Donhiser, Fiona

my name is white my
coat is white I work
with white mice in a
silo I start with
the house mouse after
months of breeding I
come up with a mutant
strain of albino
as well as what are
called waltzing mice
because they step
1-2-3 due to
an imbalance you
can’t begin to
imagine what gene
do when I knock
them out as a rule
I don’t condone
violence but I like
to play goddess now
& then it lets there
be lightness cutting
in on the dancers
I do my one thing
blasé as it is
edit slide edit

---

1. ACME Circus Company

That was Harmony, hoping to get the circus
listed first in the phone books. She got the idea,

she said, much later, from the Human Cannonball
who could bench-press many times his body weight

and was wicked-smart. Then, Harmony loved the art of
managing ten or twelve railroad cars of animals. Caricatures

of what is still being allowed to pass for human beings.
She said the ACME label worked like a charm—said

more than one Chamber of Commerce businessman-suit
optioning entertainment said that it felt wrong, and right

dialing the first listing he’d come to. Which was the place
she’d say the Human Cannonball was an expert on falling

and give him credit for the listing-name. Humble person.
I met Harm booking that circus of hers—straighforward

exchanges along the lines of this-is-what-I-can-afford-and-
what-will-it-buy-me dialogues ending with a three-day visit.

Scheduling arrival and departure times, I asked for a bond
against Acts of God and the failure to appear as contracted.

She says it’s why she loves me to this day: that I knew
the figure it would take for her to know I valued her, too.

2. A Plummeter’s Guide to the Physics of Falling Objects

Let’s begin with you skydiving, tandem,
noticing the scrolls of smoke drafting from
the flare the instructor wants you to observe.

You guess that it’s there largely to distract you,
the flare, flower-tresses of red a bright backdrop.
All around you, the boulevards of pending grasses

send up shadow-valentines of sweet warning to say
the planet has no business rising to meet the Falling.
But that’s how it seems, skydivers say: the earth is

rising. Which isn’t true. Call it The Elevator Effect.
On the ground, someone points to a bird that he says
was struck—an American Crow. It’s no raven, given

the size and strike-altitude. The bird present in a group
whereas ravens run in pairs. Shrewd-smart birds, both.
You’re hearing that divers have been hit by meteorites

but never birds. What you smell has lots of names—
you’re confident you kept you sphincter locked tight.
Deferentially, the instructor raises her goggles. Laughs.

You say that, while falling, you recall James Dickey,
his poem “The Performance,” where a soldier does all
the tricks he can before the Japanese cut his head off

and he falls, headless, into a grave. Light thinning on
billboarded horizon, someone has come forth to say
the crow must be up, and all right, since it’s flown.

3. And Every Cell of Creation Opened Its Mouth to Drink Grace
—Joy Harjo, “By the Way” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2016)

A promised job in New Jersey sent us home
with nothing to buy a house but my VA loan.
For her, stories were proof of wounding at the

hands of her wheelchair-bound mother or funny
in the way her father’s joke about a “can of pee”
and canopy bed is amusing once. Maybe twice.

One story was of a sister pinning her to the floor
under a dangle of saliva meant to tease. Trust me,
to bully. Look closely. See if you aren’t visioning

the thick cord of spittle fake-launched. Launched.
Lonely is the child and lovely are the russet eyes
flashing as she raises a slurry of damning spells.

I’d like a spell for those who took everything.
Once, in Wisconsin; then, in Florida where we
loved sun, the starry dark as surprising as a

dropped handkerchief. No one gets out what
they put in. It’s not even close. Nevertheless,
sooner of later, they’ll pin you down. Spit.

4. The Qualifications of Working As a Fortune Teller

This isn’t a calling to be entered into lightly. Although
anyone can do a thing, that class of democratic thinking
ends at the wisdom in knowing that not everyone should.

But, all right, say you’re clairvoyant. A psychic prodigy.
What Billy Collins would call the bread and the knife.
In his poem, he reaches into a painting—what if I reach

into Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and slap
away Old Gray Beard’s hand? What if I did just that,
calling attention to the shape in the background behind

God and the angels? See the halo-shaped cloud encircling?
Is any of this helping you decide if the telling of fortunes
is in your future? All morning, I watched a squirrel mad-

scamper a stairway-to-heaven of black locust branches—
if any of us is the bread and the knife, it’s a squirrel
storied into at least one future, thanks to a poem.

It’s always Forever in a poem unless some asshole
set’s fire to the world, completing crumbling futures
you’d like not to foretell. What is coming to pass is,

if you follow any part of this, you’re a fit. Go ahead.
Opened your heart to what soundlessness says in words
of wind. Or, as we say in the Midwest, the Mysteries.

5. Bastard

My father had a ’48 Plymouth. A beast-car
with an interior a kid could get lost in. Seats
that smelled of Old Spice Aftershave Lotion,

L & M cigarettes, and gasoline. Taken together,
they were my father’s smell—he adored cars and
told me he was in the Army and overseas in Korea

before he realized his gift. His mother (Susan) had,
years before, when he was a boy, been shuttled off
to the state sanitarium in Frankfort. He was raised

by relatives who couldn’t agree with his mother
loosing bullets towards the man—a married man who
said that he wasn’t in the habit of supporting bastards.

He said it like you’d spit out on e of the Devil’s names,
and my grandmother with a gun she knew how to use.
The story goes, she emptied a Colt and was reloading

when a sheriff stopped her. Maybe my dad figured
if things went bad (the wheels came off, so to speak,
as they had for her), he’d have that Goliath with the

hawk’s-beak hood. He had to rebuild the carburetor
in the rain more than once, so there were hood-dents
from his fists. One in the shape of the Commonwealth

of the Great State of Kentucky. To say he was angry
is tamping it down. To say he had a sort of need to slap
or slug someone—anyone, and soon—would be right.

6. The One-Night Cheap Hotel of Divinity
Answering All Arguments to the Contrary

That’s what our god graduated from, if there is one
a God although insisting on one is magical thinking.
So gobbledygook spawned God—rabbis and priests

and mullahs talk this rabbi- or priest or mullah-speak.
Without physical knowledge of God beyond The Torah
and Talmud, The Quran and Miles Davis. Nevertheless,

given the argument against the existence of an afterlife
posed using General Systems Theory—if there is a Deity,
she has an apocalyptic bent to her, and is a drama queen—

which centers around the nature of systems and subsystems.
What’s the name on her diploma?—The One-Night Cheap
Hotel of Divinity Answering All Arguments to the Contrary.

Which correspondence doctoral program? I won’t laugh—
we draw Whoopi-Goldberg-on-a-Good-Day kindhearted-God?
That explains a lot. Mercy in a mini-skirt, stiletto high-heels,

dreadlocks. Striking but busy filling the job of being God.
And passing the buck back to that old standby Free Will.

7. If the Physics of Falling is an Allegory for Existence

Questioning things has always been my true north.
So if the physics of falling is an allegory for existence,

then why not ask what hands will hammock your falling?
Am I hearing William Wordsworth? the Divine in nature?

Wordsworth’s connection with the earth is a connection
to something akin to the Divine Spark—and now I’m

thinking of my sister Steph and her friend Ann Colliver
setting fire to the garbage cans behind our house in Ohio.

I was in the Air Force and on active duty in another state
and so I missed my father swearing as he put out the blaze

by himself and tried to put things right. The world is on fire.
But if it had been the handiwork of kids, general mischief,

responsible parties would still be getting yelled at. As if
there’s no fixing it, is there? And no end to the scorching.

A big-for-her-age ten-year-old, in rainbows-and-unicorns
pajamas, has come out form a bedroom to face the music.

See her pausing in the hallway to beg mercy or promise
an impersonation of the kid in The Exorcist in which she

will start swearing up a not-nice storm. See her making
her mouth dramatically shape the phrase It’s your call.

---

NILS SCOOPS AWAY THE SNOW carefully at first, with a trench shovel, then desperately, finally getting down on his knees and scraping with his hands at the thick stratum of ice when he believes he’s found another body. Twice what he has uncovered has been not a body but someone’s luggage—the olive-green duffle of a soldier the first time, and now, an hour or maybe two hours later (time has become hard to measure out here in the dark and the cold), a lady’s brocade valise. He sits back on his heels and breathes the rimy air in ragged gasps. The fabric of the bag was so certainly a woman’s overcoat an instant ago, the round shape of it her curved back. He kicks at the bag with the toe of his boot and pulls off his gloves.

It is March, but there is no sign of spring here. Snow is still falling, and Nils’s fingers are still with the freezing temperature. He works at the buckles and the bag opens; when he shines the beam of his lantern inside he sees the cream colored satin of a woman’s under slip, a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses in a soft drawstring pouch, a silver compact with a clamshell design on its case and a mirror inside, the glass clean and unbroken. He snaps shut the clasp on the compact and drops it into his pants pocket, tosses the bag aside, and pulls on his gloves again to keep digging.

Here and there flares poked into the snow fizz and hiss, their sulfuric halos trembling and bright against the white drifts. In their odd, low light the wreckage of the avalanche seems imagined, too strange and awful to be real: trees snapped to raw splinters, and the whole, wide swath of the mountainside cleared; metal sheets ripped from the train car’s sides, the frames twisted and freed of their axels and carriages, shards of window glass and the steel cages from the train’s internal light fixtures tossed out onto the snow. Near the tracks, where the train had stopped to wait out the weather, the rotary plow and both engines sit mangled and half buried, wheels upturned to the sky. Two of the three passengers cars that were once hitched to one another have been flung apart and lie on their sides, farther down the mountainside—one only a hundred yards from the tracks, the other picked up by the tide of snow and ice and swept a quarter-mile downhill. Both look as if they’ve been exploded from the inside, the metal roofs blown out by the force of the snow, their wood siding broken and strewn. And everywhere precarious collisions of logs, evergreen needles, and bits of gravel and dirt churned up by the slide.

There is also what the searchers have uncovered as they’ve dug: a silver coffee carafe, and nearby, the book someone on board had been reading, its pages open and face down, the paper softening now. Nils comes across suitcases and purses; checked blankets and white pillows, stamped PROPERTY OF GREAT NORTHERN RAILROAD; and several shoes and boots somehow separated from their owners. As he walks, he spots a single seat ejected from the train and detached from its aisle mate in the accident, sitting upright between the shorn stumps of two fir trees as if waiting for a passenger to amble up and sit down.

The snow underfoot here is wet and dense and grainy. It was compacted in the rush down the mountainside, and a rigid crust has formed beneath the inches of loose, new snow, making it hard for Nils to keep his footing. There is a strange, mineral scent in the air too—stirred up by the slide—something like the smell of a river. Nils realizes he will smell this odor again when the thaw begins in the spring and this years will think not of new life, but of destruction.

He passes a new mound every few feet that looks the size and shape of a body. Sometimes he stops and digs. Sometimes he just plunges his shovel into the snow and hopes the blade won’t strike anything solid; he sighs his relief when it goes in cleanly, pulls it free again, and keeps walking. There are drifts taller than men, wider than the train cars, and the task of unburying whatever lies beneath them seems impossible and useless. This is already the second day of searching—it took Nils a full day just to arrive, with the tracks blocked by the avalanche and the only way to get up the mountain by foot. No one else will be found alive.

He recalls his mother telling him about the midwestern blizzards of her childhood. Cows out to pasture suffocated when their own breath froze in their nostrils. Farmers caught in a storm and lulled to their deaths by the monotony of white and the chill of hypothermia. He imagines children curled like rabbits in burrows beneath each mound of snow here, their eyelashes coated in tiny grains of ice, their lips sealed, their skin marbled blue.

“Here!” a man’s voice yells from several feet down the mountainside. “Here! Here!”

Nils lunges forward against the snow, breaking the ice shelled just below its surface. He feels as if he’s running through deep water; every step requires double the usual exertion. His boot tops fill and the snow melts with the warmth of his legs and soaks through the canvas of his pants, the wool of his long underwear. He sweeps the beam of his lantern across the white drifts, the kerosene inside the sloshing, and catches the shadowed columns of evergreen trunks, the shadowed bodies of other men straining to run. The men at his back holler to one another as they plod forward; one man in front of him carries an axe and a shovel, their blades clanging together as he moves.

“Where are you?” Nils yells in the direction of the voice. His exhalation is a bright cloud in the sphere of his lantern’s light. Snow whirls and kaleidscopes as it passes through the round of light.

“Down here!” calls man up ahead, and the other join him. They’ve been in a small meadow, Nils sees now for the first time; the railroad track is at the top of the short rise about them, and the voice hollering for help is thirty feet below, at least, down a steep incline.

He uses his shovel to steady himself. Some of the men use pickaxes they’ve brought, and there is the rhythmic pitch-and-stick sound of their blades cutting into the snow and holding, then dislodging as they make their way down the grade. The snow glints and shimmers inside the rails of light extending from their lamps. Overhead, most of the snow clouds have cleared, but there is no visible moon, and it is as if a lid has been screwed onto the jar of the world. The circle of sky is a hard, polished black, punctured only by the tiny, pale holes of stars.

By the time Nils reaches them, the others have already uncovered the body of a man and are lashing it to a toboggan with rope. Nils looks on and feels nothing, and then is guilty for this nothing.

