ORBITAL DEBRIS

I

 

Something about the boy was strange. Not just the way he looked—the sallow skin, the tenebrous owl eyes, the black hair that slumped across his bulbous forehead—but how he moved as he poked about the field behind their neighborhood, his gait brittle, the stick he gripped in his palsied hand twitching like a dowsing rod. Every morning this summer, Addie watched the boy wander in the knee-high grass of the field while she sipped coffee on her rear patio, designed in the New Orleans Courtyard style she’d chosen from the builder’s options when she and Hal bought the place.

It had sounded so delicious then—a French-inspired hideaway to soothe the soul under the wide expanse of stars, your own secret garden. But the market crashed and the money and buyers dried up before the remaining phases of the residential development could be implemented. More than a few of the faux-Craftsman homes were empty—some never purchased, others foreclosed. The cleared field behind Addie’s home, which was intended to boast the pool, community center, and playground, had gone to seed, as Hal used to say, fond of using his farmer’s colloquialisms, although as a concession to her the closest he’d come to farming in the ten years prior to Addie putting him in the ground had been to thumb morosely through Progressive Farmer at the kitchen table, and God forgive her, Addie was grateful for that.

The boy was there now, in the field, the dark gloom of clouds gathering in the east hulking over his form like a reatomizing superpower villain, the kind of unsettling illustration found in the comic books Addie remembered schoolmates wedging in their textbooks so many decades ago. The grass writhed around the boy’s branch-thin thighs, the storm coming in fast as they tended to do every afternoon, the year’s El Niño slamming their corner of Alabama with record levels of rain.

But the boy did not seem to notice the threat above him. He plucked through the field, unsteady on his feet, poking his stick at this and that. Occasionally, he would squat to study the ground, and in those moments, he was completely consumed by the roil of grass: it was as if he’d vanished.

Addie often wondered if the boy’s mother knew how her son, who looked to be no more than twelve or so, passed the day. Addie had seen the woman only at a distance, hauling her trash bin down the driveway or  lingering by the mailboxes staked at the end of every quaintly named street—Cottage Lane, Dogwood Trace, Magnolia Pass—picking through her mail. If the boy’s mother had a husband, Addie had never laid eyes on him. Given the boy’s sullen posture, his brooding stare when he caught Addie observing him, she suspected that the father was dead or just gone. What else but that kind of pounding sorrow would allow a mother to give her boy to a field gone wild, would permit a mother the ignorance of not knowing that at this very moment that boy stood alone under the glare of a fierce storm with no intentions of escaping it?

The rabbits were starting to stir, and they leapt en masse past Addie’s patio. The rabbits were another silly idea from the builder, a queer bucolic touch for a scab of houses wedged between a Walmart and a dilapidated mall. With few natural predators other than the restless housecats who escaped their foyers on occasion, the rabbits did what rabbits do: multiplied. Their pebbly shit studded the sidewalks; it was impossible to take a stroll without soiling one’s shoes. Mounds of rabbit shivered on too-green lawns, watching unblinkingly. Hal, who had been unable to parse the purpose of decorative rodents, once struck one across the head with a potting shovel for habitually shitting on their patio. Addie had watched from the kitchen window; the rabbit did not even think of moving when Hal raised the shovel, could not seem to comprehend that the world might be bent toward necessary violence.

It wasn’t right, Addie thought, to breed the wild out of the wild capriciously. But even now the tremor-eyed rabbits knew what was coming. They stormed the lawn, hopping into bushes, under the latticework of porches. Addie stood, her knees protesting the abrupt movement. “Get out of that field!” she yelled at the boy, the volume of her voice swelling against her cheeks. “You’re going to get yourself killed.” She waved her hands, beckoning him to her patio.

He must have heard her. His head pitched up. His ears cocked. He stared straight at her, his big eyes moons. The black was on him now, the sky preparing to cleave, lightning severing the clouds. The boy hesitated, gripped his stick as if he intended to ignore her, jabbed at something at his feet. And then the sky ruptured, the winds tearing Addie’s coffee cup right off the table, her newspaper scudding to the ground, the brightly colored pages levitating around her calves. A finger of light reached out toward the boy, a perfect spear of lightning, and like a shock cord, it retracted just before it touched him, lassoing back up into the clouds.

Addie had never seen him move quickly before, not like the other kids who played basketball in the alley or scootered around on their wheeled contraptions. No, the boy generally maneuvered like an octogenarian, his legs buckling beneath him, the joints of his body bending at bizarre angles, a little, geriatric-looking Pinocchio.

But the boy was running toward her. Fast. The wind whipped his longish hair into a ducktail; his wet T-shirt stuck to his body like a caul. Even from a distance, Addie could see the boy’s ribs beneath the fabric, each slash of bone. Then he was standing not three feet away, waiting hesitantly at the patio step, just outside the protection of the awning. His thin chest heaved. The veins of his neck jerked. His owl eyes ballooned. He seemed slightly inhuman, some creature the storm had conjured. A horrible thought struck Addie: one day this boy will be a man, his ugly body hovering over some woman Addie could not help but see as unfortunate. And that unwelcomed image—the grotesque angles of his matured face, the eyes like small, raging animals caged in his sockets—shivered her spine; the truth of it, that she’d thought it at all.

 

II

 

When Vivek got home from the old lady’s house, his own home was silent; it smelled of rain and sandalwood. Barely past four, the house was pitch black, the drapes drawn against the soupy light. He found his mother in the living room that hinged the kitchen. She still wore her scrubs, bright teal and freckled with kicking bears in top hats. A fashion magazine draped her lap, unopened. Her profile—his profile—cut a dark, shadowy void. Her thumb and middle finger noosed the stem of a half-full wineglass.

She stared at the curtained window, the last breath of the storm pelting its panes. Vivek knew she hated it, the rain, the constant moistness, the promiscuous green growth of the landscape, the way everything seemed to ooze and seep, but for some reason, she refused to leave, refused to return to southern California where she’d grown up, where she met Vivek’s father, where they lived pre-children—if the family photo albums told any truth—a happy life before his father uprooted her for a job running the regional hospital where Vivek’s mother now worked as a nurse.

Vivek opened the window curtain to allow in what little light the day offered, then eased onto the sofa beside his mother, his thigh almost resting against her own. She blinked, her lashes, as long as spider legs, pinching together then fanning open. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were untouched by the gray that shot through her hair, as if they belonged to an earlier version of herself.

“I lost a patient,” she said.

“I’m sorry.” Vivek thought to hold his mother’s hand, but even as young as he was, he understood that the gesture would be too jarring in its strangeness, what little language of touch they’d known lost to them since his father’s death the year before. They sat together for a moment, both staring out the window at the neat line of spindly, young oaks bordering the sidewalk in front of their house, which they moved into after his father died, his mother in search of a sterile newness, a blank slate.

“A girl,” his mother continued. “She was talking—about some TV show with dancing hippos—and then she wasn’t. She closed her eyes, and that was it.” His mother turned to him when she said this, her face so vulnerable he could barely look at her without feeling the familiar rage punch from his gut to his throat.

“Rice and steamed vegetables okay for dinner?” Vivek asked, unfolding off the couch.

“Sounds lovely,” his mother said, although he knew she would not eat more than a child-sized bite or two. And then, after she thought he was asleep, she’d sip wine in the dark silence. He could not understand it, his mother’s choice to work with terminal children, other than she found comfort in knowing with certainty the outcome of things. There’d been hope for his father, torturous hope for months, and still the end had been like all endings. There’d been none for the older brother Vivek never met, the teenager who died upon impact on an unlit country road, a case of empty beer cans scattered around his body in a loose constellation, the car, a graduation gift, accordioned against a tree, his girlfriend slung over a branch of the same tree, her blonde hair draping like Spanish moss. Or at least, this was what Vivek saw when he tried to imagine the scenario, which he did often enough to scare himself.

No, there had been no hope for Anaadi. Not until Vivek, a consolation baby—no one made a secret about his purpose—entered the world on the first anniversary of Anaadi’s death sixteen years ago. He was reborn, their usually unreligious mother insisted on the rare occasions she drunkenly collided with her living son in the small hours of the night, into Vivek’s own body, a frail and contorted vessel after a botched forceps delivery. If true, other than being a stupid teenager, what horrific thing had Anaadi done, Vivek often wondered, for Yama to punish him with such a body in his new life?

“What’s that?” His mother pointed at the metal detector he’d propped against the coat closet. It looked like a weed whacker.

“An old lady two streets over gave it to me. I ran into her house for a minute when the rain started.”

“Why would a stranger just give you that?”

Vivek shrugged. “She said she didn’t need it anymore. Said she didn’t want things to clutter up her house.”

His mother considered this, studying the contraption suspiciously. “Be careful,” she finally cautioned. “No one gives away things without an expectation of something in return.”

Vivek clamped the rice steamer closed. He’d become the lone cook in the house after his father died from pancreatic cancer, and although he had discovered no secret culinary talent, he liked the ritual of preparing food, felt a certain superiority over the other boys at school, boys who were obsessed with video games and sports and skateboards and flippable bangs. He’d always been different from them, but this distinction seemed noble, unrelated to his uncooperative limbs, which would never have allowed sports and skateboarding even if he had the interest. He did not.

“What would an old lady want from me?” Vivek asked, but even as he said it, he knew that in general his mother was right. No one had ever given him a thing without an expectation of something in return. An unexpected gift of a Snickers at school from one of the shaggy-bang boys had eventually cost him his trig homework, an unwanted kiss on the cheek from one of the skankier girls a peek at his physics exam. Even the sad gift of his body required that he share it with Anaadi when his mother so desired.

The old lady’s house had looked as if she was just moving in or about to move out. Packed boxes towered in the dining room. A widescreen TV rested on the floor. The only visible furniture in use was a table in the kitchen with a few chairs ringing it and a small couch in the living room facing a blank wall where the TV would have been in a normal person’s house.

He’d paused upon entering her home, eyeing the boxes, the bare dining room to the right.

“You moving?” he’d asked, his voice sounding strange in the naked room.

“Sooner or later.”

“If you haven’t moved yet, where’s the rest of your stuff?”

The woman shrugged, said, “I didn’t need it anymore. Probably never did.”

After she ushered Vivek into the kitchen, she fetched a towel and wrapped it around his shoulders, seating him at the table. She poured him some lemonade from a carton she pulled from the side of the refrigerator, then sat across from him, her scrawny hands fisted under her chin. She was tiny and birdlike, her blotched skin loosening at the chin, her nose so long the fleshy tip almost touched her top lip. She stared at him for a minute, runny green eyes narrowed. “I’m Miss Addie,” she said. Her accent, a muddied, old-fashioned drawl, was so thick it would have required subtitles if she were on one of those redneck reality shows.

“I’m not good with kids,” she said. “Never had any of my own.” Then she stood and limped over to a utility closet and retrieved the metal detector, shoving it toward him.

“This was my husband’s. He’d intended to hunt for Civil War nonsense—bullet casings and belt buckles and whatnot—but didn’t get around to using it. Maybe it will help you find what you are looking for in that field.”

“Maybe,” Vivek said uncertainly, but he could not resist reaching for the gift.

She cocked her head, her nostrils shuddering. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

This was what Vivek was searching for this summer: his brother’s class ring, the school mascot, a cartoonish tiger, prowling up the side, the center stone an oversized ruby. One lazy, early June morning it had occurred to Vivek that if what he owned belonged to Anaadi, then in theory, what Anaadi once owned should belong to him. So Vivek swiped the ring from his mother’s jewelry box, intending to keep it for just a day. At first, he slipped his hand into his pocket every few minutes; the ring felt hot to his touch, like a tiny organ pulsing heat. And then, he became distracted by the day’s project, a kite he designed and built himself, which he attempted to fly for hours in the grassy field behind his neighborhood, a childish pursuit he suspected would invoke a barrage of cruel taunts from his classmates if anyone saw him. But that was not a problem, because outside of school, Vivek never saw anyone except his mother. By the time he remembered to shove his hand into his pocket to check for the ring, he found nothing but a wad of kite string.

What he told the old woman, a lie inspired by a television program he’d watched by himself in the darkest hours of the night after waking from another disturbing dream: “Space junk. Orbital debris rocketing around the asteroid belt. Sometimes it breaks through the atmosphere. Bits of rockets and satellites.”

“Good Lord,” Miss Addie had said. “There’s junk in space, too?”

Orbital debris? his brother seemed to say now from one of the photo frames that rested on Vivek’s dresser, his sultry eyes those of a Bollywood star. Their mother had rewritten Anaadi’s modest achievements into epic feats since his death, but his looks required no exaggeration. He was the kind of handsome that made Vivek study his feet when it passed him in the school halls, overwhelming in its intensity, like staring directly into the sun.

Poor Vivek, Anaadi whispered sadly from his photo, but Vivek caught his brother’s faint snigger, and Vivek suspected, not for the first time, that his brother had been a bit of an asshole when he’d felt like it. He actually liked that about him. Boys who looked like Vivek—bug-eyed and bent-backed and perpetually preadolescent—were not permitted the luxury of assholeishness.

The top of the desk served as a shrine of sorts: pictures of Anaadi from diapers to graduation gown; a sterling silver rattle with Anaadi’s full name and date of birth engraved on the handle (there was no such rattle for Vivek); seashells Anaadi had collected from sands of the Gulf on a family vacation as a toddler. And, hidden beneath a photo of ten-year-old Anaadi in a Little League Baseball uniform, a picture of the blonde girl Anaadi had loved, the girl who’d been with him at the end. In the snapshot, she sits on the edge of a bed in purple-polka-dotted panties, her long hair tousled on her shoulders, her knees pulled to her chest and wedged inside an oversized T-shirt. She’s squinting hard at the photographer from under heavily made-up eyelids, her extended hand languidly shooting a bird, Anaadi’s class ring glaring from her middle finger like an angry, bloodshot eye. The look and the gesture seem somehow intimate, an invitation. Vivek had found several photos of the girl wedged inside his brother’s copy of The Call of the Wild, but he preferred this one the most. The edges showed the wear from his brother’s hands, and it made Vivek feel close to Anaadi—mysterious, fabulous, wonderboy Anaadi—to hold his girl in Vivek’s own.

Lila Grayson. That was the name scrawled on the back of the photo. Her last name was Williams now. He’d looked her up on Facebook, and it took a few minutes from there to figure out her current address one town over. He’d marveled at the image of her profile photo, how the tired woman in that picture could also be the glossy-skinned kid who’d once known his brother. Vivek had done the math; she would be well over thirty, almost double the age of the girl tucked into his dead brother’s book.

Last week he had taken his father’s car—a silver, vintage Mercedes his mother was saving for Vivek, though his sixteenth birthday had passed with no mention of when he might get his license—and driven to the adjacent town where Lila Williams now lived, circling the pocked roads for her address. The town was a string of doublewides and boarded storefronts, and after an hour of orbiting the same trash-strewn lawns filled with lanky, mud-kneed kids or knots of young men in low-slung pants with cigarettes pinched between their thumbs and forefingers, Vivek finally found Lila’s place—a small tract house with a patchwork of red clay and dead grass for a front yard. A pack of young children—all boys—ran wild. He parked the car next to the mailbox and watched, waiting, he supposed, for Lila to emerge through the dented front door, wondering how her life might have been different if Anaadi had not died. He liked to think that Anaadi’s death changed the course of Lila’s life. He liked to think that he was not alone. He waited until he could wait no longer, until his mother’s shift ended at work and she would soon be home to discover the missing car, and still, Lila never emerged once to check on her children, never even pulled back a drape.

Vivek caught his mother studying him often enough, her expression a mixture of wistfulness and mild distaste, to know she recognized nothing of her first son in her second, that she never once truly believed any remnant of Anaadi survived in Vivek. But at night, when he finally found sleep, Vivek sometimes saw Lila, the girl as his brother had loved her, and the details of her face—the mole that rode the rim of her upper lip, the freckles scattered across her slightly crooked nose—were so finely etched, the pressure of her lips on his so palpable, that when he first woke, her image still hovering in his mind’s eye, he half believed what he had witnessed was more memory than dream, that Anaadi’s soul, however briefly, burned within him.

      

III

 

Jacob felt like a tool, wobbling down the street on his daughter’s lavender-colored bike, his soaked clothes clinging to his skin, the ragged plastic basket that drooped from the handlebars funneling a spout of water straight at his left cheek. The plan had been to take the Camry, but when he finally worked up the nerve to pull out of his driveway a few hours before dawn, the car refused to start. It took him two hours to cover the ten miles in the rain, which pushed against him like an invisible hand.

He couldn’t remember the exact address of the old lady’s house. It had been pouring when he loaded her donations onto the Goodwill truck a couple of weeks ago—another part-time job that had not paid enough to cover even the electric bill—her house sheathed in rain. He’d been pedaling awhile now, circling the neighborhood, the large stucco homes so similar in structure and color, particularly in the night, that he worried he would never recognize the one where the bird-faced woman lived. The houses were monstrous in size—several so big they required two heating and air units. Some were silent as tombs, the owners probably off at their vacation homes to escape the summer heat. Others had yards littered with trampolines and miniature battery-operated Jeeps, porches crammed with SUV-sized strollers and bike trailers. What kind of work did these people do, Jacob wondered, to own so much stuff?

