anyone to point with.

“Lizzie,” she said and sort of hugged the open door.

I swallowed wrong and gulped a minute to get the spit out of my lungs.

“You wanna watch ‘Alice?’”

I still couldn’t straighten out my breathing and swallowing enough to think what to say or even be able to start saying it.

“Do you wanna eat? We already ate, but I’ll make another box.”

This wasn’t Perry. So much talk before, so much wholeness and clarity. All of Sarah’s words and this was what they amounted to? A blue station wagon parked too fast, worn-out Levi’s, boots and a big purse going out to lay next-game quarters and her strange hips on the pool games of college boys at Mr. Fooz; this too-tall girl wading through her days quietly thinking it all through, coming up with all the answers, knowing it all, knowing everything about me and Jana and everyone’s mother. And this was who she was. A little girl bleating mama like a lamb.

Wanting someone like me to sit with her, no tricks or traps. Just wanting me to sit beside her and eat her box mix of macaroni and cheese. Wanting to tell me everything again and again. Because maybe that’s all that ever mattered, making sense of it in her head. Passing Sarah’s words through her mouth even though they didn’t change Sarah at all. Didn’t change Perry. Didn’t even change me. So I walked away. I went home.

The boy’s body hit the hood of the Toyota, slammed off the windshield, and then slid, falling out of sight from where Marie stood. She thought it might have been a performance, it happened so quickly, but there was no mistaking the terrible, high-whistle screeching of hot rubber on asphalt, the dull thud as the kid’s body hit the street. His bike crumpled under the front wheels as though it was fake, made of foil. People flooded the street, retail workers from the stores, good Samaritans pulling over in their cars to help, but Marie was frozen, waiting for someone to tell her it was just a joke.

The kid hadn’t even had time to scream, but a woman driving by wailed through her open window. At first Marie thought the woman knew the kid, her cry had been so heartbreaking. But then she began to think of it as a transfer of sound, as if the screams that the boy himself was unable to release had been conveyed through the air and into the woman in the car, who was able, finally, to let them out. Marie whispered, “Dear God,” and pinched the inside of her wrist, something she’d done since she was a child.

They went to the boy, hovering over him in a circle, everyone afraid to touch him. He was obviously dead. It was the man behind the wheel of the car whom Marie noticed. He couldn’t have seen the boy coming with all the cars parked along the side of the street. The kid probably hadn’t even looked, had darted out into traffic just before the light turned, and the driver, probably trying to beat the yellow light, could not have stopped in time.

When Marie walked over, the man was still sitting in his car, staring straight ahead at the mass of people. She thought he was hurt, but when she tapped on the glass with her knuckle, he looked over at her, blinked a few times, and then fumbled for the door. He must’ve been Marie’s dad’s age, in his sixties, his brown hair thinning on top, and Marie felt a stab through her heart when she met his eyes. Clear blue, the color of a glassy sky. She saw the shine of panic in them.

“Are you okay, Sir?”

He didn’t answer, just struggled to get out of the car. He was tall, his legs long and thin. He placed his hands against his hips to stop them from shaking, making a deep sound in his throat. He bent over at the waist, his head resting against the trunk of his car.

Then he retched, his body convulsing, and he vomited on his back tire and the street. Marie turned away, embarrassed to witness something so private, intimate, raw. When he stood up again, wiping his mouth, she had the urge to pull him from the scene before anyone came. He turned to her, met her eyes, and said, “Thank you,” his bottom lip trembling. “Thank you.”

But before she could say anything to him, the first police car arrived, its siren wailing loudly in the cold street. The noise drowned out any words Marie might have said and then people pushed between them, jostling her to the sidewalk, and she forgot what she would’ve said anyway.

**

Bud was in the kitchen when she got home, whistling while he made a salami sandwich. He didn’t look up when she entered. She stood in the doorway watching him slap pieces of salami on the bread. She knew before he did it that he would squeeze the mustard out in a perfect spiral on the bread.

“Take a load off,” Bud said without turning around.

Marie walked behind him and rested her head on his back, smelling his shampoo. This, her kitchen—the hum of the refrigerator, the broken clock above the sink, the plants that needed watering—was familiar and safe. She brushed her finger over a crack in the counter. Bud moved away from her, putting the mustard back in the refrigerator, and she almost lost her balance.

“I saw an accident,” she said. “It was really bad.”

He looked at her then and raised his eyebrows. “Where?” His eyes flicked over her and then at the counter, where he gestured with his hand before she could answer. “Can you hand me those pickles?”

“Someone died. A little boy.” She shuddered, still in her coat. Her voice sounded too loud and shaky.

“That’s terrible.” He looked concerned now, her silence making him stop. “Are you okay?”

Instead of answering, she walked into the living room. Bud followed, watching as she removed her shoes, tucked her feet into the cushions of the couch and switched on the television. “We have to watch the news.”

It was the lead story. On the television, the reporter’s face took up most of the screen, ambulances and fire trucks over his shoulder. They didn’t show the man Marie had helped, but the reporter said his name was Raymond Balcham.

“Raymond Balcham,” Marie repeated softly, thrilled that she’d learned something more about him. He was from Old Forge, the town she had grown up in.

“I feel bad for that man,” she said, pulling her coat around her. “He looked so sad. It was awful. To hit a child. I can’t imagine.”

“He was probably drunk or something. I don’t know how you can miss a kid on a bike, for Christ’s sake,” Bud said, chewing on his sandwich. He sat back on the couch, tugging on his jeans.

“He wasn’t drunk, Bud. I was there with him. Why do you have to be so negative all the time?”

She switched off the television. He looked at her. “Hey, I was watching that. Don’t be mean.”

Marie took his crumpled napkin into the kitchen and tossed it in the trash. She swept the bread crumbs off the counter and into the garbage and put away the dishes on the drying rack. How many years now had she been cleaning up for Bud? Over and over again, the same routine. Make the bed in the morning, clean up after his food trail, bring his shoes upstairs to the closet. She opened the refrigerator and slammed it.

Outside, the wind whistled. It had started to snow. It was funny how her house, which minutes before had seemed quiet and safe, now seemed like a prison. She wanted to scream now—for the boy, for the old man, for herself. How quickly things could change.

**

A few days later, driving home from work in a light freezing rain, Marie gripped the steering wheel, afraid she was going to slide. The highway was crowded with cars going home for the day. After leaning on her brakes for the tenth time, Marie pulled off the highway on a stretch just before the expressway, behind a series of restaurants downtown where, as a teenager, she’d smoked cigarettes with friends.

She picked up the newspaper she’d bought at the convenience store near her office. She wanted to read about the accident alone, before she went home. In the past few days, there had been several stories on the little boy – full-page spreads in which they interviewed his family, his teachers. But what interested Marie were the reports on Balcham. It looked as though they were going to charge him for manslaughter, but his lawyers argued it was an accident and that no one was to blame. That morning Marie had looked up his name in the phone book. Only three Balchams were listed—Raymond F. was between Julie C. and Thomas P, and his address on South Franklin Street was only a few blocks from her parents’ house in Old Forge.

That day there was no mention of the accident in the newspaper. Disappointed and restless, Marie got out of her car, walked to the edge of the highway. The rain had let up a little and cars passed in a blur, shaking the ground. Alongside the road, trash collected, pressed flat from the tires or caked in mud. Marie could make out a bottle of Budweiser, plastic cups, a piece of a garbage bag. She had the urge to pick them up, take them to a trash can. She wandered slowly up the road, wondering what she was doing. The mist hit her in the face, coated her hair in a fine film. Above her, a sign for the interstate, New York City, pointed towards an exit half a mile down the road.

Heart pounding, Marie turned and faced the road. She extended her arm and thumb in the cold, watching as several cars passed, the drivers not even glancing at her. This is absurd, she thought. She felt very thin, almost transparent, could feel her breath like cold, cold peppermint running down her throat and into her belly.

A large, gray pick-up truck slowed as it approached and the driver waved at her, a man around her age, his baseball cap pressed tightly atop his mop of curly hair. He grinned as he passed her, the right side of his mouth turned upward in a way that reminded her of someone, although she couldn’t think who. The truck was rusting on the sides, like paint splashes around the door, and Marie could smell burning oil. The driver tapped his horn and slowed, his tires kicking up gravel as he pulled to the side of the road.

She thought about it for a moment, staring at the stopped truck, its right blinker flashing. The man was watching her in his rear view mirror. She could almost feel the cold vinyl passenger seat of his truck through her thin dress pants, hear the static radio she imagined was playing. Just like that.

Then she pulled her coat around her and ran, back where she’d come from, back to her car. She was laughing, her hair curling up around her neck. She’d never tried to hitchhike before. By the time she got back inside her car, rubbing her hands in front of the vents, she was out of breath, gasping for air, her cheeks red and raw.

**

One week after the accident, Marie’s mother turned 57 and she and Bud drove to her parents’ house in Old Forge after church to celebrate. Marie made a red velvet cake, her mother’s favorite, which she balanced on her lap as Bud drove. The volume of the radio was loud so they couldn’t talk.

Her mother greeted her with a kiss. She smelled of roses, her makeup thick. “Happy Birthday, Rhonda,” Bud said awkwardly, standing in the doorway as Marie’s mother exclaimed about the cake.

They sat down at the table, passed around spaghetti and meatballs, salad, bread, making polite comments about the food. Marie kept looking out the window to see if it had started snowing like the weather service had predicted.

“So what’s new?” Marie’s mom asked her, breaking the silence.

Marie wiped her mouth with her napkin. “You know that accident with the little boy last week? The one on Wyoming Avenue? I saw that. I was there when it happened. The man who hit him, he lives on South Franklin Street near the bakery.”

Bud looked up from his plate, shrugged at Marie’s dad. “She’s been talking about this all week. It really upset her.”

“That’s awful,” her mother said. “How old was he?”

“He was around Dad’s age, maybe sixty?” Marie said.

Her mother frowned. “Not that guy, the little boy!”

Her father looked up from his plate, picking up the last bits of pasta with his fingers and placing them on his fork to eat. “This is great uplifting conversation to be having on your mother’s birthday. You know she’s getting up there in years.”

“Well, anyway, I was questioned by the police and everything. As a witness. It was scary.” Marie pulled her hair away from her face, her cheeks hot. “I felt really awful for the man who hit that kid. He was so shaken.”
No one answered. Bud took another plateful of spaghetti. Marie put her fork down and stared at the top of her husband’s head.

“I saw him throw up, all over the road and his car. I was the only one who saw it.”

“Marie! Not when we’re eating.” Her mother took a drink of her iced tea, fanned her face.

“This is how it’s been all week, Rhonda,” Bud said. “I told her it was unhealthy.”

“Could you not talk about me like I’m not sitting right here in front of you?”

“Marie…”

“No. I don’t understand why everyone is treating me like I need therapy. It was something that happened and it’s been on my mind, okay? That’s all.” She stood up. Her mother put her hand on her arm.

“Finish dinner, Marie.”
“I am finished. It’s warm in here. I need to go for a walk.” She got up from the table, tucking her napkin beside her plate.

“But it’s freezing outside. And we’re about to have cake,” her mother said.

“You’ll catch pneumonia,” her father added, but he trailed off as she pulled her coat on.

“I’ll be right back.”