The man’s skin is gray with the cold. They’ve wrapped his body in a checkered wool blanket, his face and feet sticking out at the end of the sled. He’s still wearing dress boots and hand-knit socks. Someone takes off his own hat and puts it on the dead man’s bare head. The gesture seems ridiculous out here, an unnecessary show of warmth that can’t possibly matter. The man’s face is frozen in a grimace. His eyes are shut.

“Jesus,” someone from the back of the crowd says. “They’re all just icicles.”

Two men take hold of the toboggan’s ropes and start up the mountainside to the tracks. They’ll take the body into the station town to be counted and once the rails are cleared, onto the train, which will take it west, over the pass to the morgue in Everett.

The other’s stand for a moment. They pull flasks from their coat pockets and take off their gloves to slap their hands against their thighs, warming their fingers again before slipping gloves back on. Someone has brought a pail of sandwiches and passes it around. Nils takes one and eats quickly without tasting what’s between the bread. He crumples the waxed paper the sandwich was wrapped in and stuffs it into the top of his boot.

“It’s two a.m.,” the man next to him says, and so they pick up their shovels and startup the incline again, hiking with high steps, asking the beams of their lanterns up the rise, toward the blue-black stand of evergreens at the top of the ridge, and back and forth across the angle of the mountainside, looking impossibly for anything salvageable.

HE IS IN HER BED. Her sheets smell like summer to him. When he says this, she tells him she cut lavender from the garden in August and dried it for sachets to keep in the linen cupboard.

It’s October, two years earlier, and the house is chilled, though it is late afternoon and there is still sun behind the thin drape at the window, lighting the collection of potted plants she keeps on a side table beneath the sill—spider plants and ferns, a white-blossomed amaryllis on a lim stalk, a geranium with petals colored on oxidized red. On the floor sits a pot overcrowded with a spiny bed of hen-and-chicks. “I think you’d bring the whole yard inside if you could,” he says.

“Not the weeds. Not the bugs. I can honestly say I don’t miss a single aphid or wasp all winter.” She lays her head on the pillow beside his.

Iris grew up in California and winter here makes her homesick. “I remember the air at home smelling like persimmons. But maybe I”m misremembering. My memory is an optimist. In my memory of this moment you’ll be younger and I’ll be prettier.”

“I’ve never seen a persimmon,” he says.

“How can that be true?”

“Are they like apples? Because I’ve had my share of apples and yours too, probably.”

“Here I though you were worldly. What else have you missed?”

Iris is thirty-four—eleven years his junior—and plain, really. She wears her dark hair cut as short as a man’s, the bare stretch of her neck exposed even when she’s fully clothed. She was widowed suddenly last spring, after only nine month of marriage, when her husband’s appendix burst. He’d been the librarian in town, a fisherman on the weekends. He left her a very small savings, a wide bookcase of books, and this house—a one-bedroom bungalow a mile out of Wenatchee, with a little outhouse in back and a porch overlooking the river and mountains.

“What will you do in the winter here, alone?” Nils asks.

“I’ll be fine. There’s the stove, and I’ll buy wood.”

“You’ll have to walk them mile in the snow alone.”

“I’ve done it before. It doesn’t bother me.”

“What does bother you?”

“You pestering.” She chucks him on the chin and he pulls her toward him, kisses the flat of her chest.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “You love to worry.” Her body is warm against his. She lies still long enough that he wonders if she has fallen asleep, but then she sits up.

“Look away,” she says, and she reaches for her robe at the foot of the bed.

“I won’t. That’s ridiculous.”

“Fine. Have it your way.” She is thick across the hips and has a round, white belly into which the rose of her navel disappears when she bends to pull on her socks. Her breasts swing forward matronly. She’s never had a child. Now that she’s alone, she’s told him, she’s glad of this.

“I do worry about you,” he says. He wants her to meet his eyes, but she doesn’t. “I want to keep worrying about you.”

“Don’t,” she says. Then turning away: “Persimmons look like pale tomatoes. Orange, rot red. But they taste like apples, you were right. Nothing special, really.” She pulls a sweater over her head, swifts her fingers through her short hair. “You haven’t missed anything.”

AT FIVE THE SKY FLUSHES pink along the white and jagged eastern crests of the Cascades and a man dressed in a parka and holding a record book appears at the top of the ravine to call out that it’s time for a shift change. He’s brought with him a new crew of men—some of them company men, like Nils, dressed in winter coats with Great Northern patches on the breasts; and some members of volunteer search crews from Wenatchee and Everett and other surrounding towns. They start down the ravine as Nils and the others who have been out all night tromp up.

The man in the parka gives them a verbal report of the search, taking a small pad of paper from inside his coat to read off the numbers. Ten bodies recovered alive, eight of those injured, all ten recovered in the first hour after the wreck. Since then, thirty bodies recovered deceased. Various luggage and personal effects will remain on them mountain until the missing persons search has concluded. There are fifty-two bodies still missing, he tells them. And the third train car still hasn’t been found. “We’ll keep at it.” His voice turns falsely bright. “Thank you all for your efforts,” he says, releasing them. “Go get warmed up and rested.”

They make their way along the railroad grade. Usually the tracks would have been plowed already, but there were smaller avalanches to the east and west that have blocked the pass from both sides. In some spots the tracks are buried beneath twenty-foot drifts. The temperature is still frigid, and Nil’s fingers and feet, knees and hips have long since numbed. He seems to moving forward without willing it, and has a sensation of dislocation from his own body that makes him question for a moment if he is not maybe among the dead.

“You look dazed, Riis,” the man walking beside him says and slaps Nils on the back. The man’s familiarity startles him. He’s seem him at the rail yard in Wenatchee—he’s a mechanic, maybe, but Nils can’t think of his name. He offers his flask, but Nils declines.

“I’m fine. Just a long day.”

“Long night, you mean.”

“That’s right. That’s what I meant.”

“You need a hot plate and a warm bed.” The man takes a swig from the flask himself and nils can smell the alcohol like a tremor of heat on the cold air.

The town is small, and they arrive at the west end, the railroad tracks suddenly opening into a wide valley in the crotch of two ridgelines. Slaggy cliffs rise up on either side of the town, and a narrow creek with water so emerald green it looks like flowing paint runs parallel to the railway on the other side of the one paved street. It’s a company town, run by the railroad, with one grocery, one hotel, a post office in the railroad station, a single building to stand as both schoolhouse and church, and a few saltbox houses lining the few dirt roads off of Main Street. The avalanche swept into the far end of town, plowing through a set of barracks set up to house railroad crews. Five men asleep inside at the time of the slide were killed.

With the barracks gone, search teams have taken over the hotel, the injured being tended to in first floor rooms, and the crews sharing beds upstairs. When they arrive, Nils and the other men stand on the front porch stomping snow from their boots and lining their tools along the wall before entering the dark lobby.

There’s a crowd filling the dining room already, and the noise of conversations and the clatter of dishes being passed seem chaotic and louder than usual after so many hours in the cottony quiet of the snow. Nils finds one of the few free seats in the room, next to a man still wearing gaiters and scarf. “Pardon me,” he says. The space is tight, the chairs pushed close to one another along the table so that Nils has to ask him again to make room when he pulls out his chair to sit.

“You gentleman have left me no place to eat.” A tall woman still dressed for the outdoors stands near the table with a bowl of stew and a mug of beer in her hands. Melted snow has beaded on the wool of her coat and large leather gloves gape from her pockets where she has stuffed them.

A man across the table from Nils looks up. “You can have my seat, Sister.” He hunkers over his bowl and shovels the last spoonfuls of stew into his mouth in rapid succession, then pushes back. “I’m done anyway.”

She walks the long way around the table and the man hold the seat, nodding at her as he lifts his coat from the chair and leaves.

When she takes off her own coat, she’s wearing a man’s sweater beneath it, the brown wool loose on her narrow frame and the cuffs rolled. Her face is ruddied with the night’s work in the cold air, her hair straying in gray-blond wisps from the braid that circles her head. Around her neck is a wooden cross on a leather cord.

“Morning,” she says, brightly greeting the table of men, and then she bows her head and says a silent grace before taking up her spoon.

“WHAT DO YOU DO when you’re alone?” Iris asks.

“What do you mean, what do I do? I eat and sleep and read and work—what everyone else does.”

“No. I mean, do you ever get tired of yourself? Do you ever say anything? Just to keep yourself company. I do, sometimes. Not because I mind being alone, but because it just seems so quiet.”

“I never feel obligated to talk.”

“I’ve noticed. It’s one of your faults.”

He laughs at this.

They sit at the table in her small front room, eating the doughnuts Nils has brought from the bakery downtown.

In his mind, he places this moment earlier than the memory from the bedroom. This is September, not long after they met. He recalls with certainty the doughnuts, the dark and butter perfume of coffee in the room. Through the cracked bedroom door he can see just the foot of the bed, the yellow and blue quilt hanging lopsided as if she never pulled up the blankets after waking.

Most of the specifics of the morning are frustratingly foggy though—what she is wearing, what she does with her hands when she speaks—and trying to force his memory to clarify is like trying to draw an object and then looking down at the paper to find the image vaguely familiar but also lacking the shadows or peculiarities that make the real thing real. And so Nils fills the gaps with what is likely: Her shirt is blue, big—probably one of her husband’s. Her hair is uncombed, wild still from having slept on it, and she touches it again and again, tryign to smooth it down as they talk. A novel lays facedown on the laptop, still opened to the page she was reading when he appeared at her front door. He wasn’t invited, but she doesn’t seem surprised to have him across the table from her now, her face as placid and content as it has been each time he’s seen her.

“I wouldn’t know what to say to myself,” he tells her. “What do you say when you’re in here yakking to your shadow?”

She runs her thumb along the rim of her plate, collecting the sugar crystals that have fallen from the doughnut, then touches her thumb to her tongue. “Me and I, we talk about the weather. The cost of flour. Sometimes I complain about men. We have a wonderful sense of humor.” She grings at this. “No, actually, I mostly just sing.”

“I bet you do whole routines. Where are your tap shoes?”

“I can tap,” she says. “You’d be surprised. Come over for dinner sometime and I”ll do a little soft-shoe for you while I cook.”

“I’d like to hear you sing now.”

“What would I sing? You’ll just laugh.”

“I won’t. Sing something I’d know. Sing ‘Oh! Suzanna.’ Everyone knows that.”

“No, I’ve never liked that one. It’s too sad. I’ll do ‘Red River Valley.'” And then she signs a few lines, keeping the rhythm against the table, waving him onto join in. Her voice is high and round and clear.

After this he notices her singing all the time—as she makes coffee in the mornings, as she leans over the washbasin to rinse her face at night. Once he catches her singing as she works in the yard, her figure bend toward the gound, a pail of pulled weeds at her knee.

“Come on,” she says. “Don’t leave me out here on my ow. Join in.”

His voice is a buzz in his throat. He hasn’t sung in ages.

She drops off a few beats before him, letting him hum the last notes of the song alone, the claps when he’s finished. “Bravo! Well done!”

“I never sings,” he says.

“I can tell.” She picks up her novel, and he sips his coffee, and they sit at the table together in quiet.

HE WATCHES THE SISTER as she eats. She is ravenous. She gets up to refill her stew bowl and returns also with another hunk of bread in her hand, a slice of apple pie on a plate balanced on top of the bowl. A man down the table offers her the glass of veer in the pitcher, and Nils is surprised when she accepts. The men pass the pitcher down, hand to hand, and she takes it and fills her glass quickly so that a thick white froth forms at the top. She licks this, the drinks in gulps. He has never seen a woman eat so much as so hungrily. The other men seem to find it just as startling, as they pause in the midst of their conversations to look at her.

“You worked up quite an appetite,” Nils says.

“Didn’t you?”

“Of course.” He refills the coffee cup in front of him from a carafe on the center of the table. “I’ve just rarely seen a woman enjoy her food so fully. That’s all.”

“Maybe you’ve known only joyless women.”

“I’ll give you that,” Nils says. “You’re mostly right about that.” He nods. “You’re part of the search?”

“I’m a trained nurse. Though it turns out nurses outnumber patients up here three to one. They’re stumbling all over each other trying to be useful.” It’s true: Nils has noticed several young women in nurse’s uniforms darting in and out of the lower hallways and lobby. “It’s wonderful to see so much compassion when there is a tragedy,” she says. “But too many ladles in the pot ruins the soup, if you see what I mean.”

She forks the last bite of pie into her mouth, stacks her plate and bowl, and sits back. “That was good,” she says. “The cold did make me hungry.”

“You’ll acclimate. And you can always stay in if it’s too much—the cold. There are plenty of us out there.”

“I’m here to help. I volunteered. And, as I said, another nurse is the last person needed, so I’ll go out again, cold or not, where I might be at least a little useful.”

“What order?” Nils asks.

“Sisters of the Holy Names. You’re Catholic?”

“My mother was.”

The sister nods. “It’s not for everyone.”

“I’m surprised you’d say that.”

“If anyone could have turned your mind, it would have been your mother, would it not?” Her face softens when she smiles. “But I’ll pray for you if you like.” She pushes back in her chair and collects her dishes.