By the time the rain stopped and the sun began to emerge—a piss-colored smudge in the heavy-lidded horizon—he almost decided to cut his losses. And then he saw the planters on the front porch, two massive, ceramic bowls painted with navy blue fleurs-de-lis. He knew that the planters were plantless, filled only with dry, caked dirt, because when the old lady wasn’t watching, he’d put out his break smoke in one, embarrassed by the intense pleasure of the juvenile act. Jacob dropped the bike behind a row of drooping azaleas next to the house and crouched in the shadows of the two-story Craftsman, bile seeping up his throat.

Since he’d lost his job teaching phys ed at the elementary school during the last round of cuts, in addition to taking any job that came his way, he’d cancelled the landline and cable, pawned the TVs, the Xbox, the laptop, the crappy Walmart pay-as-you-go smartphone, listed his good tools on Craigslist, even sold his blood plasma. Still, there was not enough, and Sharla had been very clear in her terms the past weekend: Don’t come inside this house without rent money. He’d spent the last four nights sleeping in the car, waking at dawn to drive to the empty lot next to the old Piggly Wiggly, where he stood around with the other day laborers in hopes that some douche in an oversized, souped-up truck would choose him for the shit job du jour, which never happened. The younger guys and the Mexicans got picked first, more bang for the buck. Jacob felt like an aging hooker, and when he said as much to Sharla that first night when she came out to the car to torture him with another stack of bills, she snorted, said, “When a four-hundred-pound dude with titties bigger than mine sticks his hand down your G-string, we’ll talk.” Before they met, Sharla had stripped for a few years at a pretty tame tops-off-only joint, but the way she worked herself up about it, you’d think she’d been exploited by a ring of Russian sex traffickers.

Last night he was awakened in the back seat of the Camry by a persistent drip, the moonroof’s seal completely undone by age and sun exposure. He sat there for a long time, stripped to his boxers, the stringy heat of the old car unbearable. It was like sitting in a cow’s mouth. And then he understood—what he needed to do, the only thing he could do.

He chose the old woman because she had seemed so delighted to get rid of her things. She practically hummed when he hauled off a nice set of leather couches and a recliner to the Goodwill truck, spreading her arms wide in the emptied living room as if she were about to break out into a jig. Frankly, Jacob found her joy offensive to people like himself, people who were too panicked about not being able to put gas in the tank and food on their table to kick up their heels when the repo man came to haul their shit off. What was the difference, he reasoned, if he cut out the middle man and took her things himself? She wanted to donate to the poor, and God knows, Jacob was not much, but he was poor.

But standing here now, his face pressed to the old lady’s window, he wasn’t so sure. He’d never stolen anything, unless he counted beer from the stash his father used to hide in his ancient johnboat, and weed from friends in high school, a finder’s-fee pinch from a baggie here and there. Or, if he wanted to get philosophical about it—and Jacob did not—Sharla’s youth, which, according to her latest rant, had been squandered wiping the asses of his two kids.

He peeked inside the house. The old lady was nowhere to be seen, and he hoped that if she was home she was still asleep. A lady that ancient would surely sleep like the dead. He did not allow himself to consider what he might do if she were awake. Jacob spotted a wall of boxes and a large flat-screen TV perched in the foyer, a new collection of things apparently intended for donation. The TV alone would pull in at least four hundred on Craigslist. Then the obvious hit him: How was he going to carry a 55-inch TV on a bike? The panic—the cold clamping of his heart—nearly knocked him out. He pressed his cheek, raw from the hard rain, against the cool of the stucco.

Maybe, he considered, not all was lost. There could be some small stuff, jewelry or collectibles, in those boxes, things he could carry in the bike basket. He surprised himself by laughing at the thought of a man barreling down a county highway balancing a big-screen TV on his handlebars, the tone of his laugh harsh, and he wondered when his own voice began to sound like that of a stranger’s.

He would be less likely to be seen breaking in at the back of the house, which faced an open field, so he eased around the side, hugging the house as he moved, his wet, sneakered feet tripping over a paver brick, a ceramic butterfly, a garden hose, and then something soft, malleable.

Jacob looked down to find the furry belly of a small creature wedged under his heel; his foot jacked up reflexively, his shoe hovering over the animal in midair like a threat. The thing looked to be a rabbit, its eyes glassy and still. It stared straight through him, its narrow rodent mouth agape, the sharp teeth crooked and yellowed. Then it seemed to release a moan, a long, low keening.

Jacob jumped, nearly falling into the hedges, and by the time he steadied himself, he found himself at the back of the house, gripping a poorly molded wrought-iron fence that surrounded a brick patio, a wide field of grass in the distance, black clouds pressing down the horizon like a giant fist. And the moaning—it grew louder, closer, even though the dead or dying rabbit was now a good ten feet away.

Then he saw it, the woman’s body sprawled across the brick patio, a water-logged newspaper a few inches from an outstretched hand. He stared at her for at least a minute before he fully recognized her as human, as the source of the terrible sound. It was the old lady, her clothes matted to her skeletal frame, her hair a thin, see-through cap, her mouth fish-lipping the air.

At her feet, French doors winged open to the kitchen. The small dinette table that took up most of the eat-in kitchen was covered in what looked like stacks of photo albums and old papers, and next to those, a hand-carved wooden box, the kind of box in which people keep precious things. Jacob’s heart lurched instinctively at his good luck, and this response frightened him, because it took only the space of a breath to understand that he would not call 911, that in the end he would step over the woman’s body to enter her home, that he would avoid looking at the yellowed black-and-white photos spread on the table of the old lady when she wasn’t so old—when the thinness of her cheeks appeared pixie-ish and coquettish rather than birdlike, when the man he assumed was her husband still found her lovely enough to bury his broad face in the hollow of her neck—and he would reach for that box instead of the phone that hung from the wall. And later, back at his house, sitting, finally, at his own kitchen table across from his wife and kids, there would be much doubt and regret and sorrow. But in that exact moment—the moment he flipped the lid of the wooden box open to reveal a string of opaque pearls, a diamond engagement ring, and a man’s gold pocket watch—he felt only as if he’d been spared.

 

IV

 

The kids were like fucking animals. Animals. Not precocious. Not curious. Not energetic. Feral animals. Lila had tried to explain this to Trey, that the way things were going she might be dead by the end of the summer, and not metaphorically devoid of life, but straight up dead dead. She’d begged him to hire her some help, even a neighborhood girl for a few hours a week, but he’d laughed it off like silly nonsense, told her money was too tight, that she just needed to put her feet up now and again, take a nap if she could squeeze one in. If Lila closed her eyes long enough for a nap, she had no doubt that she’d wake to complete destruction. Tsunami-style devastation.

Trey still looked good in boxers, stayed sober most nights, and worked hard at his machinist job, but Lila couldn’t find anything else nice to say about her husband. She knew as much when she married him. What kind of guy calls a box of donuts and a 12-pack of Natural Light on a rusted-out tailgate a first date? But she’d been assaulted by a restless anger for a long time after the car accident, a rage that stemmed, in part, from the way the tragedy had defined her, her transition into womanhood, and her inability to say as much without the risk of sounding like a heartless bitch had only exacerbated her righteous self-destruction. She’d been overwhelmed by a want to punish—her friends, her parents, the world, herself. Trey, a good ol’ boy with a pickup truck and a gun rack and tepid blue-collar aspirations had seemed a fine way to do just that, and when he put his hand on the small of her back as she worked her way through the crowded redneck bar she frequented when home from college specifically because her father had asked her not to, she whipped around to face him, placing her mouth over his before he could introduce himself.

She was a year shy of her bachelor’s degree with no employment in sight when she discovered, a few weeks before the end of summer break, that Trey had knocked her up. Being jobless and pregnant and married, even to Trey, seemed a wiser option than being just jobless and pregnant. And if there had been other options, she had been too tired to consider them. Then Peter arrived—a squally mass of flesh—and Lila thought the baby would cement the deal, make her feel like a real wife and mother, fill her days with playdates and onesie shopping and misty baths where she would coo at the baby like serene-faced mothers on Johnson & Johnson commercials. None of that happened. She just grew weary and bored, her anger, at least, dulled by exhaustion. And then the others started coming, no matter how much birth control she pumped into her arm or gut, one boy after another, like goddamn rabbits, the youngest almost two.

Their junk multiplied, too. The house was littered with sippy cups and torn books and ride-ons and little honking cars and tooting trains. The yard was even worse: a disemboweled trampoline, a rusted-out swing set, dozens of sun-faded push toys and tire-deflated trikes. Sometimes Lila thought she’d be buried alive, just slowly sink into the mire of crap, and to tell the truth, she’d be grateful for the escape.

Wine, she recently discovered, helped tremendously. She wished she’d thought of it years ago. Trey didn’t seem to notice the drinking, and she was careful to buy cheap wine at Costco so that he wouldn’t notice the expense either. Over the last few weeks, she’d started a little earlier each day, just testing the waters. Today she didn’t even pour a bowl of Cheerios and make a show of taking a few bites; instead, she filled her coffee cup with merlot, then kept refilling it, the shrillness of the children’s squeals as they ate and dressed blessedly muted.

The rain had been ruthless all summer, and anytime the sky cleared Lila shoved the kids out the door and locked it behind them. They were out in the rain-soaked yard now, all five of them, terrorizing a neighborhood cat they’d treed. Lila knew she should stop them, but she also knew that there was no stopping them, and so she sipped her wine and watched for a moment as Peter, almost twelve now and hell-bent on turning mean, pegged the tabby with pebbles, his little brothers scrounging the ground for more ammo. Even the baby was scratching in the mud on his hands and knees, yelping in delight each time the cat screeched. She thought to yell at them to leave the cat alone, but instead she closed the drapes.

Lila settled deeper into the couch, the mug of wine resting on her belly, her free hand picking at the frayed threads of the floral couch. When she noticed a patch of dried food—most likely yogurt from the morning’s breakfast—she didn’t even think of rising to get a washcloth, and she didn’t feel guilty for not thinking of doing so either. She just shut her eyes, welcoming the stillness.

Lately, when Lila stole moments like this, her body almost floating with the buzz of wine, her mind racing in images—the slope of her own mother’s cheek from years ago, the white, downy hairs gathering the sunlight as she drove Lila to grade school; her friends from college sweating out their beer at a frat band-party, their long, wet hair lacerating their bony shoulders; Anaadi the night he died, sitting cross-legged in front of a bonfire they’d built, etching a cartoonish stick figure of her into the red dirt—she was certain that there must be many Lilas, all living their separate lives at once. Sometimes, she liked to think that if she focused hard enough she could find her way back to one of those other Lilas, that she could hit the reset button, but she suspected it wouldn’t matter much, that, eventually, she would find herself right back here on this very couch.

When she heard the knock on the door, she figured it was one of the kids, forever wanting something, and she waited a long moment before rising, savoring the velvety darkness of her eyelids. She stood unsteadily, holding her mug of wine to her chest as she moved across the cluttered room so the wine would slosh onto her old T-shirt instead of the carpet. She threw open the door, ready to respond to whatever request with an It’s-time-you-learn-to-do-it-yourself, and found herself staring at an Indian boy with bulging eyes and a slab of greasy hair paneled across his forehead. He stood too close to the door, almost inside the door frame. He smelled of dirt and grass. She almost slammed the door shut, but her kids were out there in the yard, and what kind of mother would she be if she considered only her own safety?

So instead she said, as tersely as she could, “What do you want?”

The boy blinked once, twice. “I don’t know.” He pistoned his wadded hands deep into his pockets. Stared at her shyly.

“You selling something?” Lila offered. She peered around him, as if he were hiding a clipboard or a box of candy bars. Behind him, her own boys had stilled. Only the baby crawled in crazy loops around the base of the tree, the cat still clutching to the same branch. Lila’s sons watched her and the stranger with naked curiosity.

“When you didn’t answer the door, I was just going to leave it on the step.” The boy gestured with his chin toward the ground, and Lila spotted a small object close to the toe of his boat-sized old-man shoes. It took a few moments for it to register that it was a ring, its wide band a cheap, cloudy gold. She couldn’t tell if the boy was making some kind of love offering or trying to sell her his mother’s jewelry to buy meth from one of the cook houses on their street. Either way, she wasn’t interested, and was about to tell the boy so in no uncertain terms when he unclenched a hand from his pocket and, without hesitation, touched his hot fingertips   to her face.

“You look older than yourself,” the boy said, like some retard or oracle. Then he jerked his hand away and turned to hobble down the grass-cracked walkway toward an old Mercedes, the bend of his hooked back that of an elderly man. Lila studied the ring at her feet, turning it with one big toe. It was gaudy and poorly made, the red gem only dull glass, the band so thin it razored against the skin of her feet. The sight of it made her angry. More junk. She swept it with her heel into the overgrown shrub for the kids to scavenge later.

 

V

 

First it was Addie’s heart—clogged arteries, an irregular rhythm. Then her lungs—reduced capacity—an afterthought of thirty years of smoking, a habit she regretted abandoning once she realized she would be punished for it anyway. After her knees went and her doctor doled out the assisted-living speech, Addie began giving away her things in preparation for the inevitable move: the heirloom china her mother gifted her when she married Hal; her formal dining room furniture, with the silk-backed chairs she painstakingly protected from Hal’s soiled hands for more than thirty years; and as soon as the Goodwill truck showed up again, everything else she could spare, including the TVs, with their incessant chants of economic doom and endless wars.

She had no children to whom she could farm out her things. There’d been a baby the third year of her marriage, a misshapen boy who never pinked up. The others died within her, a string of miscarriages throughout her fertile years, until, mercifully, her reproductive organs could not even ignite those weak flames. If Hal blamed her for their inability to have children, he never let on—a mysterious softness for a man who railed at her for allowing the chicken feed to mold or the morning paper to get wet—and with each loss, he brought her flowers, beautiful daffodils he left in a mason jar on the kitchen table. After the initial thrill of performing wife wore off, she found herself at twenty only dutifully fond of her husband. But she loved him with an indescribable love those mornings she woke to the daffodils.

She’d expected to experience some anxiety watching the men from the Goodwill haul her things onto the truck a couple of weeks ago when she made the first round of purging, unmoored without the familiar shadows of her household possessions. Instead, she felt strangely liberated, untethered to a past she had no recollection of deliberately choosing. She was also intrigued as the two young men tugged Hal’s leather recliner down the front steps: what must it be like, she wondered, to spend one’s time collecting the detritus of others’ lives?

She was dragging a box of dusty paperbacks to the front porch for the second scheduled pickup when she opened the front door to the boy, whom she’d only seen from a distance in the week since she’d taken him in during the storm, working the field for hours with the metal detector, its robotic burping loud enough to reach her patio. If the whole of America had the work ethic of that boy, she thought each time she saw him struggling through the field, we wouldn’t be in this economic mess. But there was something unsettling about his dogged obsession as well, a futility and desperation that made her look away.

The boy stood on her butterfly welcome mat, balancing a massive platter of cookies. “Nan Khatai,” Vivek said as soon as she opened the door, thrusting the platter toward her. There were at least two dozen cookies, all meticulously shaped, a whole almond pressed into each gut. “Now we’re even.”

“Your mother made these?” Addie said, not reaching for the cookies. How would she ever eat two dozen cookies by herself? Their presence alone seemed like an overwhelming obligation.

“No,” Vivek responded, but he did not appear inclined to elaborate.

“Come on in.” Addie surprised herself with the invitation. “I’ll need some help eating these.”

He lurched inside, his feet encased in cumbersome therapeutic shoes.

“Those don’t look too comfortable.” Addie gestured toward his feet.

“They’re not so bad,” Vivek said.

Vivek slid the plate of cookies on the kitchen counter. The plate appeared homemade, painted a neon green, like some kind of clumpy pottery a kid would bring home from school as a holiday gift for a parent. “The plate’s for you. For the metal detector.”

I have a plate, Addie almost said, irritated that no matter how much she gave away, how many boxes she stacked on her porch, things had a way of returning to her: a free can opener from the bank, a sample issue of a cooking magazine appearing unwanted in her mailbox, a new pair of silk pajamas left on her doorstep at Christmas, a gift from the Baptist church around the corner she’d been maudlin enough to visit once after Hal’s death. But it seemed important to Vivek that she accept the plate, and so she did.

“Thank you,” Addie said, and Vivek shrugged his uneven shoulders.

Addie poured them each a glass of milk, and they stood at the counter nibbling on the sweet, buttery cookies, both silent under the hum of the fluorescent kitchen lights. Addie knew she was not the best at small talk. She’d rarely invited the other farmers’ wives over for coffee and dessert when such things were expected of her years ago, and when she did, the weary-eyed women had filed into her dusty parlor in homemade dresses, their squawking babies and flesh-grabbing toddlers hoisted onto their wide hips, and they’d eaten their pie and sipped their coffee without much chatter, never asking for a second slice or a refill, excusing themselves for one task or another as soon as politeness allowed. Addie always thought that her lack of children made the women uncomfortable, reminded them of how random and precarious their good fortunes were, and those smug thoughts might have conjured up the guilt and fear that pious women steeped in day after endless day, the worry that surely all that good fortune could and should be taken away in a blink of God’s indifferent eye from foolish mothers ungrateful enough to enjoy a sense of superiority over a childless woman. It was easier to avoid such thoughts altogether.