For a Sunday, the streets were nearly deserted. The cold had driven people inside. Marie had forgotten to bring gloves and thrust her hands far in her pockets. She knew the neighborhood well, knew exactly where to go. South Franklin Street was on a hill, and the houses looked like they were baked into the side of it, tilted like steps. His house was in the middle of the street, an ordinary looking white two-story with black shutters. She had half expected it to be dark, rundown, covered in gloom—a dark cloud hanging over it, she realized with a smile, but it looked like every other house on the street.

There were no signs of life except a children’s red plastic snow shovel lying on the ground in the neighbor’s yard. After Marie got to the end of the street, she turned back, walking up the hill, and that’s when she saw the car parked in front of Raymond Balcham’s house with its headlights on. It was like a sign.

She examined the car as she approached, but no one was inside. It wasn’t the same car he’d been driving when he killed the little boy, but perhaps that one was still impounded for evidence. Perhaps this was a rental car, and he’d left the lights on by accident, distracted. She went to his porch, rang his doorbell, and waited. She would say what it was she hadn’t been able to tell him that day on the street. She would tell him that she understood what he was going through, that she didn’t think he was a bad person. That people made mistakes, had to live with the consequences of them every day.

Her head nearly touched the low, overhanging roof of his porch. The damp outdoor carpet smelled like mold and had only a small plastic table with a pot of dying flowers for decoration. Something shifted inside the house, she heard a noise like someone coming, and she had the urge to run.

The heavy door opened with a creak and then, as his face appeared, he let out a peal of laughter so loud that she jumped back, her hand flying to her chest. The face that had been in such shock when she first met him now grinned and his eyes sparkled. He looked at her, puzzled. “Could you hold a minute, Gracie?” he said into his phone, turning the receiver from his mouth. “Can I help you?”

Marie opened her mouth, then closed it. Balcham peered at her through the screen, his eyes dark and unreadable. They had been so clear, so blue, out on the street that day. She shifted her handbag and opened her mouth to try again.

“Miss, I’m sorry. I’m not interested in whatever it is you’re trying to sell.”

“I – no! I’m not selling anything. I just wanted to tell you, your car. You left the lights on.”

He peered out past her, bending down to see below the awning. She pointed, her finger drooping. She knew what he was going to say before he said it. “That’s not my car, ma’am. I don’t know whose car that is. Thank you.”

He closed the door, hard. She heard him talking loudly, retreating deeper into his house. Her anger was fierce, hot and red. She got halfway down the street before letting it out in loud, gulping sobs, crying like she hadn’t in a long time, her gasps echoing in the empty street. She didn’t care if anyone saw her. She kept hearing Raymond’s laugh, loud and sudden, like a slap.

It grew dark as she made her way back to the house. On the kitchen table, the red velvet cake she’d made had been sliced into—dirty plates were in the sink. The three of them sat in the living room, watching football, her mother completing a crossword puzzle. She looked up as Marie walked in.

“Honey? There’s cake there on the table.”

“I know, Mom. You guys didn’t wait?” Her voice sounded on the edge of hysteria. She could see her mother examining her face, the puffiness, and knew she wouldn’t ask her what was wrong.

“Well, your father—We didn’t think you’d mind. There’s still plenty left.”

“It’s ok. I’m not hungry. I want to go home, Bud.”

He looked up from the television at the sound of his name and nodded. “In a minute, Marie.”

She waited in the car for him, and a few minutes later Bud came out, carrying a wrapped plate of leftovers to the car. He set it at her feet in the front seat, not saying a word. It had begun to snow, wet flakes that melted as they touched the windshield.

Bud was quiet for the first half of the ride home. He kept glancing over at her. She shifted in her seat, pulling her knee to her chest.

Bud squeezed her leg, his touch tentative. “You know, I’ve been thinking. About us.”

She closed her eyes, rested her head. The heater blew air at her face, making her skin feel raw. She wanted a cold washcloth to press under her eyes.

“This whole accident thing has really upset you, and well, I want you to know that, if you want, we could try.” He broke off.

She opened her eyes. “Try?”

He glanced over at her, scratched beneath his ear. “Yeah. I mean, I know we’d said that we didn’t really want kids, but if you changed your mind, you know, I don’t think it’s too late yet.”

Her eyes widened. She laughed, a burst of noise — a cackle, really, echoing the old man, she realized. He tensed beside her. She caught her reflection in the rear view mirror, her cheeks red and shiny, puffed like some kind of animal. Bud was staring at her, his eyes searching hers for something, probably recognition. He must think she was crazy. She turned away from him.

“Oh God, Bud!” Her breath sucked back in a gasp. The car in front of them had stopped short at the red light, and Bud was going to slam right into the back of it. Bud reacted before Marie could brace herself, and she was thrown forward as he braked, his tires squealing as he tried to swerve to the right to avoid the car. Her seatbelt cut into her chest like she’d been punched.

They stopped inches from the car. Marie fell back against her seat, gasping for air. She closed her eyes. “It’s over,” she said.

“Yes, Marie. I’m sorry. It’s ok, we’re fine,” Bud was saying, his hand heavy on her arm. She was thinking of the boy, the way he flew through the air like it was a circus act, so light, like he weighed only as much as a sheet of paper. She was thinking how quickly it had happened; how in only one second you could change someone’s life forever. And suddenly, she knew why she sympathized with Raymond Balcham so deeply. She knew why she wanted to see him, why she kept thinking of him. It was because she was going to do the same thing he’d done. She, too, was going to kill, destroy, rip someone apart, and it was nearly impossible to avoid it.

She opened her eyes, and looked at Bud through her tears. He looked like he was ready to crumble with worry, his eyes large and focused, this man that she’d promised so much to a long time ago when they were both different people. “No, Bud. I mean it’s really over,” she said, and waited for the impact to register.

“Next round’s on me, guys.” Charlie Bishop bellied his way to the bar and leaned on it, signaling the bartender.

“Boys, I’m cashed.” Jean dug in her purse. “Charlie!” she yelled, sticking some bills under the napkin dispenser. “I gotta go! Pickin’ up Jasmine!” She waved and backed out the door. Charlie returned.

“Guys?” he said, injured. “Next round’s on me.”
Malik ducked under the strap of his messenger bag, standing to his full height. He threw a twenty on the table.

“Sorry, man.” He clasped Charlie’s hand and pulled him in, pounding his back. “See you tomorrow. Dinner’s waiting.”

“Lou? Danny?”

Lou looked around for his wallet. Danny stood, arms open, and Charlie grinned.

“Reverend Dan. One more round, come on. It’s six o’clock for fuck’s sake, do me the honor.”

Danny considered the evening ahead. Charlie, his white friend: they’d have another drink and go to one more bar, or three. The dollars, the liver and kidney stress, the buffalo wings and fried potato wedges…the cigarette breaks, the unbearable emotional intimacy.

“Sorry, brother. I gotta turn in.”

“But it’s Thursday!” The logic of Charlie’s argument seemed to instantly vaporize. “Guys? Come on. You’re a bunch of pussies.” They smiled.

Charlie dropped his head and surrendered. “All right. It’s been a beautiful evening. I love you all, gentlemen.” He hugged each of them, even Lou, and made like he was packing up, throwing his bag over his shoulder, staggering a moment under its weight.

“See you tomorrow. Bright and early,” he said, saluting them. They wondered how much longer their principal was going to let his tardy mornings go before docking his pay. They wondered if they’d be asked to cover his classes tomorrow.

Charlie headed for the bathroom. When he came out, his colleagues were gone. He went back to the bar for one more whiskey.

The bartender was dashing. Charlie wished he had a chin like this guy, a Kiefer Sutherland chin.
The tin-ceilinged room was brighter than usual: they had turned the lights on for the coming evening, but the sky still glowed blue. It felt like a music box.

Whiskey? Or beer? Beer would last longer, but it was weaker. He imagined for a moment, if he was either beer or whiskey, which would he be? What was his essence? He was probably beer. Yeasty, down-to-earth, sloshing over the sides: the kind of thing that made you fat if you drank too much. This bartender was whiskey. No, he was Scotch.

He would order a double. He tried to catch the bartender’s eye. Charlie didn’t know his name yet.

“Well, if it isn’t Charlie Bishop.” A woman with horizontal lines for eyebrows stood behind him. Her face was otherworldly; she reminded him of the girl from Blade Runner.

“Amelia,” he breathed, turning around.

“What can I get you?” the bartender finally asked. Charlie whipped around. He whipped back to Amelia.

“What’re you having?”

“Hendricks on the rocks with a lime”

“We don’t have Hendricks,” the bartender said.

“Whatever. Tanqueray, Bombay, I don’t care.” The bartender raised his eyebrows and looked at Charlie.

“I’ll have a whiskey, double. The well is fine.” Amelia set her elbow on the bar and leaned her head on it.

“Where are you at now? You still teaching?” he asked. She nodded.

“Stuyvesant.”

He swallowed and watched the twilight inking from violet to black outside. His back and chest were damp.

“Stuyvesant! Nice! How’d you swing that?”

“An interview.”

“Wow,” he nodded, hiding his envy. “How is it?”

“Everyone can read. Everyone turns in their papers on time. Some of my kids are smarter than I am. It’s fucking awesome.”

She smiled and plucked a cocktail straw, accordioning it with her fingers. Her gaze was steady.

“Are you still at Taft?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“I thought you wanted to quit. That’s what you said.”

“Well…”

He tried to conjure the custodial closet they’d shared once, but the memory wouldn’t budge.

“What about music.” She fingered the white joints she’d made in the straw.

“No,” he said. “Not, um, not anymore.” She didn’t know that when they met, writing songs and playing the bass had been new preoccupations; before music was standup comedy, welding, his own letterpress business, and several zines on philosophy and religion. He was someone whose apartment was stacked with CDs, videos, comics, a million books, leather-bound editions of Marx and Kafka and Whitman and Kant, a towering junkyard of devotion. He had been drinking a lot lately.

The bartender set their drinks down. Charlie paid before Amelia could reach for her purse, not that she would. He tipped double. The bartender had already turned around and didn’t notice.

“You still living in Prospect Heights?”

“Yup.”

He remembered her long nose. A Meryl Streep nose: it bisected her face on the vertical axis, while her high cheekbones and eyebrows did the same on the horizontal. When they were sleeping together, he had wanted to crack open her deadpan disinterest, to find the smoldering he knew was underneath. He never found it. Their affair had dissipated like smoke.

He fought to maintain the shape of his buzz. This was the expansive, ambitious part, when everything that needed doing would be done. It was the pounding buildup of the piano, punctuated by urgent staccato strums on an electric guitar, the introduction of a song before it really began and the drums and vocals kicked in. He wanted to always live in this moment, with whoever happened to bear witness as he entered it. He finished his drink and almost slammed the glass on the bar.

“Come to my place.”

Amelia’s smile was pitying. She scanned the room. She tipped her glass back and swallowed the remainder of her drink. She pulled out the lime and sucked the liquid from it. She ran her tongue along her teeth, feeling for citrus pulp. She blinked. She tossed the lime back into the glass, where it landed with a wet plop.

“Sorry, Charlie.”

“Come on.”

She shook her head.

“What are you doing? Tonight? Tomorrow?”

She stared at him.