“No, that’s fine. Thank you.”

She leaves, and in a moment Nils gets up too and goes to the desk in the lobby to inquire about a bed. The men are taking shifts, and when he gets to his room upstairs, he finds the last man has left the bed unmade, a pair of damp socks hung over the foot rail. The sheets smell like kerosene. He lifts his hands to his nose and finds that he smells kerosene on his fingers too. Everything smells like kerosene and wet wool and that gray, elemental scent of snow. He’s losing his mind up here. He shakes his head at himself, tucks under the quilt, and is quickly asleep.

SOME DREAMS COME IN SCENES: He is a character of his own mind, and watches himself. Here he’s walking around the orchards just beyond his childhood home. Or here, he’s at work in the rail yard office, bent over a record book; it’s any routine day. Sometimes he’s back in her bed, her body just a warmth beside him. In another dream, it’s his childhood bedroom: he is sick and his mother is in the chair beside his bed knitting, the quiet tick-tick-tick of her needles registering in the deep nautilus of his ear as he dreams, so that when he wakes he actually sits up and looks for his mother in the room with him. He is both inside the dream and very definitely outside it, sleep separating him from himself like an orange peeled of its skin.

But in many dreams there is no double, no order. Sometimes there is just chaos, the wreckage of fuller memories washing up against the short of his mind. The heavy metal scoop of his trench shovel slicking again and again into the snow with a metered, pitching sound. A white teacup whose reassuring weight he can feel in the palm of his hand, though there is no hand, no palm, no him. That bucket of her weeks. A windowsill piled in an inch of snow. The disembodied smell of his childhood house—so strong!—like soil and clean linens and fresh ashes in the fireplace—but no accompanying vision of the house. In one dream, the pincushion on her night table, stuffed with hair pulled from her dead husband’s brush.

And today: twenty flares, lit and hissing like a nest of snakes burning up the dark landscape of the dream, burning red against the ceiling of his head, burning up the backs of his eyes with their ed incandescence.

THE SISTER AT THE FRONT DESK when he returns to the lobby at two o’clock. He’s slept only five hours, the exertion of the search leaving him strangely too tied to sleep well.

“Hello again,” she says. She has combed and re-braided her hair, pinned it up wreath-like around her head.

“Can’t sleep either?”

“We keep a routine of prayer at home. The day begins at five a.m.”

“Well, it’s not exactly morning, but I’m looking for coffee, if you’d like some.”

“I would, thank you. I can’t seem to get warm.”

“Sit by the fire. I’ll bring you something.”

Nils fills two mugs from a carafe in the dining room and brings them to the lobby, where the sister perches on the stone ledge of the fireplace hearth, her back to the fire. She thanks him and takes the cup, holding it between both hands and closing her eyes for a moment before taking the first sip. “Thank you,” she says again.

“I found a photography while I was out there last night,” she says. “It was of a man with a heavy mustache, and beside him a little boy holding a toy drum.” She smiles. “He must have been carrying it in his pocket.”

“Sometimes you can almost see their lives from their things,” Nils agrees. He remembers the mirror and nearly takes it from his pocket to show to her, but doesn’t.

The sister raises her cup to her mouth and drinks. Steam is still rising from the coffee, and she looks contented, the way she pauses after swallowing. “I’ve ridden this train route,” she says. “Have you?”

Nils shakes his head.

“You feel every jostle of the tracks. It’s unsettling.”

“I haven’t traveled much.”

“You should. Just the going changes you.” She looks at him. “That sounds romantic, but I believe it. You are changed.”

“We’re changed even staying as still as possible.”

“Yes. Stillness is important. That’s true, but it’s not exactly what I mean.”

“That’s not what I mean either.”

“Tell me what you do mean then, Mr. Riis, if I’m getting it wrong.” She sets her coffee cup down on the hearth and looks at him. Her expression is so earnest for a woman who has known him only a few hours.

“Sister, I’m not young. Neither are you, if you don’t take offense to me saying that. And in my experience, most of the life just happens to us. It’s not as if you have to go out looking for it.”

“You sound grizzled. I think your mother would have told you to remember Providence.”

“Providence. Of course.” Nils puts down his cup and buttons his coat, fishes his gloves from his pockets and pulls them on too.

“I can see I’ve upset you,” she says.

“No, but we’ve come to the fork in our agreement.”

“You are upset.”

“Sister, I’ve finished my coffee. Any more standing around next to the fire would look like idleness. You’ll have to excuse me now.”

Outside the temperature has risen slightly and the light is thin and tinny, the sky over the mountaintops the color of water in a glass pitcher. Icicles hanging like stalactites from the edge of the porch roof drip hollows into the mound of snow below. Nils stands on the porch taking deep breaths, then collects a shovel and lantern from the line of them leaning against the porch wall and, feeling steady again, starts back toward the wreck.

SPRING NOW—March maybe, or early April, and the weather not bad for walking. He’s still far from her house when he hears the dead thuds of the axe. It’s a heavy violent sound, and he can’t place it exactly, though it sets hi heart racing, turns his stomach over. “Iris?” he calls.

The sound continues. He is running now, and in a moment he can see her. She swings the axe again and again at the tree, cracking heavy blows into its trunk, her body bending with the weight and motion of her swings. The bare branches above her quiver.

“What are you doing?” he hollers, picking up his stride. He cups his hands to his mouth and yells again. But she doesn’t hear him. Her face is pinked with fury and she pulls back again, swings a loose, wobbly arc at the tree. The triangular head of the axe embeds itself again and she yanks to wrest it free.

“Whoa!” Nils calls as he jogs into the yard. “What are you doing?” He reaches for the axe when she swings back again and the force of her motion nearly knocks him to the ground.

“Let it go,” she says. “I’ve got it done already.” He steps back and she lunges with the next swing so that the noise of the axe in the wood resounds around them. In two more blows she’s cut through. There’s a sound like bone breaking, the fraught pause as the tree sways then crashes. Its branches snap and splinter as the tree hits the dirt. It’s a crabapple, and there are berries everywhere softening, leaving behind their rust-colored pits in the dirt.

“I’ve hated this tree since I married him,” she says. She swipes the back of her wrist across her face. Her cotton housedress is stained with a deep V of sweat. “And I’m sick of its mess. The crabapples attract the birds.” She drops the axe and stands catching her breath. “And then the birds get into my garden.”

“You could have waited for me. I would have done it.”

“I couldn’t look at it anymore.”

She’s barefoot, he sees now. The last of the winter’s snow has just melted and the earth is soft and wet, the pads of her feet caked in mud. She wears a dishcloth around her waist as she does when she’s cooking.

“What were you doing before I got here?” Nils looks towards the house. The front door is open.

“What does it look like I was doing?” Her face is still flushed, and she flashes him a look.

“This is crazy.” He reaches to put his arms around her, but she walks away from his embrace adn back toward the house.

“If you want to do something for me, cut that into firewood,” she says over her shoulder. “Or don’t It doesn’t matter. I just wanted that tree gone.” She disappears into the house and the door slams at her back.

Nils picks up the axe and begins cutting away the branches, piling them to burn. It takes him all afternoon to chop and stack the wood, and by the time he’s finished and knocks on her door, she is herself again, her dress changed, her face washed, a fire going in the cook stove and a pot of potatoes boiling furiously on the stovetop for dinner.

“WHAT DID HE LOOK LIKE?”

“I hardly think of him anymore. He seems like someone else’s husband, not mine. Or I was someone else then, maybe.”

“I’m trying to see you life then. What did he look like?”

The room is sunk in the blue of midnight. There’s ice on the window glass, and the thin strains of moonlight coming through it are wobbled and distorted. He shifts to reach the water she left on the bedside table and pulls long sips from the cup. She brings water to bed every night; there is a white ring on the table’s surface.

“Not like you. Is that helpful?”

He gets up, walks across the room. There’s a mirror the shape of a large egg mounted to the wall and he stands before it. In his reflection, he can see his breath coming from the dark hold of his mouth in gray bursts. “Then I guess this: full head of hair, and body wide as a tractor. Or else he had red hair. Soft guy. Piggish eyes.” He turns around to face her. “Which is it?”

HE can’t see her but he hears her sigh. “Your either laughing, or I’m wearing you down,” he says.

“It’s both,” she says. “Come back.”

He gets in bed and she puts her hand on his face so he knows she’s looking at him. “Don’t ask me again.”
“We’ll see.”

She falls asleep curled into him beneath the weight of the blankets, her knees in his stomach, her nighttime breath a little sour on his face.

BUT BEFORE IT ALL, there is this:

She is sitting at a back table eating a plate of roast and mashed potatoes, wearing a yellow blouse, a book open on the table in front of her.

He is in his usual spot.

The waiter brings him his sandwich, his coffee. He eats dinner here after work most nights before going home. He has a newspaper rolled in his bag to read over eating, but doesn’t reach for it. Instead, he catches her turning her pages, stirring the potatoes on her plate. He sees her close the book and sit for a long minute with her hand on top of its cover and her eyes fixed in thought, as if the story is still unspooling in her head.

He argues with himself, then just gets up and carries his plate to her table. He’s never so forward, he tells her—she’ll have to forgive him—but he’d like to sit down.

“Go ahead,” she says. And he does.

IT HAS TAKEN only this small rise in temperature to start a thaw, and the mountain groans and creaks as it warms. Snow sloughs from the boughs of the evergreens in wet slumps. The branches still under mounds snap and sigh with the burden. Far off, at a higher elevation and across the valley, there is the muffled thunder of the snow tumbling down the mountainside: another slide. Nils finds himself digging faster. The sun slips from behind a raft of clouds flares one last time as the clouds part, then falls behind the mountains, bleeding a spill of bright yellow light, like an egg yolk broken across the lower reaches of the sky and gilding the mountains’ edge and the boat-bottom undersides of the clouds.

Nils stops and fishes a match from the box in his pocket, strikes it until it sparks, and lights his lantern.

The search has focused now on finding the third train car. He hears voices farther down the incline and starts moving toward them, his heels gouging deep holes int he snow as he descends.

It’s a long way down, and at the bottom the ground levels out again. Through the blue stalks of tree trunks the beams of other lanterns flicker and shine.

“You again,” the sister says. “I wondered if I’d see you.” She stops working to lean on her shovel, wipes the back of her glove across her wet nose.

“Any luck?”

“No. We’re at the end of it. They’ll call us in soon and end the search until spring. Whatever is still under the snow will have to stay that way until then.”

“I don’t like the idea of that.”

“Of leaving it unfinished? Some of these searches turn up nothing, ever. This one’s been productive, really.” Nils uses his teeth to pull his gloves from his stiff fingers, then cups his hands around his mouth and blows onto the blanched skin. There’s that kerosene smell again in his nose; it’s begun to make him sick. He takes a deep breath to quell the twinge in his stomach. He’s lost felling in his fingertips already, and his knuckles ache when he bends and straightens his fingers to get the blood moving again.

“No, of bodies staying lost. I don’t want to abandon them here.”

“I don’t quite see the difference. They’re buried in here or someplace else. Someone somewhere will miss them, whether we find the bodies now or not.”

“Why are you here then? If it doesn’t matter?” She looks angry for a moment, and Nils nearly apologizes, but he’s too tired to start in with her again.

“I work for the railroad,” he says. “I do what they tell me to do. But I didn’t say it doesn’t matter.”

The sister sniffs at this answer. “Well, you do as you wish, Mr. Riis, but I’m going to keep moving.”

“Don’t get proud and go wandering off. I never said I was quitting.” He looks toward the other lights, still a fair distance away. “If you want to follow me, it’s probably better we stay a pair. The temperature’s going to drop again, and it’s already dark.”

“I’m sure I’m fine.”

“I’m telling you not to go alone.” He works to stuff his dull fingers back into the gloves. “Please. Just follow me.”

As he works his way horizontally down the side of another slope, he hears her a few paces behind, her breath coming hard. She doesn’t speak though, and he doesn’t turn to look at her.

MAY—OVER A YEAR AGO NOW, unbelievably. When she tells him, she’s already sold the house. “This has never really been my home,” she says, and when he presses, when he says he’ll go with her and they’ll make a new home together somewhere else if she likes, she says only no.

“I have money saved,” he says. “I’ve been saving all these years for something without knowing what.” But, no, she tells him. No. She’s made up her mind.

He lies beside her on her bed. The bedroom window is open. Outside, the goldfinches and robins in her garden chirrup and flit, singing at one another, squabbling over scraps and seeds. The river down the hill is overfull with runoff from the mountains. It moves with a sound like boiling water. It turns up all sorts of flotsam onto its banks, spits out a bubbly brown froth that rides on top of its current.

He get’s up and stands looking at her. “Are you afraid of me?” he asks.

“No,” she says.

He picks up her hairbrush with the silver handle and throws it at the mirror. The mirror breaks. The glass scatters in shards across the wood slats of the bedroom floor.

“You knew all along you’d leave,” he says.

“I didn’t know. I stayed longer that I might have if I hadn’t met you.”

“Are you in trouble? Are you not telling me everything?”

“There’s not child.”

“How can I trust you?”