When she said as much to Hal, he’d told her, “That brain of yours is a wild, strange thing,” but he quit pestering her to invite the other wives over, and Addie had grown to appreciate long, languid days of her own company, to deem others’ presence a distraction, so much so that she found herself unsettled by the tender surge of her heart at the forlorn sound of the boy lapping his milk in timid sips. What kind of boy sipped his milk?

“How’s that contraption working for you?” Addie asked. “You find some space junk?”

The boy smiled nervously, pulling a small bag from his shorts pocket. He dumped its contents on the counter: a few barrettes and other hair contraptions, a slew of bolts and nails, two paint-chipped Matchbox cars, a glass hypodermic needle that must have been close to a century old, a fishing lure, a half-dozen defunct lighters, and a mound of coins. No space junk as far as Addie could tell.

“Take your pick,” Vivek said.

“But I don’t want anything,” Addie responded, perhaps too quickly. The boy’s face clouded, and he snaked his hand toward the counter with the intent of sweeping his finds back into the bag. Addie caught his arm with her hand before he could finish, his flesh warm beneath her palm. Wordlessly, she picked through the mound of objects, finally selecting an old-fashioned metal hair comb that was covered in dirt but otherwise in surprisingly good shape, the kind she used as a young woman to pull her once-heavy hair from her face the way Hal had liked it.

Later, after the boy left, Addie studied that comb for a long time, thinking of the woman who must have worn it, of the man who might have admired the length of the woman’s nape with her hair swept up, what she might have been doing when she lost it, if she were still alive, and if so, if she was old now like Addie. She left the comb on the table and fetched the photo albums and her memory box from the cedar chest Hal had made—one of the few furnishings she did not have the heart to give away—and spent the evening poring over the aged photos and keepsakes, studying each snapshot like a clue, a possible answer to a question she couldn’t quite formulate, until she grew too sleepy to sift through the photos any longer.

That was yesterday, and now Addie could see the comb lying a few inches from her face on the patio brick, but she could not make her arm move to reach for it. Early this morning, on a whim, she’d cleaned the comb with dishwashing soap as best as she could and carefully positioned it in her hair, which could hold its weight only after she doused it in several layers of hairspray. Then she’d stepped outside on the patio during a gap in the rain to have her coffee and read the paper, and the next thing she recalled she was opening her eyes to sky the color of gunmetal, her clothes soaked, the comb just in her peripheral vision, her body no longer her own.

That was what she had been trying to tell the stranger, the sad-faced young man who’d been standing over her when she awoke—that she could not feel her arms or legs, and that it was such a strange feeling, to simultaneously exist and experience nothingness. But the young man had disappeared hours ago, and soon after, when the rain stopped for good and the sky finally blued, she heard Vivek, the irregular heartbeat of the metal detector throbbing the saturated air, the sound so comforting that when it stopped abruptly, she thought for a moment that her own heart had ceased beating.

When the metal detector didn’t start back up, she tried to turn her head to see if Vivek was still in the field, but her muscles refused to obey her brain, and in the end, it didn’t matter anyway. She somehow knew the boy had found what he was looking for, that he was gone. Addie was surprised to feel a pang of disappointment that she’d missed it, the moment he discovered that bit of metal the universe had spat out. How delighted Vivek must have been, holding a piece of the heavens in his hand! She could imagine it now, the boy standing in the tangle of grass admiring the treasure nestled in his palm, the way it glinted and blazed in the raw morning light, a tiny sun illuminating an unknowable world.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story PINCHED MAGNOLIAS

Dalia brought the butt of her shotgun to her shoulder. Everything was damp, clammy. The air smelled of blooming magnolias and churned-up swamp bed, sweet and earthy all at once. Her husband stood, grinning, on the edge of her property where water met land. He spread his arms, palms toward God, and shrugged a little. Bud was a large man, wide and tall, and his broad shoulders looked ridiculous shuffling around under his denim coveralls. He took a step forward, his mudboots sinking into the black gumbo of the bayou that banked her garden.

“Off my yard, Bud. Now,” she said, the same way she might have said, “Pick up that mess.” Tired sounding, mostly. Bud took another little step, his open arms easing down, and Dalia wriggled her big toe around in the ground, digging a hole. Otherwise, she was still, a five-foot statue in a wide hat and flower-print dress. Her voice was steady and calm, her anger only apparent in how heavy her drawl had become. “Get back, I said.”

Like most of the women in Marti Parish, she’d been brought up with one finger on a trigger, and the weight of the gun felt good in her hands, natural. But Bud was the sort of fool who figured she wouldn’t use it, and he kept walking. “Baby, give me that big ol’ gun,” he said, that grin a smear across his face. “You know you ain’t going to shoot nobody.” It was the same tone he’d taken the first time he’d lifted her shirt in high school, the both of them grinning back then.

“Anybody. It’s ANYbody, you asshole.” She looked down at the hole she’d made in the soil. Her father’d had his own proverbs, wisdoms only he knew. “Nothing good ever grew from shotgun shells,” he’d say, his arms often in the dirt, “but the brass gives roses color.” The hole would do. “Take another step, Bud, really.”

“Baby, you know I love you.” His boots sucked at the ground.

Dalia pulled the trigger, smiled at Bud looking so damn surprised. “Fuck off,” she said, the sweetness of her drawl hanging on the words. She nudged the dispensed shell with her foot and sunk it deep into the dirt, pushing it into her little hole until it all but disappeared. She finished covering it, her foot sweeping and smoothing the moist earth. Only then did she look over at her husband’s body, at the ragged hole the buckshot had ripped through his chest, at the way the blood looked black as it pooled in the mud. She did a mimic of his little shrug and went inside the house to make a pot of coffee.

It wasn’t that she didn’t believe Bud loved her. Honestly, he was the sort of dumb mutt that loved everyone—therein lay the problem. She’d thrown him out when she realized that he was cheating on her, but like the old cur he was, he padded on back whenever he was hungry or lonely. He’d come in his boat, pulling in next to her daddy’s old one, a peace offering of fresh-caught white perch and half a six-pack in his worn hands.

Even that, she could live with, but he wasn’t secret with his whore. She’d eventually met the girl at the Piggly Wiggly, the both of them in the parking lot, Dalia’s cart full of half a month’s groceries, the girl’s holding only gin and tampons. She was just a little bit of a thing, short and dark like Dalia, maybe eighteen, dumb like him, and built like a rolling river, waves of her spilling out of her baby blue hot pants.

Still, Dalia could stomach it. Barely, but she could.

The girl was a stripper, of course, across the river at Pinky’s, somehow managing not to get tetanus or typhus as she crossed its parking-lot-slash-junkyard. Dalia knew the girl was just a symbol of everything that was wrong with Bud and his world and this town and had somehow managed not to hate the child whore. Not really.

She picked up her cell phone and watched the coffee drip. Her sister was sheriff, like their father had been, and so she was the only one to call. “Mary,” she said, the phone resting between ear and arm as she filled a little blue pitcher with cream and pulled out some china, “I’ve shot Bud. You might want to come.”

After their father’s death, Mary had let Dalia keep the family home but had stayed close. Three acres down, she was Dalia’s nearest neighbor. On the other side, the thin, empty homes of seasonal hunting camps leaned toward the ground. Tangled woods choked with brush and dewberries surrounded everything, slipping through and behind the sprawling lots. Only a gravel road and the bayou connected the homes, and in the thick of spring, even they seemed to get lost in the overgrowth.

The coffeepot was hot and ready when Mary stepped into the kitchen. Without even a hello, Dalia poured her a cup, and they sat at the table. Keeping her gaze on the pitcher and off of Dalia, Mary began spooning sugar into her cup.

Like so many sisters, they were opposites and made for mismatched bookends. Mary was slim and tall, her daddy’s girl, and wore rumpled jeans and a T-shirt. Her black boots, so normal everywhere else, looked out of place and clunky across from her sister’s small, naked feet.

“Looks pretty bad out there,” Mary said, finally making eye contact. “The flies are gathering.”

“I’d expect. It’s at least ninety.”

“Really, D,” Mary sounding sad now. “What on earth possessed you to shoot Bud?”

“He kept walking.”

Mary let the spoon clink against the cup as she stirred and stirred. Finally, she just said, “They always do.”

      

No one was surprised when Mary ran for sheriff, Dalia sitting right behind her at every little speech. Marti was a small parish, and everyone had known and loved their daddy. He was good people—maybe not the most honest sheriff, but wasn’t that the way? Honest and effective need not go together, not in Louisiana, and everyone understood Mary’s need to avenge her father’s murder, unsolved and itching at them all like a wound. She won easily enough, despite being a woman, her black hair yanked into a tight ponytail, skin scrubbed clean of any makeup, and Dalia behind her, bowing her head under the brim of a hat, touching her face with a tissue at each mention of their dad.

Dalia gave Mary a quick hug after she was sworn in and said, “He’d be proud,” her voice not quite happy. Mary just nodded.

She’d turned out to be a good sheriff and had been reelected, her sister once again sitting behind her, giving her the rare hug.

The women stood in the yard looking down at Bud.

Mary said, “You should wear shoes out here,” and Dalia wondered if she was just used to bossing people around these days. “Stickers and snakes.”

Dalia poking the body with her toe, “He was handsome when we met, sort of.”

“He was. But now, well, it’s a wonder he caught that girl’s eye.”

“Fairly certain he looked a bit better alive, drunk, and shoving dollars in her panties.” Dalia chewed at her lip. “Idiot. He could make a girl feel special, though, loved. In his own way, I mean. And he was funny.” The hem of her dress slipped into a mix of blood and dirt as she bent to look at her husband. She absently knotted the ends of the skirt like when she was gardening. “But, dumb.” She looked from Bud to Mary. “You know his girl looks like I did when I was young. Well, sluttier, but scrub her face and put some clothes on her . . .”

Her sister shook her head. “You ain’t exactly old.”

Dalia’d had enough of looking at Bud. Water lapped at the edge of the bank, eating it away, and she concentrated on that motion. Once upon a time when the sisters were barely more than babies, before their daddy told them that their mother ran off, before they’d forgotten her smell, her voice, there had been a couple more feet of land to play on out there, their little bodies getting bronze in the sun as they made mud pies. Their daddy drinking Beam and pretending to watch for gators as they played.

“This isn’t okay,” Mary said.

“No.”

There was a rumble of tires against gravel and both women’s heads shot up. Dalia could see a hint of black shifting behind the trees near the road. A pickup. She opened her mouth a little, finding it harder to breathe.

Mary closed her eyes, and Dalia listened to the soft shoosh of her breath. They waited. The truck kept rolling. “That camp past my house, I think. That Dutch guy,” Mary said. “It’s got to be him.”

“Shit.” The sound of the tires was almost gone now.

“Just grab his feet,” Mary said finally, waving a callused hand toward the back side of the house.

Near the farthest corner of the property stood a wooden T-frame attached to an old metal shed, rigged with a winch and rope. The nearest real grocery was the Piggly Wiggly forty-five minutes away, and so, like most everyone else they knew, the girls had been hunting for dinner since they could hold a Remington .410 steady. After a hunt, they had never been allowed to skip the skinning. “Real meat don’t come in plastic wrap,” their daddy would say, slipping a noose high around the neck of a deer before cranking the winch. Once the carcass was dangling from the T-frame, hooves a good foot from the ground, he’d grab a hose, nod toward the knives, and say, “Watch how deep you cut. You bust the gut, you contaminate dinner.” His girls, not quite tall enough to work a good-sized buck, would scrabble onto upturned pails, their daddy, tall and lean, adding his muscle to the job when necessary.

All the buckets were right side up now, but the winch was still oiled and functioning. When hunting season came around in the fall, Mary’d bring what she bagged to her sister’s house, dress it, and leave some of the meat in her freezer.

They half-carried, half-dragged Bud toward the T-frame. 

“Jesus, D, the least you could do is keep your end up,” Mary said.

Dalia’s hat fell off as she adjusted her grip. They’d slipped Bud’s boots off so she could get a good hold on his ankles, but they were wide and he was heavy, and the difference in the sisters’ heights didn’t make carrying him any easier. “Hold on,” she said.

“No. We’re almost there, and I certainly don’t have all day. Buck the hell up.” Mary’s mouth was moving, but Dalia knew that voice. It was her father talking. She didn’t answer, but she stopped and dropped Bud’s feet. Made a show of wiping the sweat from her face with the edge of her skirt despite its filth. Made a show of inspecting her hat, putting it firmly back on. Mary watched her, hands still looped under Bud’s arms, making no move to clear her own eyes of sweat.

They traveled the last few feet without much noise, but when they got to the T-frame, Mary said, “This really isn’t okay,” and as they stripped the man, made the noose, turned the winch, Dalia wondered who in the hell she was talking to, which one of them she was trying to convince.

There is a myth that any meat dumped in the swamp will be eaten by gators, but a body dumped in the bayou was as like as not to end up floating into someone’s camp. That’s how the girls found their daddy: his body bloated and nibbled but mostly intact, except for a missing finger or toe and that hole in his head that really only left his jaw in place.

That day Mary called the deputy while Dalia, home from college, sat with the remains at the edge of the water, rocks and roots digging at her. Laying her fingers on his hand—the skin sloughed off in places—she’d cried a bit and hadn’t returned to campus after, to take care of Mary, she told her friends.

So, the girls knew better than to put a whole man in the water.

They worked quickly, looking up every time a squirrel shifted the tree leaves or an acorn cracked against Dalia’s tin roof.  Once or twice she thought she heard tires again, and she stopped, looked up at nothing. It was dark before they were finished with Bud, but there was light enough from the full moon and the stars to see.

Dalia stripped to her underwear, her dress ruined. “I got a call from his girl last week.”

Mary rolled a metal barrel out from under the shed, the bottom scraping as she tugged it off the uneven concrete that rimmed the building. She filled it with faded newspapers, dropped in her jeans, her T-shirt, Dalia’s dress. “My bra clear?” she asked.

“Looks it.”

“Soak the ground. There’s been a lot of rain lately, but still a hot ash might catch this grass.”

Dalia pulled the hose. “Daddy’s matches are still in the shed,” she said. “There’s lighter fluid, too.” Their father had often burned evidence here—gambling receipts, boxes from off the back of a truck, a dead drug dealer’s clothes. “You not going to ask what she had to say?”

“Is it why you shot him?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Mary added twigs and Spanish moss to the barrel, more newspaper, threw a match in. “You got to be kidding me, D. You don’t know?” her voice loud.

Dalia ignored her. “She was crying.”

“She claim he beat her?”

“Bud?” Dalia laughed. “No. No, of course not. She said he was leaving her. Begged me to give him back. Like he was mine, like I wanted him.”

With everything damp the fire was slow to catch, and Mary got the lighter fluid out, tried another match. “Did you?”

“No.” Dalia watched the moss and wood and newspapers and bloody clothes light, watched the fire climb and fold itself over the edges of the barrel as if searching for escape. “And isn’t that sad.”

She had wanted Bud so badly when she was younger. Whenever she visited from lsu, he’d show up with magnolias that he pinched from the tree in the front yard, the one her daddy had planted for her when she was six, her daddy saying they’d grow tall together. Bud always claimed that he’d bought the big white blooms, the both of them laughing as he pretended to search for a receipt.

The night her father chased him off, Dalia had sounded just like the girl, Bud’s stripper. “I love him,” she screamed, her voice high-pitched and panting, the sound of it climbing to fill every space in the kitchen.

Her father had just stared at her. His eyes the sort of gray that blanketed the bayou in winter. She’d never yelled at him before, had never really cried, not since she was small. And there she was, sobbing so hard that her body shook. It felt as if her teeth might rattle right out of her head.

Her daddy hadn’t raised his voice, but it crackled like a bonfire. “You’re hysterical and he’s trash.” He put his 12-gauge on the table. “And if he comes back, I’ll shoot him. Now buck the hell up, sit the hell down, and calm yourself. You’re scaring Mary.”

And she knew he would. Her daddy had no problem with killing.

After a while, Dalia looked away from the fire in the barrel and said, “I’m not sure when I stopped wanting Bud; I’m just sure I didn’t want him anymore.”

“Why don’t you get dressed? I’ll watch this,” was her sister’s only answer to that.

       

Along with a large cooler full of the meat, full of Bud, Dalia loaded a frog gig, a couple of Maglites, and some Cokes onto her boat— just in case they were stopped by the Wildlife and Fisheries boys—and waited for the sound of Mary’s truck. She’d gone home for a shower, her badge, and her fishing license. “No need to take any chances,” she’d said.

The bayou was not a lonely or quiet place at night, and Dalia listened to the owls and crickets, watched the lightning bugs. She fought sleep, exhaustion creeping up on her as her boat rocked in the water. Once, she’d wanted to move to Baton Rouge or New Orleans, to be a doctor or an architect, but the cities hadn’t suited her. She’d felt trapped by the concrete, the constant buzz of lights, the people pushing against each other. She missed home, never stayed gone long.

Now, she lived off of her father’s pension and what Bud gave her, dreams of working, of being someone, lost to her wanderings in her daddy’s garden. Mary always helped her out if things got tight.