“Amelia—come on, let’s go to Manhattan. I’ll take you to the best Martinis in the city at this rooftop bar no one knows about.”

“I gotta go.” She yawned and hitched her purse. “Call me,” she said obliquely.

“I don’t have your number. I lost my phone.”

“Email me. Same address.” She mimed typing with her hands as she backed away.

“Amelia.” Charlie’s voice drowned in the din. He watched her turn around and push the door open, the dry breeze ruffling her choppy haircut. Through the blinds in the front window, he could see her stride down Washington Street and turn the corner.

A panic scuttled up to him. He reached into his pocket for his phone and texted Reverend Dan.

* * *

Against his better judgment, Danny found himself hiking to the C train to meet Charlie Bishop at a supposedly secret bar in Hell’s Kitchen. It was 7:30 on a school night, several hours before Danny’s alleged bed time. He had a weakness for Charlie. Was it because he was single now? Danny palmed his fedora and strode under the sputtering lamp of a mosque on Fulton Street. He wondered if he was the first person Charlie had texted. He wondered who Charlie was friends with outside school. Danny pictured men in hats and plaid shirts with carefully honed aesthetic judgments. Women in frumpy shoes and dark lipstick. White people who graduated from Vassar and Bard and didn’t talk about the fact that their parents had money.

They’d been teaching together for three years, and while Danny didn’t think Charlie was the best teacher at the school, or even one of the better ones, he acknowledged that he liked him. Or, he liked that Charlie seemed to like him so much, he liked feeling exalted in an unearned way. Charlie made him feel special.

* * *

Charlie’s buzz had cooled on the train, and he promised himself he would make this whiskey last until after Danny showed up. He felt foolish for coming all the way into Manhattan as he dug in his wallet for another twenty: his last, at least before he hit an ATM. He’d only been here once, after an epic night of bar-hopping with guys he vaguely knew from a friend’s fairly successful band. He’d felt huge then, like a big sail full of fresh sea wind, around these loud, articulate, bearded men flush with the sales of their new record, buying everyone drinks. For one night, he’d felt welcomed into their fold. They’d exchanged numbers, emails, blog addresses. They’d talked about jamming some time. It was as though he’d finally stumbled into the New York life he should have been having – it was supposed to feel like this, rich, bright, large-scale. He never heard from any of them again.

“Chas, what’s up, man,” Danny said behind him in his radio announcer’s baritone. Charlie loved Danny’s voice; it made him believe almost everything he said. He loved that Danny called him “Chas.” When he was a kid, he’d tried to get his family to call him Chas, but they wouldn’t do it.

“What’s up, brother, I didn’t see you come in! Sit, sit. What’re you having?” Charlie sounded like a host, like he lived there.

“Um, well. Nothing crazy. What do they have on draught here?” Danny squinted. “Yeah, gimme a Pilsner,” he told the bartender, who placed a square napkin on the bar in front of him. He reached for his wallet.

“No, lemme get this round,” Charlie protested.

“Don’t worry about it,” Danny murmured. He paid the bartender, smiling politely, and placed his hat on the bar, seating himself. He turned to Charlie.

“So,” he said.

“So,” Charlie echoed, suddenly shy. “Listen, thanks for coming out, man.”

“Naw, it’s no problem. I wasn’t doing anything anyway.” Danny folded his hands in front of him and hunched his shoulders. He thought of the episode of The Real Housewives of D.C. he was missing. Why did it make him so anxious to stray from his routines? It was one of the accusations his ex had darted at him when they broke up: he was unspontaneous and inflexible. Unspontaneous wasn’t a word; he’d checked. She made him feel so stupid, and then she went around using imaginary words.

“Lemme ask you something,” Charlie said. He had no idea what he was about to say. The impulse possessed him and vanished.

“Yeah.”

“Um,” Charlie tried again. “Listen. Question. You ever think of leaving teaching?” Was this what he’d meant to ask?

Danny thoughtfully scratched the shadow on his jaw.

“Yeah. All the time.”

“Would you? Do something else?”

“I don’t know. I’m already doing this, right? It’s hard to see starting at the bottom somewhere else.”

Charlie nodded.

“What about you, man? You thinking of leaving?”

“Aw, I don’t know. I don’t know. I probably should, but. I don’t know what else I’d do. I was gonna be a famous musician, but. You can see how that turned out.” Charlie laughed ruefully.

“I hear you,” Danny said. “I was gonna be a pro football player.”

Charlie looked at Danny and knew he had never stood a chance of playing professional football; it was a kid’s dream, every kid’s dream. He was mildly offended Danny equated it with his dream of being a musician. Charlie had played music for five years, on and off. They lapsed into silence.

“You having female trouble?” Danny asked absently.

“No. Why?” Charlie gulped the last of his whiskey. “Well, I guess I’m always having female trouble.” He laughed.

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Right. I guess.”

“You sure you’re okay? Something up?”

Charlie was full of something he could not express, and it kept filling his chest and threatening to flood. When he drank whiskey, he tried to contain it, to know its depths, but it eluded him, despite its size, its pounds of pressure per cubic inch. He sought a port in which to unload this massive cargo, and he kept not finding it.

“Why? Do I seem not okay?”

“Like. How many drinks have you had?”

Charlie felt like someone had turned on all the lights, and he blinked.

“I don’t know. I’m a big guy, it takes a lot for me to get hammered.” He laughed.

“Are you trying to get hammered?”

Charlie considered the question. “No. I don’t know. I like whiskey.”

Danny nodded.

“Oh, Danny,” Charlie said, and buried his face in his hands. Danny sipped his beer and stared ahead of him at the flickering game. The Giants were murdering the Eagles. When he looked at Charlie again, he saw that Charlie was upright, looking at the ceiling, quiet. Danny wasn’t sure whether he had seen Charlie’s face
in his hands at all.

For a long time, they watched the Giants. Muted figures like bipedal buffaloes mauled each other, and occasionally, the camera tracked a tiny orb as it flew through the air. In his mind’s ear, Danny heard the roar of the crowd keep the orb afloat, longer, longer, longer still, until it sailed between the goal posts. Instinctively, he jerked up when the field goal was made, and he quieted himself when he noticed no one else in the bar seemed to care. Danny couldn’t be sure, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of straight men here among the scattered, lonesome patrons. Of all places, why had Charlie brought him here?

Danny gulped his Pilsner and put his hand on his hat.

“I think I gotta head back to the bear cave, man. I’m out past my bedtime.”

“It’s…” Charlie looked at his watch. “It’s nine o’clock. What time do you go to bed? What, you get up at four to meditate or something?”

Danny wished it was later. He felt so far from home. He put his hat back down on the bar and skimmed the condensation off the sides of his glass with an index finger.

“I’m not much of a drinker, to be honest,” Danny said.

“Bullshit. I’ve been out with you. You throw back more than me. Bullshit.” Something in Charlie had gone slack. “Don’t go,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, man.” Charlie put his face in his hands again.

Danny thought about his sister Felicia in the years before she went to rehab to dry out. He knew the arc: jocose, bellicose, lachrymose, comatose. Danny knew that whatever was about to come next would be a soupy mess of half-cooked sorrows.

“You’re a good guy,” Charlie’s muffled voice said.

Here we go, Danny thought.

“I mean that, brother. You’re a good man. A good man.” Charlie’s head was still in his hands.

“Thanks.” Danny usually loved Charlie’s compliments, even when he thought he was full of shit, but there was a new desperation to it tonight.

Charlie sat up quickly, swaying a moment.

“Danny,” he pleaded. “Danny.”

“Yeah.”

“I got too much love.” What? Charlie was nodding vigorously, agreeing with himself. “I got too much love. I can feel it in my chest, it’s this big…love. And I don’t know where to put it.”

“Hey, you’ll find her, man,” Danny told him. “She’s out there. You just gotta be patient. Don’t try too hard, don’t go looking. She’ll turn up.” He drank the last of his beer.

“No, no. That’s not what I mean. That’s not what I mean.” Charlie put his head down on his forearms, the way their students did when they wanted to give up. Danny looked at his watch, mesmerized by the second hand’s steady clicks.

“That’s not what I mean,” Charlie repeated from his arm fort.

“All right.”

“I mean…it’s like this thing, that I can’t get rid of.” He swung up again and turned to Danny. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too, man,” Danny replied, used to Charlie’s declarations.

“No.” Charlie shook his head. “No, you don’t understand, you don’t understand. I love you. I love you.” As though awakening into an unfamiliar bedroom, Charlie shook his head and looked around the bar, dazed. He stepped down off the bar stool, staring wide-eyed at the floor, and found his bag. He clapped Danny on the shoulder, not looking at him.

“See you later, man,” he said, nodding, nodding. “Have a good night. Have a great night.” Time hovered for a moment, barely breathing, as he embraced Danny with one arm, and then he disappeared into the street.

Danny watched the game. He didn’t look anywhere else, not until it was over.

The first year after Henry’s death, the Blackwells cleared the hilly land. By the next spring, a half-dozen acres were ready to plant. On a frosty March morning, Mary headed to Harrisonburg. In her right pants pocket was ninety-two dollars folded over with twine into a tight, thick wad. She could feel its weight on her thigh, but she reached into her pocket just to feel it, to touch it and make sure it was still there. This was her and Henry’s life savings, and most of it would be spent that day on those little black specks of gold called burley seed. The future of the Blackwell family depended upon seeds.

Mary returned that night, late, after the fifty-mile round trip. Everyone but Jared was in bed. As Mary made her way to the house after bedding down the horse for the night, she saw the lone lantern in the window as she made her way to the house. The reflection of her young son in the window made her stop and stare. Jared was looking more and more like his daddy. And for just a minute, Mary let herself feel the joy of her years together with Henry. For just a split second, it felt as if her husband would be on the other side of that door when she opened it. But reality found its way back to Mary’s world as she opened the front door and saw no one there but Jared.

“Hey, Mama. I couldn’t sleep until I knew you were safely at home.”

Mary sat down at the table and reached down again into that right front pocket. This time she pulled out a small burlap sack. She pulled the drawstrings and looked inside at the tiny specks. Then she poured them out on the table.

“Jared, this is our future. Did you ever think we could hold all hope for tomorrow in one hand?”

Mary sat and stared at those magical little specks until her eyes closed and she laid her head down on her arms on the table. She sat there all night with one hand on the seeds that would become their master in the days and weeks to come.

After they planted the seeds in the plant beds that they had already prepared, Mary, along with her older sons, took turns keeping small fires burning all around the seedbeds to keep them warm. Early mornings were still cold, and frost could nip and blacken new growth way up into the spring in those mountains. They had taken pieces of old clothes and blankets to make tents over the seedlings. For six weeks, they tended the plants every night, praying to keep the still wintry air from nipping the tender plants.

Night after night, they stood vigil over the strange little sprouts. Hank took the first shift lighting the coal pits for warmth. Then Mame would relieve him. Jared’s turn was next, but most of the time, Mary would be up in the morning and take his turn. Mary had always heard the night was darkest just before dawn. As she walked around the beds of plants night after night fanning the warmth into the plants, she not only saw that darkness, she felt it. She had never been more alone in her life.

A chill rippled upon her spine as a shooting star fell to the ground not more than a hundred feet in front of her. Some people might call that a good omen. Mary thought it was just a shooting star. Schoolgirl dreaming was many years behind her.