“I’m not a liar.” She meets his eyes. “Sometimes there’s no reason. I need to leave this place, and that’s all. You can’t understand that?” She is crying now, but quietly. She gets up from the bed and kneels on the floor, sweeping the bits of glass into her palm.

“You’re running away from a dead man, is what I think.”

“Stop it,” she says, her voice even. “you’ve never been cruel. Why are doing this now?”

“It’s not meanness. It’s fact. I should have seen it earlier.

“Fine, then.” She raised her far to him. “You need a reason? You’re too much. You and this place. You need too much.”

“You’re all excuses.”

“Stop it now, I won’t argue with you. I’m tired.” She sits back on her heels. “It’s decided. And you should go now.”

He gets his clothes and begins pulling them on. He tries to keep his balance, but stumbles puttin this leg into his pants, steps back and feel needles of broken glass embedding themselves on his bare foot. He curses under his breath.

“I’m sorry it’s all turned out so badly,” she says. “I am.”

“You’re making your choices.”

His foot is bleeding; he pulls his socks and shoes on anyway. He leaves the buttons of his shirt undone.

When he goes, he slams the front door hard enough that the windows rattle at his back.

I’M ASKING YOU TO RECONSIDER. I want you to say something. I want you to stay. He writes this on a piece of paper, slides it under her door, and walks back to town.

HE ALLOWS HIMSELF TO WALK past the house once, after she is gone. The stump of the crabapple is there, but the new owners till over the garden. They put up a chicken coop where she planted strawberries and squash. The white and red chickens stalk around their fenced square scratching at the dirt, bobbing their heads at each other.

As he stands watching, two of the birds take up a fight. They circle and charge each other. They flap their wings and kick sprays of dust that rise from the ground then shower back down on their heads. In only a moment the scuffle is over, the dispute—whatever it was—settled, and the two amble away from each other. The other chickens, who paused to watch the fight, resume pecking at the ground as if nothing has happened, though their patch of yard is littered with shed feathers.

For the rest of the day he thinks of. how she would hate the ugly coop, hate the chickens and all their mess.

HE IS UNUSED to sleeping alone then. He stares at the wall of his bedroom until the square of light from the window brightens, brightens, and finally goes white with morning. He gets up and his thoughts float like fluffs of cotton through his mind. He feels like a sleepwalker, lurching through the day. He goes to work in the railway offices, comes home. There is summer and then fall again. A fine crust of first first frost on the bedroom window glass and the color of morning pale blue now, or gray. Snow then. A new year. Winter. The river calcifies with ice. A flock of starlings roost on the roofline of the building across the street—so many dark bodies all in a line. They rise all at once and circle overhead, once, twice—a knot tying and untying itself in the sky—before they are gone. He taps the window with his forefinger and beads of condensation slide down the glass. Everything comes at him as if he is lodged far beneath the surface of his own perception. His body is layers of bundling, and somewhere beneath skin and muscle, bone and gristle, he is half awake and listening for what?

IT IS NEARLY SEVEN O’CLOCK—long past dark—when the third train car is found a quarter mile down the mountain and far to the west of where searchers expected it might be. There is hollering, cheering and clapping, and Nils and the sister raise their heads and move toward the noise. Far off, the lights of many lanterns throw a faint halo around the site where the other men are digging out the car.

The sky is clouded over again. The clouds are heavy and big-bellied, full of more snow and looking less like tufts than like something wet and solid. Like soggy newspaper, Nils thinks. Or sacks of wet feathers. He says this to the sister, and she makes a sound that is something between a chirp of laughter and snort.

“I have an awful memory of plucking the ducks my father raised one winter, so we could all feast on Christmas Day,” she says.

“We kept geese and chickens. I remember it being awful.”

“My mother saved all the feathers to stuff bedding and pillows. But she wanted to wash them first, to get rid of dust and mites. There were wet feathers stuck everyplace. My hair, my sister’s arms, all over the the dirt. We had to throw them out. There was no good way to dry them.”

“She didn’t know what she was doing,” Nils says.

“No. She’d been raised in the city. But my father let her do it. HE didn’t tell her it wouldn’t work. It was better she find out by experience, or she’d never have let it go. She’d have gone on worrying about mites in the beds ’til kingdom if he’d told her she wasn’t to was the feathers.”

“And you didn’t have Christmas ducks the next year?”

“No, we did. But Mother and Father did the work themselves. We children got in the way, they said. And I don’t know what happened to the feathers, but they weren’t washed, I know that.”

“Do you miss them? Your family?”

“My parents died years ago.”

“But when you first left.”

“Of course. Isn’t that true for you too? Don’t you miss your mother since she died? Your dad? Sometimes I get nostalgic and even miss the girl I was when I was young. As if she was someone not me. That’s silly, yes?” She pauses in her walking and Nils stops to wait for her to catch her breath.

“Not silly,” Nils says. “I’ve had a similar thought. I’ve come across shed snake skins before and have thought what a thing it would be to do that—get outside your old skin as easy as taking of a jacket.”

“We’re saying different things again, I think. I’m talking about nostalgia, not regret. But maybe that’s the gift of my life: my devotion keeps me in the present. For that I’m still grateful, even all these years later.”

She shifts her weight and clasps her gloved hands together. Nils pulls his hat down over his ears.

“I’m ready,” she says, and starts ahead of him. “It’s getting cold standing here, and I”m talking too much for you again, I can see by your silence.”

“I was rude earlier.”

“You were,” she says over her shoulder. “But it’s fine. We’ve made up now. Let’s go.”

Nils lifts the lantern and follows her.

They don’t get far before the sister stops him again. “Have I been out here too long, or am I seeing something there?”

Nils treads through the snow towards the spot she’s pointing out. The slide seems to have come to a stop down here, and there are more trees still standing. They are not far now from the others. The sounds of the med shoveling out the inside of the train car have grown louder, and just ahead there is debris from the car still on top of the snow—what looks to be a piece of siding, a strip of metal from the car’s undercarriage, bent and curled up at an odd angle.

Nils stops near a fir tree and tilts his lantern so that it illuminates the sunken round of shadow beneath the tree. He gets down on his knees and moves snow aside with his hands.

“What is it?” the sister calls. “Is it anything?”

Nils hesitates. “It’s a dog,” he says.

They clear the snow away from the animal’s body. The dog ism ale. His white fur is matted with ice, his legs folded close to his abdomen in awkward, unnatural angles. The pink pads of his feet have gone gray-blue, and his nose is spongy, his eyes open and their stare waxy. When Nils lifts the dog’s body a dark blot of blood is revealed in the snow beneath him; the dog’s right ear is gone, sheared off completely, and that side of his face is crusted brown with frozen blood.

“Oh, no,” the sister says. She puts her hand over her mouth as if she may be sick.

“Someone’s pet,” Nils says. He sets the body back down and begins to cover it with snow.

“What’re you doing?”

“They’re not going to haul a dog out. There’s enough to do with human casualties.”

“Don’t do it yet.” the sister says. “Please.” She’s crying quietly, and Nils looks away from her. “I’m going to pray.”

Nils sits back on his heels and waits as she bows her head. She keeps her voice low, her words materializing as a continuous strand of chilled exhalation. When she finishes, she leans over and touches the dog’s face with her own, puts her hands on its flank, her forehead to its ribs.

“I’m starting to feel like everything I’ve ever lost is under here,” she says. “Like if we looked long enough we’d find the brooch my grandmother gave me when I turned seventeen, and those ducks, and my parents. Maybe they’re all here.” She turns to Nils. “When I was young, a neighbor woman lost a baby in the middle of a very long winter and then drowned herself when the pond between our farms thawed in the spring.”

“My mother was sick in bed for several days before she died,” Nils says. “Her priest came at the end to perform the last rites, and when she went, he told me she was needed more about than there on earth. ‘She’s been called by her maker to join Him in heaven. Take solace in knowing that her Redeemer needs her now more that you do.’ I remember he said that.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say to someone in grief. He should have known better.”

Nils smiles. “I can’t say I appreciated it much.”

“They try to be reassuring. I’m sure that’s what he meant to do. But he should have thought better of it and said something else.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference. I wanted him to say nothing, I wanted every noise to stop without her there to hear it.” He pushes back and stands . “But that kind of thinking is as useless as his consolation.”

“She wouldn’t want you to stop your life.”

“She wouldn’t have, but that hardly matters. What you’d will doesn’t matter. There’s no stopping. And that’s all. I didn’t see that then, but now I do.”

Nils buries the dog, digging first beneath the snow to bare ground, then a couple of feet deeper into the frozen dirt. The soil comes up in solid chucks, and he’s clumsy with the shovel. The exertion warms him though, slowly, and soon his hands and feet tingle with sharp needles of pain as they begin to come back to life. When he lifts the dog, he brushes the snow from its flank, fingering its leather collar for a moment and rubbing his thumb over the mirrored oval of its tag before lowering the body into the hole and covering it.

“We should see how the others are doing and then head back for the night,” he says.

They walk without speaking toward where the others are still digging out the third train car in the growing dark. Several more flares are lit, poked into the snow and throwing a low, trembling light on the wreck; some of the men have also strung their lanterns from the limbs of the evergreens and these sway and bob as the breeze moves the boughs, their warm glow bouncing against the trees and drifts, their long files of light stretching across the shadowed mountainside.

Nils takes off one glove and tucks his hand into his pocket to feel for the compact. Still there. It’s a heavy, round weight in his palm, its solid heft and curve reminding him of nothing so much as the skipping stones he collected as a boy. He’s not sure now why he took it, nor what he thought he’d do with it, this token of so much lost; but it would seem wrong to toss it away, into the snow, where it would be just another thing gone. And so he holds onto instead.

“Are you okay there, Sister?” Nils asks.

“I’ll be fine,” she says.

He nods to himself and keeps walking through the snow, toward the noise and the lights just ahead.

---

1.

THE OB-GYN NURSE WAS DISTRACTED. This was because the Doctor was sexually harassing her, but there was no name for it then, no policy. He would sneak up behind her and caress the bend in her knee through he opaque white stockings. Then he would laugh with supreme good nature, so that she would have felt like a nitpicky stick-in-the-mud to say anything about it. The back of my knee, okay, she thought, but what if he fondles my ass? As she was typing the paperwork for the two new babies—birth certificates, ID bracelets—the Doctor crept up behind her and fondled her ass. The sensation of being pillaged shot up her spine, something left over from her horn-helmeted great-to-the-6^th-power grandmother the Viking, and it resulted in a birth the same as if he had surprised her with a more specific thrust, which they did have a name for back then, though the punishment for it had softened since her ancestors’ marauding time. The Doctor laughed like a claymation Burl Ives and she keep her eyes on her papers the whole time. She spelled the baby girl’s name wrong and put down her sex as “M.” You’d think somebody would have looked into it, but authorities were different in those days. Nobody questioned authorities. Authorities were home free.

2.

THE DOCTOR KILLED HIMSELF violently—there was a gun involved and golf cart—in a public place but late at night when there was no one around. It was not because of his many medical mistakes (some of which irreversibly altered the course of innocent lives) such as a raspberry eye infection that went untreated and the undiagnosed walking pneumonia and the eating disorder that was allowed to slide until a promising young scholar died at age fourteen, buried with her flute case and stuffed pandas. He never saw the dead girl’s skeletal face chomping at him, exacting revenge. Nor did he kill himself over the sexual harassment. As the limits were defined and made punishable, he stayed one step ahead. He learned to target pudgy, bewildered women who were going through divorces, and ones who couldn’t afford who couldn’t afford to lose their jobs but made stupid mistakes like stealing from the petty cash to buy granola bars from the vending machine. He killed himself because the drugs were too easy to get and even all the people who should have been after him, it was gnomes that he saw marching half-legged over every hill; he could hear their stunted grunts on the line when he made phone calls; they spit blue pulp into his coffee. He would never have turned to drugs if they’d only kept the old nurses’ uniforms intact. The new baggy scrubs drove him to despondency. His one indulgence, as he saw it, was the plum ripple at the back of a woman’s knee, straining against white nylons.

3.

SHE AND HE BOTH READ about the Doctor’s spectacular suicide in the town newspaper. Neither of them lost their appetite. He noted where the Doctor had gone to school, and spat out a mouthful of mile to show that he was not impressed. She wondered who would get the Doctor’s money now.

4.

WITH THE KIDS AWAY at school, their parents became entwined. Her father’s drunkenness progressed from tidy to delusional and energetic. He believed he was a star of black-and-white movies whose genius was being unfairly hobbled by the studio system of the 1940s. He was displeased with his wife. “I’m their top box office draw!” he would bellow, with a rakish disregard for enunciation. “Their cash cow! And they pair me up with that frump! Jack’s gonna get an earful from me, brother, and how!” Her mother would smile vacantly and continue quilting, which was her new hobby, though it was meticulously slow work and she never succeeded in finishing an entire quilt. His mother, who’d always had a grandiose streak and imagined herself to be too big for her present life, found her father’s spoiled-star raving to be intriguing, then exciting. His father hadn’t touched his mother since she twisted her ankle while weeding the garden three years ago; he had walked in on the unexpected sight of her swollen ankle propped on the sofa, packed in ice, staring up at him with the dumb offensive ugliness of an overlarge insect, some fat albino roach who had flourished off the household’s careless leavings. So his mother really couldn’t be blamed for seeking out affection elsewhere. At one point during the affair, she thought she might be pregnant, and for five days she was radiant and rewound, but it turned out to be a false alarm and her face fell back to its usual fretting.