Tonight a part of her was afraid her sister wouldn’t return, though, so when the grating rumble of tires on pea gravel interrupted the swamp song, it was a relief. She squinted at the lights and felt panicky when they stayed steady, even after the engine cut off. She imagined Mary staring at her, how she looked in the harsh beams, and wondered if Mary hated her a little. As far as Dalia knew, Mary had never taken a bribe or planted evidence, had never enjoyed the “tiny perks” their daddy so loved. She’d walked straight.

Eyes watering from the light, Dalia counted. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Her breath more shallow with each Mississippi. Finally, the lights winked out, and the sound of the door opening knocked her in the chest. Dalia could breathe again, but her eyes were light-blind so she couldn’t see her sister’s face. Mary said, “Last boat ride, D. I mean it,” her voice hot and crackling like their daddy’s.

And suddenly in her head, Dalia was screaming at her daddy all over again. That night in the kitchen. Screaming and begging incoherently. Grabbing his shotgun and running into the night.

“Last boat ride,” she whispered as Mary got into Bud’s boat, untied it. Then Dalia reached for the ropes that held hers, loosed it, and turned the motor over, following Mary down the river.

She imagined what it was like for Mary that night, watching from the doorway as their father chased her. Her sister had worshipped the man, following him around and playing sheriff with his badge, showing him their mud pies and laughing as he told fish stories. Cutting the vegetables as he cooked dinner. Pouring Beam for him to sip on the porch. Always a good daughter. Dalia knew that they hunted together long after she stopped going, and that after she left for college they drank together, played cards together, even missed her together.

She barely knew her little sister when she came home for visits. Even though they were so close in age, she’d always thought of Mary as the baby, but the child had grown out of her quickly, the woman having moved in more and more each month.

Up ahead, Mary cut the motor, called out, “Here’s good.” So Dalia pulled alongside her and tried to hold the boats steady as her sister nimbly climbed from one to the other. “Let’s go,” she said, leaving Bud’s boat to the current. Dalia handed her a Coke and turned the wheel.

They drove for a while and finally cut the engine to drift quietly into a set of smaller waterways that branched off from the main bayou. Cypress knees bumped the hull occasionally, and the water was shallow enough that a wrong turn could beach them. Maglites out, they scanned the marsh grasses with the beams, looking for the red glow of alligator eyes. Frogs’ and spiders’ eyes glow green or yellow under flashlight, and there were plenty of those, the frogs singing nonstop, their voices so big.

Finally they found a series of banks with red reflections and backed the boat a little ways away until they were upstream from what looked to be nesting grounds, the darkness thick with gator eyes.

“Here’s good,” Mary said. It was the first they’d spoken in a while, and Dalia tried to read her sister’s tone. She got nothing from it.

They worked quickly, dropping the meat in the water a bit at a time.

She remembered how surprised her father looked when she whirled on him, his own gun in her hands. His eyes were hidden in the darkness but his whole body shot straight up with the shock of it, and he lifted his palms a little. There was a small noise as if he was about to say, “Baby,” as if the word was caught in his breath. Dalia still wasn’t sure if she actually pulled the trigger that night or if the gun had just gone off. The feel of it kicking in her hands made her think it was alive, that maybe, maybe, it had propelled the shot on its own—maybe she’d done nothing but not stop it. His face opened like a flower, blooming horribly, and she stood there forever, expecting it to close again.

The sound of the meat hitting the water made her feel a little sick. “I did love him,” she said to Mary, unsure of which man she meant.

It had been Mary who took the gun from her that night, who had decided they should leave their father in the dark water. Mary who’d told the deputy that their father’d left to hunt and that they hadn’t seen him since. Mary who’d mentioned a drug dealer from Dallas, mentioned that he’d been calling the house, leaving threats. Mary who’d run for sheriff so that Dalia would always be safe.

Dalia, on the other hand, had done nothing much except marry Bud.

Tossing the bits of the man she’d killed her daddy for into the black of the swamp, she thought of the morning her father floated back to them, of how she did not understand what the thing bumping the bank really was.

The fetid water churned and splashed as gar and bass and finally, finally, the alligators moved in. And the same sweet rot she had smelled a million years ago, sitting on the bank with her daddy’s body, then smelled again with Bud that morning, filled her nose.

DELTA FOXTROT

One Thursday in October, I went to the restored theater downtown for the film-society showing of The Thin Man. Just as the movie started, a handsome man sat down two rows in front of me. First I noticed the hair—thick and wavy like my husband’s when we first met. Then I found myself studying his profile, how his expression changed as the black-and-white movie menaced us with its long shadows, its echoing footsteps and tilted fedoras. I thought how like a scene in a movie it was: him unaware that I was watching him as he watched the screen, his face alternately illuminated and shadowed by what was playing out above us.

Afterward, the society president announced that we were all welcome to meet for drinks at a restaurant down the street. I’d never gone along before and didn’t know anybody in the group, but the hair guy was walking over, so I thought what the hell, why not try to meet some people? Everyone clustered around the bar, waiting to order, and I worked my way through until I stood next to him. He was squinting up at the chalkboard above the bar as if he couldn’t quite make out the list of wines and beers.

“How could you see the movie if you can’t see that?” I asked.

Though his eyes were small and his nose a bit too thin and sharp, the hair was so luxurious that when he smiled I felt foolishly pleased with myself.

“I can see what it says,” he said, putting out his hand for me to shake. “I just can’t decide what I want.”

His name was Preston.

“Preston, huh? Like the writer of The Great McGinty and The Palm Beach Story?” Movies my husband showed me years ago, back when the only dates we could afford were nights at home with a six-pack and a video.

He made a cute little half bow. “I wish I could say that Sturges is my middle name, but it’s really Edward.”

“The official middle name of the male wasp.”

“I had a Jewish grandfather, so I’m not technically a wasp.”

“Saved by the mohel!”

He laughed, and I thought, this guy likes to play. When our turn came at the bar, he asked if I’d share a bottle with him. I said I preferred red. The film-society people were talking around a big table on the other side of the room, but when the bartender set the Sangiovese and two glasses in front of us, Preston carried them to a small table by the big plate glass windows overlooking the street.

As he poured, he said he was working on a PhD in film studies.

“You seem remarkably cheerful for somebody in that line.”

He laughed in a good-natured way; maybe he’d heard that before. “And what do you do?”

“For the last eight years, I’ve mostly been home with my two children, but now my youngest is in kindergarten. So I work part-time in a paper store.” (For some reason, I forgot to say it was my husband’s store.) “You know, writing paper, printed invitations, party supplies, that kind of thing.”

“You’re a stationer. That’s so wonderfully old-fashioned.” He leaned his elbows on the table and gazed at me as he listened. I knew it was partly the wine, partly his determined interest, but I couldn’t help looking at that hair and wishing I could get my hands all in it. That he was younger—in his early thirties as opposed to my just-turned forty—made his attention all the more flattering.

Each Thursday after that, the film-society people sat at their big table, and Preston and I shared a bottle at our two-top. After a few weeks, I realized that he assumed I was separated from my husband. I knew I ought to correct his false impression, but I didn’t want him to think I’d assume a man wanted to date me just because we shared a few bottles of wine and some laughs.

Each Thursday, I arrived home later—eleven, eleven-thirty, midnight—giddy from flirting, gobbling breath mints and swearing I would never drive myself again after that many drinks. The house was always quiet when I came in. Even the dog couldn’t be bothered to get off his bed and greet me. Upstairs, the bedside lamps would be on, my husband under the covers—a book fallen on his chest, his head lolling to the side—completely unconcerned about my safety or my fidelity.

 

On Saturdays, my husband stayed with the children while I ran errands and visited my father. When Daddy first moved into assisted living, he would scold me.

“You don’t have to check on me all the time. Live your life, out there in the world.” As though it were a place he was glad to have escaped rather than one he’d fought leaving. But if I didn’t come for a few days, he’d go down to the nurses’ station and make them call me. “Where the hell have you been?” he’d ask when they handed him the phone. “Down with the clap?”

“Yeah, Daddy. The fleet was in last weekend, and now I’m on penicillin.”

“Serves you right.”

My mother would have said that somebody ought to have incarcerated my father long ago, but she hadn’t lived long enough to gloat. Four years ago, she’d left her vacation house at Sea Island, Georgia, put her car key in the ignition, and collapsed on the steering wheel before she could turn it. An aneurysm. Her husband, a retired banker, found her when he came home for lunch after golfing all morning. “Never knew what hit her,” he said when he called, as if her lack of self-awareness might, for once, make me feel better. The banker, she’d always maintained, was an afterthought and not the cause of her split from my father. She and my father had opposing dispositions—his dark and cynical, hers relentlessly, almost abusively sunny. His rude salty talk was just one of many things about him that she didn’t care for.

“Jesus, Charlie,” she’d say, “you cuss like a sailor.”

“I am a sailor,” he’d roar, jostling the ice cubes in his glass to let her know he needed more scotch.

Sailing was how they’d met, through friends of friends, at a beach club near Wrightsville in 1964. She’d just graduated from the women’s college; he was forty-two, divorced, a partner at a respected Raleigh law firm. When they were introduced, he frowned and said, “Well, you’re an attractive little thing,” as though attractiveness was an obstacle he was going to have to work around.

They were married the next summer. She had double-majored in classics and art history, planning to become a curator, but my father was old-fashioned and didn’t want his wife to work. She filled her time volunteering until, after two miscarriages, I came along. I was too late—they were already irreconcilably unhappy, often arguing and worried about money. Sailing remained the one thing they could stand to do together, momentarily forgetting their quarrels as they jibbed and tacked.

They sent me to sailing camp, where I failed to progress. As much as I loved the wind on my face on a sunny day, I couldn’t be bothered with navigation and ropes and all the figuring out that the work of sailing required. Even so, nautical terms were our family lingua franca, and it was a regular thing for the three of us to speak as code the names of the flags sailors use to signal other vessels, one flag for each letter of the alphabet. Many an evening my father would come home from the office, glowering, and head straight for the wet bar. If my mother asked him what was the matter, he’d throw up his hand and say, “Delta,” meaning, Keep clear of me. I am maneuvering with difficulty.

I used to try them with my husband, but he’d just raise his eyebrow and say, “Really? A flag? That’s all I get?” Even my jokes about semaphornication, complete with hand gestures, couldn’t win him over to the flag system.

It was just as well. Married twelve years and together for sixteen, we’ve developed our own private language. For instance, if he mentions the Civic hatchback he drove when I first knew him, I’ll say, My, she was yar, and he knows I mean that those were happy days. It’s Katharine Hepburn’s line in The Philadelphia Story about the sailboat Cary Grant designed for their honeymoon. They’re divorced, but as soon as she says, My, she was yar, with that wistful expression on her face, you know they’re going to get back together.

By the time my father went to assisted living, he had forgotten about the divorce and the banker. When I visited, he would fuss because my mother wasn’t there to receive me. Out shopping, he’d grouse, as though she, not he, had been the impulsive spender. I didn’t argue. He’d go on complaining about her, the irritation in his voice so fresh that sometimes I almost believed that they were still married, that she was still alive.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving was the first time my children saw my father after he moved into the nursing wing. Assisted living had been bright and lively, with Bingo games and a resident golden retriever. But the nursing wing was “one of those places,” as in, when your friends—whose parents are still playing golf and cruising to Puerto Vallarta—say, “I’d never put my folks in one of those places.” (To which I say, “Good luck with that.”) The fluorescent light pressed down on you, the beige walls pressed in on you, and if that wasn’t enough to choke you and make you want to run, there were the sickbed odors, masked by something cloying and purportedly floral. Every now and then the ambulatory patients set off the exit alarm with their ankle bracelets.

The oldest resident, Mrs. Beamon, 101, always parked her wheelchair where you would be forced to walk close to her. Everything about Mrs. Beamon—white hair, ecru bathrobe, pallid skin—was devoid of color except her pink slippers and her baby doll, wrapped in a blue crocheted blanket. When she saw my children, she extended a trembling hand toward them and made a guttural noise.

“Say hello,” I prompted Jacob, who was staring as though Mrs. Beamon were a rare albino animal exhibited behind glass. When he spoke, she gurgled again, and Elsie put her face in my skirt until I told Jacob it was okay to move along.

Down the hall in Room 132, my father’s favorite CNA, Bobby, was helping him brush his teeth.

“He’s the only one I’ll let bathe me,” Daddy would say. “He’s not queer like most of these male orderlies. He’s got seven children and four grandchildren.”

“Homosexuals have children, Daddy,” I sighed.

“Not in Jamaica, they don’t!”

Now my father stared at the television as Bobby handed him a cup of water and held a pink kidney-shaped tray under his mouth. Elsie made a sound of intrigued disgust when Daddy spat, and Jacob nudged her. They started poking and scrapping until I threw them a look.

“Knock knock,” I sang, hating my own false cheer as I rapped my knuckles on the open door.

Daddy’s eyes darted to me, shrunken and angry behind his bifocals. “Foxtrot,” he said. The flag that means I am disabled; communicate with me.

“It’s all right, Mr. Charlie, we’re done.” Bobby wiped Daddy’s chin with a washcloth and stepped back. “Now you’re all fresh for a visit with your daughter and your beautiful grandchildren.” Bobby was good like that—he always found a subtle way to remind Daddy who I was.

An anguished cry came from across the hall—a man, pleading, “Help me, Father.”

Daddy shook his head. “Calling for his priest. Does it all day and night. He can’t help it. Poor old bastard doesn’t know where he is.”

“Yes, it’s true,” Bobby agreed. “He’s confused.” With his usual inconspicuous efficiency, he finished straightening the things on the hospital table, then beckoned to the children. “Here’s the little man, not so little, what you, about nine?”

“Eight,” Jacob said.

“And, Miss Lady, your mama tells me you’re a dancer. Is that true?”

Elsie shuffle-ball-chained, bit her lip, then added some jazz hands.

“Look at you, with your razzle-dazzle! You see that, Mr. Charlie? Your grandbaby can dance.”

Daddy frowned at us, then turned his eyes back toward the television. “Your mother didn’t tell me you were coming. She never tells me anything.”

 

By the middle of December, they had Daddy on oxygen, and I was stopping by the home every day, always missing the doctor on his rounds, never able to find the right nurse who could tell me about my father’s condition. With Christmas coming, things were crazy at the store and the children were wild with Santa fever. Still, I managed to get to film club on Thursday nights. My life at home felt like low-budget mumblecore—a plotless ramble, all awkward pauses and tense situations—and I was looking to Preston to put me in a zippier feature. I yearned for sparkling dialogue, zany capers, dance numbers, and satin gowns cut on the bias. I wanted to drink my morning coffee while wearing a feather-trimmed dressing gown, winking at a man with brilliantined hair on a goddamned train.

Sure enough, one Thursday night Preston walked me to my car, took me in his arms, and kissed me in a way that let me know he’d been wanting to do it for a long time. His lips felt and tasted surprising, different, wrong. But also appreciative, eager, and, if not right, then right on. We were only kissing, after all. I could stop after kissing and still be considered a faithful wife. When he ran his hand inside my blouse, it was startling but not unwelcome.

Romeo: The way is off my ship. You may feel your way past me.

Soon, though, we had climbed into the back of my Honda—only because it was cold, I reasoned, and we couldn’t very well stand around making out in a parking deck where we might be seen. The car was the perfect spot in which to explain to him that we had to cease at once. But maybe, first, just a little more kissing, because that damage was done already, and I might as well enjoy it before I shut it down forever. But then, somehow, pants were off, and it was only a matter of minutes before even I couldn’t trick myself, in any way, into thinking I was still a faithful wife.

Alpha: Diver below.

Bracing my left foot on the back of the driver’s headrest, I abandoned myself to him, not caring that the sharp corner of a juice box was pressing into my behind.

Bravo: I am taking on or discharging explosives.

“I want to be with you,” he whispered.

Something in me summoned the wit to say, “Well, of course you do, after that.”

“Come home with me.”

I said I’d come over on Saturday. I figured I could visit Preston, shower at his place, pick up the dry cleaning, see Daddy, do the grocery shopping, go home and put the food away, and still make Jacob’s karate tournament by 2 pm. When I got to Preston’s apartment that Saturday, much more groomed than I usually am on the weekend, we went at it right away. In true romantic comedy fashion, we stumbled around the apartment in progressively giddy undress before falling onto his futon. After performing the sex act in several classic—but for me nearly forgotten—styles, I caught sight of his alarm clock and gave a cry that he mistook for pleasure. I had allotted time for married sex, not adulterous sex, and I was already late for Jacob’s tournament. Obviously, Saturdays were going to be more complicated, schedule-wise, than I had envisioned.

That afternoon, as I sat, aching, on the hard bleachers, cheering on Jacob as he sparred, I told myself that having an extramarital affair was a common enough life experience. Not one I’d planned to have, surely, but it was too late for plans now. Besides, didn’t I believe in fate? This affair with Preston was meant to be. Why else would my husband have suggested that I start attending the film-society screenings? Why else had Preston been sitting right where I could admire his lupine hair and feel those first stirrings of lust? I had been sent to the theater expressly to find Preston because there was something I was meant to learn, to discover. It was some kind of test. I was going to grow. As a person.