Finally all fear of the chilling mists passed. Now all that was left to do was to wait until the plants were big enough to transplant into the newly formed fields. The day arrived and the work began. Disbelieving neighbors watched as Mary and her sons took the delicate plants one by one and dropped them into thousands of holes that they’d dug with a mattock into the rich mountain earth. It took them two weeks, working every day from daylight to dark, to finish their transplanting. All six acres or so that were cleared were set.

Now it was time to start back at the beginning, hoeing and putting livestock litter beside each plant. They continued this cycle of fertilizing all summer. Every day, even Sunday, no matter if it rained or if the sun shone, they were in the fields. The boys, Hank, James, and Jared, got very restless, doing nothing but working. But they respected their mother and knew she was working as hard as they were, so they kept it up. Soon, very soon, it would be time to start chopping down the stalks of tobacco. Then they would stack it like teepees in the fields for a few days to start it drying. Next they would move it to the barn loft and hang it to finish the curing out process.

As the last stalk fell to the ground, there rang a loud yell that could be heard for miles around. It was Mary Blackwell as she fell to the ground and cried. This was the first real emotion she had shown in almost two years. For the first time since Henry died, she felt as if she could breathe. The tight knot in her chest was beginning to unwind. She looked up at her family, spread across the rows like scarecrows. It was as if she were seeing her children for the first time in months.

These had not been mere children. Even little William, not quite three, helped Mame in the house. They had been fellow workers doing much more than seemed possible. All odds had been against them—a woman and a bunch of kids, raising a tobacco crop. Never, the townspeople had predicted. There were even bets placed against them. No one imagined tobacco growing in these hills. But Mary had taken her chances and done a lot of research. She had bought the new burly seeds that were supposed to be better suited to their cool climate. And it had worked. That wad of ninety-two dollars had turned into what Mary believed was a fine crop of tobacco that would soon be loaded into a wagon ready for market.

Ginnie and Roger were already planning next year’s trip, when they’d just arrived for this year’s annual family vacation, one of the lesser Caribbean islands with a Catholic-sounding name. They preferred to just call it Paradise, as in Next year in Paradise we’ll rent a car for the far beach, the one with the goats. When their daughter Maxine was little, Roger would hoist her on his shoulders to hang their bag of peanut butter sandwiches from a high branch so the mangy gray goats couldn’t nuzzle for a bite. By next year, Maxine’s baby would be old enough to make goat sounds, if Ginnie sang “Old MacDonald’s Farm” like she used to with Maxine.

“What sound do goats make?” Ginnie asked.

Roger, reclining in his lounge, didn’t look up from the book resting on his expanse of belly.

“We’ll get one of those little hut contraptions,” Ginnie went on. “You know, like a playpen with a top? Set it in the shade.” She pointed to a clutch of palm trees. “And she’ll need one of those inner tube things, the kind with a seat, and some of that special baby sun block.”

“Waste of money,” Roger said, turning a page. “Regular sun block will do. And she might be walking by next year. Won’t like being cooped up in a cage.”

“Not a cage,” Ginnie said, angling her chair away from him, to face the sun. “You know what I mean, like a pup tent. Kids always like tents. Remember how Maxine used to beg me to drape a blanket over the dining room table? She’d spend the whole day under there if I’d let her.”

This was the first time in years Ginnie and Roger were alone on the island, Maxine back home with her husband Stu and the new baby. It had been touch and go if they’d make the trip this year. First Maxine was laid up with high blood pressure, so Ginnie’d had to take off from work to go up there and help out. Stu tried, but he only knew how to cook chicken stir-fry, with red sauce over spaghetti or teriyaki sauce over rice. Then the doctors decided to take the baby early, and there was the jaundice that lasted long past it was supposed to.

But everything was fine now, thank God, the baby fattening up, nursing like a champ, Maxine whipping out a boob at a moment’s notice, so Roger couldn’t bring himself to look at her below the neck. I was better off not knowing what everything looked like under there, he said.

Judy, Ginnie’s boss at the bookstore, told Ginnie to take her scheduled vacation, never mind all the time she’d just taken off for the baby. Judy knew Ginnie was no good to anyone without her week in Paradise.

They booked the same week every year, used to pull Maxine out of school if her vacation didn’t fall the second week of February. In the fifth grade, they actually got a phone call from her teacher, suggesting they leave Maxine home with a friend, as if her life would be ruined by missing a week of multiplication and fifth grade spelling. But Madame Jeanette expected them, reserved their cottage a year in advance, took next year’s deposit at the end of last year’s week when they turned in their keys – cash, Roger would peel from his wallet the bills he’d stashed before leaving home. No need for cancelled checks or credit card receipts. In Paradise? he’d say, a handshake and trust all that was needed between him and Madame Jeanette after all these years.

She always saved them the same cottage, plenty of room for noisy children, although there’d only ever been Maxine, directly across from the beach, pink and soft underfoot, no need for shoes. Madame Jeanette advertised a B&B, although they’d learned early on there’d only be the occasional homemade breakfast, if Madame Jeanette happened to be in the mood.

We have ze same name, Madame Jeanette had said that very first year, Ginnie and Roger also alone then, treating themselves to a week in the tropics as they tried and tried for a baby, as if sun and heat would start their innards properly cooking, a bun in the oven, as someone’s grandma might say, not Ginnie’s, who would’ve had some spicy Yiddish exhortation. Ginnie didn’t bother mentioning to Madame Jeanette that her name was actually Virginia, for the state where her grandparents ended up fresh off the boat, the American name Ginnie’s grandmother had picked to celebrate her escape from Eastern Europe with its poverty and pogroms. Zhinnie, Madame Jeannette pronounced the soft French J, ma soeur. Although sisters, of course, would not have the same name. Soul sisters, Maxine sneered one sullen teenage year, rolling her eyes at the story she’d heard umpteen times.

Once, after an argument with Roger, surely something about Maxine – were they too hard on her, or too easy? – Ginnie had encountered Madame Jeanette on the midnight patio, had inquired after Monsieur Jeanette. The Madame had turned away with a flap of her hand, as if to say, You I will know, the fights, the secrets, the kids gone wrong. But me, no. I belong to myself. So much for sisterhood. But the next morning she left a basket of fresh banana muffins on Ginnie and Roger’s porch, under a dishtowel against the lizards and the brilliant tropical birds.

If you’d asked Ginnie, last year, whether she could’ve missed any baby so much after one day away as she missed Maxine’s, she’d have said you were crazy. It’s not as if she saw the baby every day back home, with the kids way up in Boston. Stu had set them up with a computer, with a camera and speakers, so they could goggle and burble at the monitor down in Connecticut, while at the other end sat Maxine with Ruby in her lap, sucking on her burp cloth or nodding off to sleep, hardly noticing the show going on for her benefit.

Roger even toted the new laptop with him on the airplane, practically getting strip-searched after forgetting to take it out of his carry-on going through security. But of course there was no Internet at the cottage, no wireless in their corner of Paradise. They’d have to wait ’til they were home next week to get a look, Maxine flapping one of Ruby’s arms up and down in a frantic way for the camera. Say hi to Grandma. Say hi to Grandpa.

Ginnie always resisted the urge to tell Maxine to be careful, she might dislocate Ruby’s delicate shoulder. Hard to believe this was the same Maxine from those first days in the hospital, afraid to pick up the baby, practically afraid to touch her, she might break. Maxine was turning into a good mother, talked to the baby nonstop, carried her around all day in one of those papoose baby carriers. She certainly had all the paraphernalia, the swing and the bouncy seat and the baby genius CDs, Ruby should learn Mozart in her sleep.

Ruby. Maxine and Stu had picked a good name. For Ginnie’s mother, Rose, but better. A gem, a sparkling jewel. Perfect. Ginnie finally understood the phrase light of my life in a way she hadn’t when she’d been a harried young mother herself, Roger rolling in late every night from the office, and Maxine with the colic that lasted a full year, never mind only three months like the books promised. Guess she never read the books, Roger would say, lifting a squalling Maxine from Ginnie’s aching arms just when Ginnie was sure she’d drop that baby, if she didn’t toss her into the trash.

Ruby, on the other hand, was a placid, happy baby, gurgled and cooed in front of the computer, seldom cried, or if she did Maxine wasn’t admitting to it. Maxine seemed to have developed a sudden need for Ginnie’s approval, phoned home every day, which was not her usual habit, reporting how much Ruby had nursed, slept, pooped. She’d made Ginnie promise to check for cell phone service in Paradise, but, as always, there was none. Everyone knew there was only one landline at Madame Jeanette’s, in the Madame’s bedroom, off limits except for the direst emergency, which Maxine had discovered the hard way the time she thought she could sneak a call home to some gangly high school heart throb. It’d be good for Maxine, this week on her own, without her mother to lean on for advice. Still, Ginnie flipped open her cell phone every morning to check for bars, always a spark of hope, and then a pang of regret.

At the market, buying milk and juice and Ginnie’s yogurt and Roger’s fiber cereal that Maxine called straw, Ginnie spotted just exactly the inner tube she wanted, with a cloth sling seat so the baby could sit safely, not slip out the bottom. Roger said she was nuts to buy it now, a year in advance, but the way the corners of his mouth crept up when he pulled out his wallet to pay told a different story. He was just as nuts about that baby as she was.

By the end of the week, Ginnie had read six novels and a story collection she was previewing for the bookstore, Roger had finished the latest John Grisham and his backlog of Popular Science, and they’d bought blow-up swimmies for Ruby’s tiny arms, a folding umbrella to protect her from the sun, and the cutest baby swim suit, a one-piece tank with foam inserts all around the waist like a built-in life preserver. Ruby was going to be the safest baby alive in Paradise next year.

“We should stop,” Ginnie said. But she couldn’t stop, planning the easiest route to push the stroller to the water, wondering if their favorite island burger joint had high chairs. When Roger discovered, in one of the free island dailies he picked up at the market, a service that would store stuff for winter folks, Ginnie even dragged him to the new discount mart for a folding crib – wouldn’t Ruby need a place to sleep next year? He laughed at her foolishness, but she didn’t have to ask twice.

Who’d have imagined a discount mart in Paradise? And high-rises going up, condominiums and time-shares. Now this storage service, so you didn’t have to schlep stuff back and forth every year, what with new airline weight restrictions and that damn airport security.

Ginnie and Roger were changing, too. Won’t be much of a vacation, Roger’s cheeky brother Paul had teased before they left, now that you’re sleeping with a grandma, and Ginnie had surprised herself, feeling not old, but newborn with joy. All week she noticed Roger patting her rump, ogling her breasts, as if she were the new mother sporting a youthful, milk-filled rack. Rack! A word she didn’t remember Roger ever using before, at least not in reference to his wife. When they made love, he took special care to please her, brought glasses and a split of chilled champagne to bed, on the last night even joked about trying again, twice in one night, like when they were kids.

In the morning, Roger paid the storage fellow who picked everything up, arranged for him to deliver the load to Madame Jeanette’s next year. Then he unfolded the bills for next year’s deposit, planting a kiss on each of the Madame’s cheeks to seal the deal. Some things never changed, second week of February, their week in Paradise.