5.

THE IMAGINARY LITTLE SISTER, Dawn, still lived in the house with her parents, utterly forgotten. One time Dawn walked in on her father and his mother having fumbling, drunken sex, and she was traumatized. His mother immediately felt a tingle of cold air spider up his spine. She disengaged herself from the tangle and wept inconsolably into the half-finished quilt on the bed. She had the distinct feeling that she had been pillaged.

6.

THE ENTIRE CITY IS OUTRAGED by his perversions. Police bulletins pop through the airwaves. Girls clutch each other by the elbows and scare themselves by peering into the eyes of any man in a hat. They nowilayme themselves to sleep, combating the roar of flight rushing through their rational at-home-with-the-deadbolt-locked stomachs. Her drastic fleeing to Catalonia goes unreported, conveniently eclipsed. Her husband is too despondent to make sure his daughters are safe from the maniac at large. The husband drinks himself into incoherence and one night he takes the color-by-numbers activity off the fridge, removing the magnets as gingerly as he once brushed back her sleeve to look at her watch when he still had his Virgin Mary complex and need an excuse to touch her. He burns holes in the color-by-numbers with the tip of his newly acquired cigarette, and he doesn’t know why. It isn’t out of anger. It’s because his home is askew and he can’t recognize any of the furniture and there’s no place for him to sit. He passes out without remembering to lock the door. Fortunately, her daughters are safe as babes. He’s never liked ’em young.

7.

THE OB-GYN NURSE GOES BLIND. She does not relate this to her mistake of the switched babies, a mistake she never realized she made. Nor does she see it as a punishment. It’s comforting to be an invalid, to be waited upon after all those years of catering to the birth-sick. When the Nurses’s daughter complains that her married boss makes inappropriate comments and calls her “doll” in front of clients, the Nurse flexes her thick legs and smiles wanly, assigned to the deceased Doctor’s fingers a searching sincerity that she knows they never had. But to be blind and pillaged would be too much. She would give up altogether.

At night she tunes the radio to the opera and now that there is no one to watch out for, she lets her dead pupils and the raw mollusk insides of her eyelids perform a complex mating ritual, always falling asleep when it’s still that first harmless glance, when it’s all trilling and swelling, the rumble of the tympani heralding something too far away to start hoping for yet, before names are assigned and exchanged, before any sort of consummation, before the terror of a beginning.

---

MRS. JOCELYN’S SON Hammond had been doing spectacularly in pre-algebra and it was a delight to tell her so. I waxed on about Hammond’s innate quantitative ability, his friendly and helpful manner in class, his creative problem-solving skills. I segued to a gentle suggestion that there might be occasional interpersonal difficulties, but nothing to worry about. These I knew were primarily due to Hammond’s poor hygiene—his nickname among his peers was “Grease”—but I had no intention of mentioning that in a parent-teacher conference. The kid caused me no problems and was a whiz at the math.

Mrs. Jocelyn beamed brighter as I brought the conference to a close with the classic pleasure-to-teach. Not that I’m insincere when I use it, but you develop a certain shorthand for these things, and sometimes it’s surprising how completely parents fall for it. Mrs. Jocelyn’s pride in her son shone through an otherwise haggard demeanor—Hammond was the third of her kids I had taught in as many years, and God only knew how many more were in line, wearing the poor woman out with their hygiene issues and their need to be fed and their unsettling intellectual gifts Hammond and his siblings all attended Sheffield Academy on academic scholarship. Mrs. Jocelyn was proud of her brood, and genuinely grateful for the opportunities Sheffield afforded them. She touched a hand to the ruffled neckline of a pale green, faded-looking dress when she thanked me.

The conferences were drawing to a close. Most of the parents had been sane and polite and unassuming. Others lived up to the cliché of private school parents, furrowing their brows and jabbering on about college prospects, with the occasional hint of threat underneath the concerned veneer, as though five years from now I’d better watch my back if their kid ended up at the ag tech. A good portion, maybe a third of the total, had no clue about their twelve-year-olds, academically or otherwise. That proportion would increase sharply over the next few years, reaching something close to a hundred percent parental cluelessness by the time the kids hit tenth grade. I was starting my third year of teaching and felt pretty confident with he ropes. It’s amazing how fast you learn to read the parents, how few surprises there ever are. Early in the evening, Emily Warrenton’s mother had cried a little, but that was nothing I hadn’t seen before.

It was exactly ten after nine when I ushered Mrs. Jocelyn out the door. I said goodbye with the freshest smile I could muster at that late hour, and reminded myself that I was almost done—only Timmy Dolan and Rachel Allimont left to go. I worried that I might not be up to the task of filling the Dolans in on the subtleties of what I perceived to be Timmy’s rather deep-rooted problems, partly because I was getting fuzzy with fatigue. I’d caught myself at one point telling Mrs. Jocelyn that Hammond had gotten a whiz on the last test, but I was pretty sure she hadn’t noticed.

Rachel’s parent were waiting in the hall, sitting awkwardly in the student desk-chair combinations that had been lined up out there, an indignity all the parents had to suffer. They were scheduled for after Timmy’s parents but had arrived early. Rachel’s mother, a petite woman in jeans and a jean jacket with a notebook open in front of her, said hello to Mrs. Jocelyn and then apologetically to me, “Don’t mind us, Mr. Wesley. They told us how you like to stick to your schedule.” She mimed zipping her lip and waved me back into the classroom with complicated self-effacing semaphore: we’ll wait our turn, we’re humble people—an offering of patience tot he teacher conference gods, that her mute deference might earn her daughter a glowing report. Her husband sat next to her smiling dully, a big genial man crammed into his desk, obliviously used to this kind of nonsense from the little lady. I was sure it all said something about why Rachel was so clearly headed toward eating disorders, but I was too tired to piece it together. I considered telling them to come in and get it over with since there were no Dolans in sight, but instead I waved my thanks and ducked back into the room for a breather.

I went back to my desk and turned to my notes on Timmy Dolan, wondering which “they” had made me out to Rachel’s parents to be a persnickety schedule Nazi. Probably Mary Ann in the front office, who had always had some kind of problem with me. I glanced out the window at the leafy autumn parking lot, where several figures milled about among the cars in the eerie glow of metal halide lighting. I was about among the cars in the eerie glow of metal halide lighting. I was about to let the Allimonts in when there was a knock on the door. I put on a charming attitude and rose to greet the Dolans.

The wife opened the door and smiled at me apologetically, mock-devastated. She was white, which I had heard, and tall. She moved confidently into the room, revealing a startlingly handsome black man with a squarish face that I recognized immediately. Gray at the temples, tall like his wife, wide shoulders, tweed jacket. He looked at me and paused in the doorway as if considering a retreat, then stepped in and closed the door behind him in a kind of dazed slow motion. I’d had sex with him in Yellow Notch Park. Twice.

Mrs. Dolan said, “I’m so, so sorry. Are those poor people in the hall waiting because of us?”

I half nodded, half shook my head, keeping my eyes on hers.

“It’s inexcusable, I know,” she continued. “I’m Loretta Dolan and this is my husband John.”

I extended my hand and she took it in both hers and squeezed a further apology. When she released it, I extended it toward her husband, with a dizzying awareness of having done so in the past. He took it and we shook hands perfunctorily, but with a moment of direct eye contact. In one glance we both saw that the other knew, and that we were on our own.

I remembered those eyes: beautiful and deeply brown. They had once looked at me with raw appraisal and veiled interest, and then, when we ran into each other the second time, with recognition and playfulness and desire. And he had noticed mine, too. Those are some beautiful green eyes now, aren’t they?

“Nice to meet you both,” I said, motioning them to take the chairs that faced my desk. THey were adult-sized folding chairs, not demeaning student desklets, but as I took my own more comfortable seat behind the bulwark of my desk, I wondered if the arrangement might make some parents feel an unwelcome power dynamic. It occurred to me that in this ase I should feel grateful for any advantage, but I’d had no such intention when I first chose the setup two years ago. The prospect of unconscious unacknowledged intentions of all sorts suddenly filled my brain, vaguely and alarmingly.

And yet my exterior seemed to show no alarm, no distress, any. more than Mr. Dolan’s did. He sat next to his wife and took her hand in his. He wore a thick gold wedding band, which had not been there in the park. From all indications—the small, finely calibrated smile on his face, the precise relaxation of his body, neither too rigid nor too loose—the initial panic I was sure I had witnessed just seconds earlier had completely vanished, or perhaps had never been there at all. He sat with his wife and waited for me to begin. The beautiful eyes showed friendliness and attentiveness in perfect proportion for the parent-teacher conference scenario. I smiled at Mr. and Mrs. Dolan exactly as I expected to be smiling at Mr. and Mrs. Allimont in ten minutes’ time. It was astonishing how accomplished Mr. Dolan and I both were at this, whatever it was we were doing.

“Okay,” Mrs. Dolan said with a comically exaggerated sigh, “let’s hear the bad news.” She glanced at her husband with a little laugh, then back at me.

“Oh, no. No bad news,” I said. “Not really.” I pushed around some papers on my desk, looking for my notes on Timmy, and remembered that they were on top of the pile.

“Timmy’s a great kid,” I said, habit coming to my rescue. It generally seemed best to start with something noncommittally positive like great-kid. It was never really a lie. A kid could be great in any number of ways—most kids were, if you looked hard enough for the evidence—and still be abominable in plenty of others.

“Oh, good,” said Mrs. Dolan. “It’s so nice to hear at least something positive, even if you don’t really mean it. The reason we were late was Ms. Davis had so many bad things to say about Timmy that she kept us there for twenty minutes, didn’t she, honey?” Nadine Davis taught earth science. She and I had often commiserated about Timmy over coffee.

“She was unkind,” said Mr. Dolan. The voice was deep and masculine, self-confident, not quite how I remembered it. I had known him to use it only sparingly—some beautiful green eyes now. I wasn’t sure I had used my own at all in my encounters with him. His was all direct efficiency now, but its availability for sensual nuance was there in the undertones. The smile appeared to be fading.

“No, not unkind,” said Mrs. Dolan, removing her hand from his. She looked at me to check my reaction, which I hoped was neutral. “She was just very clear about certain things.”

I found myself searching for a phrase that wouldn’t come to me, something descriptive of this encounter or some aspect of it. There was a perfect word for it, but I couldn’t think what it was.

“I call it unkind when someone calls my son maladjusted,” he said.

Mrs. Dolan rolled her eyes in my direction as if to ask my indulgence, then turned to her husband and said, “She didn’t say that . And do you mean unkind to him or to you?”

Down low was the phrase. He was having sex with other men in secret. He was on the down low.

“To him,” he said evenly. He shifted his focus to me. The smile fell away. I imagined I saw him decide, in his annoyance with his wife and Nadine, that if behaving normally was going to be his goal, he might as well drop the politeness act. “But why don’t we hear what Mr. Wesley thinks.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m sure Ms. Davis doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” The disorientation that sets in after three hours of conferences is a kind of drunkenness. I felt unfit for the concentration this was going to require.

Mrs. Dolan laughed, as if I’d made an intentional joke. Mr. Dolan was unmoved. He said, “How is Timmy doing?” He stared at me, impatiently I though, but as though it had nothing to do with me, as though impatience were a habitual state with him. He was bouncing a knee. It looked as though it could bounce forever. The eyes were steady, comfortable in impatience.

“As you probably know,” I began, “he hasn’t been doing all that well on quizzes and test so far this year.”

“No, we didn’t know,” Mr. Dolan said, with no hesitation and no request for corroboration from his wife. “Ms. Davis said the same thing and it was news to us. How badly is he doing?”

“We didn’t actually think there had been enough time for tests yet,” Mrs. Dolan said, defending herself in advance against charges of not keeping close enough tabs on her son and his quizzes and his college prospects and his at-risk behaviors. We were six weeks into the year and I’d given three quizzes and three test.

“The transition to middle school can be rough for some kids, and there can be some transitioning for parents as well. Sheffield is very big on quizzes and test, even though we’re not supposed to admit that.”

The bid for conspiratorial camaraderie had no discernible effect on either of them.

“So how badly is he doing?” Mr. Dolan asked again.

“Well.” I knew the answer, but took some time to look at my notes anyway. “His average is a 63.”

“So he’s flunking.”

“He’s not off to a good start, no.”

Except for the discomposure of his first few seconds in the room, we still had not shared the slightest acknowledge of our situation—no subtle warning in an inflection of voice, not even a conspicuous avoidance of eye contact from either of us. I was sure that any observer—Mrs. Dolan, for example—would be incapable of detecting anything out of the ordinary, other than the typical tensions of a conference with a teacher who’s failing your child. But that absence, that refusal, was itself a bond. Mr. Dolan and I shared an impregnable hiding place, some pitch-black cave where we couldn’t be seen, even by each other, hunched in our separate corner—but we were both there.