The whistle blew, and we clapped as Jacob bowed to his opponent. My dalliance with Preston wouldn’t hurt my family. I’d make sure my husband didn’t find out, and anyway, I was sure it wouldn’t last long. I just had to get Preston out of my system, and the only way I knew to get a man out of your system was to keep having sex with him until it didn’t seem fun anymore. I figured you didn’t have to be married to do that.

 

About two months passed, and the less I enjoyed the sex, the guiltier I felt. Tenderness crept in without my meaning for it to, and that worried me. Once or twice, I allowed myself to think what it would be like if I left my husband. I imagined sleeping every night in Preston’s one-bedroom apartment, with the moldy shower curtain and the bicycle in the living room. I’d miss my pillow top mattress and my matching blue Chinese ginger jar lamps. (I could bring them along, but Preston had no bedside tables.) I’d never again eat my husband’s sweet potato pancakes with my children on Sunday morning. And how many years would it take to achieve the companionable silence I now enjoyed with my husband? I couldn’t imagine returning to that phase when somebody was always saying, “What’s wrong? Are you sure? You seem upset.” It was like when somebody asked if I was going to have a third child and I thought about going back to all those diapers and sleepless nights.

So when Preston asked if my divorce was moving along, I’d say, “It’s complicated. I don’t want to talk about it.” But that didn’t satisfy him. He wanted to visit my father and play with my children; he was sure they would all become fond of him. They wouldn’t, I promised. I assured him that they were difficult, opinionated people whom he didn’t want to know. I reminded him to live in the moment. It didn’t matter what I said, though—he pressed; he sulked. Obviously, I’d soon have to break up with him, but I didn’t know the etiquette, and I liked having somewhere to go on Saturdays besides the nursing home. Plus, there was this one thing Preston did on that futon that my husband had never much gone for, and I wasn’t quite ready to give it up.

Then my father took a turn for the worse. It was the week of Valentine’s; the film was Bringing Up Baby. To my embarrassment, Preston brought me a red rose and put his arm around me during the screening. If any of the film-society people ever met me in the grocery store with my husband, I was going to be in big trouble. At the bar afterward, we took our usual table. I explained that I wouldn’t be able to come over that Saturday and that, no, he couldn’t visit my father with me.

“You’re my break from all that, Preston. You’re my Philadelphia Story. You’re my Palm Beach Story.”

“I know it’s probably been a long time since you’ve seen those movies,” he pouted, “but you might recall that in both of them the husband and wife get back together.”

I had to backpedal. Managing him had become too much like dealing with a touchy girlfriend—all hurt feelings and guesswork and apologies. “Oh, Preston. You know what I mean. Romance and all that. Good times. Black-and-white.”

He clasped my hands on the tabletop, and I prayed nobody was watching. “But I want to be more than that,” he said. “I want to be with you. I want to be there for you.”

Behind the big windows of the restaurant, the street was slick with rain.

 

The Saturday after I told Preston I couldn’t see him, I went by the library on my way to visit Daddy. The day before, the x-rays had come back, confirming that he had pneumonia. Too weak to rearrange himself in the bed or cough up the stuff in his lungs, he hadn’t been up for talking. All he could do was work on breathing. So I thought this time I’d just sit with him, even read to him if he liked.

At the library, I picked up a Czech novel I’d seen reviewed and a cookbook I thought would interest my husband. I dawdled among the shelves, looking for something I could read to Daddy. I hated seeing him the way he was now—his eyes yellowed, nails brittle, skin flaking. In the last few months, I could barely bring myself to touch him; a pat on the shoulder, a kiss on the forehead, or a brief hand squeeze was all I could manage. I’d back out of his room, throwing him bright promises of return, and then hurry to the visitors’ bathroom to wash my hands with antibacterial soap and the hottest water I could stand.

I settled on a book about Churchill—“never, never, never give up” was one of my father’s favorite sayings—and as I was checking out, my phone vibrated. Preston wanted me to come over for a “quick glass of wine.” I reminded him I had to go see my father. It was the same excuse I gave my husband when I went to see Preston; now I was trying to use it to get out of seeing Preston.

“You have time for just one glass.”

“All right. But no funny business.”

“I love that you call it funny business.”

By the time we made it out of the bedroom, it was nearly four o’clock, the time I was supposed to be back home.

“Fuck. I haven’t even been to the nursing home yet. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” I struggled into my coat.

“What’s the big deal?”

“I have a family, you know. I can’t just be gone all the time.”

“Okay.” He frowned, uncertain how to take my anger. “But you’re separated. You’re allowed to date.”

Uniform: You are running into danger.

“My father is really sick.”

“I know that, sweetie, but I don’t think it’s fair for you to be mad at me because I invited you over for a glass of wine and made love to you—”

I can’t stand to hear a man say “made love.” It sounds so cheesy and sentimental.

“—You never said you had to be home at a certain time, and I don’t think it’s fair for you to be mad at me because you have scheduling problems.”

He lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head so that his elbows stuck out, the sheet draped to hide his junk. There was something so lazy and cavalier about him just then, his beady eyes roving over me as I dressed, that I got mad. It sounded like he was taunting me because he thought he was free and I was trapped.

“You know what, Preston? I think I’m getting sort of tired of you.”

It was the first time I’d ever been mean to him, and I saw what went on in his face. He struggled not to say something mean back, like “Your pussy wasn’t tired of me ten minutes ago.” No, that was too vulgar for Preston. Hoo-ha? Too comic. Straight-up “vagina”? Forget it. He couldn’t say words like that. The point is, I saw him think of mean things to say and dismiss them. I saw him decide to take the high road. Now, there is nothing I hate more in an argument than when somebody takes the high road. Because you know what people do up there on the high road? Look down on you. Look down on you, all smug, as you scream and shake your fist and dare them to come down and fight.

There were a hundred nasty things I wanted to say, but this time I took the high road myself. I told him I had to visit my sick father and go feed my children their supper. He didn’t need to know that I don’t do the cooking at my house. Properly chastened, he said that he understood. I kissed him to show we were made up and ran out to the car.

 

Three women in teal scrubs smoked in the parking lot, looking at their phones. Shift change. Inside, televisions blared, and the med techs moved in and out of doors doling out pills, worker bees in a hive of unmoving queens. I turned at the photo collage of residents, turned again at the framed poster of a Mary Cassatt mother and child, and hurried around Mrs. Beamon cradling her baby doll. Daddy’s door was closed; he usually napped in the afternoon. Not wanting to wake him, I opened it just enough to see his bare freckled back. Bobby and a female attendant were bathing him or changing his diaper, so I softly closed the door again and leaned against the wall to wait.

After a few minutes, Bobby came out, gave me a sorrowful look, and put his hand on my arm. He’d never touched me before. I thought my father must be really bad off, and he wanted to prepare me for what I was about to see.

“We’ve got Mr. Charlie’s shirt on him now, and I’ll come back in a few minutes to shave him.”

He spoke quietly, as though he didn’t want anyone to hear. I wondered why he was continuing to pat my arm, shaking his head mournfully and moaning in gentle commiseration. Finally, it dawned on me to ask, “Are you saying—is he dead?”

His eyes widened, and he pulled back without letting go of my arm.

“Oh. I’m sorry! The nurse said she would call you.” He shook his head again, this time at the ambient incompetence that suffused the place and made his job even harder. I reached for my phone. Then I realized how pointless it was to check my voicemail to find out what I already knew. Helpless, I held up my empty hands to Bobby. Now what?

He touched the door handle. “Do you want to see him?”

I nodded. Inside, the blinds were drawn against the fading afternoon, so the room was fairly dark. The female attendant cleared away the soiled diapers and the pan of water they’d used to wash him, then scurried out, mumbling her condolence. The head of the bed was raised to an angle between sitting up and lying down, as though Daddy was just relaxing to watch some TV. They’d buttoned his blue-and-white-striped shirt at the throat, wet-combed his silver hair, and drawn the institutional blanket up to his sternum. His mouth hung open, and without his dentures, his caved cheeks made him look more gaunt than usual. He needed that shave Bobby was going to give him, but all in all, he didn’t look terrible for a man who would have been eighty-one in a few months and who’d been sick a long time.

“I’m just not hungry,” he’d said on Thursday. “It hurts when I try to put food in my stomach.”

Whiskey: I require medical assistance. I’d known he was dying, of course. I just hadn’t wanted to think about it.

I crossed to the bed and put my hand on his chest, thin and hard under his shirt. If I knocked on it, I wondered, what kind of sound would come?

“When?” I asked Bobby. Where had I been?

“Maybe forty-five minutes ago. Maybe an hour.”

Preston’s.

“Was he alone?” I undid the top button of Daddy’s shirt, then the second. Now he looked more comfortable, more natural.

“Yes. He was alone. I came in to check on him a while ago, and the TV was off. That was strange because usually he turns it on at lunchtime.”

“He said he couldn’t hear the screamer down the hall if the TV was on.”

Bobby nodded. “For a minute I thought he was asleep, but then I saw.”

Daddy’s right hand hung out from under the blanket, dangling off the side of the bed. I remembered how I used to flop my arm off the top bunk at camp just to freak out the girl in the bunk below. “Oooh!” she’d squeal. “Stop it! It looks like a dead body’s up there!”

“Was he feeling worse? Did he ask anybody to call me?” Was he mad because I wasn’t there? That’s what I really wanted to know. But Bobby had no answers. He approached the bed, took rubber gloves from a box on the hospital table, and put them on. “I think your father passed peacefully.” He pushed the chin closed, then stood, holding my father’s jaw, staring at the closed blinds. It struck me how many times Bobby must have helped people this way.

When I’d been there earlier in the week, Daddy had complained that his back was sore from lying around so much. Rubbing his shoulders through his nylon pajama shirt, I realized it was the first time I’d touched him that long in years.

“Oh, that feels so good,” he’d sighed. “You used to beg to rub my back when you were a little girl. You were too small to do it hard enough.” He scratched his whiskers with a thick overgrown fingernail. “But it’s the thought that counts.”

I’d thought of Preston, then. How simple was the thing I’d been seeking; it could have come from anybody. Ashamed, I had massaged Daddy’s back until he said my arms must be getting tired and it was okay to stop.

“You don’t have to hold his mouth closed,” I told Bobby. “It doesn’t bother me.”

“Maybe if we do this.”

He lowered the head of the hospital bed, then rolled up a hand towel and wedged it between Daddy’s chin and chest. We agreed that was better. Bobby showed no impatience, but I knew he had work to do and told him he didn’t need to stay with me. He bowed his head.

“I will pray for your father’s soul to rest. And for you and your family.”

“Thank you.”

After Bobby left, I took my father’s dangling hand and tucked it under the blanket. His stillness unnerved me. Now what? I rummaged in my purse for a notepad to start a list: Call the undertaker. Pack up Daddy’s things. Call his brother down in Baton Rouge and his cousin in D.C. Write the obituary. But the problems weighing on me were not the ones I was writing down. I needed to call home.

“Oh, honey,” said my husband, his voice breaking in sympathy. “I’ll just drop off Jacob and Elsie at the Lawrences’, and then I’ll be right there.”

“Don’t tell them yet. I’ll do it when I get home.”

“All right.”

“You know what I was thinking just now when I was calling you? I was thinking that if Daddy was the one making this call, you know, about me, or something, he would’ve flagged you. When you answered the phone, he would have said, ‘Oscar.’”

“What’s that mean?”

“Man overboard.”

“Poor Charlie. At least you were there with him.”

“But that’s just it,” I said, before I could chicken out. “I wasn’t here.”

There was a pause. Waiting for him to respond, I walked over to open the blinds, but it was five-thirty in February and already dark outside. I could smell the dinner trays out in the hall.

“Of course you were there,” he said firmly.

From the pause, and the way he spoke, I realized he didn’t want me to tell him anything. There would be no catharsis through confession. He was not going to indulge or absolve me, and my father, cooling on the bed, that towel under his chin, had gone where he could no longer help me, even if he’d been the kind to help, and I’d been the kind to ask.

OF SWEAT AND DISTANCE

When I can feel the heat’s weight, I stay sweating as if

this will prove that I work, if not cutting steel

or pushing a cart of hot dogs down the sidewalk

or a broom through an empty elementary school,

 

then at least at being alive. My first choice for cool

is the breeze, and if a trek’s ahead—let’s say

forty furlongs—I choose my own engine,

cooled by beads of brine on my skin and the wind

 

singing in my face while I pedal past traffic.

So far I’ve not been pickled by saline crystals

that barely glint in noontime light.

When I stumble into my neighbors buying fileted trout

 

or a cup of coffee, I avoid the handshake,

apologize through and for my dew,

answer any questions. I lean toward the polite,

though as a body might, I’d prefer a comrade to wrap

 

in the wave of an embrace, an ally to mist with a sea

fighting free of its holding ocean. I believe

that breed of people exists, just a bit rough.

When I meet one, I might see my life as a series of tides, receding

 

now, but rising in the future that will become past.

My sweat will leave a dark patch of moisture, the kind

that allows fallow ground to grow fecund and full without

a mind for tainted or grime, so lush you can’t see the filth.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem AUBADE

They must have been so gentle, the deer—

for me to sleep like that, through the garden’s

ruin. Sometime in the night, maybe,

or just after dawn. The softness of them

bearing the teeth & hooves, the timidness

hiding the improbable hunger. So able to tear

& crush, so able to wreck, each neat row yielding

under unimagined heaviness. And now once more

it’s morning: light still weightless, sky

flat blue, and the moon, the night’s diminished

revenant, abandoned there—hanging

over it all like a question never answered. How

I could be one thing so long and then suddenly

not. What walked so softly through me.

STORY THAT BEGINS AND ENDS WITH BURNING

Help, as usual, arrived too late. In jugs slung across

          the backs of cows, the water sloshed and spit itself out,

the daughter tugging and hustling the animals

          flameward up the hill. By the time she reached it,

the house lay in charring heaps, the trees

        hissing like blown-out wicks. The daughter knew

she should’ve burnt too

          and spent the soot-stained afternoon

watching herself in a reckoning blaze—

          bound up in the curtains, her fingers fretting hot cloth,

holding a melting plastic pail

          twisted like a wrung bird’s neck,

chaining herself up in the dim attic.

          And oh the savage heat of it all—

But let her rest now. Let her lie down in the ash

          and shut her eyes. Let her always wish the house

back to burning—when the portraits still held

          a familiar flaming hand or eye, when smoke rose

into the air like new blooms, when a door,

        smoldering but whole, was still there to be opened.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award FOUR MONTHS AFTER YOU GAVE ME THE GOOSE DOWN COAT

                                                  for Dad

When I pulled the pieces of pine needles
from the pockets of your coat, I pictured
you prebirth (my birth), bundled up in
Appalachia beside a small fire built for one,
two curls falling from beneath Grandpa’s wool hat,
a cigarette in one hand and a hatchet in the other.

Gently guiding the needles along the terrain of my hand,
I think about that hazy photograph: you standing,
straddling the peak of Backbone Mountain,
shirtless with your shorts around your ankles,
hairy bare ass and varsity thigh tan lines
splitting the horizon in half.

I reach deeper—my index finger dredging
the inseam of your down coat—remembering
watching you glide the bench plane along strips of cedar,
sipping beer out of silver cans, quickly dropping flies
into that mason jar we kept the black widow in
(the one we hid from Mom), cutting the heads off
the copperheads in the sandbox, taking out your own stitches,
building decks, building forts, building playgrounds, building.

I’m standing outside on a Friday night, pushing
these pine needles around my palm through sweat
from thought and glass, the smell of a cigarette ending.

Do you remember that time in Austin when it was ninety-
eight degrees after nightfall? The rooftop bar on Sixth Street?
When we staggered through the streets “on business”?
Do you remember the way the sidewalk enveloped the trees?
You tripped on a root and apologized. I was twenty-two
and wanted to hold your hand.

EASY LOVE

Sunday was Emma’s birthday. It was also my birthday, and, unfortunately, Dan’s birthday, too. What were the chances of an entire family having a birthday on the same day? “We’re just crazy-lucky like that,” Emma used to tell people.

This year, Emma would turn thirteen, I was going to be forty-three, and Dan—my husband, Emma’s dad—had died last April, so he would be forty-five forever.

In the weeks leading up to the “big day,” Emma claimed desperately one moment that she had to have a party and claimed the next that all parties were “annoying” and “stupid” and that she wouldn’t sit through one unless I gave her a thousand dollars. I longed to spend the day distracted by a chaotic sleepover or shepherding a herd of girls through an afternoon of disco bowling, but the final word was absolutely not, no “pathetic” birthday party for her.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I think maybe we should do something.”

“No party,” she said. “No special dinner. No nothing. Just no.” She was hunkered down into the big leather couch, and I perched on the edge, watching the Caps’ hockey game. Emma wore the lucky “Rock the Red” T-shirt Dan gave her during last year’s playoff run. Dan had been a hockey fan, had played goalie in college, and while I could follow the action, I couldn’t care about the outcome the way he and Emma did. Win, lose, tie: there was another game soon enough, another season, a different team to root for if yours wasn’t any good this year. Not that I shared these scandalous thoughts.

“I want a party for myself then,” I said. Of course I didn’t: the torment of planning and shopping, the fake smile pinning my lips upward as I pretended to have a swell and jolly time. I squeezed a throw pillow in my arms.