That was last year. Last year’s next year has turned into this year. Confusing. Which is how Ginnie feels. Confused. Swimming through fog. Gasping for air. She and Roger are once again alone in Paradise.

Even after four months, people back home were still asking what happened. Did it have something to do with the jaundice? The difficult birth? Was the crib mattress too soft? Too hard? As if it was somehow Maxine’s fault, and then, by extension, Ginnie’s.

Are you sure Maxine understood the new rule against blankets in the crib? Roger’s obnoxious brother Paul had the nerve to ask. How could any new mother be expected to keep track of all the rules, especially when those rules shifted as quickly and dangerously as quicksand?

No wonder everyone asks, Ginnie thinks. If they can figure it out, it won’t happen to them.

Madame Jeanette doesn’t ask. She packs up the crib and the swimmies and the life-preserver bathing suit that were delivered from storage as scheduled – the delivery Ginnie and Roger forgot to cancel, their minds full to bursting with other thoughts – and whisks them away, Ginnie has no idea where, and Madame Jeanette knows Ginnie won’t care. The Madame seems suddenly old this year, her lovely copper hair now a brassy bronze, dangly earrings turned from island exotic to dead weights threatening to stretch old-lady earlobes down to bony brown shoulders.

The island is different this year, as well, not older, but suddenly younger, flooded with children, a tsunami of babies in arms, in strollers, in backpacks, and toddlers weaving and lurching, unstoppable forward motion. Every which way Ginnie turns her head, she sees only sand toys and saggy diapers, tiny sunhats and sandy thumbs in rosy mouths, little boys with their Yankees caps and their swim shorts down to their knees. But it’s the little girls Ginnie can’t peel her eyes from – dimples and soft curls and ruffled bottoms, sweet rolls of flesh behind their necks, Ginnie’s secret place for bestowing kisses and blessings on Ruby.

Against all the strength and wisdom she possesses, Ginnie finds herself secretly planning for next year, Maxine and Stu already trying again, although Ginnie knows from experience sometimes you only ever get the one chance. There’s a family filling a blow-up baby pool with buckets of water, their own safe baby-sized ocean. Look at that little one’s miniature safari hat, perfect to protect her gentle white neck from the sun.

“It’s our fault,” Ginnie whispers, “with our plans and our purchases. We shouldn’t have done that. We gave ourselves a kine-ahora, quoting her grandmother, Yiddish for jinx, or evil eye, or worse, no English equivalent for the troubles she’d once seen.

“Nobody’s fault,” Roger says, not bothering with the pretense of a book this year, just staring at the unchanging ocean, so close to the equator there isn’t even a tide to break the seamless monotony. He’s the one who brought home the news that the kids were trying again, after a trip to Home Depot with Stu, unexpected confidence shared over nails or roach killer or drill bits. Ginnie certainly didn’t hear it from Maxine, who’s too busy back at work for those daily phone calls, back to her old self, if Ginnie didn’t know better. Ginnie is secretly relieved Maxine doesn’t call, Ginnie who once told knock-knock jokes while Maxine’s broken arm was casted, who sang Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats through stitches in Maxine’s knee. “Nobody’s fault,” Roger repeats, “don’t shop for troubles,” quoting his shrink. That’s something else new this year, the shrink.

So they pass the week on fruity vodka cocktails and platitudes, set upon by the intrusion of familiar floral fragrances, blinding red sunsets, insistent singing birds. Too much. It overwhelms the senses. If only it could knock you senseless.

“We should phone the kids,” Roger says. “Maybe they need us.” Which Ginnie translates to mean he needs them, needs to hear Maxine’s voice. Maxine, his own baby girl.

“Don’t you know there’s no cell service on this goddamn island?” Ginnie snaps.

At night she lies in bed, pretending to sleep, remembering that dreadful first week home from the hospital, when Ruby wouldn’t sleep at all. Maxine and Stu were bleary with exhaustion, Ginnie on the foldout couch, up every hour trying to help, discovering there’s a reason God makes mothers young. Take her into your bed, Ginnie finally advised Maxine. That’s what I did with you.

But the rules, Maxine said.

Fuck the rules, Ginnie said. It was three in the morning. Maxine was crying. Everyone does it. It’s every new mother’s secret.

Ginnie startles upright in bed under the ceiling fan stirring the cottage’s dense humid air, reaching blindly in the dark for the comfort of Roger’s cool back. But Roger is in the living room, weeping, no help at all. Not that he hasn’t been trying. He washes the breakfast dishes, except he forgets to use soap. He straightens the bed linens, although when Ginnie crawls back in at noon, she finds he hasn’t really made the bed, just pulled up the duvet to hide sheets still crumpled and twisted, evidence of the night spent less than sleeping.

The bedroom sliders allow Ginnie to avoid Roger on her way to the darkened patio, where she finds not solitude but Madame Jeanette, who seems to subsist on tall glasses clinking ice cubes and lack of sleep. Madame Jeanette doesn’t ask, so she’s the one Ginnie chooses to tell.

“It wasn’t the crib mattress,” Ginnie says, “or some forbidden crib blanket. No crib at all, at least not so you’d notice, turned to extra storage space for packs of diapers, piles of laundry Maxine couldn’t find time to put away.”

Jeanette holds out her glass, and Ginnie takes a sip of something that burns going down, an unexpectedly intimate gesture.

“If she’d been asleep in the crib,” Ginnie continues, “maybe Stu would’ve been the one to find her. Aren’t fathers supposed to get up for the 6 am feeding? Why did it have to be Maxine, half asleep, pulling Ruby to her breast? Do you think she was cold already, the baby?” Ginnie is whispering now, and shivering despite the heavy tropical heat. “It might help,” she says so softly she might only be thinking it, “if only I could know she wasn’t cold.” She takes another drink, this time a long swallow, before handing back the glass. “The Internet says it’s safe to sleep with your baby, or else it’s not. Who knows?”

“This knowing,” Jeanette says, “this will change something?”

The next morning, the last day before the long flight home, Roger sneaks away when Ginnie has slumped into the drugged sleep that eluded her at night, returns with a rental car, a bottle of French wine, plans for a trip to the far beach, the one with the goats. Then he gets lost along the way, meandering across the island, no one to ask directions, so by the time they arrive, it’s nearly dusk. And they find the goats are gone, banished, replaced by a tiki bar and raft rentals, the steel girders of a new high-rise towering overhead, blocking the last waning view of the sun.

They drink the wine and ride back in silence, not at all mellow. Then they make love – the first time this week, the first time in a long time – slowly and drunkenly, like the two old people they have become. She needs a lot of wine, and he needs a lot of time. It was better last year, when you were sleeping with a grandma, Ginnie thinks, moving and grinding under his weight, tears sliding backwards into her ears. Roger pauses briefly, mid-thrust, then resumes. Had she spoken out loud?

In the morning, Madame Jeanette has the taxi waiting, as always, a bag of warm croissants and Styrofoam cups of milky coffee they’ll have to drink before going through security. Roger rolls out the bags, Ginnie lagging behind, checking under the bed, in the bathroom drawers. She double-checks her purse – passports, wallet, house keys, phone. Roger doesn’t have to know that she noticed bars one day midweek, when she thought to check, cell phone service having apparently arrived along with the high-rises on Paradise. Tonight, back home, she will call Maxine, be strong for her once again.

By the time she steps outside, Roger is holding open the taxi door, glancing at his watch, Madame Jeanette grabbing Ginnie for a hot, bony hug before heading into the cottage to strip the bed for the next visitors. If Roger handed her the cash for next year’s deposit, Ginnie missed it.

Chapter One

It’s strange to grow old. I feel I’m the same person inside. All my life I was around people more or less my own age, and suddenly there are hardly any left. I think about death all the time. I guess you could say I’m apprehensive. I don’t want to suffer. I live my life as if my actions could make a difference, but I suppose at heart I’m a fatalist. Whatever happens, happens. I have to accept the fact that my efforts might not have the results I want them to have.

Images and impressions from different times in my life come to my mind, and I exist simultaneously in all of them. I am the short girl with the pale, round face posing in the family photo between Patricia and Eddie, who are between our parents, Martin and Mary Helen Wrightsman. I am right in the middle of the photo, and yet I am the least of them. I am the adopted child.

Most of the time it went unspoken, yet I was always aware of it. I felt it most acutely from Patricia. As the daughter of the family, her status was threatened by my addition more than anyone else’s. I was afraid of her, and I gave in to her. She could be fierce, and I couldn’t cope with that. Better let her keep her advantage.

All those years, I got used to staying out of the spotlight. Instinctively, I avoid attention. Let it come to people who believe that good will follow from their being noticed. I don’t. And who knows? Maybe that’s why I’ve survived so long, when others haven’t.

Eddie didn’t feel the same way about me as Patricia did, but neither were we particularly close. In our childhood, I was a dreamer, and he was a doer. He was off with other boys, playing games. It made a difference that Daddy taught at the school he went to, and it was an all boys’ school, whereas Patricia and I went to a girls’ school. We lived in a faculty house on the campus of Harrison, the boys’ school, so Eddie had a lot more opportunities to get together with friends than we did. But that didn’t stop Patricia from having a life chock-filled with activities, too. She was also sports-minded. She played lacrosse, tennis, basketball; she was a big, strong girl, and she’d try almost anything.

I, on the other hand, dodged sports like I’ve dodged so much else. I’ve learned that although I’m left-handed, my right eye is dominant, which makes it hard for me to aim or catch. My hand-eye coordination is a nightmare, and I’m right-footed, too. I’ve thought sometimes that my brain must be more strangely configured than other people’s. Maybe no one side is dominant; I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I was a bookish child, and introspective, and I tried to be obedient and agreeable and not cause anyone any trouble. There was a deep, lingering fear that I couldn’t give voice to, that Mother and Daddy might one day decide they didn’t want me after all, and send me back to the orphanage, or wherever it was I had come from.

Of my earliest days, I have no memory.

* * *

There’s a passage I once read in a book, The Lights of Earth, by Gina Berriault, that struck a deep chord in me:

“A dense fog covered the city, concealing the hills below this one. Only a few patches of neighborhoods could be seen, floating islets, appearing and vanishing, in a gray sea. She went down the hill trying not to shiver…She had inquired at every bookstore for a job, the secondhand ones, the antiquarian ones, the ones that sold only the latest, because to work in the midst of thousands of books, no matter how cluttered, how musty, how concrete-cold the store might be, was to feel cloistered and concealed from the world and yet in the world.”

Daddy would have been unhappy with my expressing this preference. He was forever encouraging me to be more involved and connected, the way he was, and the ways, after their own inclinations, Mother, Patricia, and Eddie were as well. They all had a tendency to throw themselves into things, whereas I have always held back.

Mother loved me, but hers was a tough love; I had to earn it. I tried hard, she tried hard, too; and this created a strain between us. I wouldn’t naturally go to her if I had a problem; in fact, I’d try to keep it from her, worried about lowering her assessment of me.

I sought out Daddy when I was in need of help or comfort. He was the one who loved me wholeheartedly, and I him in return. His father had died when he was six years old, and that fact brought us together as much as it indicated our differences. He knew firmly who he was. He had taken on the responsibilities for his mother and sister at a tender age. I, on the other hand, had been given away, and taken in, and reared up, like a grafted plant.