“There’s still plenty of time to get him on track,” I said. “And I was wondering how you thought we might be able to work together to make that happen.” This was standard issue, Education 101. When a child has emotional and developmental problems, you’re not going to get anywhere without full collaboration with the family. But as soon as it was out of my mouth, I realized what bullshit it was, because I saw what bullshit Mr. Dolan considered it to be.

He lowered his eyebrows a tad. “So you need help from us on this,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “it’s Timmy who needs all our help.”

“Because his problems are so sever?”

“He didn’t say that,” said his wife, her pitch rising with her annoyance. ” I think my husband is just concerned, Mr. Wesley. We’re both more concerned that we expected to be this evening. We think Timmy is a good boy.”

“Oh, he is!” I said. My need to please had taken over, the need to keep the meeting safe, and I heard the insincerity and weakness in my voice.

“If things are so bad, why is everybody just mentioning it to us now” asked Mr. Dolan. His frown deepend, demanding something coherent from me, something they could use.

It was a nastiness. That was the word Nadine and I had settled on. Never a punch, never a swear word, never any detentionable offense. Nothing that could be said, nothing to point that would begin to cover it. Just constant, low-level meanness, self-satisfied underachievement, unpleasantness, unworthiness. He sneered at people. He sneered at his classwork and homework. Most of the other children hated him and avoided him. The friends he did have were always just back from a suspension or on their way out again. We didn’t like him, but we were worried about him, or at least we thought we should be.

Mr. Dolan was looking into my eyes in a new way, as if he’d heard my thoughts. The look was ironic and predatory at the same time, aware of both the game and the stakes, like the first look he ever gave me. He was bringing it into the open, warning me to remember myself on my knees before him under the pine trees before I dared to say another word about his son.

And then the pine trees of Yellow Notch Park, surrounded us there in the classroom, where I never allowed them. Their Christmas smell, the cool damp of their shade. I’d been living in Burlington a week or two when I discovered them, out for an innocent drive in the Vermont countryside the summer before I started at Sheffield. The parking area showed all the signs—secluded, silent, a few empty cars, a few with single men behind the wheel who watched you as you drove by and then as you parked and wandered into the woods to see what might be there to sees. Something to do if you’re new in town, or lonely and lazy, or daring, or shy, or too redneck for the bars, or married. I called myself curious. I’d been curious since puberty.

A path led down along the creek that dried up to nothing in the summer. Mr. Dolan and I circled each other at a distance the first time, slow, spiraling in, cautious, probably not cautious enough. The second time was months later, last April, and there was no circling, no hesitation then. Beautiful green eyes now, aren’t they?

I turned to his wife. She looked at me as if waiting for me to say something. I imagined her guessing the truth from my eyes and racing home in tears, piling Timmy and some clothes in a car and getting as far from her husband and me as she could. Or—did she already know? Maybe she’d been putting up with it for years. Or maybe she liked it, liked to watch. Or had secret lives of her own. Maybe she was an old hand at sitting politely, pretending everything was in her control, waiting in secret for the components of her life to fly apart. Why shouldn’t she be as good at the game as her husband and I were?

She waited for another moment, and then said, “What exactly are we talking about Mr. Wesley? How do you think we can help?” She was holding her husband’s hand again. Whether for comfort or to restrain him, I couldn’t tell.

“No,” I said, “It’s not. . .”

Mr Dolan leaned forward in his seat.

“I’m only here as hi math teacher,” I said. “Maybe if you could help with him homework from time to time—”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Dolan, seizing on this as a solution to whatever the problem was. “We should do that. We can do that?”

She looked to her husband and I remembered his hands on me, under my shirt.

“The problem is fractions,” I said.

Mr. Dolan looked as if I’d spoken Latin. “Fractions?” he said. “What does that mean?”

“He doesn’t have them under control.”

“He doesn’t have fractions under control?”

“What is so hard to understand about that?” his wife asked him, clearly furious with him now and trying not to show it, but still holding the hand with the wedding ring, holding to the idea of the unified front. “Mr. Wesley is the math teacher and he’s telling us that Timmy is having trouble with fractions.”

“What’s hard to understand about fractions?” Mr. Dolan asked me.

“Well, you know. How to add them. Finding the lowest common denominator. For Timmy, even what they mean, really.”

“What they mean?”

“Yes.”

“What do they mean?”

“Well, you know, in the sense of what the numerator and the denominator represent.”

“What do the numerator and the denominator represent?”

“John!” said Mrs. Dolan. “What is your problem tonight?”

“Apparently it’s some kind of a math problem, Loretta.”

“I apologize,” Mrs. Dolan said. “He knows perfectly well what the numerator and denominator represent.”

“Do you?” He asked her.

“Yes! Piece of Pie!”

“Sometimes,” I interrupted, falling back again on the tried-and-true, falling back, falling back, “I try to use real-world examples to make it easier and more fun, especially since some kids, like Timmy, aren’t able to think . . . abstractly yet at this age. But Timmy doesn’t really respond to that the way some other concrete-thinking children do.”

“Okay,” Mr. Dolan said. He help up his hands in a sarcastic surrender. “Think of me as a concrete child. Give me a real-world example. Make this easier and more fun.”

He leaned back in his seat as though getting comfortable for a long explanation, but Mrs. Dolan pulled her hand sharply out of his, as though he had squeezed it painfully. She immediately recovered and folded her hands on the conference orientation sheet she had on her lap. Or maybe he hadn’t squeezed too hard at all and I was merely extrapolating from the bruises he had left me with, a little discomfort and discoloration to remember him by the next day. Not the first time, but the second, when his hands held my ribs and pushed me against a tree and he kissed me until I stopped struggling against it.

Mrs. Dolan sat up very straight, hands folded in front of her, still doing her best to give nothing away. And what was she struggling against? A wretched sex life at the very least. Emotional neglect. Was he in the habit of bruising her? Or Timmy? I suddenly felt that I was the one in the room with the least to lose. I wanted him to remember that I hadn’t been the only one on my knees.

“Okay,” I said. “Say one-third of the kids in the room have brown eyes and one-half have blue eyes—what fraction have eyes that are neither brown nor blue? That kind of thing.”

He looked away and stared at the wall, at my poster of pi to ten thousand decimal places. Then he looked at his wife, shaking his head in a parody of disbelief, then back to me. “That’s a real-world example?”

“A simple one.”

“You have a lot of classrooms where half the eyes are blue?”

It was the resonate voice again. The deeper, woodsy tone. Challenging me, shifting the parameters, seducing me back to his home turf.

“It’s only hypothetical,” I said.

“Why not look at the actual eyes of the actual kids in the class and use the real numbers? Everybody might learn a thing or two.”

He was doing a great impression of refusing to see the point, a tactic his son was a master of. I had allowed Timmy to decide the terms of too many arguments to allow it again here.

“Because then everything would become a simple matter of counting, Mr. Dolan.”

“Well if it’s a simple matter of counting, then it’s a simple matter of counting. Why complicate it for the poor kids?”

“It’s not a matter of . . .”

“How is it different from saying some of the kids are black and some are white and some are left over, so how many must be both?”

“John, please don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Dolan said quietly, looking at the floor.

“Or there’s three little nelly boys in a class of fifteen, what fraction of the boys are queer? Is that what you get into with these kids, Mr. Wesley?”

Mrs. Dolan stood up. Her eyes were closed. She looked not merely mortified but genuinely shocked by her husband’s behavior, and I realized she had no idea. No idea who she lived with, no idea who was teaching her kid. She only knew her husband was insulting me, and that something was more wrong that she had suspected. She put a hand on her husband’s shoulder and appeared to squeeze it hard. Again it wasn’t clear whether it was him or herself that she was trying most to control. “Mr. Wesley, I’m terribly sorry about all this.”

Mr. Dolan shrugged her hand off and stood next to her and said, “I asked y ou a question. Are those the kind of things you’re teaching my boy, Mr. Wesley?”

Mrs. Dolan spoke loudly and with finality, an unmistakable warning to her husband not to interrupt again. “Mr. Wesley, my husband is an engineer. I’m sure he knows all there is to know about fractions, including why it’s important for Timmy to learn how to handle them. I’m not sure why he’s putting either of us through all this. We should go.” She picked her purse up off the floor and headed for the door.

Her husband remained where he was. HE stood looking down at me, back-lit by fluorescents that I could now hear humming. In the stillness of the eyes I thought I could see that he felt he’d won, but then I decided the subtlety of the approach, the first touch, the strength of his arms, the rush of fear I felt in myself and in him. The kinds of power we held over each other then and still held. And I thought again of his wife leaving him, shattered, even less able to handle Timmy on her own. Then I thought of the Allimonts out in the hall, waiting to hear what I would have to say about their daughter, expecting to believe me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure which part of me was speaking, or to whom.

He looked for a moment as though he might reply, but instead looked away, and I caught a glipse of Timmy in his profile, the same curve of forehead, the same resignation and retreat. The shame that he could not allow himself. I watched him follow his wife out of the room and I thought then, and almost believed, that I would not be going back to that park.

---

THEY LOOK LIKE THEY’RE IN ON IT. That’s how kidnapped girls strike me on the flyers circulated after their abductions. The pictures are usually school photos, which don’t start off as anything special—just an image of a child told to sit in front of a gray paper screen and smile. But when that picture gets taped to a shop window, scanned onto the back of a milk carton, and stamped with the word “Missing!” the kidnapped girl becomes a star, someone we desperately need to see. It’s as if posing for a picture makes her complicit in her own disappearance; if she’d just stayed out of sight, after all, she wouldn’t be missing girl’s final moments, and makes me wonder why she didn’t hide, why she was foolish enough to smile, even though one day soon, as she skipped to school, a man would drive by pointing and say, “That one. The cute one. She’s the one I want.”

That’s what happened to Jaycee Lee Dugard, one of the vanished stars. On June 10, 1991, a man and woman drove up to her while she was waiting at her school bus stop, pulled her into their. car, and sped away. According to the photos on the Missing flyers that soon appeared, Jaycee didn’t see it coming and smile all the way through it. She would stay missing for eighteen years, until she was finally found in 2009.

The story of Jaycee’s kidnapping sounds a lot like another story I heard as a little girl, the story of being seen doing something you do every day, and then being discovered and made a star. Nadia Comaneci was spotted doing cartwheels in her schoolyard and became the first Olympic 10. Cindy Crawford was spotted in a cornfield in Illinois and became a supermodel. Every day as I went to school, went to dance class or went to the grocery store with my mother, I thought about these stories and staged my discovery in my mind, wondering who would see me and when. I didn’t want to be lost exactly, but I wanted desperately to be found.

Michaela Garecht, Amber Swartz-Garcia, and Jaycee were all stars of my youth—girls who were kidnapped in Northern California, where I grew up, when they were more or less my age. They were my best friends the way Jason Priestley was my boyfriend: I stared at their pictures, memorized every detail of their lives, and looked for them everywhere I went. Jaycee’s story struck closest to home. When she was eleven and I was thirteen, she was taken from the same neighborhood in South Lake Tahoe where my grandparents had a vacation home, a neighborhood where A-frame houses in cul-de-sacs are tucked into groves of Jeffrey Pines. My memories of Tahoe are summer memories—visits to the lake during the day to sit on warm sand, read Sweet Valley High books, and float on air mattresses, one hand dangling into the water. The summer after she went missing, Jaycee kept me company all day long.

In the morning, I saw her picture on the front window of the market where my grandfather and I walked to pick up the paper. Along the way, I would count the fire hydrants at the edge of the road. Each fire hydrant was topped with a small flag, so it could be located under the snow. After Jaycee was kidnapped, I imagined her counting the hydrants as she was driven away, a trial of breadcrumbs that would be buried when the seasons changed.

“I heard she doesn’t even look like that anymore,” said a man in the market one day. “I heard that whoever grabbed her cut her hair as soon as she got in the car.”

Every afternoon my family went shopping at Raley’s. where I saw those flyers taped at the entrance. I made sure to have as much fun as I could picking out the special foot I ate only on vacation—jellybeans and Fruit Roll-Ups and Skippy peanut butter—because I felt Jaycee watching me do what she no longer could. Jaycee’s flyers spun around on the casinos’ revolving doors, and on the evenings when my grandparents took us to Harrah’s buffet for dinner. I would turn to get a look at her description—four feet seven inches, eighty pounds, blond hair and blue eyes—as my grandmother hurried my sister and me past the slot machines.

Most of the flyers featured on of two photos. The school photo showed Jaycee with her hair in what I used to call a some-hair-up-some-hair-down ponytail. Her bangs are brushed to either side of her forehead, a bit out of place, as if she’s been running or jumping rope. She’s looking straight at the camera, smiling with her mouth a little open, perhaps laughing at something the photographer said. Our school photographer told us to say, “boys have stinky feet,” and I always started laughing before I could get the words out. The other photo on the flyers looked like a snapshot, more close-up than the school photo, as if there were originally other people in the picture who had been cropped. Jaycee looks mischievous, like she could barely stand still long enough for that picture to be taken. Her smile faces the camera, but her eyes wander off in the direction of her ponytail. These photos didn’t stay where they were supposed to, in the plastic sleeve of her stepfather’s wallet, or taped to a magnet and stuck on her aunt’s fridge. Only people who loved her were supposed to see them.