“Have a party,” she said. “So what.”

“I will,” I said. “And you’re invited.”

“I might be busy that day.”

“You don’t know when my party is.”

“In general I’m quite busy,” she said.

I laughed, flung aside the pillow, and gave Emma a half-hug, which was all she allowed these days, and only when I was able to sneak it in—which is why I was watching the game with her, because whenever the Caps scored, she’d fling her arms around me in a brief, loose moment of happiness, and that moment was a lightning glimpse of how things used to feel—so good, so simple, my life filled with that kind of easy love.

In the end, she relented the tiniest bit and let me invite three of her friends, but otherwise the party guests were family, and what with Kennedy Center tickets and pottery classes and gymnastics meets and all the flotsam of suburban life, it turned out that brunch worked best for those who “had” to be there. I sprang this bad news on Emma, who glared up at me from the kitchen table like I had sprouted a Cyclops eye. Then she quickly shrugged and said, “So? Why should I care?  I like pancakes fine.”

“Because we always celebrated Dad’s birthday at breakfast,” I said.

She twirled her fork in her spaghetti noodles, round and round, then let it drop onto the plate with a clatter. “Obviously.”

I waited for her to say more, hoped she might laugh with me about how Dan insisted that his birthday meant he got sausage, ham, and bacon, “a big ole plate of each.” Or that she might tear up. But her eyes remained flat and clear. She shrugged again, a dismissive flick. I smiled brightly. “We’re set then,” I said. “And I hired a clown.”

“Oh, God,” she groaned. “Super embarrassing. I’m way too old for a pathetic clown.”

“The clown is mine,” I said. “I want a clown.”

“Seriously? Since when do you care about clowns?”

“What’s a birthday party without a clown?” I asked.

She gave her plate quick, tiny, measured nudges, one after the other, until it was pushed right up against her water glass. One more and the water would spill. Then she shot me the Cyclops glare again. “My friends are not coming over if some stupid clown’s running around.”

“The clown is for me,” I repeated. “He’s my clown. So don’t worry. He’ll be happy to stay away from you and your friends.”

She stood up and headed toward the den but turned back to holler: “You know, there are people who have phobias about clowns! It’s like a real disease! Don’t always be so selfish.”

 

Selfish.

In another world, my daughter might have been burned at the stake, because how could she have known that, yes, I was being entirely selfish? I had hired Slappy the Clown, a.k.a. Jason Phillips, who had an earlier role as my high school boyfriend. Everyone snoops on Facebook, so I wasn’t doing anything bad, wondering one night what he looked like, and then clicking a few computer keys: full head of dark hair, hadn’t ballooned a gut, and looked basically like he did the last time I saw him, when I broke his heart by telling him about Dan.

Oh, and he was single, if Facebook was to be trusted—which it wasn’t, since my Facebook page proclaimed me to be married.

 

The morning of the party was crisp and sunny and blue. I was secretly hoping for a wintry mix or a massive snowstorm—anything to keep people away, to keep Slappy the Clown from being able to drive from Reston to Alexandria.

Since the weather was about as perfect as winter weather gets, I loofahed with the fancy shower gel and took extra time with my makeup. A skirt, the shoes that were too nice to wear, the French perfume I hadn’t used in forever. I mean, it was a party, right? Anyone would want to look good for someone from high school, right?   

The Spoon Catering van pulled up exactly on time, which got me nervous, as if things going well now could only mean that soon everything would go wrong. Things going well cannot be sustained.

Women in black chef jackets sweetly commandeered the kitchen and dining room, setting up a waffle station, a bloody mary bar, and what I called the dead pig buffet (bacon, ham, and sausage, which the caterer had kindly noted was “quite a variety of protein choices”). Emma was in her bedroom, rejecting dozens of outfits that I would later find scattered on her floor like a flurry of used tissues. I was in the powder room, setting out the guest towels people would be afraid to touch, when the doorbell rang.

Probably my mother, who arrived everywhere half an hour early, which meant she sat in her car for twenty minutes, staring straight ahead. I told her many times she should just come in, that it was stalkerish to sit outside in a car like that. It certainly wasn’t Dan’s mother, for whom the phrase, “I’m running a little late, dear,” was invented. Dan’s mother, his sister, my uncle and his wife, my cousin and her kids, the rest . . . the reality of the party bushwhacked my gut as I stared at my made-up face in the bathroom mirror. Would it be funny to lock myself in the powder room and refuse to come out? No, I didn’t do things like that, so I ran to the front door. My mother could help with Emma; maybe she’d have the patience to sort out the clothing traumas.

It was Slappy the Clown, wearing a well-pressed but loose, vibrantly blue jacket edged with candy cane striping, punctuated with four bulging polka-dotted pockets. Matching pants. Slurpee blue, a color no one in the real world would wear. His face and neck were aggressively white, a wall of makeup, and his wig flamed scarlet, inflating his head three times the normal size. Eyes circled in black, eyebrows shaped like waves. The traditional clown nose seemed tame in comparison to the rest of the get-up. He smiled at me—rather, his wide painted-on lips smiled, and didn’t stop smiling. Mesmerizing. I had to look away. In one hand he held a pair of two-foot-long vinyl, red and blue saddle shoes, which he dropped onto the ground. Slung over his shoulder was a lumpy duffel bag. A red Lexus SUV sat in my driveway. I mean, I didn’t expect him to show up in a tiny clown car, but something about the Lexus embarrassed me, as if he were nothing but a DC lawyer dressed up like a clown. It bothered me, the surprise of that car.

“Slappy’s here,” he said, pulling a toy bicycle horn out of a pocket and honking it.

“Yes,” I said. “I thought we said eleven o’clock.”

He shot up his sleeve to show me his wrist and the old-fashioned alarm clock strapped there. Instead of numbers there were pictures of clown faces. “Exactly. Clown o’clock.” More honks. “Right on time,” and he slid through the door, nudging his clown shoes inside with one foot. He wore a pair of ragged flip-flops and his toes looked too naked.

“Jason, it’s me,” I said, feeling awkward. I reached behind him to lock the door—I don’t know why—and the click was loud in the small entryway. “Kathy Werner, from high school.”

He pulled a pair of oversized, striped eyeglass frames out of a pocket, slipped them on, and peered closely at me. “Bless your heart,” he said, non-committally. “So it is you.”

I felt my face redden. I had booked him online, impulsively not using my married name, assuming he would make the connection. How vain I was, expecting him to remember me all these years later. He had sworn—with that deep and frightening ardor that certain high school boys affect—that we were destined to be together, inspired by an English teacher who had assigned Wuthering Heights. In fact, our early romance mirrored our English classes: he wrote sonnets and recited soliloquies during our Shakespeare unit; there was a series of rhyming couplets that coincided with Alexander Pope; the modernists set loose stream of consciousness love letters. He was inspired by absolutely anything, and I loved that about him, even as it wore me out. It was surprising that he ended up as a clown (with a Lexus), yet it wasn’t, since he got every lead in the school plays. Just before our junior year of college, his father committed suicide, and Jason dropped out to move back to Virginia. Unfortunately, that was right around the time I met Dan.

Emma’s voice from upstairs: “Mo-om! All my clothes are putrid!” I turned and went up a couple of stairs, then looked back at Slappy, who was using the cuff of his jacket to polish the nonexistent lenses of his eyeglasses.

He said, “I know who you are.” He stared up at me with that painted smile stretched across his face.

“It’s good to see you, Jason,” I said.

“Look at me,” he said. “I haven’t changed a bit.”

I chuckled nervously, and Emma shrieked, “Mo-om! Oh my God! Hurry up!”

“She’s turning thirteen today,” I said as an explanation and an excuse. “She’s kind of dramatic sometimes.”

“And you’re turning forty-three.”

Of course he would remember. Again, I blushed. He kept smiling.

His birthday was December 26; “all my presents were bought on sale that day,” he used to complain, “wrapped in half-price Christmas paper.” So my gift was given before Christmas, on the solstice. He liked that. A lifetime ago.

I smelled bacon; someone ran the garbage disposal in the kitchen. Upstairs, Emma slammed a door. I grabbed the painted railing, rubbed one thumb along the underside. “Who thought we’d end up so old?” I asked.

“Me,” he said. “Back when I was thirteen, I figured out the whole racket, one year coming after another. How they pile up. How they accumulate into this.” He motioned one arm in half a semi-circle.

This what? I looked at him uncertainly. My house? My rickety, middle-aged mom-body? My life with a dead husband and a cranky daughter who couldn’t clothe herself without a hissy fit?  Then he laughed and said, “Don’t say Jason. You’ve got to call me Slappy.”

“Slappy,” I repeated.

“Slappy the Clown,” he said, “to be specific. When you Google me, you also get Slappy the Puppet and a ventriloquist’s dummy. But I’m first.” He paused, as if I was supposed to say something, then said, “Don’t ask me any questions about it, okay?”

“But you look great,” I said.

He lifted his horn and honked it in my face. “Darn tootin’,” he said.

Emma appeared at the top of the stairs wearing black leggings, studded boots I’d never seen that rose well above her knees but mercifully were flat, and an unfamiliar sleeveless sweater, oversized and so fluffy and white that it made me think of a standoffish, expensive cat. “Great. The clown’s here,” she said. “It looks stupid.”

“This is Slappy,” I said. “The Clown. ‘He’, not ‘it.’”

Jason bowed low and tugged a bouquet of daisies out of his sleeve.

“Oh my God.” Emma rolled her eyes and stalked off to the den.

“I’ve never seen that sweater,” I called after her.

“It’s Tilda’s,” she yelled back. “She’s letting me borrow it—” and the rest was cut off by the voices from the Sunday morning TV news shows that Dan had followed.

Jason presented the flowers to me. “Happy Birthday,” he said. “Better get these in water,” and I automatically stepped toward the kitchen before realizing they were plastic. When I turned back, a stream of water zinged out of a plastic daisy on his lapel; it couldn’t reach me and puddled on the wooden floor of the entryway.

“Where’s Dan?” he asked. “The husband.”

I stared at Jason’s never-ending smile. It trapped me somehow, forcing me to smile back even though I didn’t want to. “He’s around,” I said quickly. “I’ve got to check something. You can set up or whatever in there,” and I gestured toward the living room. Then I pointed the direction Emma had gone, toward the den, and mumbled, “I should see about the food,” then walked purposefully to the kitchen, when really I just had to catch my breath.

The last time I saw Jason was twentyish years ago. We both went to Columbia, and he didn’t return that September after his dad died. Instead, Jason’s former summer boss at the second-run movie theater in the has-been mall rehired him as assistant manager, and he was working every night, pretending he was one step away from enrolling in the community college. He had lost fifteen pounds, his sister had run away twice, and his mom was back to putting down a couple of bottles of white wine over dinner. At night, after reconciling the cash and locking the safe, Jason’s job basically was sitting in the lobby until the movies were over, hoping that no one knifed anyone on their way out. That’s when he’d call me. I wanted to hear from him, but this was back before cell phones, so I had to stick around my phone waiting for him to call, which meant I couldn’t be anywhere else, like a party or a bar or a study group or anywhere that wasn’t the studio apartment I shared with another girl and her musician boyfriend. Every night Jason had a new plan: stand-up, bartending, acting, security guard, deep-cover CIA operative, bread baker, long-haul truck driving, answering mail for the White House, opening a store that sold expensive surfer clothes to Georgetown students. “I could do that, couldn’t I?” he’d repeat, “don’t you think I’d be good at that?” until I agreed: “I know you could, Bear.” It was like a bedtime story he needed every night. I felt sorry for him, and it occurred to me that feeling sorry for a guy was not a good enough reason to date him.

I met Dan at a party; he was down from Boston visiting his brother, and I was in the kitchen, getting water, when my elbow knocked a beer bottle off the counter, and Dan’s hand shot out and caught it before it hit the floor. “My God,” I gasped. “How’d you do that?”

“Reflex,” he said. “Former hockey goalie never forgets.” Later, I appreciated that during our conversation he didn’t drop in any of his stats about his shutouts playing for Boston College or the infamous overtime game in the NCAA tournament or BC’s trip to the Frozen Four or how back in Boston, among a certain college hockey-obsessed set, he was a god. Mostly we talked about life in Northern Virginia, where his parents had moved from Connecticut: the random things we both liked—chili dogs at the Vienna Inn, and lying back in the dewy grass at Gravelly Point Park as planes roared down into National Airport, and watching the water churn at Great Falls after a big rain. He made me homesick in a good way, as if before I met him, I’d never noticed how amazing my life was. The next weekend I took Amtrak up to visit him at grad school, which meant I missed three nights in a row of Jason’s phone calls.

The week after that, I rode the train down to Washington and went to Jason’s movie theater to tell him that we were breaking up. Jason said he didn’t blame me, which made me feel awful.

“I see it,” he said. “I’m a mess. No one would marry me.”

sex, lies, and videotape was playing, and something by Woody Allen, and we were eating way too much cold popcorn because our hands needed something to do. We sat up on the ticket counter, staying long after the shows ended and the customers were gone, staying even after the cleaning people arrived with their blaring boom boxes.

Garish posters for movies I’d already seen hung in the lobby, and I stared at them as we hashed it all out—how happy we used to be, how he knew he’d never meet anyone so perfect, so beautiful and sexy. “Don’t you like being loved?” he kept asking me.

I was afraid Jason would bring up his father’s suicide, but he didn’t. Mr. Phillips had hung himself in the garage in August.

Jason promised that he’d be there for me if it didn’t work out with Dan—he had weaseled out the name and kept repeating it in a snaky voice like a car salesman, like there were perpetual quotation marks around the single syllable—“if for whatever reason ‘Dan’ gets the heave-ho, then you know, Kathy, that I’ll take you back, no questions asked, even if you and ‘Dan’ end up sleeping together.”

Too late, I thought.

Also, I thought: Get mad, you stupid fucking asshole, what the fuck is wrong with you? But I didn’t say that because I was breaking up with him, so why was I angry?

Finally, I said I had to leave for real. I was tired; I was staying with my friend who needed her car to get to work in the morning—the things I’d been saying all along, trying to escape—and he nodded as if he understood, giving my head and my shoulder uncoordinated, floppy pats that irritated me.

I leaned away, eyeing the glass door that led to the safety of the empty mall corridor, and he spoke with the first quiver of outrage: “We were supposed to be forever, us,” and I said, “I’m so sorry,” for like the nine hundredth time that night, and he said, “When this guy, ‘Dan’—when ‘Dan’ deserts you—tell me. I’ll never stop waiting for you. Never. As long as it takes.”

I murmured, “I know,” and it was funny: I did know. And it was funny, too, that knowing this was the exact thing that made it easy for me to leave Jason. It was awkward and embarrassing to be loved intensely. I was twenty-two. I wasn’t worth all this; no one was. Wuthering Heights was a made-up story. I expected Dan would desert me, maybe even soon, but, yeah. I loved Dan, I did.

I ignored Jason’s outstretched arms, begging one-last-hug-please. I jumped down off the ticket counter and so did Jason. I walked toward the glass double doors at the front of the lobby, yanked the handle and listened to the rattle of the bolt. I pushed and rattled while Jason—key ring looped around one finger—stood behind the ticket counter, unmoving. Finally, I had to say, “Let me out.”

“Maybe I won’t.”

But he walked over, moving slowly, as if not feeling his feet against the plaid carpet, the way a ghost might lazily float toward you. Then he abruptly lunged forward hard, his shoulder slamming the door and crushing through the glass, which shattered into a million tiny pieces. Strangely, he didn’t seem to be cut because it was tempered safety glass, which I didn’t know could be broken like that, and so there he was, angry, which was what I had thought I wanted. I carefully stepped through the doorframe, listening to my feet crunch those glittering shards, sparkling like sun speckles on water, keeping my eyes straight ahead so I wouldn’t see Jason sprawled on the mall floor amidst that pretty glass. So I wouldn’t catch his gaze, which I knew would be bold and fierce, certain he’d proven something important.

I called Dan that night and said everything went fine. He didn’t ask for details. Already the life with Jason felt half-erased, part of the past you don’t talk about because now you believe you’re a different person, and it’s awkward remembering who you used to be.

That was the last time I saw Jason Phillips. I didn’t think of him much until after Dan died, and those words knocked in my head during loose scraps of night: I’ll never stop waiting for you, he had said. We were supposed to be forever. Overwrought and melodramatic, the desperate and creepy yearning of a dopey kid.

But now there was a clown in my house.

A little experiment.

I was in the way in the kitchen, where the chef-jacketed whirlwinds were too well trained to demand I get the hell out, so I continued down the hall to the den to check on Emma. She was slouched so deeply into the leather couch that her body was virtually parallel to the floor, her booted legs extending onto the rug. The boots looked too big for her feet. Mascara and blue eyeliner smeared the rims of her eyes, and I decided to save that fight for another time. Men and women in navy suits cackled on the TV.

“Are you thinking about Dad?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“So I guess you’re interested in the pros and cons of a balanced budget amendment?” My laugh sounded fake and untrustworthy.

“It’s a judicial appointment,” and she started to parrot back one of the bombastic experts, but I interrupted:

“You should talk to me about how you’re feeling.”

Instead, she said, “Who’s that clown?”

“Slappy,” I said.