Maybe even more than Patricia and Eddie, I loved listening to Daddy’s stories of his past, with its deep roots in New England. In his boyhood, he knew the Civil War veterans who used to sit on the front porch of the general store in Ashland, New Hampshire, smoking and swapping stores and passing time. One man had only one leg; another was missing an eye. They’d all been wounded in one way or another, and they weren’t shy about showing Daddy their old wounds. Their wounds were evidence that they’d given their utmost to their country.

These men made a tremendous impression on Daddy when he was a boy and later influenced his attitudes when it came time for him to serve his country in World War II. He transferred from the Coast Guard into the Navy as Lieutenant Junior Grade and finished the war with his own command. He served on board the Clay at the battles of Saipan and Guam and on the Morrison at Truk and Okinawa without injury. He left the Morrison two weeks before it was sunk by a kami-kaze. Then he was given the job of writing to the families of all the men who had died, men whom he remembered and wrote about personally.

He was assigned to navigate the empty tanker Androscoggin. On a return trip from Okinawa to Ulihi Atoll, they picked up the signal of a Japanese submarine on their sonar and outran it. Back on Guam, he learned that the cruiser Indianapolis had been sunk at that very spot with the loss of 1,300 lives.

He was on the St. Paul, part of Bull Halsey’s fleet. Ten miles from Honshu, planes took off, dropped bombs, and circled back to the fleet, steaming east away from Japan. Many ran out of fuel and didn’t make it; he saw them drop in the sea to be left behind.

He had no illusions about his survival. “It was a matter of pure chance,” he said, as we sat spellbound around him. As I recall, Mother didn’t take part, either as narrator or listener, in Daddy’s story hours, but neither did she discourage him, even though his stories were frightening to children—and to grown-ups, too. I think she recognized how important they were for him to tell and us to hear, and she tolerated them, even though they weren’t part of her world. She didn’t like to dwell on war and adventure and courageous deeds and grisly ends.

She had a Yankee background, too; her people were ministers and college professors. I admired both Mother and Daddy, and if I could have chosen my own family, I would have selected people like them. They knew where they came from, and they stood up for what they believed in.

* * *

Mother and Daddy were frugal to a fault. They practiced economies that most of their friends never considered. Mother mended and patched our clothes and darned our socks until they were falling apart. She bought dented cans at the grocery store to save a nickel. Anything that she and Daddy could make or repair themselves, they did. Never once did they buy a new car or appliance. The general opinion held that their attitude was a result of their having grown up during the Depression. I think that those experiences contributed, but it went deeper than that.

When Daddy was three years old, his father, a New Hampshire country doctor, contracted tuberculosis from a patient. For three years Dr. Wrightsman lingered in a worsening illness. Without success, he tried special diets, treatments, a sojourn at a sanitarium. His illness was a financial disaster for his family—Daddy, Daddy’s mother Alma, and sister Gertrude. He couldn’t practice medicine. His earnings dried up. For years, he had treated any patient who came to him, regardless of his or her ability to pay, with the result that many of his patients had accumulated quite substantial debts, and when he fell ill, none came forward to pay him. At the time of his death, when Daddy was six years old, he was owed about fifty thousand dollars, an enormous sum at that time. My grandmother never saw this money.

One of Daddy’s indelible memories was of being summoned to a family conference shortly after his father’s death. There he was, six years old, surrounded by his aunts and uncles. Uncle Henry, his mother’s sister’s husband, bent down so they were at eye level and, wagging a finger in Daddy’s face, he told Daddy that he was the man of the family now, and it was up to him to provide for his mother and sister.

Uncle Henry was the one who owned The Eaton, a rambling resort hotel in the White Mountains that catered to a rich city clientele escaping the summer heat. After his father died, Daddy and his mother and sister spent their summers there. But it was quickly understood that Daddy had to work—all day long he was required to be available to run errands and do odd jobs.

Grandma was a fragile woman, overwhelmed by grief. She was unequipped to take charge of the family’s affairs and unprepared to earn a living. I knew her, but not well; she died when I was ten. It certainly seems that she was content to be dependent and had few qualms about her young son going to work to support her. Daddy shoveled snow and split wood for the neighbors, and soon he was taking care of the horses that were used back then for road work or to pull the narrow-gauge railroad trains that plied the mountain valleys out of the snow drifts that stranded them in the bitter winters.

Daddy handed over all his earnings to his mother. He developed a life-long reluctance to spend money on himself. In old photographs I see a handsome youth with a painful smile. Yet sociability came easily to him, more easily than to me. He knew how to fit into a group and make himself indispensable. He was a natural leader. These qualities were evident in his Navy career and in his profession as a prep school master.

As a growing boy, Daddy had a mentor—a boyhood friend of his father, who was kinder to him than most of his relatives. This man had a house on Oyster Bay and kept a sailboat. It was he who taught Daddy how to sail in Long Island Sound and developed in him his life-long love of ships and the sea.

Daddy was a natural athlete (Patricia and Eddie take after him), and in his studies he discovered a talent for Latin. All college-bound boys needed Latin back then. As a high school student, Daddy tutored other students and coached sport teams for younger boys (which prevented him from playing on his school’s varsity teams). After The Eaton was sold out of the family, Daddy worked at various summer camps as a tennis, horseback riding, and canoe and sailing instructor. He loved these jobs and cherished happy memories of those relatively carefree summers.

He was a hardworking student, well-liked by his teachers, and it was a happy day for him when he was accepted into Harvard. He borrowed the tuition fees, $1,200 for the four years, from a great-aunt, with a promise to pay back every penny, which he eventually did. In addition to attending class, he had to work to earn his room and board, and the first semester he nearly flunked out. In his rural high school, he had not been taught how to write a formal essay. He was unprepared for the college curriculum. He nearly broke down from the stress, but he was lucky; a friend he had made, from a Boston Brahmin family, invited him to live rent-free in the apartment over the family garage, enabling him to quit some of his jobs and devote more time to his studies. For the rest of the year, Daddy had to commute from Boston, and he missed out on extracurricular campus life, but he learned to perform academically at the level expected of him. He graduated with honors in history.

As a teacher, Daddy was all for giving his students another chance—to a point. In the sixties, when Harrison began to accept more students from underprivileged backgrounds, Daddy held firm to the belief that Harrison could be the making of them. For students who refused to conform or put forth the effort, he had no patience. He let them know in no uncertain terms what opportunities they would be throwing away. Usually they would come to their senses, but if they didn’t, Harrison wasn’t the place for them, and they didn’t last there.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m not sure how Daddy became a history master and athletic coach. I know when he began teaching at Harrison before the war, he had earned his master’s degree in history and taught at two other schools. Knowing him as I do, I think that the first teaching job must have been offered to him, and that he probably accepted it because it promised work that appealed to him, benefits, and job security. After a few years, the war intervened and took him off to the adventure of his life, and by that time, I think, he already had earned tenure at Harrison.

In other words, I doubt prep school teaching was what he set out to do. I’m not sure what his aspirations were, but I think he would have liked a university career. But the life that chose him was suited for him. There’s no denying he had a gift for molding hearts and minds—particularly boys’. For several years, he’d handpick a group of six students and invite them on a summer sailing trip, charging their families only expenses. He’d drive the group from outside of Philadelphia, where we lived, to New London, Connecticut, where his boat, a navy surplus tender that he had bought after the war at auction and had refitted—would be ready. For a month they would sail up and down the New England coast, from Connecticut to Maine and back, stopping at ports of interest along the way. Some of those boys later cited Daddy as their single most important influence and kept in touch with him for the rest of his life.

While Daddy was on his sailing trips with his students, we stayed at the cottage on the Vermont lake that belonged to Mother’s family. All summer, friends and relatives dropped in—it was that kind of place. We loved it. It was paradise to us.

There was a day camp on the other side of the lake, with a swimming school, canoeing, hiking, and other activities that we all participated in, but most of the time we were free to wander.

By the time that Patricia was twelve and I was nine and Eddie seven, Daddy put an end to his summer sailing trips with his students. Instead, we all sailed together for a couple of summers, and then Daddy sold his boat and bought a smaller sailboat, named the Mary Helen for mother, for the lake. We also kept canoes and kayaks there. Back then motor boats weren’t allowed on the lake, and we eschewed them on principle.

There was a state forest bordering part of the lake, with steep trails up rocky slopes and streams that fell in small waterfalls on their courses into the lake. There were also deep underground springs that fed the lake, whose waters at that time were crystal clear. I remember summer nights, sleeping in the hammock on the screened-in porch. If I craned my neck, I could see the stars over the lake. On moonless nights they seemed to hang so close in the black sky that I found it hard to believe how many millions of miles away they really were.

* * *

Mother and Daddy had met while chaperoning a co-ed dance that brought together students from Chapin-Oakes, the all-girls’ school where Mother was teaching, and Harrison. Mother had reached her thirties without getting married and seemed destined for spinsterhood. In fact, that evening she had hoped to get out of going to the dance, but there weren’t enough chaperones.

No less than Harrison’s headmaster claimed the first dance from Mother. Daddy later said that he had noticed Mother right away and wanted to ask her first, but the headmaster’s rank was higher, and Daddy dared not presume on it. By this time he had already commanded a ship of three thousand men on Guam, and he was a scrupulous observer of courtesy and hierarchy.

It seemed to Mother that she had been waiting for Daddy all her life without knowing it. For the rest of the evening, they danced all the dances together, except when they stopped to talk to each other.

Mother instinctively felt that Daddy was a man who could be depended on, a man who had already proved his worth as an adult many times over, and who would be a good husband and father. She saw that he respected her intelligence, and she believed he would let himself be influenced by her opinions. When she learned of the hardships he had suffered in his youth and the burdens he had borne for others, her heart went out to him. She fell in love with him because she could tell he was a loving man who had been deprived of love. She believed that her love could rescue him from his unhappy past.

Consciously, they entered into marriage as an equal partnership. Mother came from a line of strong-minded men and women, who weren’t afraid to agitate for what they believed in. They were Abolitionists and women suffragists. One hundred fifty years ago, they had been Quakers; now they were Congregationalists. No matter the denomination, their religious ideals stressed works more than faith. They focused their efforts on building a better world in the here and now.

They were sober people, plain and respectable. They revered music, painting, poetry, drama—in a serious-minded way that was in keeping with their characters. Everything they did had a purpose of improvement. Their great values were humanism and education, yet they also indulged their children, allowing them long stretches of unstructured time in which to develop their interests as they wished.

Mother was devoted to her parents and to her younger sister, who suffered from cerebral palsy, but because of the family’s care and support, lived a normal life. I was well into my teenaged years before I realized that Aunt Kat had a disability. It had not occurred to me before.

Mother’s father, Julius Phelps, was Professor of English and Philosophy at Swarthmore College, and his living room was often a gathering place for his students, where they were welcomed with cookies and conversation. Mother later created that atmosphere in our home, but with an inescapable difference, because Daddy’s students were all boys.

When Mother and Daddy met, she was French instructor at Chapin-Oakes. She had graduated from Bryn Mawr College with honors in French and continued her studies at the Sorbonne. That was in the thirties, before the war. Sensing that Europe was about to explode, she returned to the U.S. and found a teaching job. Chapin-Oakes had an excellent reputation and the added advantage of being near her family. She had been employed there for eight years when she met Daddy.