In my first school photo, I look like I already know what a frightening thing it is to be seen. I wear a denim jumper, a red gingham blouse, and red barrettes, and I’m frowning. My mother tells me this is because I used to misunderstand what it meant to smile. In candid pictures, taken when I was twirling on a tire swing or running through the sprinklers, I grinned like any kid. But when I was made to smile for the camera, I furrowed my brown, stuck out my lower lip, and turned down the corners of my mouth. As I grew older, though, I figured out what to do, and even enjoyed posing. I began to understand what it took to become a star. After Charles and Diana got married, my parents bought a coffee table book of royal wedding photos. I’d flip through the pages, focusing on the pictures taken of Diana when she was still a schoolteacher, when the world was just beginning to see her. One photo caught her standing in the schoolyard, balancing a child on her hip. She wore a long white skirt, and the sun shone behind her, exposing her legs to view. Maybe because she was aware of this, or maybe because she wasn’t, she lowered her chin and gazed at the camera through her eyelashes. She looks reluctant to be seen, but like she still wants to know who’s watching. She looks like a star.

When I was eleven or twelve, my friends and I took pictures of ourselves pretending to be someone else. We used hot rollers and crimpers and my mother’s free Clinique make-up samples, and we made ourselves up like celebrities. My prettiest friend had long brown hair and large brown eyes, so we would an eye pencil to color in a dark mole on her upper lip and she would pose like Cindy Crawford. One day we went to Glamour Shots, where cranky college-aged girls did our hair and make-up and then took our photos. They teased and curled my hair until it surrounded my head like a halo. They brushed orange eye shadow up to my brows, taped on false eyelashes, and coated my lips in sticky pink gloss. They gave me a red scarf to wear, and draped it over my shoulders so it looked like I wasn’t wearing anything else. I felt gorgeous and mysterious while the camera was clicking, cut when I saw the photos, all those layers of paint and fabric looked like a crow of people piled on top of me, hiding me from view.

When my friend’s mother picked us up from the shop, she bought a few photos of her daughter and the flipped through mine.

“Melissa, don’t you want to buy anything?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“But I think your parent would love these!”

“I don’t think they would,” I said.

That night, my father drove to the mall and bought all the photos. I told him I didn’t think I looked that good in them, and that I didn’t want any. He said that he only got them because he didn’t want anyone else to see me like that. I didn’t look like anyone he recognized.

As time went on and Jaycee stayed missing, photographs of her gave way to fantasies. She was eleven when she was kidnapped, and eleven-year-old girls change quickly. Those Missing flyers were probably outdated before they even went up, if she had her ponytail cut off in those first few minutes. A few summers after she was abducted, I began seeing flyers with images of an older Jaycee, uses age-advancement technology to represent what she might look like now, if she were still alive and attractive and in the habit of sitting for photos. In one, she looks about sixteen, like a high school athlete who’s popular but doesn’t make a big deal out of it. She looks strong and confident, but her smile’s not quite as wide as when she was younger. The other picture looks like it could have been taken when she was younger. The other picture looks like it could have been taken at her first job out of college, maybe working as an office manager or an elementary school teacher. She wears hoop earrings and a denim jacket, and this time her smile is bright, showing off dimples on her cheeks.

Those age-advancement images must be so hard on the parents. After they see that picture, something between a portrait and a police sketch, they have to accept that their daughter is now someone else’s creation. But parents take so many pictures of their children in disguise. I have a picture of myself as a princess, trick-or-treat in a silver gown; I have a picture of myself as a purple crayon, cartwheeling in a matching leotard and triangular felt cap; I have a picture of myself draped in pink pearls, playing dress-up with my great-aunt’s costume jewelry. Jaycee’s age-advancement images don’t seem so different from my snapshots. They made her look like she was happy and safe, enjoying an afternoon of make-believe. I wonder if that’s the reason those images didn’t bring her back home. Apparently, Jaycee was spotted a number of times while she was missing—by a neighborhood boy, by a man at a gas station—but nobody recognized her as a little girl in danger.

She was finally found in August 2009, shortly after Phillip Garrido went to the police station on the UC Berkeley campus, hoping to get permission to hold an event for a Christian program he had started called “God’s Desire.” He seemed a little odd, so the officer he spoke with asked him to come again the next day. In the meantime, she did a background check, and realized Garrido was a registered sex offender, currently on parole. When he returned to the campus station, he brought along two girls, aged eleven and fourteen, whom he introduced as his daughters. After they left, the police officer called Garrido’s parole officer, who said that Garrido didn’t have any daughters. The parole officer asked Garrido to come in for a meeting. Once again, he obliged, bringing along the two girls, his wife Nancy, and a young woman named Alissa. When police spoke with Alissa separately, they discovered that she was actually Jaycee, and those two little girls were her daughters with Garrido. He was charged with abduction and rape, and Jaycee was reunited with her mother. In June 2011, Garrido was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. His wife, Nancy was also found guilty, and sentenced to thirty-six years to life. Appearing on the cover of People magazine in October 2009, Jaycee looked completely different from what everyone imagined. She was taller, her hair was curly, she was brunette—but there was something else, too. She was a real girl once again.

Just as with pictures of any star, photographs and age-advancement images do not simply represent with girl; they are all we have left of the girl, and perhaps all that they want. After they go missing, kidnapped girls are at our disposal. We see their pictures and make up stories about where they are and who they might become, filling in a few details and making up the rest. In reality, of course, every picture takes us a bit further from the truth. The girl who goes missing loses more of herself every time she is seen, even by those just trying to protect her, trying to imagine her back in the place she should be. I always felt like those pictures made the missing girl look just like me; imagining myself in her pace, her terror became my own.

I grew up surrounded by an elaborate system of safety precautions that should have made me feel protected. The knowledge that someone was always watching out for me, no matter where I was, should have comforted me. But safety drills and neighborhood safe zones only increased my sense of danger, making me feel like every menace was close at hand. Everyone began to look like a threat.

When children in my neighborhood sensed danger—say, if a strange car started following us down the street—we were supposed to knock on the door of the closest Block Parent, identified by a yellow sign in their front window. The presence of Block Parents implied that one or two people in your neighborhood are guaranteed not to hurt you. As for the rest—who knew? Looking at the houses next to the Block Parent homes, I wondered what they were hiding. They weren’t saying they would keep safe. So what were they saying? But then I would look back to the Block Parent sign and wonder if that home hid the real strangers I should fear. Perhaps I shouldn’t trust what I saw. What if Block Parents were actually kidnappers hoping to lure children into their homes, and those yellow signs were like the gumdrops and peppermints that tricked Hansel and Gretel? I knew I wasn’t supposed to enter the home of a stranger. But was it okay if I was only trying to hide from someone worse?

My elementary school frequently held “stranger danger” drills. First, we heard a high, piercing beep, and then we learned what was wrong. Our principal, Sister Elaine, would get on the school loudspeaker and say something like, “There is an unidentified woman by the drinking fountain. All children must stay in the classroom.” That beep always indicated the start of an announcement, and at 8:10 every morning, it was as reassuring as homemade pancakes, signaling a daily ritual of prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. But at any other time of day, it meant something bad had happened, something out of the ordinary. When the Challenger space shuttle broke into two streams of smoke, we heard that beep, followed by Sister’s broken voice leading us in a decade of the rosary.

I was always a little excited to hear that unexpected beep. You knew it couldn’t mean something terrible happened to you personally—student messengers arrived at the classroom door with a note from the secretary when there was a family emergency. And no actual disaster would ever be signaled by a beep. We heard that beep for our fire and earthquake drills, when it was obvious that we weren’t actually having a fire or an earthquake. With those drills, there was nothing to fear.

But stranger drills were different. We had to stay inside, sit where we always sat, and keep doing the work we always did—so we could never really tell whether the threat was real. We couldn’t rely on our senses to help assess the situation. If there were a fire we have smelled it, if there were an earthquake, we would have felt it—in that kind of disaster, your body can help you save yourself. But during a stranger drill, all we could do was stay inside, feel uneasy, and wonder if we were being watched.

After a half hour or so, the principal would come on the loudspeaker to give us the all clear, and tell us it had only been pretend. Someone always had to run to the bathroom then, having barely held it throughout the drill. But the rest of us just went back to doing what we were doing during the drill, which made it seem like we were always surrounded by strangers and could never know when we were safe. If you don’t burn, you’ve avoided a fire; if you regain your balance, you’ve survived an earthquake; but if you stick to your same routine—leaving your house at the same time every morning, walking to the same corner where the carpool mom picks you up, drinking from the same drinking fountain at recess—you can’t be reassured because everything’s back to normal. It’s the predictability of these routines that puts us in danger, that makes us able to be spotted, and maybe stolen.

One day when I was in third grade, two child safety experts visited our classroom, teaching us what to do if anyone tried to steal us. The women put each child through a simulated abduction attempt. They started by describing a few scenarios in which we could be kidnapped. Let’s say you live close to school, and it’s a Saturday, and you want to play on the monkey bars without all those bigger kids around stealing your turn. You go to school by yourself, where you’re used to feeling safe, and a strange man grabs you from behind while you’re hanging off the bars, drags you to the parking lot, stuffs you in a waiting car, and you’re off. Or, let’s say your tap dancing class is over, and you’re waiting outside for your mother to pick you up. It’s November, just starting to get cold, and you have a sweatshirt, but even though you zip it up, it only goes down to your waist, and your tights aren’t really keeping you warm. Pretty soon a woman about your mother’s age pulls up next to you and says she’s there to take you home, says she’s your new neighbor, doing a favor for your mother. You’ve never seen her before, but maybe you have; a lot of the neighborhood ladies look alike. She seems nice, she drives a station wagon, so you get in and you’re off.

“You have to remember all of the weapons you carry around with you every day,” one of the women said. She scanned the room as she spoke, bobbing her head in line with each row of desks. “Like your fingers! Like your fingernails!” She raised her arms about her head and clamped her hands open and shut like a cartoon lobster. “Don’t forget your pinchers!”

The pinching technique fit in with the being-grabbed-from-behind scenario. You were supposed to pinch your abductor’s arms and hands to make them release you. When it was my turn to demonstrate the technique, I looked at my feet, clenching my stomach muscles the way I would when my sister tickled me. When the woman grabbed me from behind, I started to giggle.

The other child safety expert, standing at the back of the room, shouted, “Go, go! Come on! Time’s running out!”

I tried to pinch, but my fingernails were ragged, chewed to my skin, and I couldn’t get a good grip.

“I’m dragging you to my car,” the woman said. “We’re about to drive away.”

My classmates started to laugh.

“I can’t do it, I can’t,” I said, blushing and out of breath. After a minute or so, my teacher told me I could head back to my seat.

“All right, everybody,” the safety expert said. “Something just happened that you have to make never happens in a real situation. Melissa didn’t pinch me because she didn’t want to be mean. She knows she’s not supposed to to mean to grown-ups, so she didn’t want to hurt me. But that won’t help you in a real situation.”

She was wrong. I didn’t pinch because I was afraid to drawn any more attention to myself. I felt so exposed already. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t forget what it felt like to be grabbed from behind, to pinch the person grabbing you and know you couldn’t pinch hard enough to save yourself. Trying to practice my pinching, I dug the nail of each index finger into the tops of my thumbs. But I had a habit of scratching my thumbs when I felt anxious, so pinching myself only added to my anxiety, as if the repeated act of keeping myself safe was an expression of fear, and nothing more. Any precaution I might take, anything I might do to protect myself, seemed beside the point. Practicing what I was supposed to do in a “real situation” made me feel like I was rehearsing my part as the kidnapped child in every abduction story I’d ever heard. I pulled the covers up to my chin and looked at the crack of light under my bedroom door, watching for the shadows of a stranger’s feet. Recalling those two strangers in my classroom, grabbing and shouting at me, I could see how my abduction story would end.

I always thought it would happen to me. I grew up blue-eyed and blond, just like Amber and Michaela and Jaycee. “They’re killing Kennedys,” Jackie supposedly said after Bobby was assassinated. “They’re killing blonds,” I though to myself, every time I felt in danger. I know it’s absurd to think of hair color as an affliction. I know how ridiculous it sounds, how sorely y fear lacked perspective. It isn’t just blond girls who are kidnapped; boys go missing too, and so often we focus on the abductions of white children while ignoring the children of color who disappear from their homes and fade from public memory all too quickly. But I’m not the only one worried about blonds. In September 2009, amidst the flurry of interest in Jaycee’s reappearance, the New York Times ran a story questioning whether parents should allow their children to walk to school by themselves. The author of the article, Jan Hoffman, wrote that her friends warned her not to let her daughter walk alone, saying things like, “‘She’s just so pretty. She’s just so . . . blond.'”