“I mean, who is he? Why’s there a clown in our house?” She lifted the remote and clicked the TV to mute. The experts looked misplaced now, so terribly worked up but silent. “Today?” She stared straight ahead at the noiseless argument. “Why is there a clown in our house today?”

“I thought it would be fun.” My false voice, my artificial cheer. “He won’t be here forever,” I added, noticing my curious word choice, forever.

“Are you thinking about Dad?” she asked, an accusation. At the same time, she clicked the remote again, so the sound jumped back into the room. She clicked again and again, the voices growing louder, louder, and they drowned out my answer:

“Always,” I said. “Of course.”

She swished one hand in a “get out” motion and closed her eyes. Smears of violet and gray eye shadow made her appear bruised and tired. I felt sad for my daughter. Also, apprehensive about being in this room—Dan’s den—with her right now, so I backed out of the doorway.

 

Slappy had moved to the living room, now wearing his clown shoes and sporting a purple hat that looked like an upside-down flowerpot. He stood in front of a line of photos on a credenza: Emma as a baby, Emma graduating from kindergarten, Emma sitting on Santa’s lap, Emma dressed as a black cat for Halloween. I hadn’t thought about how we’d stopped updating the framed photos. We were too lazy to print them off, so anything half-current remained trapped somewhere in the computer. Though, really, Dan had been the one who enjoyed messing around with the camera. Me now taking the pictures seemed depressing.

I cleared my throat so Jason would know I was watching him, but he didn’t turn away from the pictures, and he didn’t speak.

“My husband is dead,” I said. “Dan is dead.”

I didn’t know what I expected Jason to say or do; I guess I expected him to be like most people and stumble through some cliché of consolation, or at least tell me he was sorry, but he said, “You’re wearing a ring.”

“It was my grandmother’s,” I said. “I suppose I like it. Not wearing it would be weird.”

“I never got married,” he said. He lifted his bicycle horn and squeezed it—toot toot—as he turned to face me.

There was a pause, and I self-consciously twisted my ring, sliding the emerald around to my palm. She had been married to another man before marrying my grandfather. I always wondered what that man’s family thought about her; I didn’t remember his name, if I had even known it. He worked in the mines in Pennsylvania, but my grandmother divorced him because he drank too much, and then she moved to Philadelphia and met my grandfather on a streetcar. “Handsome and rich,” she used to tell me. “Easy to love.”

Jason said, “That’s got to be shitty for your daughter.”

“And me,” I said.

“You could’ve just called,” he said. “Emailed. That’s cheaper than hiring me.”

“Especially with that two-hour minimum,” I joked.

“Plus travel time,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “I didn’t even try negotiating down. I hope you appreciate that.” We chuckled awkwardly. The minutes felt complicated and long.

Then he said, “Everything you think you remember was a long time ago.” His white face was placid, smiling. For a confusing moment, I found myself thinking about Dan’s motionless face in the casket. Eyes closed. Stiff lips. Fake, ruddy cheeks. Too many pores on his nose. I thought I’d be afraid to touch his body, but I wasn’t; I liked letting my hand rest on top of his chest as I greeted people. Even so, I told Emma not to look, but I think she did when I was in the bathroom. I remembered kissing Dan’s stony face when I was alone with him for the last time. Everyone was heading to the parking lot, and the funeral home people hovered outside the room, ready to lock up the box. I thought it would be like a fairy tale, my final kiss bringing him back to life, but no, it wasn’t. It wasn’t.

“Aren’t you a clown?” I asked. “Aren’t you supposed to make me laugh?”

He raised one hand to the side of his head and twisted his fingers, curving them into a fist, which he then opened to a flat palm, revealing a brown egg. I noticed an expiration date stamped on the end in red ink: the same brand of organic, cage-free eggs I bought.

I shook my head. “That’s not funny,” I said desperately.

“It is if I drop it,” and he tilted his palm so the egg rolled and fell to the hardwood floor.

“Damn it, no,” I said, but the egg bounced neatly upward, and he caught it in the same hand.

“Maybe a tiny bit funny?” he asked.

“Didn’t you hear me?” I asked. “He’s dead. He died.” I’d spoken the words a trillion sad times.

“I have my own life,” he said. “This isn’t twenty years ago.”

I shook my head impatiently, my hair whipping against my cheeks. “I know, I know.” I watched him. He had to think I was still beautiful. He had to say so. When he didn’t, I felt tears bulge in my eyes, so I looked aside and spoke in a stiff voice: “You should just leave. This is a mistake. You have my credit card number, so just charge me, travel time and all. Give yourself a big fat tip.”

He stepped closer, his big clown shoes slapping the floor, and tugged me into a floppy hug; his jacket was soft and fragrant, like the fabric of an old quilt. I accidentally stepped on the toe of one of his shoes, and it squished down, flat and empty.

Men hugged differently. Better. Stronger.

The derisive cough of a miserable teenager. “Grandma just pulled up,” Emma said from the entryway. “So maybe stop hugging your pathetic clown for a minute.”

I stepped away from Jason, from Slappy, from this man, and swiped at my teary eyes with my forefingers, the tips of which darkened from smudged mascara. My cheeks felt hot, embarrassed, as if I’d been caught doing something naughty, and I pressed my icy palms to my face. Jason looked precisely the same: white and smiling. He blinked a few times, but then everyone blinks. I couldn’t see what he might be thinking. He pitied me. He loved me.

“Emma,” I said. I thought some sort of explanation might appear, but all I could say was her name. She looked so much like her father. Everyone said so. That was supposed to be something to love about her. Maybe she saw it too, that close resemblance, and secretly hated it the way I did. Maybe that was why all the makeup lately. Or maybe she was just being a thirteen-year-old.

The doorbell rang, and Emma spun around, off to open the door. The click of the lock, the creak of the hinges, “Grandma!” I used to rate that level of enthusiasm from Emma, but not lately. The murmur of birthday greetings, comments about the party, the rustle of a gift bag exchanging hands.

“Your mom never liked me much, did she?” Jason asked.

“She warned me you were overwrought,” I said.

“I’ll hide,” and he stepped behind a floor lamp, crouching to align his head with the shade.

I finally laughed.

“Aren’t you too old for clowns?” I heard my mother ask Emma.

“Why do people always say that?” Jason stage-whispered as he crooked his head sideways. “So hurtful.” He pushed his lips into a frowny face, but with that smile in the way, he only succeeded in looking misshapen. “Let’s run away together,” he said casually.

I laughed again, imagining the two of us crammed into a tiny clown car, trailing plastic daisies, tossing rubber eggs at pedestrians, driving into a sunset as bright and pure as a clown’s red nose.

“No one ever knows when I’m serious,” he said. That pasted smile.

Emma’s squeal: “I love it! I have to show Mom!”

“Shh . . . my mom’s coming!” I was giddy, back in high school, the two of us pressed too close on the couch downstairs, the TV turned high to camouflage muffled zippers and panting. That groaning floorboard overhead and the race to get situated, staring at the cop show so the snooping parent suspected nothing.

Emma and my mother appeared in the doorway, Emma extending her wrist, now encircled by a loose sparkly diamond bracelet that looked significantly too grown-up for a thirteen-year-old girl who lost things or lent them to friends who lost them. (My red cashmere scarf.)

“Look!” she exclaimed, tilting her wrist to make the stones catch the light. “It’s so fabulous!” It was a bracelet a lover would buy, inappropriate for a little girl—a lover or a cheating husband. Someone wanting—needing—to splurge.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty fancy.” Petal-shaped marquise diamonds arranged like flowers, a shimmering chain of daisies. Surely they weren’t real. I caught my mother’s eye and gave the world’s tiniest frown. She still wore her fur coat and that irritated me—Jason seeing it, that Emma hadn’t offered to hang it up.

“It’s from Tiffany,” Emma said.

“Maybe Grandma should have talked to me first,” I said. “Maybe Grandma should have waited until you were older before giving you such an expensive gift.”

My mother said, “Why wait?” She said it like I would be afraid to answer back after hearing that. She said it like any fool would know to give an extravagant gift to a girl whose father had died. She said it like Emma would require extravagant gifts for the rest of her life. She spoke as if all of this was obvious to anyone.

I glanced at Jason, who gave an exaggerated clown shrug, shoulders rising to his ears, hands popping palm-up. Apparently, my mother hadn’t recognized him, and why would she? He wasn’t supposed to be here. It was supposed to be Dan. If Dan were here, there would be no diamonds and no clowns. There would be bacon and sausage and ham.

I forced a smile, reached out to touch Emma’s wrist so I could look more closely at the bracelet. Emma’s skin felt warm, and she twisted free of my grasp. “It’s beautiful,” I said, because I had to say something and there was nothing to say. She knew I wouldn’t take it away from her or forbid her to wear it.

“There’s a surprise for you,” Emma said.

Something about the way she looked at my mother and the way Slappy grabbed his toy horn and beeped it twice blasted a pit deep into my stomach. The incessant smell of bacon. The thought of a dozen family members roaming the house, my lifeless smile what they wanted to see because as long as there was a smile frozen onto my face, we could all agree that everything was fine.

“That’s why I’m here early,” my mother said. “To give this to you in private.” She opened her purse and pulled out not a box from Tiffany but a crumpled, white, business-size envelope. She held it out to me. Her hands were steady.

I knew I didn’t want this.

There was a moment where I stood there, doing nothing, forgetting to breathe.

“Take it,” my mother finally said, and she reached for my limp hand, lifting it up to set the sealed envelope into my palm. My fingers automatically folded, holding the envelope, which was exceedingly light, as if what was contained inside barely existed.

“Mom, you’re being weird,” Emma said.

My mother seemed suddenly to notice Slappy. “My God,” she said. “There’s actually a clown.”

He bowed to her, then spun and dropped his pants to moon her with a pair of orange and purple polka dot underwear. Then back around, extending his hand for a handshake, which my mother reluctantly gave, Slappy pumping her arm, holding tight as she struggled to release her hand from his grip.

“This isn’t funny,” my mother said.

“I don’t want this,” I said.

“I think you’ll want it when you see what it is,” my mother said.

I shook my head, hard, repeatedly. My eyes rattled in their sockets, though that couldn’t technically be true; I just wanted them to. If I kept shaking, none of this would be happening. Everything blurred, and I had to stop.

“Mom.” Emma put her hands on her hips, disgusted, but—I suspected—enjoying the sensation of the bracelet sliding along her wrist.

“I don’t want this,” I repeated.

“The lady says no,” Slappy said, sounding not like a clown but like an overwrought high school boy. He snatched the envelope from me and tucked it into a polka dot pocket. He smiled, first at my mother, then at me. He seemed proud of himself, as if pleased at how quickly everything had been solved.

I couldn’t smile back. I had understood immediately what was in the envelope.

“Good Lord,” my mother sputtered. “That’s Dan’s wedding ring. What’s the matter with you?”

“I told you I didn’t want it,” I said. “I wanted him buried with it on.” I hated that decision the most of all of the decisions I had hated making. I didn’t know until the morning of the funeral. That last kiss. That was when I decided. He would be gone, but maybe I would feel he was still married to me because he was wearing his ring.

“I knew you’d change your mind,” she said. “So I told them at the funeral home to remove it before . . . before. Because I knew you’d change your mind.”

“Oh my God, Mom,” Emma said. “Of course you want Dad’s wedding ring. What do you mean, you didn’t keep it?”

“He died?” Jason asked. “For real? I thought you were messing with me.”

“Last April,” I said.

“April tenth,” Emma said. Her voice was cold and prim.

Jason slid his hand in the pocket and I half-hoped for another bouquet, but it was the envelope he withdrew. I silently took it from him. I didn’t have to rip it open to see the ring—a simple gold band, about a quarter-inch wide, engraved with the date of our wedding, 3-1-92. Anniversary, birthday, the day we met, the day he died . . . these numbers were locked in my head, burial or not.

Emma stretched out her arm, the one wearing the bracelet, and I placed the envelope in her hand. She clutched it to her chest. We were heading down a rocky path, the two of us, and I had no idea how we would find the end, or whether we were even traveling the same direction or to a shared destination. My mother, tears turning her eyes shiny, folded Emma into a hug, stroking her back, rubbing the fuzzy sweater.

I envied the easy comfort of the gesture, both the giving and the receiving. That’s what it seemed I would never have again.

I glanced at Slappy the Clown. “You were supposed to make me laugh,” I said. “It’s my birthday.”

“They teach you in clowning school that nothing is really all that funny,” Slappy said. “Not in real life anyway.” That painted-on smile, that fake smile. I imagined Jason staring at himself in the bathroom mirror this morning, watching as he disappeared: sponging layers of white across the planes of his face and neck; the silky caress of the powder puff, its pale cloud gently dissipating; and, always saved for last, the slow brushstrokes of deep and startling red, the immense care needed—every time—to get that smile exactly right.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem SERVING TIME

                                                    for J.

 

Think fairy fly, think

small wasp digging with her legs

 

through a water’s skin.

Think wings, think fringed

 

and beautiful. Think

of the thing done

 

by the boy that cannot be

undone. Think swim,

 

think down, think

of the paddles, which are really

 

wings, which are really

beautiful. And the thing done

 

by the boy that cannot be

undone. Think of the eggs

 

she is looking for—the eggs

of the water beetle into which

 

she will insert her own.

Think of the boy, think

 

of the thing done by the boy,

think of the boy undone

 

by rage, undone

by its rising, rage undoing

 

what he thought he knew

of his mind, to undo that

 

of another. Think of the thing

done to a boy that cannot be

 

undone. Think of the eggs

which are not her eggs

 

which will become her own.

Wings, fringed

 

and beautiful. Think of her

exiting, think of her

 

climbing a stem, waterweed

perhaps, without which

 

she would be unable

to lift her body

 

back into air. Think

of the boy, the beautiful boy.

 

Think of a thing done

that cannot be undone.

THE LITTLE ONES WEARY

Hilde has come to love the garden. She tries to recall the name of each plant as Aunt Vivian has taught her—rhododendron and pampas grass and wisteria tree, the one with the fuzzy green pods, hard-candy seeds inside. At midday, she hides under the domed trellis of scuppernong vine at the edge of the yard, looks out through a gap in the hedge and sees the city skyline across the sound, metal and gray stone, the old world from which her parents sent her, and which she is already starting to forget. There the castle sits, far off. It blows from its tower a train of white clouds.

Hilde sits and watches the castle while her aunt works in the yard. She dreams of the army that occupies it, the wizard responsible for the cloud. She knows they must be watching her the way that she watches them, so she calls to her aunt, “I’m protecting you from the invasion. This is our lookout. You’re safe now.”

“Oh good,” says Aunt Vivian. “I was worried about that invasion.”

“Me too,” says Hilde, but it is not long before she finds herself sharing the lookout post with another occupant.

It’s a spider. She’s seen spiders before—the gray-brown ones that hide in the cracks in the molding—but this is a beastly, primordial hunter-spider, its abdomen a bright tiger stripe of black and white and yellow, its legs as shiny as the teeth of a comb. It sits very still, and when Hilde twangs its web with her finger, it comes alive and ticks its prickly legs into the leaves above her head.

Hilde peers out the other side of the trellis where she can see her aunt on her knees in the vegetable patch, picking squash and placing them into a plastic grocery bag. “It isn’t supposed to be in here,” she says.

“What’s that?” says Aunt Vivian.

“A spider. It’s a big spider in my lookout tower.” She waits for her aunt’s response. Really, what she would like is for Aunt Vivian to come and eject the spider, since Hilde is too afraid to touch it herself. But she has too much pride to ask.

“Come look at it now,” she demands.

“I’ve seen plenty of those before,” says her aunt. “Give it space. It’s got as much right to be in the garden as you do.”

Aunt Vivian picks up her bag of vegetables and looks toward the vine trellis. In the sunlight, her skin is shining and smooth like the seeds in the wisteria pods, though Hilde, who knows that some adults are older than others, understands now that Aunt Vivian is probably the oldest person she knows.

“Come out of there,” Aunt Vivian says. “It’s time to come in.”

Hilde crouches down and presses her face into the grass, lets loose a muted scream.

“No, ma’am,” says her aunt. “I’ll have none of that.”

“I’m guarding my fort.”

“What fort? This garden? This is my fort. Get out of there now before something bites you. Lots of calamine tonight, and aloe—you’re already sunburned to a crisp, I’m sure.”

The sun bears down razorlike through the leaves of the vine, and Hilde knows the hours of boredom that await her inside. She screams until darkness edges in around her eyeballs and Aunt Vivian comes to retrieve her by the arm. Vivian does not indulge her niece’s bids for power, not even when they are purely imaginative. She can see the castle too, far, far across the water, but for her it holds no wonder, and for the rest of the afternoon, she relegates the girl’s play to the stuffy rooms of the house.

      

The cloud-billowing structure across the sound is not a castle at all. The man in the yellow plastic suit is the one who tells her. He comes by a couple days later.

Hilde’s alone in the front yard when this happens. Aunt Vivian has disappeared behind the carport to get a trowel, complaining about the dandelions and the crabgrass, demon plants of insidious variety, and then Hilde sees him. She’s not sure if he even is a man, maybe he isn’t, because the suit is not like anything she’s seen before. It crinkles loudly and covers all of him, even his face, which she can only half see through the tinted plastic square that shields him. But because he has a face, and because he’s walking a bicycle along the sidewalk in front of their house, she realizes he must have chosen to wear the suit in the same way Aunt Vivian chooses to wear denim.