To hear Mother tell it, through her college and graduate years, she was too busy studying to think of young men, and once she found herself ensconced in a girls’ school, there were no young men around to meet. Then came the war, and all the young men were off fighting, and many didn’t come back. Eventually she had to face it; there weren’t a lot of men around, period. As I said, she’d just about given up when she met Daddy.

The dance was in November; by Christmas, they were engaged, but they had to conceal it, because if Mother’s principal knew, Mother would lose her job. School policy did not allow married teachers or even engaged teachers at Chapin-Oakes. But Mother and Daddy needed the salary from her job to start their married life with, and she was intending to finish out the year before resigning.

There followed a winter and spring of secrecy and subterfuge. Mother’s parents knew, but no one else did. Daddy was insistent that he wanted to be married in a small ceremony with only Mother’s immediate family attending. Mother felt guilty about excluding Daddy’s mother. She hadn’t yet met her future mother-in-law, yet felt she would never be forgiven. Daddy explained to her that his mother would insist on their having a fancy, expensive wedding, just the kind of wedding that they didn’t want and couldn’t afford, and she would involve herself in the planning of it, and the result would be an additional headache for them that they could well do without.

“Believe me,” he emphasized, “I know my mother. I’m certain what she’ll do.”

As Mother got to know Daddy better, she realized that he had an additional reason for not including his mother: she lived with a man that she wasn’t married to. She called herself Mrs. Bruce Aylmer; she had the name engraved on her calling cards and her stationery, but, in fact, there was already a Mrs. Bruce Aylmer, and that first Mrs. Bruce Aylmer clung to the name and refused to divorce, even though she and Bruce Aylmer hadn’t lived as man and wife for nearly twenty years.

Mother also learned that Daddy’s mother was still his chief financial burden. Since Bruce Aylmer was disabled by an injury and unable to resume employment as a train conductor, Daddy was obliged to contribute to maintain them. Gertrude, now married, also helped out when she could, but she had a young child and depended upon her husband’s salary.

Poor Martin! thought Mother. His family has caused him little but trouble! Almost all his life, Martin has been supporting his mother, and he still is, and he is ashamed of her.

Once Mother understood the sources of Daddy’s feelings, she willingly acceded to his wishes. They were married in early June, just after their school terms ended, in the Phelpses’ garden. A garland of roses was wound around a wire arch under which Mother walked, escorted by her father, on her way to Daddy. Mother wore a white, calf-length dress suitable for the afternoon, and perched on her head was a tiara sewn with pearls, anchoring a veil, that had been passed down in her family for four generations.

The service deliberately omitted the word “obey” from the vows.

Mother and Daddy spent their honeymoon at a summer camp in the Berkshires, where Daddy had worked, that hadn’t yet opened for the season. The owner had offered it to Daddy free of charge. They were the only people there, except for two workmen making repairs to the cabins. There was a large kitchen in the main building, but they had brought an ice chest with them and preferred to cook their dinner over an open fire and at breakfast and lunch sustain themselves on sandwiches and fruit.

There was a lake where Daddy took Mother rowing and canoeing. No sailboats were available, but Daddy promised Mother a future of many sails.

Following their honeymoon, they went to Amherst to pay a visit to Daddy’s mother and Bruce Aylmer, who were living there.

In my experience, Mother was always careful of what she said about her mother-in-law. “She’s had a hard life,” Mother was apt to remark, “we mustn’t blame her.” But a note of impatience invariably got into Mother’s voice when she mentioned Grandma; she couldn’t seem to help it.

When Mother married, she was in her thirties, past what was then considered childbearing age, and she and Daddy tried to start a family immediately. She suffered two miscarriages before she gave birth to Patricia, and then there was a long space before they had Eddie, during which time they adopted me.

After Mother and Daddy were married, Harrison rented them a house on the campus. This was the house we grew up in, a lovely center-hall colonial, painted white, with a dining room downstairs on one side, a living room on the other, and a kitchen at the back. Upstairs were three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Patricia and I shared a bedroom until Mother and Daddy created a room for Eddie in the attic, and I took his bedroom.

In the beginning of their marriage, in order to spare Mother the work of shopping and cooking, Mother and Daddy paid Harrison a boarding fee and took their meals in the dining hall with students and other faculty. They had calculated the costs, and they were more or less equivalent. But after Mother became pregnant, she wasn’t allowed to eat with the students. Apparently, these boys were of a tender age and not to be subjected to the sight of a pregnant woman.

For all Mother’s championship of women’s rights and equality, she was unable to continue to work after she was married, and, pregnant, she was banned from the dining hall at her husband’s school. The school refunded her portion of the board, and for the remainder of the term, Daddy ate his meals in the dining hall and Mother at home.

But this was an unsatisfactory situation, made infinitely worse when Mother lost the baby. From then on, Mother and Daddy ate their meals at home. Daddy washed the dishes and frequently assisted with food preparation. He preferred to cook what was simple and easy, and so did Mother, with an emphasis on what was good for you.

I admit, as teenagers, that Patricia and I were hard on Mother when we asked her how she could call herself a feminist and yet have put up with such discriminatory behavior from both schools. We once reproached her in this way as she sat at the sewing machine, mending a torn seam in a sheet so it could still be used. I recall, bent like that over the sprigged fabric, that she reminded me of nothing as much as a pioneer woman (although pioneer women didn’t have electric sewing machines). After we both upbraided her, she was silent for a moment. Raising her eyes to meet ours, she said, “One cannot bring about such a revolution in a year or even ten years. Or in my lifetime. Perhaps your generation will experience perfect equality between the sexes, but I doubt it.”

The glare of the sewing machine light was reflected upward on her face. It hurt my eyes to look back at her, but Patricia wasn’t fazed. “Women can’t continue to wait forever,” Patricia replied. “You’ll see.”

Patricia came of age at the exact break in our culture between cotillion balls and rock concerts, between padded bras and girdles and nylons (what was once called a “foundation”) and a loose, liberated, bra-less way of being and dressing—tie-dye, fringe on jeans, flowing blouses, and wavy hair. Mother was tolerant of Patricia’s appearance. Not Daddy. He said he’d had too much experience of men to trust them around his daughter with her looking the way she did when she went out.

Daddy and Patricia clashed. They each claimed the moral high ground, and they both had to be right. When they argued, I pictured two determined bulls locking horns. With Patricia, Daddy seemed to forget his tact, and once, when she had infuriated him, he lashed out at her in such a tone of voice I have never forgotten it. Until he got control of himself, it sounded as if he were strangling.

I think Daddy’s conflicts with Patricia must have triggered a reaction that awakened his complicated feelings about his mother. Daddy’s mother had been an intelligent and cultured woman; she’d read widely and had good taste. He admired her in many ways, and her discriminating nature had helped form his character. Yet she’d been a weight on him that dragged him down and a sorrow he had to bear.

His mother’s experiences indicated to Daddy that Patricia did not appreciate how hard life could be for a woman, and how, more than a man, she needed protection and support. An unblemished reputation, a good name—these were important assets, difficult to acquire, and essential to maintain. Daddy believed that Patricia valued these too lightly. He knew she was impulsive, and he didn’t trust her judgment.

There was something about Patricia that drove her to tangle with Daddy. She would oppose him even when she had no intention of disobeying him. Struggle with him seemed to energize her. Her excitement built, and Daddy would get angrier.

Eddie and I both took cautionary lessons from Patricia. Instead of welcoming confrontation, we try to avoid it. To give her credit, she blazed a trail for us as the eldest child. After Patricia opposed Mother and Daddy, there was no need for us to.

In many ways, I admired Patricia for her bravery. She was then—and remained—a crusader. She was too transparent to be a politician, but she had a politician’s ability to change people’s opinions. In the union office where she ran the literacy program, she attracted many followers, and they became the union’s next generation of leaders. For all that she conceived of herself in opposition to Daddy, she ended up transmitting Daddy’s essential values and his lessons in civic duties and responsibilities.

Yet I’ve always felt uncomfortable around her. I felt she judged me and found me lacking because I wasn’t like her. It’s not that I’m a cynic, or don’t believe in helping my fellow human being, but I’ve always avoided large public demonstrations. I guess I’m afraid of losing my individuality in the multitude. I invariably had an excuse for Patricia when she wanted me to join one of her marches, because I knew she wouldn’t understand or accept my real reasons for not participating.

When we were growing up, she definitely let me know that my accomplishments were a threat to her, except in areas she did not care about, and I did my best to avoid arousing her feelings of competition. There’s no denying that I was a plump, mousy, stay-at-home girl. While part of me longed to be pretty and popular, another part of me was relieved not to be. I was only twelve when Patricia started going out with boys, and I had plenty of opportunities to witness examples of her jealousy and possessiveness. I wasn’t eager to stimulate them, nor, after the anxieties that she’d caused Mother and Daddy, did I want to be the source of any more trouble for them.

I never have been willing to reveal my private feelings and motives in the same way Patricia did. Patricia, who was touchy about so many things—her prerogatives as the eldest, her principles when she felt they were being compromised—did not seem to feel sensitive at all about what other people knew about her.

Mother was more like me, circumspect. Patricia sometimes shocked her. She considered Patricia headstrong and occasionally thoughtless. She knew I was not, but I don’t think she was at all aware of the fear I lived with, of having been an unwanted child. I was good at concealing my feelings. I succeeded in concealing them from myself.

* * *

I was a little afraid and in awe of Harrison students when I was young. Sometimes I’d be crossing the campus with Mother and Daddy, and I’d see some of them chasing after each other or throwing a football or butting into each other in the way that boys do, and I’d worry that I’d somehow get in their way and get hurt. I tended to avoid them and knew little at all about them, except for occasional details that Daddy shared with us at the dinner table. It wasn’t until I began to attend Daddy’s “Cookies and Conversations” that I became acquainted with any of them.

As I mentioned, the idea for Daddy’s “Cookies and Conversations” was really Mother’s, because it was inspired by Professor Phelps’s evenings with his students in his home. But while Professor Phelps’s gatherings had a literary purpose—one particularly notable evening was his reading from The Turn of the Screw, in which he frightened some of his students so much they couldn’t go to sleep—Daddy’s meetings had a wholly different raison d’être. Daddy was deeply interested in his students as individuals, and he welcomed opportunities for frank and stimulating exchange. I believe he had in mind Socrates’ Academy when he spoke of education as a kind of conversation. This was the lofty ideal behind his “Cookies and Conversations.”

They were memorable evenings, not so much, I think, for what was said, but for their relaxed and pleasant atmosphere. Daddy laid some ground rules: no one could monopolize the conversation or interrupt anyone else; each had to speak in turn and give all a chance to have their say. It sounds simple, but I think it was the rare quality of Daddy’s encouragement—and Mother’s, too, for she always participated at these gatherings—that left us feeling uplifted.

Daddy never asked, “Do you mean?” He made a statement, “You mean,” and when he finished, he had not only expressed the thought clearly and simply but had made it sound as though it had been entirely the other person’s, with no contribution from him. He was a generous teacher, and that was why his students revered him.