On morning when I was thirteen, my mother turned on the news as my sister and I got ready for school. The night before, a thirty-one-year-old man carrying three guns had walked into a bar in Berkeley and taken everyone hostage, killing a UC Berkeley student and wounding several other people. Mehrdad Dashti shot out the lights in the room. Then he made the blond women strip from the waist down, and had the men violate them with carrots. I remember seeing the news reports that morning live from the scene, eating my Cheerios and watching half-naked blonds run out of the bar. They didn’t scream or cry; they just stared straight ahead, avoiding the cameras and each other, and ran like hell. I wondered if, by watching these women, I was violating them myself—violating them in the same way that all those Missing flyers violate kidnapped girls. The missing disappear because they’ve been exposed, but they can only be discovered when they are exposed again. This is the dilemma of visibility. This is what it means to be lost, and then found.

I’ve got my own story of being lost and found. I always think of it as the day I was almost kidnapped on my way home from kindergarten. My mother waited at the bus stop for me one afternoon, and kept waiting as the other children filed out. When the driver pulled away, and I still hadn’t appeared, she got in her station wagon and drove to my school. I imagine her rushing into the classroom, where my teacher was putting away tubs of paste left over from that day’s art project. He told my mother that he definitely saw me get on the bus. What must have happened, he said, was that he somehow walked me to the wrong bus, and that I was probably still on the wrong bus. He gave her maps of the routes that the other buses took, and my mother got back in the car to drive around town.

Three kindergarten buses lined up at the school curb every afternoon. I always took the third in line, the one marked “C.” But on that day, the buses were out of order, and the one marked “C” was second in line. I didn’t know what to do, so I got on the third bus, which that day was marked “B.” When the bus turned left at the corner instead of right, I realized my mistake and panicked. I started crying, and at the first stop I rushed up to tell the driver that I was on the wrong bus. She said I would have to stay on the bus until she finished her route and then she would bring me back to school. Despite what she said, I though I would have to stay on the bus until someone discovered me, cold and hungry and stinking like vinyl from sleeping on the seats all night.

I ran back to the last seat and cried, until I heard a car honking behind us. My mother told me later that when I turned around, she saw the tiniest face crying, the tiniest hand waving back at her. I remember that moment of turning and waving as if seeing myself through my mother’s eyes. I knelt on the backseat and propped my chin on the bottom ledge of the rear window. My bangs dropped almost into my eyes and my face took up so little space. I felt small and lost and scared, and even though I could see my mother, I worried I could so easily be missed, so easily miss my chance to be found. The time Melissa got on the wrong bus, as the story is known in my family, wasn’t really a close call. I thought I was going to live at the bus depot, and the thought made me cry, but I knew I wasn’t being kidnapped. Yet I remember it as my almost-abduction because it was the only time I ever experienced the thrill of being discovered. And so it is the only story I can offer to claim my place among the stars of my youth, those girls who were lost and those girls who were found.

So many of their stories start to sound the same after a while, stories of a certain girl who was spotted by a certain person, singled out, and made a star. And once you realized that, there’s nothing those kidnapped girls can teach you. There’s no lesson to be learned from any of their stories—no place to be avoided, no person to be ignored, no special attention to be plaid. If anything, it’s the happy stories, the ones about being in the right place at the right time, that are the real cautionary tales. They warn you that to have a chance at becoming a star, you can’t very well stay hidden. To be visible—to make oneself vulnerable to discovery—is to be in a constant state of peril. But to be invisible, you may as well be dead.

WE SEE THE SKY getting dark and Chris goes out to cover the lettuce. He wants the vegetables safe and unbruised, has tarps and buckets collected in the outbuilding for must such an occasion. I’ve learned not to ask if he wants help. When I used to offer, he thought it was because I figured he couldn’t do it himself. But it wasn’t that. Or maybe it was. It doesn’t matter anymore.

The clouds roll in and I watch him cover his lettuce fro the kitchen window, remembering the time I was ten and visiting my aunt in Illinois. We had a storm, what the news people said was a derecho, like a wall of hell. A horizontal tornado, some said, but it rolled more like a hurricane. It lasted a long time and I was crying before it was over. When we looked at the sky, the layers of dark heavy clouds, I was sure it was the end of the world. But it finally cleared, and people picked up, cleaned up, moved on.

The rain starts falling fast and hard. I see Chris stoop, but he doesn’t wasn’t to sacrifice the tender lettuce. He puts the tarp over some, weights it down with big rocks. He places buckets over the tomato and pepper plants.

Then the hail comes, pellets hitting the roof of the porch, tinny and loud. Chris tried to cover himself by holding his non-arm over his head, but he doesn’t quit, because now his work is even more important. Some wives would run out, grab an umbrella or a pot or something that would happen in a movie. I stand and watch, wondering how long it will take him to give in.

Before the storm came, I’d been grating carrots for a salad. Chris is vegetarian now. This has irritated me from the beginning, not because I care about the food, but because it seems so predictable, like something that would happen in a movie. That’s what this all feels like sometimes—not our real life, but some melodramatic, made-for-TV movie. Boy goes off to war, sees unspeakable, loses left arm in an IED explosion, can’t stomach the blood and flesh of meat anymore. I can’t name any movie where this happens, but I’m sure it has. It’s not that I don’t have any compassion, until I couldn’t be anymore.

When I was grating carrots, I heard a car coming up the drive. Really, it wasn’t in our drive, just going slow up the bumpy dirt road, but as I jumped to look, I slipped. The carrot nub flipped out of my hand, and my knuckles went down hard and fast across those sharp teeth. It took a minute to sink in, the way it does when you hurt yourself in some stupid way and can’t look down for fear of what you’ll see. Pictures flashed in my head of shredded skin, white knuckle bone shining through blood and gore. I grabbed a dishtowel and pressed it to my knuckles, but when I looked down I saw that a few tiny drops of blood had dripped into the salad bowl. The red was bold and hot against the orange of the carrots, and I knew that I should throw it all out. But the big wooden bowl was full of tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, and peppers. Throwing it out would be wasteful, and there wasn’t time to run to town for more vegetables.

This is how I told it to myself. And when I came back downstairs after washing my hand and bandaging my knuckles, I mixed the the carrot shreds up good so the bloody spot were gone. That’s what I did and I’m not sorry.

“Son of a bitch came on fast,” Chris says when he bangs in, soaking wet and dripping all over the kitchen floor. “I think I got it in time. Hope I did.”

“I’m sure you did,” I say, but I don’t have much in my voice to convince him. He doesn’t notice, so I don’t try too hard.

“I don’t remember the weatherman saying it was going to rain today, do you? Is it still hailing? You know what they say about hail.” Chris looks out the window, though we can hear the ice bouncing off the porch roof. They say hail is sometimes a sign a tornado is coming, but I don’t know what Chris means anymore. He could mean anything.

“You’re dripping,” I say. “You shouldn’t track that mud upstairs. Just strip your clothes here, then go put on something dry.” His face goes a little funny because he doesn’t like the idea. “Come on, Chris. It’s a mess.”

“Fine,” he says. I cross my arms and watch as he pushes off his boots, then, one-handed, undoes his buckle, button, and zipper; he sloughs his wet jeans off like a snake losing his skin. His boxers are wet through, but I decide not to push it. I wonder if he’ll leave the non-arm on as he tries to get his wet T-shirt off, or if he’ll release this contraption I hate. I see he’s also wondering which would be best.

He doesn’t like for anyone to see his scars, not even me, and it’s not because of vanity. Chris is a good-looking man, always has bee, but doesn’t try too hard. No hair gel or fancy clothes. He still wears the same brand of drug store cologne his mother bought him when he started shaving, even through the army, even still. I think he’s afraid the scars and stump and machine-like parts of the non-arm make him look weaker. He already feels weak, even after all the months in physical therapy, even though his good arm is stronger than most two put together. Some men get to hid their damage, but Chris has to wear his—artificial flesh-toned and creepy veiny—every day.

It took a while, but now he can dress and undress himself, take care of his bathroom things. He can do garden work and some of the farm work for his daddy, like drive the tractor. “Use the arm,” the therapists told him. “It’s not like the old prosthetics. These new pieces are incredibly.”

At first, they wanted to give him a hi-tech, robot-like one that could grasp cups. It was an experimental model and they tried to tell me how it works—something about nerves being re-routed, muscles in the chest learning to twitch in a way that would make the fingers move. I didn’t understand. When they showed me, I couldn’t stop staring at the icy silver of it.

“Chris would be able to hold your hand,” one therapist said. She was a young girl with the bright eyes, a long curled ponytail, intricately applied makeup. She wasn’t much younger than us, but she seemed like a kid. To her, the idea of Chris being able to hold my hand again probably sounded sweet, romantic.

I touched the robot hand and tried to imagine the cool fingers beginning to tighten. I thought I felt a twitch and jerked away.

“What good is this doing?” Chris asked the girl. “I’ll never be able to feel her hand. Why would I ever do this in real life?”

My cheeks went red then, imagining real life and what he might do with his bionic arm. Images flashed in my head of our bedroom, Chris saying, “Look how my chest muscles make my fingers close. Look how I can move them on you.” I felt a sick quake in my stomach and had to get up. I was outside the door quick, and slid down the wall.

The pretty girl couldn’t understand. She met men like Chris and wives like me every day, but then she went home to her boyfriend who still has everything he’s supposed to have. Some farm boy who still has his twinkle, who hold her and undresses her and touches her with two warm hands.

“That’s the last time she’s in here,” I heard Chris say to the girl.

CHRIS HAS A DIFFERENT sort of arm now. This one fastens around his body with thick straps and is still incredible, but now quite as incredible as the robotic one. He thought that one scared me, and that I was embarrassed. He told the therapist it just didn’t feel right, that maybe he wasn’t strong enough yet. So instead he has one that looks more like “the real thing” from the elbow down. The hand is always slightly bent, ready for gripping. The doctors say that the technology is improving all the time, especially now with such demand. Chris tells me he’s on a list to get a better arm permanently. I read about it on the internet—the “Luke” they call it, after Luke Skywalker’s bionic arm in the Star Wars movies.

I WATCH CHRIS STRUGGLE, trying to get the wet T-shirt up and over his non-arm. Normally he could do it, but the shirt is wet and stuck to his skin. “Okay, Jenny,” he says finally. “Help me.”

I peel gently from the bottom, first over his good arm so he can help, then over the non-arm, then over his head. I’m close enough that I can see the little welts on his shoulders and forehead where the hail hit him. That’s when I remember to listen, and hear that it’s stopped.

“Just rain now,” I say, and realize I”m still holding the shirt above his head and that our chests are touching. On my tiptoes I just can reach his lips because he is tall and I am not. I’m surprised that I kiss him because I didn’t think I would. My hand is in his hair, long now, grown out, so that I can grab it, wrap my hand up in it like he used to in mine.

“Jen,” he says around my lips, but I keep my hand in his hair, and kiss him so hard that I taste blood in my mouth, his or mine I don’t know.

If he would take off the arm, I would lick his scars. When he’s awake, he won’t let me touch them, doesn’t want me to look, but sometimes when he’s asleep, I kneel on the floor beside the bed and run my finger around each purple crevice, each indentation. I cup the missing piece. The pills make him sleep deep and I’m glad, because if he woke to find me there, he would howl. He’d push me and my kisses away like he does every time.

I pull his hair, force his head back and kiss his throat.

“What’s gotten in to you?” he says. He’s trying to move away, trying to laugh me off, but I don’t want to let him go.

How would the movie go? If we were living out this drama on the screen, would he push me away now, again, or would this be the climax where Chris finally lets me unstrap his non-arm and lies down on the cold kitchen tiles? Would he cry? Would the hail start again, or the lightning and thunder, rolling over us?

I USED TO LOVE those nights when the air got thick with electricity. The thunder rolled around the house in waves, the lightning showing Chris to me in flashes as it lit up the bedroom. When it was over, there was just the slow, soft rain. We’d lie close together. I knew everything then.

WITH HIS GOOD HAND, Chris pats my shoulder. “Isn’t it about time for dinner?” he asks. “I’ll go get some dry clothes on. Okay?” He’s using his hand to disentangle mine from his hair. He doesn’t want to hurt me. He just wants to go.

I watch him gather his wet clothes from the floor. I think I should go get the mop and take care of the puddles, but I don’t. Instead, I get the vegetarian lasagna from the oven. I get the salad from the refrigerator.

The storm has somehow circled us and, when we sit to eat, the rain is loud again. When the thunder comes, I can feel it in my whole body as the house shudders.

“Here it comes again,” Chris says. He’s wearing a blue T-shirt from high school, with the school mascot—a wildcat—on the front. His hair is in his eyes. He looks so young, so much younger than I feel. How unfair that he can look like that and I have to feel like this. His non-arm is resting on the table. He’s waiting for me to serve him.

“This looks good,” he says as I cut the lasagna and scoop it onto his plate. I’m not a good cook, especially when it comes to dishes where delicate vegetables are expected to pull together and make something hearty.

“Have some salad.” I use the plastic tongs to fill our bowls to the top.

I spear some with my fork, but don’t put it to my mouth until I’ve watched Chris take a mouthful, mostly lettuce, streaked with shreds of orange. He chews and when he sees me watching, he smiles.

“At least I can make salad,” I say. I take my bite, already knowing that after he goes to sleep tonight, I’ll sneak out and drive the forty-five minutes to Morgantown to get a greasy fast food cheeseburger. Maybe two.