“What are you doing?” she asks. “Why are you wearing that?”

The man stops and turns toward her. He tilts the bike against the chainlink fence, leans in. “What’s that?” he asks, his voice muffled and echoey inside the hollow chamber of his suit.

“Why,” Hilde asks, “are you wearing that?”

“Safety,” he says. He gestures broadly toward the sound. “That way, the power plant. You seen it, over there ’cross the water?”

Hilde stares at where he’s pointing. Now she knows for sure that it isn’t a castle, but for the man in the suit, she pretends she never thought it in the first place.

“Right,” she says. “That power plant.”

“That there’s a nuclear plant,” he says. “It leaking. So I go to my house and lock the door and stay in, but I can’t stay in forever. Can’t spend my whole life in my living room with the walls covered in plastic, no sir, but I still do what I can to keep my insides from boiling. This bike, can’t ride it no more when I wear this thing, so I’m dropping it off at a friend’s place.”

He speaks so fervently that a patch of condensation blooms on the plastic shield near his mouth. Hilde hugs her stomach and feels nauseated.

“What you doin’ at Vivi’s place, little girl?” the man asks.

Hilde doesn’t answer. She is trying not to cry—crying in front of a stranger, very embarrassing—but the man notices.

“What’s wrong with you? Eh? Can’t you speak?”

Aunt Vivian returns. She lets out a shout when she sees the man in the plastic suit, and Hilde, not wanting her aunt to see her tears, pulls her head inside the collar of her dress like a tortoise.

“Who is that? Who the hell are you?”

The man in the suit waves his arm above his head. “Just old Mott, that’s all!”

Aunt Vivian looks baffled, but she is angry now, not frightened.

“What are you doing? Why are you wearing that? Are you terrifying this child?”

“It’s for the nuclear plant, Vivi. Ain’t you heard? You must not’ve heard, being out in the yard like normal. There is a plague on this land.”

“I didn’t hear a word of that,” Aunt Vivian says. “I didn’t hear a word because you have plastic over your whole head. Mott, go home. You’ve lost your mind.”

Mott, in his crinkling yellow suit, takes up his bike and continues on down the sidewalk. Hilde emerges from her dress and watches him through a film of tears, feeling the heat of shame in her neck and ears.

“Don’t listen to him,” Aunt Vivian says. She puts a warm, dry hand on each of Hilde’s shoulders. “He’s a rare bird.”

      

All birds are rare now, but this was not always the case. When she was with her parents, Hilde lived up on the nineteenth floor of a huge gray building, and she used to watch for them from the living room window, black specks against a vast creamsicle sky. She has a memory of seeing birds by the hundreds, flickering checkmarks of birds, but maybe that’s a dream she had. Maybe this was a dream also: lying with her back against the carpet, something dripping in the back of her throat that is salty like blood. She stares at the sky. There’s one—far up. Or maybe an airplane.

Now at Aunt Vivian’s place, following her encounter with Mott, Hilde goes to the kitchen, finds the plastic wrap in one of the drawers, and takes it into the back bedroom. She has trussed up all but the top part of her head by the time her aunt finds her, which gets the woman screaming:

“You stupid child! You’ll suffocate yourself!”

Hilde is made mute by the plastic over her mouth, otherwise she would explain that she has scissors at the ready to cut the eyeholes and mouth holes as needed. But Aunt Vivian destroys her work in a fury. Now Hilde’s protective suit lies about her feet like tattered snakeskin, and she explodes in a fit.

An hour later, when Aunt Vivian comes to retrieve her for supper, Hilde pretends to be dead. Her aunt takes her by the ankles and hauls her a few inches, wheelbarrow-style, but Hilde stays limp, keeps her eyes closed.

“Fine,” Aunt Vivian says. “Go hungry.” She retreats to the kitchen alone.

 

Mott returns around noon the next day, a yellow oversized moonwalker. This time he is carrying a weed eater, and he sets to hacking up the crabgrass that Aunt Vivian hadn’t finished off the day before. Hilde pulls back the linen curtain to watch him as her aunt leans in over her shoulder.

“Surely he can’t see a damn thing,” Vivian says under her breath. “He’ll cut himself to pieces with that machine.”

But Mott is surprisingly deft, and once he has finished, he knocks on the front door and delivers six cans barbecued beans, five cans peaches in sweet syrup, a jar of pickled okra, peas, green beans, beets, Spam, and sweet potatoes (three cans apiece), a plastic container of flour, a bottle of gin, and a loaf of bread he baked himself, wrapped in tinfoil. All this he had been keeping in his own pantry, lined in plastic.

“You and the child shouldn’t eat those veggies from the garden,” he says. “It’s all good as poisoned.”

“What?” says Vivian. “Mott, I swear, I can’t hear you in that costume.”

Mott bows. His bag also contains several lengths of plastic tarp and a roll of duct tape. He goes around sealing the plastic over the windows and doorways of the kitchen and living room, and Hilde is amazed that Aunt Vivian doesn’t stop him. She stands tiredly with her arms folded, and at one point, she mutters under her breath: “Good God. All these theatrics.” But she allows Mott to have run of her place, and when the area is sealed to his liking, he finally unzips his suit.

He is maybe Aunt Vivian’s age, maybe younger, his bald scalp bright and red, dripping with sweat.

“You think all this really works?” Vivian asks.

“I try to limit my exposure best I can. You should too. You should come live with me in my bunker, I got a system worked out.”

She sighs, but Hilde, who first believed that her aunt didn’t like Mott, can now plainly see that she actually does, that they have been friends a long time and that this is just one of the things Mott does. Hilde sits in the current of an oscillating fan while they chat—about mutual acquaintances, about the scorching summer weather. And because it’s lunchtime, Mott heats up a can of the beans and fries some Spam for them. Hilde doesn’t eat the Spam, picks a little at the beans.

“She never eats much,” says Vivian.

“Pale as a glowworm, ain’t she,” says Mott. “You glow in the dark?”

Hilde shakes her head.

“She’s my grandniece,” Aunt Vivian says. “She’s visiting from the city.”

“A grandniece,” says Mott, as if this is an accomplishment on Hilde’s part. “So you from the city. How you like it out here in the sticks?”

She shrugs, unusually self-conscious. Aunt Vivian doesn’t have guests often. A stretch of marsh separates her house from any neighbors, and Hilde is not allowed to explore anywhere on her own. In midafternoon, when the weather is too hot to be out in the yard, the house is deathly quiet. While Aunt Vivian sits at the kitchen table and smokes her cigarettes, Hilde is overcome with lethargy, rolls on the carpet like a beached fish. Mott broke all that, the monotonous spell.

He watches her, mistakes her shyness for fear. “I don’t do all this just to scare you,” he says, gesturing around at the plastic on the windows. “It’s safer out here than it is in the city, that’s for sure. But you look old enough to know that the world’s filled with evil forces. Invisible forces. You’re not really safe anywhere.”

“Mott,” Aunt Vivian snaps. “Suit or no suit, I will throw you out in the road.”

But Hilde feels that Mott is right. “The invasion,” she says. “The spider is watching us for the invasion.”

“What spider?” Mott asks. “What invasion?”

Vivian waves her hand. “It’s just something she’s got in her head now.”

After lunch, he puts the suit back on, takes down the plastic, and she leads him out into the yard to show him. Now it is not just one spider they see, but five of various sizes, all occupying large webs in the scuppernong vine. Hilde can no longer even enter its shade without a spider blocking her way.

“Good Lord,” Mott says. “They really are invading. It’s a bad sign, I tell you. Look at this one—I’ve never seen them that big before.”

“Me either,” says Hilde. She thinks the big spider is one she saw three days ago, that it has since grown in size. She is part pleased that Mott is impressed, part genuinely frightened. Now she is more certain than ever that the spiders are infiltrators, that their dark power comes from the fortress over the water.

Mott calls toward the house: “Vivi, come see this!” But Aunt Vivian stays where she is, standing on the back stoop with a cigarette.

      

Later, once Mott has left and the plastic is taken down, Hilde vomits what little lunch she ate onto the carpet in the back bedroom. She doesn’t want her aunt to see that she’s gotten sick again, so she cleans it up with a hand towel, throws it in the trash.

      

A few days after lunch with Mott, Hilde comes down with a fever. She begins to spend hours lying on the back porch with her cheek pressed against the tile floor, staring out through the screen while Aunt Vivian works in the garden. She is running into the spiders too, and every once in a while, when she makes a sharp turn, she jumps back from a too-close encounter. They’ve formed their webs all along the hedge, in the tomato plants, in between the okra stalks, draped over the wheelbarrow, which she keeps propped up against the shed. The females have already laid egg sacs, some as large as Ping-Pong balls. The invasion has truly begun.

Whenever Aunt Vivian comes back inside, she leans down and rubs Hilde’s back. “Let’s clean you up, you’re getting all greasy.” And she leads her down the hall to give her a salt bath and put her to bed early. Hilde eats what she can keep down—cereal or crackers with a glass of ginger ale—and falls dead asleep.

It’s on a particularly stuffy night that the voices wake her up.

At first, she believes she’s paralyzed, on fire. It takes great strength for her to shove the quilt off her chest, but then she rolls out of bed, flops onto the floor, and, free of weight, the feeling comes back in her limbs. She slides her way across the carpet on her back, using her feet to push herself along, and when she gets to the door of her room, she tilts her head back and sees the end of the hall is sealed off in plastic. Mott is here again. He and Aunt Vivian are talking.

Hilde rolls over onto her stomach and crawls forward until she reaches the plastic, which is moving ghostlike in the air of the fan. There’s a hole in it, near the bottom, and looking out she can see Aunt Vivian at the kitchen table, crushing cigarettes into her ashtray. From Hilde’s viewpoint, they resemble a crumpled, ashen little skyline.

“Ugh. They’re everywhere this year,” her aunt says. “Can’t walk two feet without running into ’em.”

“You know it’s ’cause there ain’t no birds,” says Mott. “Birds die. Bugs come out. Spiders get fat off the bugs. No competition.”

Vivian lights up another cigarette. “Thank you, Mr. Ecology.”

“You know they been lying for years about how that thing affects us. Go to the hospital, they lie there too. It leaks, they evacuate everyone within a mile, to everyone else they say, ‘Stay in your homes,’ and we do, we’re culpable. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. That’s upon us, only it’s not God that done it. We brought it all on ourselves.”

Her aunt is quiet a moment. “You don’t know it’s the plant, Mott. Could be other stuff. Could be cars, could be, what, pesticides, herbicides. You just think it’s the plant ’cause you see it out there on the horizon, but in truth you might be gettin’ it just as well from the cans you eat out of.”

Mott doesn’t reply at first. Then he starts up, his voice quick and angry: “You don’t even got a TV, Vivi, or a damn radio. You got no way to know—”

“According to you,” she snaps, “they just spin lies, so why bother?”

His side of the kitchen table goes dark and sullen.

“Even if it is the plant,” she continues, breathing smoke from her nostrils, “that ain’t what’s wrong with the girl like you think. She always get sick, get better, get sick again. Don’t know what it is. My sister was the same way. It’s a curse. Cursed genes.”

“They tell you that at the hospital?”

“Oh, get off the goddamn hospital, will you? I’m taking her over there if the fever gets any worse.”

“You ain’t got a driver’s license anymore.”

“I can pretend I do for a little while.”

“What about her parents?”

Vivian sighs. She crushes out her cigarette and lights another. “They don’t know what to do. They children themselves.”

This time, they both fall silent, and when the two of them pick up the conversation again, they begin to talk about money, or want of it. Hilde’s mind clouds and drifts away. She’s awakened when her aunt tears down the plastic from the doorway and stumbles over her body.

“Jesus, girl!”

Hilde opens one eye. Mott is standing in the kitchen, clothed in his yellow suit again. When his muffled voice speaks, Hilde hears it, though Vivian does not:

“The only thing that’d help this child is to take her away from here.”

Hilde covers her sweaty face as Aunt Vivian picks her up. She can’t remember the hospital, but bright lights, the smell of latex and alcohol—these sensations scare her.

     

In the morning, Hilde’s fever has broken. She watches from the porch as Aunt Vivian turns her attention to the spiders. She doesn’t kill them—as bug-eaters, they’re friends of the gardener after all—but their sheer number has clearly made her uneasy. She tears down some of the larger webs with a rake in the hope that they’ll move elsewhere. By the afternoon, they have all rebuilt, and seem to have multiplied.

      

Though she’s gotten a little better, Hilde’s head is still bleary, and she stays inside on most days. Vivian keeps saying she hopes it will rain to cool things off, and Hilde imagines all the spiders getting washed from their webs in streams, carried out to the sound with their legs kicking.

But the rain never comes, the heat carries on, and Hilde struggles to stay awake. Once, in the midst of a heavy nap, she wakens to find Mott, in his suit, on the other side of her window, taping plastic over it. He waves at her and then continues his task until the world outside becomes blockaded in an opaque film. All she can see of Mott now is his shadow.

Hilde assumes that Mott is doing this with Aunt Vivian’s permission, but when she wanders down the hall to the living room, her aunt is reading the paper in the easy chair as if nothing is going on.

“Mott’s out there,” Hilde says. “He’s taping our windows.”

Aunt Vivian looks up. “He’s what?”

From the yard, Mott sees them and waves, but Aunt Vivian shakes her head, shouting, “No, sir! I won’t play this game with you! I said no!” She slams the door as she goes out, and Hilde crawls onto the back of the sofa so she can watch their confrontation from the window. Her aunt yells at Mott, pointing to the plastic tarp, slicing the air with the edge of her hand. Mott holds out his arms at first, sheepish, but then he starts yelling back, gesticulating wildly in the direction of the power plant. Aunt Vivian stands there a moment, arms folded. She can’t understand him. She loses her patience. It happens in an instant, so fast that Hilde has to catch her breath; Vivian reaches up, grabs the hood of Mott’s suit, and rips it open. Mott crouches down as if being beaten, his face in agony, and Hilde is sad to see that his head looks almost shriveled, tiny in comparison to the cumbersome yellow body. She can read the words on his mouth—“What’ve you done? What the hell have you done?”—and when he straightens up again, he shoves Vivian so hard that she stumbles back and falls in the driveway. He flees down the road. His wounded suit flaps in the air.

 

Later, as Vivian cleans the grit from a scrape on her palm, Hilde sits curled up in the kitchen chair. She fights back a tremble brought on by the smell of peroxide and Band-Aids, asking quietly, “Why’d Mott push you?”

“Because,” says her aunt, “he wants to do something he thinks will make the house safe, and I won’t let him do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because he ain’t in his right mind, that’s why.”

Hilde doesn’t know what this means. Is there a wrong mind? A left mind? “But will it make the house safe,” she asks, “what he wants to do?”

“I doubt it.”

“But it could, maybe?”

Vivian looks up at the child, curled in the chair like a pale, wide-eyed shrimp. She can recall a time before the plant, but even then the streams ran with a film and there was always an orange haze, which hung over the city, even when she was a little girl. When the plant arrived, it became the neighborhood devil, as if it had destroyed what was once pristine. But Vivian knows better and she will not leave, doesn’t have the will or money to do so anyway. Each day she tends her garden, and that will be the end of it.

“It’s hard to explain,” she tells Hilde, and lays a bandage over her scrape.

      

In the middle of the night, Hilde can tell that her face is getting hot again, that her stomach is fighting against what little she ate for supper. The whine of a siren is what wakes her, far off, and when she opens her eyes, she sees that someone has lifted up the window. A breeze comes in, carrying the sound with it. Then Hilde squints and focuses on the shape at the foot of her bed, can make out the glint of a bald scalp in the shadows.

“Mott,” says Hilde. “Where’s your suit?”

“It’s busted,” he says. “Hilde, sweetheart, you hear that siren?”

“Yes,” she says.

“That’s from the plant. That means bad things. It ain’t safe here. Your aunt, she means well, but she just don’t know, she don’t keep informed. You come with me, all right? I got my house proofed. I bring you there, and Vivi’ll come along too, okay?”

Hilde rubs her eyes with her palms, blinks them clear. Now she can see the features of Mott’s face, alive with fear.

“Okay,” she says.

He hauls her up, and it feels good, the strength of his arms, the oniony smell of his skin. Her father had a similar smell, she thinks, maybe his sweat, but she hasn’t seen him for so long. Maybe she has no parents, only Aunt Vivian and Mott. He carries her out into the open air of the yard. The spiders sit silent in their webs.

They are at the edge of the front yard when the plant’s siren suddenly dies, and they can hear Aunt Vivian screaming. Now the lights are all on in the house, blazing and golden, and she’s at the front door flailing her arms—“Mott! Mott! What are you doing?” Mott begins to run, and Hilde’s world trembles and shudders, and she feels if he lets her go she will fall, not down, but up into the night sky, moonless and black. “Mott, no! Bring her back!”

“It’s okay,” Mott is saying. “It’ll be okay.” But Hilde can hear in his breathless voice that he’s just as scared as she is, and his gait is slowing down, as if he’s no longer sure he’s running in the right direction.