There’s a story Daddy used to tell from his days in Guam that illustrates some of his qualities. A Japanese sampan, a fifty-foot fishing boat, had been stranded a hundred feet up on the beach of the base where Daddy was stationed. One of Daddy’s young ensigns rounded up a motor machinist and several others and went to work on the engine. Daddy regarded this as good recreation. They got the engine going, and they began digging up the beach to get the boat into the water. Daddy saw what they were doing, and he also saw that they had to cope with a hard coral beach below the sand.

One afternoon Daddy heard a loud explosion, and he knew there would be trouble. When he got back from the beach, he had to return a call to Naval Supply Command and report that the explosion was unauthorized and wouldn’t happen again. He thought the boys would give up in the hundred-degree heat, but two days later he noticed that the boat was not on the beach. In fact, it was out in the water inside the reef at anchor.

At the Officers’ Club, the Captain informed Daddy that he had no authorization to increase the size of the United States Navy, and further, Daddy was to get rid of the boat even if he had to sink it.

Daddy bargained with him to let him give it to Captain Olaf, the Swedish husband of a native lady with whom Daddy had been working to set up a school for the native children. The Captain approved and said Daddy could let those boys cruise on the sampan with Captain Olaf if they had an officer present in charge and did not go more than a half mile beyond the reef and only in perfect weather. Captain Olaf was glad of the boat and took the boys for their well-earned outing. It was a great boost to their morale, said Daddy.

Daddy enjoyed telling this story to his students because he believed it was important not to discourage young people. He didn’t let his deep, unfulfilled need for a father prevent him from becoming the kind of fatherly man that two generations of young men looked up to. It was only with Patricia that Daddy’s ideals came into painful conflict with his behavior, and I think it was because Patricia was able to hurt him in ways that no one else had except his mother.

But at the “Cookies and Conversations,” Daddy took a calmer, more measured attitude to Patricia. He seemed to listen to her more carefully and weigh her opinions, which were sometimes extreme, more judiciously than he might at other times. Thus, these evenings had a salutary effect on him as well, and he was able to be more accepting of Patricia as an individual.

It is an indication of the difference between Patricia and me that at these gatherings she liked to sit in the center of the room, where everyone could see her, and I preferred to remain at the periphery. Eddie, when he was old enough to be included, was rarely still, but liked to be petted and made much of by the young men. It excited him to be around them. It excited all of us. Patricia’s face glowed in the lamplight, and even Mother relaxed and grew more animated than usual.

I was excited, too. Listening to the high-minded talk gave me a sense of security and contentment, and I rarely felt the need to add any idea of my own. I was shy and unconfident of my ability to express myself. I preferred to watch the others; I hardly thought they noticed me.

I noticed them, of course. And so it is that now I find myself approaching the other subject, as yet unmentioned, underlying these pages.

Paden. Paden Powell. Just saying his name aloud affects me strongly.

At Harrison, one of my first memories of Paden was of him kneeling on the rug in front of the coffee table in our living room, pouring out tea and passing around the cups. Paden had beautiful hands, with long, slender, tapering fingers, and he loved tea and the ceremonial aspects of tea drinking. The reason for his presence in our living room was that he was one of a group of Daddy’s students invited over for “Cookies and Conversations.” Yet from the beginning Paden was more than a student. He was almost like a member of the family.

One reason was because the Powells had become our neighbors at the lake. They had bought a three-acre lot on the water a quarter-mile down from us. The first year after Daddy had stopped taking his students sailing up the New England coast and had taken us instead, we visited the lake at Labor Day to find the Powells already well-established.

Augustus Powell had first seen the lake many years before that, when he had been one of Mother’s father’s favorite students and had come to stay for a week one summer and assist Professor Phelps in his research. When I knew Augustus, he was Professor of Philosophy at Columbia. He had piercing blue eyes under bushy eyebrows and an abrupt way of coming up behind me when I wasn’t looking and surprising me with direct questions. I felt uncomfortable around him, because he seemed to enjoy embarrassing me, and I never knew what he would say.

His wife Sally was blonde and curvy, as different from him as could be. When I think of her, I think of a de Kooning painting, all chaos and bright colors. She liked to make outrageous statements for effect. Much of the time Augustus barely seemed to pay attention to her. Paden knew just how to calm her down when she was upset. “Now, Sally,” he’d begin, with that silky note in his voice, slightly teasing and flirtatious, and it worked every time.

Paden had always called his parents by their first names. They didn’t seem to mind—quite the opposite. Sarah, Paden’s junior by nine years, followed his example, and so did everyone else in Paden’s circle.

* * *

Another memory I have of Paden is of when he was building his treehouse at the lake that summer after his freshman year at Columbia, before he went to France. He said he’d always wanted a treehouse. It would be his place, where no one else could come unless invited. He was making it purposely hard to get to. He’d found the tree—a tall red maple out of sight of the lake and the Powells’ house. The first thing he did was nail a ladder up the trunk. Fifteen feet up, he constructed the treehouse’s platform. He brought the boards up on a pulley, and he used a hammer, nails, wood screws, and a cordless drill.

Once Paden had built the platform, he’d sleep up there sometimes, even before there were any walls. He wasn’t afraid of falling out of the tree in his sleep. He said that he just told himself not to move, and he never did. He buried his head in his sleeping bag to keep off the insects, and he said he’d never slept so soundly.

There was a path through the woods that went near Paden’s treehouse, and during the day sometimes I would pass by there to observe his progress. By mid-August, he’d gotten the roof and three walls up.

The day I’m remembering was hot and sunny. The sun filtered down through the trees, creating a dappled pattern on the forest floor. It was so pronounced it was almost like an optical illusion. I had lost track of where I was when I came on the small clearing where Paden’s tree had grown so tall. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I peered up at the treehouse. In my angle of vision, it was in front of the sun, and I was dazzled. I made out a dark shape—it was Paden—waving his arms, in greeting or in warning, I couldn’t tell. Then I saw part of a shape moving behind him, the glimpse of a bare shoulder and a woman’s hair.

I knew who it was. I hadn’t spoken, and neither had Paden, but he had seen me, and I had seen him. Very quietly, I turned my back and retraced my steps the way I had come. I didn’t think the woman he was with had seen me.

That’s how I found out that Patricia was sleeping with Paden.

* * *

It was a long time after Paden was dead, and I was living on my own, when I discovered a new connection to him. Oliver had been Paden’s friend at Columbia. When Paden went to France, they had kept up the friendship for a while and then lost track of each other—so Oliver told me when we met. They were out of touch when Oliver had learned of Paden’s death. He hadn’t even known that Paden had gone to Chile.

Apparently, even years later, Oliver remained affected by Paden, because he’d spoken about him to his girlfriend, Renée, who was the high school friend of my friend, Maria, which is how I learned of it.

At that time I was not in close contact with the Powells, and the wish to talk about Paden with someone who had been his friend overwhelmed me. Through my grapevine connection between Maria and Renée, I sent out feelers to learn if Oliver would be willing to meet with me to share our reminiscences. It took about a month for the answer to come back in the affirmative and another week for us to set a time and place.

Over the phone Oliver had a deep voice, and I tried to picture him. I had seen his likeness in a photograph Maria showed me of him and Renée. He was handsome, there was no doubt about it, with dark hair and eyes, and easily as tall as Paden.

Impulsively, I told him about the letters and asked him if he and Paden had ever corresponded.

“Oh yes, I believe we did,” he replied. “Paden was a great one for writing letters.”

“I have some wonderful letters from him,” I said. “I’ll bring them to show you, if you show me yours.”

To my surprise, he and Renée didn’t live far from me. I agreed to meet him at a neighborhood bar later that week after he got off from work.

I was nervous when the time came, and I deliberately arrived late so I wouldn’t have to wait alone for him. He was sitting at a booth with a bowl of peanuts in front of him when I walked in. It was winter, and he was wearing a heavy knit turtleneck sweater, like one Paden might have worn.

In person, Oliver was even handsomer than in his picture, and I felt nervous, the way I often feel with someone that physically attractive, that I won’t be able to measure up to the same standard. The lighting in the room was deliberately dim, and I was glad of it, since it made it harder for us to scrutinize each other. Immediately I brought the conversation to Paden.

I wanted so much to understand Paden, and I thought perhaps Oliver could provide me with some keys to knowing him that would give me new insights.

“I have to hand it to Paden that he was a serious scholar and thorough in his studies. He wasn’t afraid of hard work. For example, he was determined to read the Greek and Roman philosophers in the original, and he would do it,” Oliver recalled. “And yet, I wonder if there wasn’t something lacking in him. That he just didn’t have that spark of creativity, and all his diligence couldn’t make up for it.”

What Oliver said caused me pain. I didn’t want to believe it. To my mind, there had been no one like Paden, no one with his brilliance. Why, it was even legend in our family. I remembered what Daddy had said about him as his prize student.

I also remembered, of course, how later Paden lost much of his luster. But that had been due to his illness.

At this thought, I felt sadness cloud my feelings—sadness, and nostalgia. It was then that I offered to show Oliver my letters. It turned out he had none to show me in return. I accepted the disappointment.

As I handed him the small collection of thin, light-blue aerogrammes and white, blue-lined envelopes, they seemed to me as delicate and fragile as butterfly wings. Paden had had a small, careful handwriting, and Oliver had to put on glasses and strain close to read in the dim light of the bar. For a while I looked at him reading, and then I looked away. I couldn’t see his expression, but I felt embarrassed all the same. I wondered if I had made a mistake in showing him the letters, and if I would regret it.

Oliver read one letter, and then another, and another, perhaps half a dozen in all, before he folded them, arranged them in a neat stack, and carefully laid his hand over them. There was a silence as I sensed him struggling for what to say.

I could feel his eyes on me, and his voice was so gentle I could barely make it out. “Were you Paden’s lover?”

His question astonished me. “Oh no, no…nothing like that,” I stammered. “You don’t understand. He was so much older than I. Four years…”

Oliver’s expression turned to disbelief, and I suddenly remembered that he was six years older than Renée.

“Well, it seemed a big difference back then,” I lamely tried to explain.

It was clear that Oliver didn’t believe me. “But these are intimate letters,” he said. “Letters you would write to a lover. Paden never wrote letters like these to me.”

Our hands touched briefly as he gave me back my letters, but it was his words that had opened up a well of feeling. I had never allowed myself to admit how much I loved Paden. That I had been afraid of Patricia, afraid of her anger, long after she and Paden broke apart—that was one reason. I’d also believed that, because of Patricia, Mother and Daddy wouldn’t have approved. But the main reason was Paden himself. I couldn’t comprehend that he could really have been interested in me as a lover. He always seemed lofty and unapproachable, far above me. For years I had treasured his letters and kept them separate from other letters, but the thought that they might have been as important to him—that was a new thought, and an answer I’ll never know.

Oliver and I never met again, but he helped me see what had passed between me and Paden in a new light. The ancient Greeks whom Paden revered believed that what happens to you after you die can affect how well your life has gone. Most people today would scoff at the notion that what you say about a man after he is dead can make a difference to him, yet the ancient Greeks took it for granted.

One purpose in writing this memoir is to learn about myself and explain myself to me. Another is to make a gesture of love and affection to Paden in perpetuating his memory. I ask his forgiveness from beyond the grave for not being as good to him as I might have been, for not understanding what he was suffering when I should have, and not helping him when I could have.

At last I acknowledge the love for him that I never allowed myself to express to him directly.